Man Crush

So your carte is entirely blanche 

and you must name one man you fancy

she says, 

having just listed twenty-six women 

she fancies,

having lured me outside,

umbrellaless,

into the strained, ecstatic rain of fantasy.

I think. I Think. I THINK.

Paul Simonon, I say. In 1977. Not now. 

Who? she says.

Paul Simonon. Does that make me gay? I say.

It depends, she says.

On what? I say.

On whether I'd fancy him too, she says.

Oh, I say.
 

Sometimes I wonder if anyone else

finds it all quite as confusing

as I do.

Baker Street

The maroon-jacketed barbers have clearly spent the morning Brylcreeming themselves in preparation. The pictures on their wall – Gregory and Rock and the first Darren from Bewitched – greet us with sneeringly-slick Hollywood sparkle. It’s the bloke who looks like that wise Irish sergeant from Z Cars doing my hair today. The bloke with his own monogrammed scissors. I steal a packet of dunkies (did you call them that?) when he turns his back to get a mirror. I’ll never use them, obviously. I’m eleven, for God’s sake.

Hair now successfully sliced in a mock-Rock style, we leave. In the haberdasher’s opposite The Hop Poles, the haber is busy dashing. When he and my mum aren’t looking, I nick a needle and thread. Just in case. That, too, goes in my Spurs bag.

Cobblers. Alf is tall, wears a clinical white coat. He’s fired up his whirring noideawhatitdoes machine in preparation, just for me. A true professional. There’s nothing he can’t mend, Alf. He smiles as he chats to mum. And I steal some Cherry Blossom as I slide out of the place behind her. Brown Cherry Blossom: all my shoes are black.

In Ken’s, with mum outside talking to a bunch of older kids who are scrounging pennies for a guy that looks exactly like my headmaster, I leaf through the used singles. Wizzard. Medicine Head. Mud. When Ken is distracted by Cliff the Biff walking into his shop, I take a Jubbly. It’ll make my gums bleed and taste of snow. They always do.

Nearly home. The rag-and-bone man rings his bell as his horse and cart turn from the Crescent into our road, excited – I can tell by the way he and the horse are both neighing – to see me. Someone’s dumped a promo picture of Elvis in Viva Las Vegas in the cart. I nick it as old Steptoe chats to mum and Mrs Ganderton. I can’t stand Elvis.

Later, in the stillness of my bedroom, I empty my bag of my imaginary haul, spread the stuff out neatly on the bed. I stare at it all, inwardly cackling like The Joker. I don’t yet know what a metaphor is.

Broadmoor

You drew a picture once, some therapeutic tiger, and it looked quite lifelike - all striped and fierce and ready to kill, but with an old lady's smile. I liked you.

Shared gifts: I'd been afraid and hopeful and lost two teeth crashing into a tree as I flew across the stream on a frayed rope, briefly free of parents and the different city that breathed the other side of the Thames, that queued  in Vauxhall Vivas to board the rickety rocky Woolwich Ferry: the city that ached for some new kind of sunlight.

You dumped a handbag in that stream, my stream, this stream, the handbag that got you caught, swallowed by 37/41 forever or until the Home Secretary loses the plot and you must know I never wanted to grow up so quickly?

You were serving in the canteen once - a twisted tuck-shop, trusting - and I heard one of your customers spit 'you know what I want!' and you said, grave, 'how would I fucking know, I'm a psychopath not a telepath?' and you winked at me and we all sniggered, even the ghosts of those old ladies whose skin you'd ripped like old newspapers. 

Precious few joys in any of our lives - kept in check by our neuroleptic timidity - the nurses seemed to hate you more for your stabs at normality than for the blood you spilt. Tough: they told me you murdered the place that I'd made myth from, the peace I'd inserted into my childhood. 

Yes. Two women in Bostall Woods, one on the Heath. I could never do what you did. 

