Suffolk Punch

Piece on Ray Manzarek at Empty Mirror

2013-05-22T08:26:00.001+01:00

It usually irritates me when writers and poets promote their own work as if there could be no more inspiring thing for a person to do than read them. But I relax my prejudice towards self-promotion when I'm the writer. I never claimed I was intellectually consistent.

Right now I have a piece on Doors keyboard player Ray Manzarek at the fabulous Empty Mirror. I think it's rather good too, though I say so myself. Enrich your day by going over there for a look, and then, if you have time, explore the site. It's full of great arts-related/ Beat-inflected/ alternative-underground treasures.

New poem: Dawn Taxi

2013-05-19T19:38:00.003+01:00

DAWN TAXI

At dawn, back in the red dress

which she’d bought at lunchtime yesterday

with a slight frisson of danger,

she felt just like the roses

that were dying on her steps at home.

Her head lolled in the dark rear

of the taxi that had picked her up

from the phone box near the school.

She straightened, took out her mirror,

and seeing what she expected,

she closed the mirror with a sigh.

The driver watched her furtively.

He wondered why she had no shoes

The Old Way

2013-05-17T14:24:00.003+01:00

I found The John Lennon Letters (2012) in a charity shop the other day. Edited by Beatles biographer Hunter Davies, it’s a collection of letters (no surprise there perhaps), postcards, fan surveys filled in by Lennon, and even shopping lists retrieved from bins. Fascinating, if you like Lennon as I do, and soul-curdlingly tedious, I would imagine, if you don’t.

The book, though, as well as my thoughts about the recent passing of Norbert Blei and other poets (see previous post), has had me reflecting for a couple of days about how much I prefer communication done in what Gary Snyder calls "the old way".Face to face is best, of course, but if you can’t manage that, it’s much better to have a physical object like a letter or a card from someone than an email or a message on Facebook. E-communication has its uses, but it’s not warm; it doesn’t feel like you’re interacting with anything other than the device that the message is coming through.

Yesterday I opened a book and found a card from my mother. She left her body seventeen years ago, but here was a thing she’d gone out to buy, rested on her lap or on a table one quiet afternoon, written a message in and handed to me on the morning of my birthday. “Still my baby boy,” the message said, in the large block-lettering I knew so well. It made me cry, naturally, but it also reminded me how much I was loved once, by her, and how lucky I was to know such a beautiful, open-hearted woman.It gave a piece of our time together back to me. I don’t think a rediscovered note in my Facebook inbox would have had quite the same impact.

Norb Blei

2013-05-08T18:05:00.000+01:00

Today I heard the sad news that Norbert Blei, a quiet hero of the American literary world, has died. He passed away on April 23^rd in his beloved Wisconsin, leaving behind an immense body of work and the gratitude of thousands of authors and poets around the world whose writing he selflessly promoted. I was one of them.

I don’t remember how I got to know him. It must have been when I acquired a home computer for the first time, around 2003 or ‘4. But whether I submitted work to him or we just started corresponding and publication developed from that, I don’t know. It seems like there was a lot of literary activity back then. Letters and emails were passing back and forth between Hodder’s home at the Lookout and locations all over the world.

Norb was someone I even thought of as a friend, a long-distance friend. I have photocopies of lots of long emails he sent to me, which I will cherish now and keep safe in my archive in anticipation of the wider recognition of Norb’s work that must come, whether he would have wanted it or not. Yes, he was a friend. But then, around 2007, something happened. I stopped being able to write good poetry consistently. Work I’d sent to magazines and websites kept coming back. My confidence in my art shattered into a million tiny pieces.

It was breaking up with my girlfriend that did it. And loneliness. And burn-out at my care work job. (I was physically and mentally fried.) It was, ridiculously, my discovery of Facebook and all the time and energy I wasted on there. And it was my epilepsy diagnosis. It was everything. Most of all it was my insatiable need to have my ego massaged. If you don’t tell me I’m the greatest I become convinced I’m the worst. It’s childish, but a deeply buried reflex.

I was certainly too proud to tell Norb I was struggling. So I didn’t write at all. What the hell, I told myself. Norb doesn’t want to hear from an insecure care worker with literary pretensions he can’t live up to. But the one email I got from him in the long silence that followed suggested that he had wanted to hear. I’m sure I wasn’t the first thing he thought about when he woke up in the morning (it’s coffee or toilet for me), but when I did cross his mind, I think he felt I’d turned my back on him. Well, he wouldn’t be the first or the last to think that.

