The Dark Hour Of Reason

First published in Fish Anthology, 2021

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Anthology-Winners-Publishings-writing-prizes/dp/0995620040

The Dark Hour of Reason

Kevin Acott

Paul and I were in a pub in Southwark a few years ago, one of those lairy, now-gone London places that was tattooed with scruff and fade and curled sandwiches and pork scratchings and spills on the bar that soak your leaning arms: a creaking, brown, rough old boozer clinging hard to its past with a bit of pride and a lot of arthritis. We were talking there, me and Paul, and drinking, and I interrupted him. Nothing unusual about that: scrabbling around excitedly together in the salty, peppery, tumultuous mash of half-ideas and indulgences and gossip and memories and silliness we'd cook-up whenever we met, we would often talk over – trip over – each other. That’s how it was, how it needed to be. All the rubbish I've ever read or taught about respectful, focused listening would be thrown out into the street when we got together, particularly in those hours after the first pint but before the fourth or fifth whiskey. Which was fine: I've never been listened to with so much joy, so much energy as I was with him. I was always excited by our conversations, before, during and after – excited to hear him, and, if I'm honest, excited to hear me. He made me feel so much cleverer than I suspect I've ever felt with anyone else; for the too-short periods we were together, I think I actually was cleverer. His astonishing intellect, his compassion, his pure, wide-open fascination with what I had to say, with what we both had to say – with what we were building – would raise me up: way, way up ...

Anyway, as I said, that afternoon we were talking and drinking as we rested for a while, supposedly en route to the Tate Modern, hiding away for the afternoon/evening/night in that primitive – in our primitive – 2000-year-old settlement. He was saying something and I started to cut across him (I can’t remember what he was saying, or what I wanted to say), and Paul slammed his hand abruptly down on the scratched, rickety table and, eyes bulging, said 'LET ME FINISH!'. I jumped: I was stunned. But he didn’t know or care, he just carried on talking: intense, passionate, full of his urgent, gesticulating, transparent need to tell me it all, to make the cauldron in his head become something cooler and new and real for both of us. I was still trying to make sense of what I was feeling when, about thirty seconds later, a song came on the jukebox (yeah, they still had a jukebox) and he stopped talking, smiled, and we both began, at first a little apologetically, to sing along. It was Madness, ‘Our House’. Something massive swept over me. Something massive is sweeping over me right now. I felt/feel tears threaten. Because ... because this – this place, this time, this tune, these words, this togetherness – was/is ours: solid, flawed, uncertain, proper, longing, harsh, bloody, beautiful, beyond. There was/is an embracing, seductive familiarity to what I was feeling – visceral and disembodied, sweet and sharp – and I want/wanted to hold onto it forever. That day the more-than-just-feeling dissolved, of course, quickly, even before the song finished, but we’d shifted, shifted together. We carried on debating and creating and being and disagreeing, knowing life was better, now, than before. And we never made it to the exhibition.

As that experience fades again, it seems to me that hand-slammed-on table, and its aftermath, were a sudden, momentary glimpse – after forty years of knowing him, one of my very first – into the world of Paul beyond me, into a hard, ruthless place in which he edited the ramblings of angry, grizzled white men and women, received death threats from his colleagues for erasing some of their bigotry and all of their split infinitives from that weekend's paper, and stood up to the tyrant boss who made his life a misery, a boss who he was so, so loyal to, and who was so unexpectedly, paternally, redemptively kind to him right at the end, in a way his own father never had been. And reflecting now on his demand to be heard, and my accompanying hurt and shock – followed so abruptly by shared, tearful, rhythmic joy – I realise the thing I really want to talk to you about is not as simple as it can appear, not as simple as I'm at risk of suggesting it is. So I’ll try to be careful. And I'll try to be honest.

Part of The Thing is a kind of sweetness. Part is sadness. It has to have both, this sort of spiritual lava I want you to help me walk through. It's both whole and partial. It can mimic sentimentality; sentimentality can mimic it. It has to at least embrace – to flirt with, to kiss, even – loss too, it has to show us, has to embody, as Blake said, the fact that 'joy and woe are wove fine.' Yearning, of course: it has to contain yearning, too. And place, a taste at least of place, of the hurts and warmths of home and of exile. Time, obviously, it has also to sit in time, in currents sensed as simultaneously passed, and standing still, and passing. And ... there's something else, something so hard to grasp, let alone explain. It's something celebratory, wordless, elusive, magical, both playful and deadly serious: something deep within all of us I think, something connecting each of us to ourselves and to others, to the past and the future, to a selfless now. It tells us we're free, and tells us there's meaning for us to create.

But it's dark, too, this Thing, it lives alongside all the good stuff, inhabits it, inhibits it, undercuts it, eats and drinks and fights it. It reminds us – it’s brutal – that we came into the world alone and we'll die alone and there's certainly no inherent meaning here. There’s no single word in English for it (and right now I want so much to discuss it with Paul, to find that word: I don’t think we ever talked about it.) Nearly every other language does have a word for it, or for something very similar, which may of course say something about our people. The Portuguese call it 'saudade'. The Finns call it 'kaukokaipuu'. In Amharic, it's 'tizita'. The Welsh say 'hiraeth': a Swansea-born friend of mine relates it to rugby, to pride, to heart and soul and fight and the mines and class struggle and nation and the sense of a culture that they/we tried to destroy. He says it's 'something you can feel but not explain.' But I'm English, so I'm going to try to over-explain it. And appropriate it. First though...