Nostalgia

…they chained up the swings on Sundays because breeze-in-face smiling would lead us into temptation and they couldn’t afford to pay Parkie overtime

and they cleaned up the crisp bags and empty tubes of glue once a week because they wanted to save our souls and because the locals had petitioned the council for three years and they didn’t know what else to do with the YOPs kids but arm them with blunt rakes and rubbish bags and send them out to battle our need to breathe a different world

and they cleared the white dog-shit and dunkies from the alleyways every September without fail, except during The Winter of Discontent (which lasted, roughly, from 1957 until 1982)

and they even threw ELO at us (although, to be fair, they also gave us Ziggy because no-one – not even them – could expect us to live in Enfield without at least one lightning stripe of transcendence)…

Ah, the old days. They tried their best not to give us Schubert or Ted Hughes or Goya because they knew we’d never, ever have been good enough.

Dear Jane: A Confession

I’d walk past your old man’s rust-ridden Aston Martin every day and wonder if it had an ejector seat.

I’d pass your place on the way to the bus stop and pray you’d choose just that moment to emerge from your weird, pebble-dashed house, greet me with the smile that launched a thousand hard-ons, take me in hand and whisk me away like I was a Bond who couldn’t drive and you were a Bond girl who’d nicked your dad’s car keys.

But my cunning plan never quite worked. Nothing ever did. You even made a more convincing man than I ever did: you spotted me once when we were both younger, saw me fantasising, Tarzan walking with my invisible Cheetah, chest out, stomach in. You ran towards me, punched me full in the guts, hard. I couldn’t breathe but pretended I could. Which was not a good look. I can still hear your giggle. Your cackle.

A few years after that – remember? – they blocked off the alley behind our houses, the cracked concrete ribbon that divided our back garden from yours. Too much joy-riding, apparently.

I could no longer sneak out and peer through the gap in the fence, stare longingly at your garden shed. So, one cidered-up evening, I broke into your old man’s Aston. I sat down, took a deep breath. The red button on the dashboard said, simply, ‘Press’. And I did, knowing in my heart of hearts nothing would happen.

RRRRRRRRHHHHHHHWHOOSH!

At the very top of my trajectory, I could see people sunbathing in their gardens, the Civic Centre, the Hop Poles and the Brimsdown cooling towers. A moment of pure, joyous liberty.

But the parachute didn’t open. Because there was no parachute. Because your old man was a cheapskate. A flash cheapskate. And so I plummeted. Down. Fast. As opposed to plummeting up. Obviously.

And that’s how your cat saved my life. And that’s how I killed your cat.

Sorry.

A Mostly Untrue Story About A Mostly Real Place Called Hilly Fields

…so a body was found here last April – foreign, arm-scarred and illegal, child become man become corpse become cadaver – and I return again and again: these are, let’s face it, fields which are hilly, these are quiet, past-sugared fields which stick hard town to soft country like unwanted kisses, these are holy fields which once offered a bold cover-version of hope – autumnal rhythms and soft mists and tight desires and wet socks – and they lead, if you follow me, through the woods to the viaduct, the viaduct we called Fourteen Arches for reasons that escape me and I shiver with now echoes of then voices bouncing and booming and dubbing and rising as the pissed trains pass above us in the sober rain and, almost certainly, my soul will be found here one day soon

if I have one, and my dear, dead heart will rise here again, sing up to the graffiti’d bricks and the modest sky, my past greeting my future (as it once did) with an adolescent mumble and a reluctant handshake and when I was really young here, the quiet oaks did ‘stern and parental’ so, so well, so well that when I’d reached the salt-grey stream by the bandstand I’d sneak a look back up the hill and I could only just make out a house sitting pretty next to the church, the gingerbread house of the girl I never really spoke to, badly-drawn dodgy flats and the cold, squinting sun leering behind it and I’d blink twice and there it was gone as my old man used to say and I’d turn back, turn and walk into the woods where two years ago I came here with a woman, a strange, beautiful-to-me woman who, a century before, had sat up a tree near the bandstand, reading prize-won horror stories and stuff by Sylvia Plath

or someone similar, at the very same time as I was booklessly wandering the damp grass beneath, each of us waiting for the rickety red bus out of childhood, each of us oblivious to the other, each of us already old and knowing that those buses always come in threes and, OK, the thought I may have passed underneath her as she sat up there is warm and unbearable but – you guessed it – I never looked up, she never looked down and now these are still fields which are still hilly, these are still fields which still defy and still beckon and did I mention a body was found here in April, foreign and illegal

and yes, yes, you have to believe me: it was a body, foreign and illegal and – mostly – mine.