A year or two ago I started missing Norb and thought it was time to rekindle our friendship. I sent a series of haiku to his supreme internet page Basho’s Road; but they were probably shit, and he ignored me anyway. Maybe he just didn’t want to reject an old mate. He’d undoubtedly heard about my Facebook clash with a guy who we both knew. This guy told me I should write less politics and more poetry. I blew up at him because his tone was so patronising, and because he’d stuck a thumb in a really raw wound. The next time I looked I was no longer his friend.

It doesn’t do, as a poet, to offend publishers and editors. But when you start playing that game, they might as well “float you down the river with the turds,” as Bukowski so eloquently put it.

I’m saddened, now, to think of all those wasted days when my friendship with Norb could have flowered; when I could have been learning from one of America’s great writers about how to do this and how to say that. Other Voices, the book on my shelf that he edited, and which I have several poems in, is as much of a monument to the stupidity of my ego as it is to the relationship that culminated in its publication in 2007. But we had that relationship for a while, and whatever happened afterwards I feel that was a privilege.

I came along at a really magical time. Consequently I have known some of the greats, and too many of them these days are making their exit. Dave Church, Joe Speer, Todd Moore … they’re all gone. But somehow Norb Blei was supposed to be around forever, bearing everyone on his considerable shoulders like a Mount Rushmore of poets. Alas, he was flesh, bone and heart like the rest of us.

People wishing to mark Norb's passing can make a donation to the Norb Blei Memorial Literary Fund at The Clearing, PO Box 65, Ellison Bay, WI 54210 USA.

The Filth and the Fury: The Times Ain't Now but What They Used to Be

2013-05-06T12:06:00.002+01:00

Last night ended with a gaiety it will be hard to match today. We sat down with our crack pipes and watched The Filth and the Fury, Julien Temple’s documentary about a beat group from the long-ago days called The Sex Pistols. And my head is still reeling with the marvellousness of what unfolded on the old elephantine tv in the corner of the living room at the Bard Gaff.

The Sex Pistols were, and are on the record they left behind, a great fucking band. In 1977, when they released ‘God Save The Queen’, I was just leaving primary school and starting secondary school. I didn’t know anything about them until I arrived at Westfield in Wellingborough, and when I saw pictures and heard their records I was terrified. They looked like the people who were picking on me in the corridors and the playground every day. That, of course, is because those nasty little maladjusted bastards thought that making someone’s life a misery was being very punk.

But rewind a moment. In The Filth and the Fury you see footage of people at those Silver Jubilee celebrations, street parties and union jack bunting everywhere. I was one of those people, improbably. In the summer between primary and secondary school they set out trestle tables on the lane between the church and my school in Little Harrowden and gave us fruit juice, cake and jelly. No doubt lots of flags were waved and some fool played the original version of ‘God Save the Queen’; I don’t remember. But talk about indoctrination. If you saw stuff like that happening in North Korea you’d be calling for air strikes against the revolting Commie dictator.

Now wind forward to 2012. People are at it again, gathering wherever they can to wave a flag whose very design is an emblem of the brutal suppression of once-sovereign countries; they’re weeping big sentimental tears about the monarch, who’s still here even though the Pistols are gone and Sid went to the worm farm so long ago no one even remembers his name. They’re so proud. They love their country. And the best answer anyone can come up with to that is an attempt, not supported by John Lydon, to get God Save The Queen by the Pistols into the download chart. (He didn’t want a great song to be used as a tokenistic act of dissent by people too dumb to speak for themselves.)

Jesus, though, how depressing. What happened between 1977 and 2012 to castrate artists so thoroughly they needed a 35 year old song to tell their story?

Rebellion became systematised. (Were the Pistols a rebellion? or a reaction?) It became a thing you do, a pose you strike, a way of packaging your butter. The last act I heard with talent and access to the airwaves who had something genuinely challenging to say were Public Enemy twenty years ago. Listening to their albums was exhausting, almost masochistic, because they were so intense; and Chuck D., like Lydon, had a fiercely independent, original mind that smashed through political, social and showbiz bullshit like a cannonball going through a wall.

There is the problem of mainstream access of course. The bigger media outlets hadn’t quite found a way of shutting down everything worth listening to in the Nineties, although they were half way there. Digital radio and the internet increase the diversity of what’s available to people, but trying to find a new Pistols or a new Public Enemy in the digital and cyber worlds is like looking for a penny in a million miles of grass. They may be out there; my generation was no more special than my mum’s, or her mum’s. But where are they? And what’s the chance of more than five people ever hearing about them, if that’s the goal?