He was tall, Paul, and always (at least in later years) expensively and neatly dressed. I never have been – either tall or expensively-dressed. I wish I could be but I know I never will. Paul could recite Keats, too, and had a favourite work by Schubert. I can't and don't, though I've tried both, more than once, for his sake, if not for mine.

We were from the outskirts, from a scrawny, scratchy suburb on the shadowed edges of the city and Essex and Hertfordshire, but from two very different worlds. He lived up the hill from me (0.8 miles, Google Maps tells me), in what my child-mind still remembers as a dark, Gothic mansion, but in fact wasn't. At least, isn't any more: I went there recently to have a look and it's still frank and a little imposing, but it's bland and light too, beige rather than black, and entirely missing the foreboding it had (for us both) back then. And it's much, much smaller.

We first met when we were eleven, at senior school. We both supported Spurs: there was no alternative. We both loved music (though I never, ever got his love for Procol Harum and he only got mine for Alex Harvey a year or so before he died). We were both a little ... ill-fitting, twisted. I've no idea now how it began – did I have the temerity to ask him? – but soon after we started school, he was striding down that hill every morning, crossing over the invisible, crystal-clear class boundaries as he reached Baker Street, heading – his mind full of self-denigration and casually-arrived-at-but-scarily-wise observations – for our small semi and a lift to school.

(Paul's recollection of 17, Radnor Gardens, Enfield, Middx jarred me once with its slap-face truth, when he told me that, for him, Our House was always grey, and still, and sad.) He'd wait softly there, on our so- seventies black-and-yellow couch, inhaling that tense, awkward quiet, until we were all ready to head to school in the Vauxhall Victor.

For a couple of minutes after Dad (sensibly, speed-limit-adheringly, hands at ten to two) drove us off, we'd each stay a little grey and still and sad until, gradually nudged into colour by our shared, bare, eager energy and Terry Wogan's chatter, we'd start to allow my tight, quiet, kind father to hear a semi-censored version of our thoughts and in-jokes as we rumbled bumpily along past the Hop Poles, up past the police station, through the Town, heading south, south, south towards our half-posh, half-safe oasis in unposh Edmonton, growing into life and light ...

I remember those drives so well: with nostalgia. But not, not really, with saudade. (Yes: I think I want to call The Thing saudade, because ... I don't know, because the way the Portuguese seem to understand it comes closest to my understanding, my experience, my fado.) I don't remember feeling it as a kid, but I recognised it in others: I wonder if maybe you have to grow into it, if maybe it develops as you lose innocence, as you place masks over feeling, as you begin that adolescent process of shedding childhood and climbing awkwardly into what Betjeman called adulthood's 'dark of reason'?

I sat in a history class once and the teacher read out one of Paul's essays, trying to show us thickoes how it should be done. I remember it being incisive, complex, and way, way beyond what I could write. What any of us could write. I remember that day as the day I knew I would never be really clever, and I look back on it now and saudade emerges. There was a pain there, somewhere, I reckon, for each of us: Paul was plagued by his cleverness, by his raw compassion and ability to see things. You could have been different, I think now ¼ I could have been different.

A bit later I was sitting in that same classroom one afternoon, bored, waiting for some reluctant teacher or other to start some reluctant lesson or other, and I overheard the lovely Lucy proudly talking to a couple of her equally-unattainable friends about how 'depressed' she felt, now her 22-year-old boyfriend had dumped her, and how 'If You Leave Me Now' by Chicago was ́’our song’ ́but she couldn't listen to it anymore, it upset her too much. I remember feeling so, so envious because I'd never actually had a girlfriend, let alone someone like Lucy. Paul, if he'd been there, may well have felt empathy for her, but I know, looking back, I just wanted to be feeling her pain, a pain that seemed to have glamour and music and sweetness and time and place in it. Whenever I hear that song now, saudade returns, sniggers at me, then retreats, quickly, to half-hide in the shadows.

It's largely physical, saudade, I think I need to mention that. I've never actually had a 'lump in my throat', nor have I ever noticed the hairs on my arms standing up, or goosebumps, whatever they are. But when it arrives, I feel a swirling in my abdomen and a clench of breath and the light-wet approach of tears and a shudder that moves down from my throat. If I try to stifle it, try to hold it back, the shudder becomes external. My partner knows I'm feeling it when she's sitting next to me, in a cinema say, or watching TV in bed, because I shiver, outwardly. I turn, see it in her eyes then, too.