Future

Yesterday I told someone it felt like I had a choice: go to yet another bloody meeting or run away to join the circus.

So I chose: wore silly clothes, put on a mask, held a dozen balls in the air, told bad jokes, suspended myself above a baying crowd, played games with a frightened, toothless bully, led big grey animals round and round in pointless circles.

Tomorrow, though, tomorrow I'll join the circus.

La Chanson Des Vieux Amants

I’ve always loved Jacques Brel’s La Chanson Des Vieux Amants. I was listening to it again the other day and started looking online for a translation. The only ones I found were really clunky, Google Translate-type things, so I decided to do one myself, drawing on the French I picked up at Lavender Road Junior School and from visiting Paris a few times. And using Google Translate. And making the rest up.

I think I might have too much time on my hands:

The Song of Old Lovers

Yeah, I know: we’ve walked through storms,
Through twenty years of insane bloody love.
A thousand times you’ve picked up your suitcase,
A thousand times I’ve run away
And each piece of furniture
In this cradleless room
Sparks flashes of the old lightning.
Nothing makes sense now:
You’ve lost your taste for booze
And I’ve lost mine for conquest.

But my love, my sweet,
My tender, my marvellous love:
In the clear light of dawn
And at the end of the day,
I love you still, you know. I love you.

Me, I know all your spells;
You, you see through my ‘charms';
You, you’ve protected me, from harm to harm,
Me, yeah, I’ve forgotten you every now and then.
(Of course, you’ve had a few lovers:
No point in wasting time,
The body has to rejoice in itself.)
Oh, and ultimately, at the end of the day,
When all’s said and done, you’ve got to agree:
It’s pretty impressive
To get to be this old without ever growing up.

But my love, my sweet,
My tender, my marvellous love:
In the clear light of dawn
And at the end of the day,
I love you still, you know. I love you.

The more time marches us off to our funerals,
The more it tortures us.
But isn’t the very worst trap of all
When lovers live in peace?
Granted, you no longer cry as quickly,
Granted, it takes me longer these days to tear myself apart,
Granted, we guard our secrets less
And granted, we leave less to chance these days –
We’re cautious of the undercurrents –
But it remains, always, war,
A tender war, but a war. As it should.

And my love, my sweet,
My tender, my marvellous love,
In the clear light of dawn
And at the end of the day,
I love you still, you know. I love you.

Balaclava

Blue, fluffy, two sizes two small, I wore it every morning for a while, looking like a very small, uncertain IRA man, though I like to think now I made balaclavas cool long before terrorists did. Bafflingly, its unbelievable itchiness, its Napoleonic harshness, the way it made me almost unrecognisable but only almost, the way in which it attracted attention and invited ridicule for its anti-style, its anti-elegance – even in 1970, even in Enfield – meant I hated it. And so, keeping it on for approximately thirteen seconds after setting off for school, I’d turn the corner into Kenilworth Crescent and stuff it in my bag. By the time I reached Baker Street and the fiefdom of the shouty crossing lady with her enormous child-battering stick, you’d never have known I wasn’t always the smooth, debonair balaclavaless man-about-town I knew I was.

One day, I realised the pretence had to end. Enough was enough. Time to make a stand. I refused to leave the house unless I could leave the knitted, sinister monstrosity at home. Words and threats and tears flew but, eventually, I won.The hat stayed at home with mum while I headed off to school to impress Caroline Evans with my impersonations of Dad’s Army characters. Life was good.