Maybe it isn’t the goal. We saw in the Eighties what the commercialisation of pop music led to. Fucking Queen being elevated to the status of rock gods by Tory tv presenters and people who love “Emmerdale”.

When I listened to Lydon talking on The Filth and the Fury – I say listened because he’s photographed, appropriately, in shadow (it was never about celebrity) – I realized how much I am the product of a certain strand of thought that came along at a certain time in history. (Unless it’s just a similarity of temperament.) I was too young to know what the fuck was going on in ’77, but I felt exactly his exasperation about the Silver Jubilee during the Diamond Jubilee; and the Olympics drove me up the bloody pole. What is it about people that they want to indulge in public displays of subservience and bad taste with millions of others who look and dress exactly like they do?

My attitude was dismissed as grumpy, as an indicator of the rigidity of middle age, by people reading my writing here and on Facebook. I’m some sort of old crank party pooper, according to people who would rather live their lives on one knee hoping for a crust from the lord of the manor. But that’s not it at all. I always knew that the things I say are true, or at least, I did when I was old enough to start thinking for myself. I just didn’t always have the words or the self-confidence to express my opinion.

I've got bucket loads of words and confidence now. Which is probably why my readership has fallen off a cliff.

AT UNI, FEBRUARY 2011

2013-04-29T10:31:00.000+01:00

It’s Thursday morning. I’m at the Uni early,

sending emails from a free computer

to poets in Kentucky, Michigan, New York.

This black kid’s talking to a pink-skinned kid

with spots, and twisting teenage angst.

The former’s got a gold chain round his neck,

and a giant watch. He’s doing all the talking.

“If you want it, man, you gotta work for it.

I want it all: the house, the car, the swimming pool.”

It's thirty years since Thatcherism, and still they talk

that crap. Nothing marks you out more clearly

for a life of scrubbing round for pence.

I’ve got to get away from them. In the canteen,

Deutschland’s sitting by himself, ipod wires dangling,

a metal band like ants brawling in his earphones.

Then Jess comes, armed with Lucozade and Skittles,

and Martyna, due in three months, sits and sighs.

We all agree that we’re too tired for class.

Jess shows the sandwiches her mother made.

They’re wrapped at least twice round in clingfilm.

“My Mummy loves me,” she beams, carefully unwrapping.

Martyna dreamt she gave birth to a girl

in a hard cocoon, but with the mouth stuck out.

It was more a snout, she smiles, but wet enough for kisses.

She takes her pad and draws a half-thumb shape,

with piggy nose and wide, believing eyes.

“My baby,” she says, as if she’s worrying

she might really have this little alien.

We laugh, and I move sideways for the cleaner,

who’s sweeping up our crumbs. I say thanks,

and sorry. I don’t like people picking up for me.

The young socialists at the window table

boom with laughter as she brushes round them.

I’m remembering my mum, and the better, fairer world

she worked for. It won’t come from those spoiled brats.

Or me, the willow on the quad accuses.

- February 2011/ April 2013

LAST DAYS OF THE CHEESY BANDIT KID: HOW BARD GOT OUT OF THE CLASSROOM

2013-04-27T11:49:00.000+01:00

I’d think about it carefully. If you go to university you may never write a decent poem again – email from poet friend, March 2010.

I left university yesterday. I don’t know if I’ve left with a degree because my last exam was a bit of a disaster and I might have failed the module as a result. That particular lecturer chose to give the exam 50% of the credit toward our final grade, which is unfair but wholly indicative of the quiet, cowardly sadism of the man. And I messed it up. Well, I gave one good answer, but the second one was a complete car wreck. I hadn’t revised lyric poetry because you can only revise so much and I’d been thoroughly working over comic and tragic plays and the metaphysical poets. But although one question had to be about poetry, none of the questions allowed you to write about the metaphysical poets. Even now, when I don’t want to chew Dr. Kildare’s head off anymore, that strikes me as perverse, cruel and a deliberate trap for students. He knew everybody liked Donne and Marvell, with their pithy little poems about compasses, fleas and fucking.

I was tired. I’d been awake since 3 in the morning revising so by 10.30, when I looked at the question, I was ready for my afternoon nap. I couldn’t think of any lyrical poetry. Not one, at least specifically. So I answered a question, badly, about Edmund Spenser and John Milton, neither of whom had the Doc properly taught; nor could I remember a great deal about them, except that reading both was like walking through cold porridge. No matter. I subsequently realised that, having already written about Twelfth Night and The Duchess of Malfi, I wasn’t supposed to attempt their giant works anyway. “One answer MUST be about non-dramatic poetry,” said the arse-pinchingly tight directive at the top of the paper. (Pretty self-important for a bloke who eats a bag of Monster Munch a day.) In my sleep-fogged state I thought non-dramatic poetry referred to anything that wasn’t located in the text of a play. No, I realized as I was sitting in the park afterwards trying to wrap my brain around the idea that university was over.