Sometimes it's saudade In Itself that causes the shiver. Sometimes it's saudade about saudade. And sometimes it's The Remembering Of Saudade. C.S. Lewis used the German term ‘Sehnsucht’ for it. He thought it “the inconsolable longing in the heart for we know not what,” “that unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier." And he's right, partly: there's a sudden, exquisite stab/choke in the heart and the soul, then a sense we're about to be reunited with ourselves, with all the others. It's a little bit nostalgia and port and Christmas. It sits in the hearts of Sufism, Zen, Quakerism, the Kabbalah. It's the Buddha, that of God within. It's my daughter loving 'Stay Free' by The Clash for the same reasons I do - and it's the sweet, fond London-loss within that song. It's falling in love with Jan Morris' 'Trieste And The Meaning Of Nowhere' and then finding myself the only customer in a German-speaking bar in the city, being given free sausage by the barman and a peculiar blue liqueur. It's driving around the Ring of Kerry listening to the Saw Doctors doing 'Hay Wrap' and the little boy – who would die too young from a hateful, rare cancer – singing along with it in the back of my car; it's the shopkeepers closing the shutters and doors of their shops as his funeral cortege passed through the town en route to the cathedral. It's the chimes at the end of ‘Same Oul' Town', sounds of want and memory which remind me of the Famine burial grounds at Abbeystrewry. It's people standing up as 'Amhrán na bhFiann' is played at the end of a session in the Skibbereen Eagle; it's forgetting every single time for about ten years to stand up myself and show respect. It's memories of my Dad taking me to White Hart Lane and our shared, close joy at a Chivers goal and thrilled terror at the fighting on the pitch. It's poetry, sometimes: it's Eliot's 'Four Quartets', despite/because of never quite understanding it; it's Heaney, always. It's 'Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind' and whoever you imagine erasing from your memory, and it’s watching '2001: A Space Odyssey' with my Dad and him telling me he didn’t get it and me thinking, "I'm glad, I didn't either". It's the sound of Sister Sledge and the taste of Mackeson’s and the smell of over-cooked sausages at that Wellington Road barbecue; it's watching Tony Hadley sing 'True' to an empty Deep South bar as part of some 'They Used To Be Young And Famous In The Eighties' reality show; it's the silly-sweet taste of Coole Swan and cheap chocolates, the mating-call ringing of New Jersey cicadas and the clamour of the Greensboro railroad at dusk and the couple singing 'Heroes' next door in Limoux and the suddenly-stilled chatter of the barbershop in Green Lanes and that giggling night in the Clown Room at Hornsey Town Hall and the soft murmur of the North Circular traffic one summer-stoop, doo-wop morning-after and the gospel choir in Dalston and the pissed laughter of the pool party up at Middlesex Poly and its oh-so-inevitable consequences ...

It’s love. It's helping my mate Adam compile a Spotify playlist of London songs for his daughter, about to leave her home for University in the frozen wastelands of the North. It’s 'No Woman No Cry' and 'Caledonia', 'Ride On', and 'These Boots Are Made For Walking'. It's Sam Cooke. It’s Aretha. It’s ‘Dry Your Eyes’. It's 'Independence Day' and 'Jersey Girl' and 'Shipbuilding’ and 'Just My Imagination'. It's Emmylou. It's America. It's music beyond music. It has melody and harmony, layers and textures, lifts and swirls and spins. It flows and wraps and pricks and hugs and kisses and smooths. And it can be edged and softly discordant, full of hope and dread. It's the Taj Mahal, that Autumn evening. It's the pier at Deal, that clean Spring morning. It's Be-Bop Deluxe's 'Adventures in a Yorkshire Landscape', the first time I heard it. It’s Hibs fans singing 'Sunshine On Leith’ (KT Tunstall once referred to The Proclaimers' stuff - to their saudade - as ‘anthemic crying’). It's telling Paul about the first and only glass of Chablis Grand Cru I’d had in Paris, and the patience and skill of the waiter preparing the fish. It's watching Billy Bragg doing an impromptu gig outside the Royal Festival Hall and Paul jokingly urging me not to reveal he'd been singing along to 'Power In The Union'. It's cracking open a bottle of Redbreast when Portillo lost his Enfield constituency in ‘97; it's the unspoken, certain knowledge, even then, that Blair would betray us. It's the feeling of freedom when writing my will a few months ago, and the thunder and wind of horses pounding like angry Gods past us in Dingle one Summer. It's the statue of the Virgin Mary swaying in Ballinspittle, and the Gardai chasing us out of the pub with batons drawn afterwards. It's 'Mayn Shvester Khaye' and stories of the camps, it's my daughter wondering if we were Jewish, it's spending an early, early morning in the Church of The Holy Sepulchre, it's a young girl celebrating her Bat Mitzvah and the little girl she was twinned with who didn't live to celebrate hers. It's reading George Herbert's 'Love III' at Paul’s request at his funeral and his (absurd?) insistence that it's a sexual poem; it's talking about cheese-chasing and Englishness with my exiled daughter.

Art can conjure saudade too: the Caravaggio I saw with my other daughter in Valetta; a stared-at-in-awe Bacon triptych in Dallas; the first time I saw ‘The Fighting Temeraire’ at the National, just after my Dad died, thinking back to my grandparents' place and the cheap Woolworth's print of it in their sitting-room. It’s watching Peter Howson's frustrated obliteration of his first painting of John Ogilvie. And it’s standing in the beautiful, sunshined stillness of Waco and the discovery that twenty-four British people died in the massacre there.

There may be a kind of pure saudade and a more complex, impure saudade, though it's hard to tell which is which. I do know it’s Gareth Bale storming down the wing with the ball and leaving John Terry floundering on the ground, and it's the communal noise in the Turkish restaurant on the High Road before the match with Arsenal that same week. It's rain and mist and more: I read once about a Greenland shark that had lived for “392 ± 120 years” and was, consequently, born between 1504 and 1744. Learning that ignited a flame of saudade, at least as I read it, flying silent over the Disko Bay, wondering if I was doing the right thing being there, looking down at the blue-white magnificence of Greenland.