And then, at break-time, Caroline told me she’d seen me the day before wearing my balaclava. Told me with a grin on her face. Told me with a smugness she’d (almost certainly) come to regret for the rest of her life. Or would do, if she knew we were an item, if she ever knew I’d just dumped her, my pride crushed, my hurt spilling across the playground. Life was no longer good: I went home and dropped the bloody thing at the bottom of the dustbin. And I never spoke to Caroline again.

And that’s it, really. I never thought about the episode until a few minutes ago. It never affected me at all. Had no lasting impact on me. None. Not at all. And there’s definitely no symbolism or metaphor lurking here. Nope.

(One more thing: I was amazed to see that www.balaclavasRUs.co.uk has what looks exactly like my balaclava for sale. I’m really tempted.)

An Accidental Man

A couple of years ago, Kingston University bought hundreds of Iris Murdoch's letters. When I heard about this, I emailed The Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies (oh yes), arranged a time to go down there, underwent a rigorous examination of my motives that included waterboarding and being forced to listen to Level 42's entire back catalogue, put on special Kev-proof gloves made from swan's feathers, swore I'd be really, really, really, really careful and then sat there for hours, immersed in Iris' thoughts and dreams and anxieties, all the time being glared at by the scarily-bespectacled Keeper Of The Letters.

All the letters were from Iris - she apparently destroyed every single one she ever received. And, while The Guardian had been full of the 'sensational' discovery of her long-term gay relationship with Philippa Foot, the fascination for me lay in those to Raymond Queneau, the French writer who wrote one of my favourite books, 'Exercises in Style'. I sat there trying to piece together what he must have said to her: her responses were loving, tantalising, exquisite and sad.

The whole process felt poignant, incredibly intimate and a huge, oddly guilty privilege. I wrote down some of the words that particularly struck me - and the next day lost the bits of paper I'd scrounged off  a reluctant KOTL...

I found my scribbles again last night, which felt so nice, and decided I'd try and write something based on those shared, tight, stolen moments. But I soon realised this morning that I don't have the skill or energy or inclination to come up with a poem or a short-story or anything too imaginative: so this is a sort of brief, 'found' letter that - hopefully - offers a glimpse into Iris Murdoch's correspondence with Raymond Queneau. Every word is hers:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

4 Eastbourne Road,
Chiswick

Sweet, gentle Queneau

Will you be in Paris? Are Simone de Beauvoir and Merleen Ponty likely to be there? That would be a lovely unbirthday present for me.

I am not writing. My novel has an airy, witty, flashy perfection in my head which I should undoubtedly spoil by putting pen to paper. Sometimes I suspect I haven't enough imagination to be a good writer nor enough hard logic to be a good philosopher.

Yet there is so much life here- quite mysterious still, like fishes in a dark aquarium, but very moving. Van Eyckish light on white wimples and jewelled crosses, the beautiful unwearying plain-song, speaking through a grille...

Life is very strange, isn't it? The self, sitting behind a locked door, watches itself, passes its time in not willing to be itself and yet is self enough to love itself. And I can't live without giving and receiving affection, my sweet man. I'm sorry about the scene on the bridge, or rather I'm sorry in the sense that I ought to have said nothing or to have said something sooner.

Yes. Yes. I love you in the most absolute sense possible. I would do anything for you, be anything you wished me, come to you at any time or place if you wished it, even for a moment.

Iris

PS My surname ends with an H not a K.

Thoughts On 'The Story Of The Jam: About The Young Idea.'

Thoughts On 'The Story Of The Jam: About The Young Idea' (Sky Arts). https://youtu.be/8XZAxx5-u2k

I was never a mod. Too awkward, too uncertain, too utterly lacking in cool or style, too scared of my own shadow. But I loved The Jam. Absolutely bloody loved them. I remember thinking - and saying - and believing - that, in the late Seventies, Paul Weller was writing songs that I would write if I had... if I had... whatever it was Weller had. Their music - that first album and All Mod Cons particularly - made me feel alive, raw, real, certain, understood. And, just as it did for someone in the film, Weller sticking a Shelley quote on an album-cover helped dig poetry - and politics - deep into the soil of the rest of my life.