John Milton: Cold Porridge Poet

So I don’t know if I have a degree; but I do know I’ve left because I’m not going back to repeat the module if I’ve failed. I can’t afford to, and I would rather perform surgery on myself with a rusty flick knife. It was an interesting experiment, going to uni, and a nice way of burying the ghosts of my breakdown 30 years ago, when I was supposed to come to what was then Nene College but ended up retreating to my bedroom for three years instead. But I was probably too old when I enrolled in 2010 to feel a part of what they like to call “the university experience” (I’ve never been sure what that was); if I went back at the end of this year I’d been more than half way to 50 by the time I finished, assuming I did. (Imagine being stuck endlessly repeating the same boring module over and over again forever.) I’ve never had the right attitude for university either. I’m too critical of authority. Too critical of received wisdom. And too stubborn. The more you tell me that something is indisputably so, the less I will believe it, even if I know, in the small hours of the night, that you are right and I am wrong. The two most depressing words in the world, as far as I’m concerned, are “peer review”. I couldn’t give a fuck what anybody else thinks really, but lordy how much some of these scholars care about their status.

Oh, I had some good lecturers. Mark Brown was wonderfully charming and a fabulous communicator. I loved his lectures, despite his highly dubious obsession with Paul Auster and his dismissal of Jack Kerouac as “hippie shit”. Unfortunately, the callous bastard abandoned the university because he wanted to live closer to his family. Sonya Andermahr scared and infuriated half of her students with her utter intolerance of anybody who didn’t share her taste in literature or her feminist orientation; but I agreed with her on politics even if we diverged on books and it was refreshing to be exposed, once a week, to someone with such a razor-sharp intellect. Course leader Phillippa Bennett was always unflappably calm and in control, and I never saw her embarrass a student who hadn’t quite understood a question that she’d asked. And tattooed, dreadlocked Jaz Shadrack electrified a post-colonial class in year two that had been made comatose by a departing lecturer. Some may not have appreciated her political digressions – one student took to calling her “Citizen Jaz” – but were they even digressions, when the module was centred on literature responding to political oppression? Can you divorce Brick Lane from the role of women in Islamic society, for example? Of course you can’t.

Naturally, the fact that I agreed with her helped. If I’d had to sit for two hours a week listening to someone glorifying the British Empire or the healing power of global capitalism, I might have quit the university last January. It was hard enough to stick around when I was being told week after week by another lecturer that Bill Wordsworth was the best thing since the electric cheese grater. Actually, he’s a windy bore (the poet). The great Japanese haiku writers could say what he said, and say it better, in three lines; he took thirty pages. (By the way, Doc, it isn’t funny to say that Welsh people have sex with sheep, French people are intolerable and all Americans are stupid. Knock it on the head next year, mate.)

Bill Wordsworth after reading his own poetry.

The best part of university for me, and almost everybody says it, but it’s true, was that I met some nice people and we had some fun times together. That doesn’t sound like much when bloody wars are being fought, when two million children a year are dying of malnutrition, but actually, it’s everything. See what you remember most when you’re lying on your death bed about to gurgle your last. The days I spent with Martyna Hatton, seeing her through her pregnancy, the birth of her beautiful daughter Leila (I wasn’t there, but someone should make a film about it), and her fabulous Goth marriage to Kenny at the Sunley conference centre on Park campus, will stay with me until my mind lapses into amnesia and hallucination (I have about six months); and I so admired the way she ploughed on through the difficulties of the last year, I couldn’t even tell her without being patronising. I loved getting to know Kerry Wilkinson too, whose university trajectory was almost the polar opposite of mine (if I’m not mixing metaphors) in that she started off poorly and then worked her arse off until she became one of the best students of the 2010 intake. We were united, at first, by our difficulties with Charles Bennett, the Creative Writing lecturer, who used a tea pot to demonstrate the eccentricity he wanted you to believe defined him, and set his own book as the mandatory text for students to purchase in year one. I still think that was immoral. Kerry argued with Bennett, and I fought with him so bitterly it became something of a popular sport for students to come along to our Wednesday classes and wait for the moment when the cork popped. I still feel that the spectacle of two old grey-haired bitches fighting over poetry while teens looked on degraded both of us.