Saudade is time, as I said, and it’s place. Rachel Menken, in 'Mad Men', talking about Israel (everything, in the end, comes back to ‘Mad Men’): "I'll visit, but I don't have to live there. It just has to be. For me, it's more of an idea than a place." To which Don Draper asks, "Utopia?" And Rachel replies, "Maybe. They taught us at Barnard about that word, utopia. The Greeks had two meanings for it: eutopos meaning 'the good place' and outopos, meaning 'the place that cannot be'."

Is each place worth fighting for? Paul regularly pointed out that we were born only seventeen years after the end of the war, that some of our teachers had seen active service, that our parents had been evacuees. War haunts us, is bound up with our saudade; the older I get, the more thoughts of my grandfather lying about his age to get into the army intrude, as does his brief, fiery, post-war desire to topple the class that had sent so many of his mates to their death. Saudade is about touching a good place, and a place that cannot be. But death - disinterested, random death - is always there, in both.

A friend of ours from school was murdered, soon after we left. I wrote something years later, the conceit of which was that it was a posthumous typed letter from our friend to us. It tried to honour him, and it also expressed disappointment in what we - in particular what I - had done with my life since. Paul told me he liked it but he hated its tone of self-deprecation, my virtuous sense of failure. I wonder now if he struggled with it so much because he saw that, in part, my self-deprecation was cosmetic, quasi-saudade. And he knew what self-hate was really like.

Saudade touches everything. He told me once he thought we each wanted the same thing politically, we just had very different ways to achieve it. And in the packed, noisy pub straight after his funeral, someone – of course it couldn’t have been him, but in the tired, three- pints-and-a-few-JDs haze it looked and sounded for a moment so like him – someone leaned in and whispered to me, whispered with conspiratorial eyes darting around, that if there was a bomb here, now, then the cause of right-wing Britain – by which this man meant Brexit and the revenge of angry, betrayed white people, the hurt resistance to the bafflement of change, the reclaiming of the right to find homosexuality and equality and multiculturalism alien and threatening to all that is good and proper in the world would be set back fifty years. Which was true, I replied, if that wasn't actually what they would have loved, this lot: to be blown back fifty years, I mean. I'd have repeated that later, if I could have done, to Paul and he would have winced at my unkindness to people so important to him, and at the laziness of the joke. And he'd have been right in his wincing, not least because I think deep within Trumpism and Brexit lies saudade - and liberals don't understand that. And it’s not only on the right: if it's true that conservatives long for Eden and progressives for Utopia, then acknowledging saudade, integral to both, could, perhaps (he says, naively) be part of bridging our desperate chasms.

I'm digressing. I still, foolishly, feel a need to pin saudade down, despite the fact it can disappear, morph abruptly into something else. I remember being elevated by Alex Harvey's version of 'Tomorrow Belongs To Me' ... until I saw it being sung by the Nazi in 'Cabaret'. And I used to love Mott The Hoople's 'Saturday Gigs', a comic, honest reminiscence that had burned itself into my heart before I was old enough to understand why. It was mine, always had been, that song – no-one I knew had even heard of it. And then the band did it as an encore at one of their many absolutely-final-this-time gigs, and every single person in the place was singing along with it and I felt I'd lost it, somehow; no more mine, no more saudade. It comes and goes: that's the point of it, in a way. Saudade walks the tightrope between life and death and back again, a tightrope frequently oiled with alcohol.

I miss Paul. I still want to be Paul when I grow up. I wish so much I'd been able to do more to bring him back from his exiles. The child in me feels it's my fault, that I somehow LET HIM FINISH! when I shouldn't have done. But I think – maybe – writing this has helped me understand him, and me, and saudade a little bit more, even if I haven't really done any of us justice in the process. I’m worried – the only person I know who’s worried more than me about this kind of thing was Paul – I’m worried I've lurched into sentimentality, and I'm wondering what he'd have to say about that. But I still hope that, perhaps, something I've said here has given you a glimpse of, taste of, breath of your own saudade, and of your own Paul. And if it hasn't, you could, if you want, try reading it all again, this time with whiskey. And, this time, while listening to Madness.

This Morning: A Crouch End Story

Bowie: Five Years.

… so there's the time I was over Hilly Fields and a girl my age was standing on the bandstand singing Life On Mars and I didn't know what it was but it was softly weird and beckoning, and there's the Gordon Road discos where they always, always played Jean Genie, and there's hearing Sorrow when the bloke at Number 16 made us listen to it and loving it, even though He didn't even write it and it was a bit straight, man, and there's my Mum tutting furiously when He came on Top Of The Pops even more than she did when Suzi Quatro came on, and there's never being forgiven for missing a family do because I had tickets to see Him at Earls Court and being completely thrilled and baffled by his austere beauty, and there's me wishing I could be a thousandth as happy with my not-fittingness as He was, and there's that warped, bleeding-brown cover art on Diamond Dogs and this ain't rock 'n' roll, this is genocide, and there's Bewlay Brothers and thinking I was the only person who ever liked it, and there's singing 'Ah, hear this Robert Zimmerman...' with Steve in Dylan's voice, and there's that bit in Young Americans that always does make me want to break down and cry, and there's seeing Him in Milton Keynes and getting sunburned and thinking He was a bit disappointing but it didn't really matter, und dann sind wir Helden, and there's Máiréad texting me about a sadness that leapt out of all the other sad texts, then reminding me about giggling to The Laughing Gnome, and there's me being jealous because Karen saw him more often than I did and Garret hadn't let him disappear into fond memory like I had, and there's knowing that my Mum would actually be really sad: a little for herself, and a lot because I've lost one of the friends she thoroughly disapproved of but secretly liked…

Back to Work. One Year Ago.