Of course, when I say I wasn't a mod, it wasn't through lack of trying, at least for a few months. I bought a (terrible) parka in Second Time Around. I got my hair cut like Weller (only to end up with something that made me look more like Rick Buckler). I bunked off school and went down to the Royalty to try and get a part (unsuccessfully) as an extra in Quadrophenia. I once sang 'Down In The Tube Station At Midnight' live on stage, at The Pegasus in Stoke Newington (to what was almost certainly huge acclaim from adoring fans, though I don't really know - I was too drunk on rum and blacks and fantasies of Whatsername turning up to be properly aware of my moment of glory).

There are those who would question whether Weller was a mod anyway, whether The Jam were really a mod band. I don't know the answer to that either: i suppose I'm still not sure what ‘mod’ really means. I'm not sure how subversive, how modernist, how European, how political it ever was/is. Or whether it even matters. I do know it was - as a movement, as a series of moments - proud and glittering and embracing and good-looking and precious and exclusive and - sometimes - beautiful, and that it wrapped itself around some of the greatest black-and-white music ever made. I think it was/is important, in a way. And I know that, while I wasn't ever a mod, however hard I tried, some of its pride and glitter spilt onto my ill-fitting two-tone suit and some of it has stayed stuck to my hands.

I wanted to cry, at times, watching this warped, wayward, disingenuous film, and I'm still not sure why. It reminded me of growing up, of course, of my parents, of my kids, of time passing. It reminded me of my twenty-odd years living in Woking too, of people and places lost, of dreams diluted or dumped, of hope kept alive by music and friendship and love and language and football and art and beer. It reminded me of both how like and how unlike Weller I am. And it reminded me how the people who made the film (most particularly, Weller himself) couldn't ever quite bring themselves to admit either what unites us or what divides us.

Someone said the other day that Weller was 'the man we all wanted to be', because he was 'more of a man' than us. Well maybe, yes. And, absolutely, no. I watched the old clips and I could see why he enraptured us. I could see why I've spent half my adult life talking about him. Watching them, I recognised the part of me that still wants to be him (or at least the 19-year-old him). And yet...There was no darkness in this programme: this was hagiography, a weird, cartoony panegyric. People like me, and (more importantly) people who should have been in it because they directly helped make Weller who he is, were airbrushed, in a Stalinist way, from the story.

When my youngest watched it, she said, 'I suppose I never heard them chronologically, you just showed me the individual songs you liked, not the full albums in order. I'm jealous, honestly, that I didn't grow up with it in the same way'. I felt hugely guilty for a moment. And I began to envy her her distance from it all.

I envied Weller too, of course. But he wasn't a bloody saint. He was, mostly, a projection, a screen, a mirror. He was a single-minded, selfish twat. He was full of righteous and unrighteous rage. He was a bully. He was charming and clever and an occasional genius and I once watched him be hugely, unnecessarily kind to someone at a gig. He’s still utterly unlike me (apart from the selfish twattiness. And the charm, obviously) and we’d probably hate each other if we ever met: I can only play the driven, sure-of-himself, working-class hard man convincingly for about a second. (Of course, that might be the point: I suspect without his slow-burning, finely-crafted public brand, without his songs, without his fame, Weller could only actually play the driven, working-class hard man for a few seconds…)

Another friend remarked, after watching this, that ‘he seems more comfortable these days'. True, perhaps - and her saying that emphasised to me that Paul Weller has never actually been comfortable, not ever: his drinking, his drug-taking, his entire life seems to have been one of seeking comfort and simultaneously spitting at it and running from it as soon as it appeared round the corner. He's written a handful of great songs (each one, interestingly, a straightforward love song) in our lifetimes since The Jam. But his attempts at experimentation, to distance himself from The Other Two and his essential Sixtiesness, have seemed to me (mostly) clunky and self-conscious.

Paul Weller: completely unlike me. There's a fabulous moment about 25 seconds into this post-Jam (but desperately/knowingly-nostalgic-already) Style Council video, filmed at Woking Football Club. Watch him leap off the scooter, and notice the car shake:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIZxNy2i5EQ

He's human. Aloof. Fleetingly brilliant. Uncomfortable. A bit crap. The voice of a bloody generation. It's one of my favourite Weller things, that scooter moment. Wonderful. Kevlike. And, surprise surprise, the video’s not in this film.

Which is a shame, however predictable. Because it's almost - almost - as wonderful and moving and telling as watching the power, hope, certainty and utter uncrapness of this:

https://youtu.be/ycnWuHsly0A

General Election

I was reading Cendrars this morning, on the tube, like you do

if you still harbour childhood fantasies of becoming French at the age of fifty-three, a real poet with a jaunty cap and a scarf and Gitanes, or if you still harbour childhood fantasies of finding meaning and purpose out there instead of in here and anyway I was reading him this morning, the morning after the election, the morning after we lost hope and I saw that the French for ‘Art Nouveau furniture’ is ‘Mobilier modern-style’ and this pleased me in a way only someone continually searching for meaning and purpose out there can be pleased by something that suggests an Olympian overseer with a wry mind focused on the trivial is sitting up there and watching.

So yes: I loved the poem Cendrars left me to read fifty-four years after his death but I’m still wondering what a ‘trellised bandstand’ is (‘un kiosque en treillage’) and whether the magic roundabout of my childhood was trellised or not and, if it was, whether that was a good thing nd if ‘bandstand’ is the correct translation for ‘kiosque’ anyway.

They say Cendrars was a whaler once and fought at the Somme. He lost an arm and wrote “I like legends, dialects, mistakes of language, detective novels, the flesh of girls, the sun, the Eiffel Tower”. And I agree with him on all but one of those. When I wake up tomorrow morning, it’s possible I’ll find I’ve never heard of Cendrars and that we all got the result we wanted.

Eleven Things A Brit Must Do In The USA

1. Begin at Newark. Don’t pay the extra for a sat nav. The hire car will take you to a disused-warehousey, cardboard-boxey, burning-trashcanny, wet-and-windy wasteground: death-dark, Shakespearean, haunted by Scorsesan ghosts. Panic, just long enough and hard enough to ensure you’ve spent more time there than it takes to watch an entire episode of The Sopranos.
2. Stay, for a while longer, in New Jersey. Put on jaunty hat. As you listen to the jabber of crickets, narrowly avoid stepping on a skulking skunk, wonder if that was a cicada that just fell on your head, sing drunkenly along to a slowed-down ‘Born To Run‘ and eat a thousand sticky buffalo wings, remember that friendship and love and family and hope and the places we’ve come from are all we have. Those and the ability to pronounce ‘aluminium’ properly.
3. Stroll around Asbury Park. Imagine what Madame Marie would say. Feel prose become poetry, bars become stadiums. Watch a Queen tribute band. Deny knowing any of the words.
4. Leave Jersey. Drive. Drive. Drive some more. Later, as you sit, aching-ankled, eating crab and drinking beer through a wry Maryland dusk, look out across the glistening bay and remember heaven is always here, now.
5. Shoot at barrels. Drink some Eagle Rare. Drink some more Eagle Rare. Shoot more confidently at barrels. Hide from the sheriff. Wonder where Daisy is.
6. When the sweet girl who wants to be a nurse asks, ‘Do you have a King and Queen?’, remember the question is far, far too complicated for a conservative, lefty Englishman (alone in a land so like Ireland!) to even begin to answer. And then try.
7. On a tie-undone, half-pissed evening, as Christy sings out across the valley, as Nina pleads and you start to cry with love and loss, remember this is the first Wedding In A Vineyard On A Beautiful Hillside In North Carolina that’s ever heard Chas and Dave.
8. Head back through Virginia’s proud-oak miles, take photos of tired sepia roadhouses and unconscious fairgrounds. Wave to Paradise and Moriarty as their ’49 Hudson passes you. Look forward to your appearance in Kerouac’s first posthumously-written novel.
9. It’s time for NYC, time to listen to the clumsy majesty of ‘Empire State Of Mind‘ again and again. But first – as you jerk, doors locked, through Jersey City, as you smell and hear and touch the strangle of a new/old apartheid – first remember the kindness of the black guy in the car in front showing you the way, remember the kindness of the white people you’ve met, remember kindness is all we have. That and an unnecessary ‘u’ in honour.
10. Go to the 9/11 memorial. Look down into the depths of our fears and up at the heights of our transcendence. Watch kids take smiling selfies. Remember we’re all tourists, all the time.
11. Breathe. Take your different self back to the airport. Explain it to the nice customs officers. Head home. Wonder where your hat is. Wonder, for the last time, where home is.