Back to work.

The Metropolitan line.

You’re too old for this...

Around Harrow, images from La Dolce Vita swim through your mind. You watched it for the first time ever last night. Beautiful, cynical, poignant, and full of truth, great suits and Vespas. You wish the tube went to Rome in 1960.

You read a chapter of The Age Of Innocence, a Christmas present, trying to ignore the bloke opposite’s sniffing. You give up, have a look at Twitter, start reading an article about academic misconduct by nursing students. You sigh, then give that up too. You float aimlessly around Twitter a bit more, find yourself agreeing with Peter Hitchens. Again.

You arrive at the barriers at Uxbridge. A kid pushes through behind you, gets away without paying. Little git. You feel full, impotent, middle-aged fury, then let it go. He ain’t worth it, Kev...

You have a coffee, discover Mourinho’s been moaning about the weight of the ball in yesterday’s match. You decide it’s time to support someone else. Anyone.

You take a deep breath, find yourself thinking about the time you met Phil Lynott and he passed you a football.

You smile.

Back to work.

Jan Morris

About fifteen years ago, I stumbled across ‘Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere,’ and, as soon as I started reading it, I could feel it easing its way gently into my soul. It’s never completely gone. The book opened up new ways of seeing Europe, of seeing Italy, of seeing history, of seeing our place in it all, of seeing the discipline of the north and the exuberance of the south, of seeing myself. It challenged me to think about how easily I’d dismissed ‘conservative’ values like decency, respect, dignity, quietude, tradition. It made me reconsider how we can feel right in the centre of everything and on the outside simultaneously: not one thing or another; belonging and not belonging.

Seduced by TATMON, I went to Trieste a few times, becoming more and more engrossed in its sweet, harsh linguistic and cultural stews, by its myths and its raw, contested histories. For a while, I tried again and again to write something that honoured it all - I wrote about James Joyce teaching Italo Svevo to speak English there, about his cruelty to Nora there, about Isabel destroying all of Burton’s work there, about fascism and the Risiera di San Sabba camp, about the wild bora raging in and from the Adriatic, about the closing of the asylums, about the beauty and proud, battered civilisation this sharp, soft, weird, conventional city still holds close to itself.

Nothing I ever wrote really worked. The place won’t let itself be pinned down. And I’m not Jan Morris. I talked a lot over the years to people, too, about the city and about the book, but I’m not sure I ever really convinced anyone of the magic. And now I’ve got older and Trieste has faded a little for me, as it has for Europe and for history, into the shadows, and my urgency to translate it has dimmed.

Ah well. I love a lot of the other stuff Jan Morris wrote, but I’ll always be most grateful to her for introducing Trieste to me. And, when all this is over, I want to go there one last time, visit Mirimare and the ‘segregated’ beach, take the tram up to Opicina, drink too much Zanna, eat too much presnitz and fritto misto, and salute this incredible woman and this incredible city. RIP Jan.

It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track.

A year ago today, I was reading this book on my first tube of the morning. It’s so, so in love with music and with language and with knowing stuff and sharing stuff and with the day and night of being human, that it’s utterly, exquisitely transporting. And for a few seconds that day, I hated - even more than usual - the mundanity of changing trains, hated it for ripping me away from the zest and guts of this burning, wordy thing.

I remember gripping it tightly on the platform at Finchley Road station, freezing cold, breeze-blown, feeling a weird mix of joy and gratitude and yearning. And then sitting on a bench, opening it and starting to read it again. And then missing my train to Uxbridge.

Ian Penman was one of three music writers (Paul Morley and Julie Burchill being the others) who made me both desperate to write (in their very different ways, their raging, tripping words flew so high and were so slap-in-the-face/kiss-on-the-lips, they seemed to call from other, better, worlds) and unknowingly intimidated the scared, shy, silly adolescent me-I-was so much, I couldn’t risk showing anyone my own writing for years. Love/hate.

Penman’s title is from Auden, clever, chameleonic, transport-obsessed Auden, who once, long before I was born, talked about

“...the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”

So. They all - Penman, Morley, Burchill, Auden - still intimidate me a little, but these days reading rare, beautiful books like this mostly makes me want to try and capture at least a little of my own magic, to capture it and share it before the ship sails on. Sometimes Uxbridge just has to wait.

G*d

It’s raining in Jerusalem. I just crammed an agnostic elegy into a crack in the Wailing Wall. Is there a G*d somewhere who can reverse our losses? Will this sacred tourist act bring Him to me for the first time? My mother and father came here too, back in the old times; a hat blew over a wall into the monastery.