Je Suis?

So I try to work out what I think and I try to work out what I feel and I realise I think nothing and feel nothing I could possibly be proud of next year. Or even tomorrow.

And this is what they want.

And I don’t want to do what they want.

They want me to be frightened.

And they want me to act in the way their cartoon versions of me act, to prove themselves right, to prove their vicious circle is actually virtuous.

And I feel myself drawn to doing just that, to acting on rage and hurt: I want to avenge myself on them for their belief that no-one should have a belief different to theirs. I want to impose my tolerance on these people. I want to force them to give up their reliance on force to overcome their uncertainty. I want to destroy their capacity for destruction. I want to be certain my uncertainty is preferable to their certainty.

They mustn’t win. There may be reasons why I don’t do what they do, think the way they think, it may be so much easier for me. But they mustn’t win.

So what I think I’m thinking right now is that there’s actually something greater than them or me or you or what you think and do or I think and do or what they think and do. Not God or Allah, not some greater super-someone, but a greater something. A courageous something that unites. A strong something that protects both its own and those not its own. A kind something that teaches and hugs and desires. A joyous something that laughs and mocks itself and sees its own holy ridiculousness, that kisses and cries and eats and drinks and sings and dances. A childlike something that wonders and wanders and stares and digs around for truth. A liberated something that is free to say what it wants, free to fail, often, and not mind. An organic something that’s blood and soul and flesh and thought and emotion, that lives and dies and lives again.

And I think I’m thinking maybe first I have to calm my own rage, see my own blindness. Maybe I have to acknowledge my own greatness, celebrate my own spirit. Maybe I have to acknowledge and celebrate theirs and yours. Maybe I have to try a lot harder to believe we can all change.

I think I think – and I might be completely wrong – that it’s not all impossible; I think I think that tomorrow – right now – we could each open ourselves up to the elusive something a little more. And be a little closer to not ever giving them what they think they want.

White (From Something About England, December 2010)

I scraped the snow from the weather-buried car this morning, opened the door,
sat down in the driver’s seat. For a couple of minutes, there was no traffic,
no sound: a pre-industrial peace. The calm stillness was pricked, suddenly, by a
rush of mocking thoughts and blurred, threatening memories and I quickly
scrabbled around for some music to put on. I stuck Nebraska in the CD player,
wondering briefly why this was the first time I’d listened to it for a couple
of years, if the heater was ever going to start working, if Springsteen had ever
driven a bloody Seat. I put off turning the key, just sat there shivering, as
song followed song, as the thoughts and memories shifted and as, slowly and
silently, a misty, twisted, echoing cloud of tired, sick ghosts eased into the
car with me: young people whose zest and fire was long-ago extinguished by the
adult world’s sly envy, unemployed middle-aged men who’d worked all their
lives for family and self-respect and their country, lovers whose joy in each
other had turned to pity and alienation, coppers and criminals whose ideals had
disappeared in nights of need and desperation, women whose love and desires and
heat had been suffocated, petrified. I turned to look at all these familiar
strangers, felt angry, insistent guitars slice through me and I thought: this is
the soundtrack to our future.  For what seemed like hours, I didn't move, just
listened, still cold but OK with it until, halfway through Johnny 99, I brought
myself back, took a deep breath, turned the engine on and drove us all off,
carefully, down sharp-white, funereal roads towards our English town.