There are serious men with serious beards, just in front of me, doing what looks like a serious hokey cokey, and I realise I envy them with all my heart. There’s a call-to-prayer floating across from the mosque, seductive, demanding. The market-traders are yelling and selling tat and beauty in equal measure. This afternoon we stood and commemorated - we tried to hug and to hold - the children who died in the Shoah. 1,500,000.

The horns of the cars out on the road to Tel Aviv and the Crusaders’ trumpets blare in wild competition. We get lost on the way back to the hotel and we finally arrive and breathe fire with freedom. Alive.

No.

Born in Enfield in 1983, she died nine years ago today. I wrote this the day after:

I was drinking coffee when I heard Amy Winehouse was dead. I felt tears threaten immediately, but dismissed the sudden, unexpected wave of sadness as self-indulgent nonsense that had far more to do with me and my life than with her. But I kept thinking about her. And I had a small whiskey. And another. And I kept thinking about her.

One of the exercises I've used, occasionally, when teaching mental health students, has been to put up on screen the phrase 'I feel sorry for Amy Winehouse,' and ask people to notice their immediate reactions - and talk about them. The room's usually been split into those who see her as victim - of the media, of the voraciously abusive record industry, of her family, of men, of the 'illness' of addiction - and those who see her primarily as unfortunate but somehow willing participant in her own destruction, a weak, ruined kid who no-one could have saved because she didn’t want saving. What most have usually agreed on is that, at some point, her symbiotic relationship with the press - and us - became co-dependant, parasitic, cannabilistic and blackly, bloodily destructive.

Hungover this morning - and still miserable - I found myself thinking about the superficiality of that exercise, the way in which I used 'Amy Winehouse' to make some pretty crass points, the way in which, in the unreality of those soulless, protected classrooms, we all had clear opinions, saw ourselves in her, wanted to be like her and not be like her, admired her and pitied her, dismissed her and granted her some distorted significance beyond what she either wanted or deserved. Somehow, I thought, we never actually seemed to think of her as a real fucking person, full and complex and flawed and feeling and sensing and hurting and dreaming. I found myself wondering this morning exactly why I used her, and not anyone else, as an example to hang my flimsy points about suicide, addiction and mental health on - and why I felt so upset last night.

Amy was from just down the road - fiercely, otherly attractive in the early days of her fame/infamy, strange, thrilling, difficult, tortured - and she was a bloody good singer (though I'm not about to do the usual Stalinist thing and pretend I loved all her music - some of it was too hard, too jazzy, not quite soully enough for me - but I could listen to the best of it for ever and the words she wrote could be stunningly, batteringly honest, wry, warm and shockingly insightful.)

As a strange, difficult, music-obsessed boy/man from Enfield who’d spent half his adolescence in unrequited love with tortured girls from Southgate, I had messy reasons for feeling some kind of connection with her, perhaps. But more than any of those, Amy seemed - or, rather, the avatar we all created of her in our lives seemed - to tell us so much about ourselves, to tell me so much about myself: my own weaknesses, my own desires to be heard and understood, my own self-destructiveness, my own soul and jazz. As long as Amy was around, there was someone like me, but far, far, far worse: I could feel sane, sensible, neither victim nor wilful culprit in my own life. Whatever fuck-ups I made, they were never going to be as bad as hers; and however badly I treated those around me, it would never be as bad as those who should have treated her in the ways deserved, in ways that proved they really loved her. So she was useful to me, Amy, as she was to those (often men) who are already claiming her as some kind of feminist icon, weirdly proud of her living a destructive life in popular music in the same way men have always done, as if that's equality, somehow, as if it's progress...

There was a second part to that student exercise I'd sometimes use: a second screen that had the phrase 'What I have in common with Amy Winehouse is...' Thinking about that now, I remember my own internal answers, know I too feel unable/unwilling to cope at times, feel useless, even worthless every now and then, know I use chemicals (conservatively, gently) as an avoidant prop. And I know I have responsibility for my own life, I know I'm, in part, the result of my childhood, of everything that's ever happened to me, of the friends who died when they were 27, of my genes and my biology and my chemistry and my culture. I know I too can self-mythologise, use my past, use image and projection and half-truths. I know I'm just some flawed loner from the London Borough of Enfield...

There have been so many times I've been enraged by the failure of the mental health system and ‘society’ to help people like Amy Winehouse and right now I feel enraged by my own vague complicity in her death and in that of so many others who never had her talent or 'luck'. But I'm not totally convinced the 'system' failed as such: I think one of the tragedies and sadnesses of her death is that none of us ever really recognised her as a person, merely as that avatar, as a perverse learning tool, as an exemplar, as a repository for all the stuff - good and bad - we don't want to face up to in ourselves.

So I hope Amy doesn't become another Jimi or Janis or Kurt: I hope she stays, in our hearts, the strange, tortured, joyful girl from Southgate who could sing our desires and losses like no-one else of her generation. And then maybe we can really learn from her. And give her back some of her real self.

All Of Us.

I was seven. Seven and a half. On this day in 1969, I watched humans land on the moon, walk on the moon, bring the moon and the whole of the universe down to us.

Mum and Dad had bought me an Airfix Apollo 11 rocket the day before, which must have been so expensive for them. It stood proudly on the dining table next to us as we watched the weird grainy pictures and listened to the weird grainy voices and we breathed quietly together and I knew something magical was happening up there and something magical and poetic was happening down here too, here in grey, prosaic Enfield. I imagined I was Neil Armstrong. I wondered what Buzz Aldrin was thinking. And I felt a bit sorry for Michael Collins because he wouldn't be able to say he landed on the moon. I knew I'd probably never be an astronaut but I thought I might one day be an American if I tried hard enough.

Every year on this day I wonder why no-one's really making more of it. That evening my parents and my sister and my friends and the neighbours and Neil and Buzz and Michael and me and the rest of the world shared something we can be so, so proud of. Today’s one of the anniversaries we should all celebrate with pride and awe and joy.

I really wish I could be back there with Mum and Dad, sit on that hideous yellow and black sofa of theirs, watch it happen all over again. And I wish they were here now to read this and to talk to about it. But it's OK. They helped me walk on the moon once, just for a while.

Thanks For The Dance

I knew three wise men once.

Sometimes I forget what they taught me.

~~~

I think I spend too much time these days looking for the father I had
and the father I didn’t.

I spend too much time wondering about my legacy.

I spend too much time flipping between old and new testaments.

I spend too much time back there,
instead of right here.

I spend too much time wondering about God.

I spend too much time trying to define me, pin me down, rid myself of uncertainty.

~~~

Yesterday, for all sorts of reasons, was one of those days all the searching and wondering got a bit too much. So I decided to listen to the new Leonard Cohen album.

Separation, distance, introspection: Adam, his son, and a whole load of others who loved and worked with Cohen, had posthumously slipped soft, sure, delicate music in and around and under nine of his poems. Mexico was here, the borderlands, America, Canada, Israel, Greece, sweet guitars, gentle pianos. It was nice and neat and reassuring but, that first time round, words and music, life and death, me and him, here and there, all felt a little semi-adhesive, fog-glimpsed, grey. I’d stopped the work I’d been doing to listen to the album, but stayed distracted, obsessed with the day’s hurts, started piling wondering on wondering: half-listening, half-thinking in fragmentary circles, pointlessly pondering the relationships between poetry and lyrics, between music and words, between song and conversation, between rhythm and melody, between life and death.

The second time I listened to the album, though, it decided to give me what I wanted: no more wondering, no more analysis, a coming together of heart and soul. There was truth and wisdom - hand-round-the-shoulders, kick-in-the-arse wisdom - a blue-warm, fiery, firm, unapologetic masculinity, a rage at injustice and hatred, a joyous love of life and words and song, of our histories and our futures. Dark, never black. Serious, though only fleetingly sombre. Spoken, momentarily sung. Clever, but never, ever pretentious. And embracing, never depressing. I started remembering the lessons.

Our legacies, our fathers, our Gods, our nows, our testaments: for that second thirty minutes, I’d stopped searching and I’d stopped wondering and I’d sat in Zen and I’d understood. I realised the man who convinced me to walk into Leonard’s world about a decade ago would have loved it. That Leonard would have loved him. And that I loved them both and - somewhere, deep down - knew by heart what they wanted me to hear.

RIP.

Class

Last night. A true story. 

There’s a man. Let’s call him Mick. Mick is having a drink in his local, the place he’s gone to relax in after work for the last twenty years or so. He’s at the bar, talking to a mate of his. The place has changed, to be honest - the clientele is younger now than it was, and posher, there are fewer of the old crowd, and it does food - but it’s still a decent pub. Homely, you know? 

Tonight there’s football on the big screens and some comedy thing in the back. He gets talking to a nice couple. Turns out she’s doing a spot at the comedy herself, and the bloke’s there to support her. They say to Mick and his mate, ‘Come in with us, it’ll be good.’ He agrees, intrigued, though his mate says he doesn’t want to, he’ll stay in here. There’s been comedy every Thursday in the room at the back for years, but Mick’s never even thought about going before. As far as he knows, none of his mates have ever gone either. 

Mick leaves the bar, walks through the function room, enters the place they used to call the snug. There’s three rows of creaky wooden chairs here. He sits at the back. Mick takes a couple of swigs of his beer, waits, has a chat about Man United with the nice couple, who have sat next to him. An Asian man gets up on stage, welcomes everyone to the evening, tells a few jokes. He’s pretty funny. Mick starts replying to him, joining in, having a bit of banter. People in front of him turn round. The compère looks a bit uncomfortable, but doesn’t say anything, just introduces the first act. 

The first act is a man, a very - calculatedly - camp man, who keeps talking about how much cocaine he’s had. Mick doesn’t think he’s very funny. ‘Oi, mate, when’s the comedy start?’ The unfunny man ignores Mick, finishes his five minutes, and swaggers off. 

The compère comes back on. ‘I see we’ve got UKIP in tonight,’ he says, seeming like he’s looking straight at Mick. The audience giggles, but Mick has no idea what he’s talking about. 

The compère introduces another act. This one’s a student talking about his gap year in Bhutan. There’s nothing really for Mick to respond to, so he keeps quiet. 

Time passes, the compère introducing act after act, most of them men, most of them talking sneeringly about Brexit, all of them doing jobs you’ve never heard of: ‘I’m in creative solutions.’ ‘I’m a graphic insights facilitator’. ‘I run my own artisanal pairing hub’.

Mick tries to join in. The compère asks him at one point what his name is, says it’s ‘great to have people like you here, Mick. What do you do?’ ‘I’m a postman.’ ‘Oh,’ says the compère, ‘How long you done that?’ ‘Twenty years,’ says Mick. ‘Oh,’ says the compère.

A few minutes later, one of the comedians mentions ‘firemen’. Mick shouts out, ‘you mean ‘firefighters’’. Everyone laughs. Mick has no idea why at first. And then he realises. He feels like he wants to go back to the main bar, but it would be rude to walk out now.

The compère gets up to introduce the last act of the evening, thanks everyone for coming, ‘especially Mick.’ Everyone laughs again. 

The final act ends with another Brexit joke. The compère comes back on one last time. He finishes with ‘Cheers Mick, you’re what comedy’s all about. Come again mate.’ Mick stares at him. He wants to say something, but he knows he’s no comedian. He stands up, says goodbye to the nice couple and rushes out of the door into the cold night. He feels a bit... weird. He takes a deep breath, turns round, thinks about going back into his pub, but decides against it. He should probably have an early night.

Road Trip: LA

Who knew? This place is a proper city: human and alien and alive with art and drama and suffocated ennui and smoke and silliness and ghost-hint memories of London and Beijing and Athens and Tijuana.

Up the coast: we find ourselves sharing the ankle-pulling, chest-striking ocean (all power and promise) with a pair of dolphins. I feel the open-hearted joy of a cartoon child.

Meanwhile, back on earth, there’s a homeless man pissing in the street. Behind him, the graffiti says ‘Chucky loves Kitty.’ He’s smoking as he pisses.

Look up: a poster says, ‘Gentrification Sucks’. Another, ‘We Are Not A Minority’. A cardboard sign above a fading shop: ‘Mariscos 4 Vientos’.

The old Sears building is a beautiful, messy thing, a dozen kinds of church. It watches us like the Texas sun did, but it knows its place in our histories far better.

LA has a Byzantine-Latino Quarter. Google says it’s ‘permanently closed’.

Road Trip: Arizona/New Mexico/Joshua Tree, CA.

Do you know how many civilisations have died here, in this beautiful place? How many buffalo? Do you know how many dreams have been dreamed, how much love has been made, how much music has sweetened souls?

Did you know Buffalo Bill’s rifle was called Lucretia Borgia?

Did you know Wild Bill Hickock was originally nicknamed Duck Bill because of his long nose and protruding lips? He grew a moustache and started calling himself ‘Wild Bill’ in a (successful) effort to re-brand himself.

Did you know that when Billy The Kid was sentenced, the judge told him he was going to hang until he was “dead, dead, dead”. His response was, “you can go to hell, hell, hell.”

Did you know Colonel Custer graduated from West Point bottom of his class?

Did you know one of Sitting Bull’s other names was Jumping Badger?

My grandfather loved Westerns and I always wanted to be John Wayne. I’m not sure I want to apologise.

Road Trip: Vegas

You wonder what the point of Tarantino is. Then you play blackjack.

Road Trip: Everywhere and nowhere, baby.

Come with me to:

Twin Arrows

Two Guns

Winona

Rattlesnake Wash

Thousand Oaks Drive

Slaughter Creek

Pecan Creek

Flying Heart Road

Dr Mud’s Liquor

Sour Lake

Z's Bar

Sugar Tree Baptist Chapel

Hungry Mother State Park

Gap In The Ridge Road

and

Bulltown Swamp.

Then tell me you don’t want to be here.

Road Trip: Joshua Tree, CA.

I love the Joshua trees. They reach my hands up to God.

I think about Gram being kicked out by the Stones and I feel sorry for him and I imagine his choking motel room and his melancholy that night. I imagine his friends giggling in grief as his snatched body almost burns. I imagined Emmylou’s pain.

I first listened to Grievous Angel about twenty years ago and didn’t get it. At all. A couple of weeks ago, I totally fell in love with it. I‘m older now, more willing to hear despair.

Road Trip: Winslow, AZ.

One says she’s a friend of mine.

Road Trip: Lubbock, TX.

1. I hear a story.

Buddy Holly’s got a little bit of money, for the first time in his life. He goes with his mates to the local dealer to buy a Harley. He wants to do a Brando in The Wild One, ride down to Dallas. The people in the showroom laugh - ‘Yeah, like you can afford a Harley? You just want a free ride on one, kid. Get out of here.’ Buddy doesn’t care, says, ‘Come on guys,’ and leads them across the street to another dealer. There, he buys an Ariel - a 1958 650cc Cyclone. Cool. His mates buy a Triumph TR6 and a Thunderbird. They add in some Levi jackets and peaked caps and head off through a thunderstorm on their English steeds, making sure they noisily drive a couple of times past the Harley place first...

***

2. I look at a guitar.

It’s Buddy’s Fender Strat. I see the pick he’d placed for the next gig (as usual) between the body of the guitar and the pickguard.

Buddy took the plane to that next gig. The guitar took the bus. He was 22.

Road Trip: Garner State Park, TX.

Sometimes all you can do is drift. The river is gentle. Sit with me in this big tyre. For a moment, it’s 1971. There’s a Mexican guy on a floating sound system. There’s cheesy music and the chitter of kids enjoying themselves. The sun watches some of them jumping from trees, holds its breath until they splash. You watch them with envy. The sun winks.

They say there are no alligators here.