But there were many people I met at uni who made the time worthwhile. Robert Davies is the most disciplined and yet the most intellectually independent man I’ve ever met. I saw him walking on his own through a dense crowd of protestors at the tuition fee march in London in 2010, holding a placard high in the air and looking absolutely at peace with himself. At his age I was hiding under a blanket in my bedroom. And when I asked him what his motivation was for coming on the march he said, “I’m here for my younger sisters.” Lucia Madalena Conte has the best and readiest laugh I’ve ever heard other than Rachel Lovesy’s, and she graces any company she’s in with her intelligence, her perfect manners (if that doesn’t make me sound about 90) and her interest in you; Christine Horne (I hope she won’t mind me saying this!) grew from what Allen Ginsberg called “wallflower anxieties” to be unexpectedly self-confident at the oddest moments and the person I always asked when I wasn’t sure of something; James Goswell disappeared to form a band in year three but even his smart-alec desire always to have the last word (identical to my own) didn’t detract from his affable manner and keen wit . I didn’t know Charlotte Farrow too well before she left to have her baby, but speaking to her since on Facebook I’ve found someone who, growing out of the same soil as me, I like very much. And there were others. But since I hate the long lists of names in Greek poetry, I’ll spare you any more in this.

As for my poet friend’s assumption that university would blunt my ability to write truly, independently, free of the starch of received academic wisdom – I know what he meant, and there was a certain amount of truth in what he said. An English degree does present you with an incredibly narrow, uninformed literary canon and train you to believe that’s all there is; anything else is not serious. Why was there no d.a.levy on the American Lit module? You can’t teach American poetry after 1960 without mentioning levy. And why was Don Delillo presented as the last word in modern American writing and not Wild Bill Blackolive? Is a book only worthy of academic consideration if it comes from a major publishing house? How on earth could Laurence Marriott not have heard of John Fante, or Charles Bennett warn me to avoid Charles Bukowski and read somnambulant English drears like himself instead?

Buk. Stay away from anyone you can actually read.

And yet, I’ve ridden in labourers’ vans in muddy boots watching men drool over women’s tits in newspapers. I’ve worked in McDonald’s with zitty, brain-dead and probably impotent boys in white shirts telling me what to do. After long days of hard physical work it’s just as easy to pull a case of beer from the fridge and veg out in front of the television as it is to write poetry. But I didn't. If you’re ready to write, you’ll write; it doesn’t matter where you are. And whether you’re pulling a root up in an old lady’s garden with the snow falling on your frozen hands, or sitting in a warm classroom watching the sixth beautiful, pampered, middle-class kid in two hours do a presentation on gender in Jeanette Winterson, the honesty and the style in what you produce will depend on the honesty and style in you. University may be the monkey-see/ monkey-do mechanism that ensures the continuation of the existing power structure, or it may be, as the Tibetans would say in a different context, the Great Liberation through Hearing. But you, ladies and gentlemen, are your own responsibility.

I take me, now, out into the big bad world I was seeking refuge from when I enrolled at the university in 2010. No more education for Bard, at least not in the classroom. I may or may not have a degree, time will tell. I don’t even care, really, other than in the sense that it would be nice to have something to show for the giant debt I’ll have hanging around my neck like a fat badger corpse for the next 25 years. But all things considered, and generally in all the wrong ways, it’s been enlightening. Now the Vice Chancellor can sing love songs to Chinese Communism and have nobody point out the screams of the dying in Llhasa.

An 80s Photo Gallery

2013-04-13T09:46:00.002+01:00

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting" -

Milan Kundera.

Poets

2013-04-05T10:02:00.000+01:00

Maple Dewleaf

When I was at college at sixteen

My favourite poet was Dryden

‘MacFlecknoe’ was rude

Johnny wasn’t a prude

Like that ‘Paradise Lost’ bloke, the blind one.

At eighteen I bought lots of records

Bob Dylan was my superhero

‘Hard Rain’ was a bastard

and that’s why it lasted

Those Faber fucks couldn’t come near-o.

Back then all the libraries had books in

Not playgrounds and tables for coffee

I found Allen and Jack

On a shelf at the back

And the last flakes of normal fell off me.

My reading, though, took me down alleys

That some of you good folk have questioned.

I liked Ezra Pound

Though his views were unsound

If not crazy (and that’s why the Section).

When the internet came I met writers

Who were working all over the planet

Wild Bill, Church and Speer

Weber, Baatz and Vermeer

(Yes, I threw in a painter to scan it.)

Their stuff told me how to dump caution

And be me with invention and guts

Once I knew about them

I wrote gem after gem

And our brittle Brit bull drove me nuts

Then I found myself back in a classroom

Learning writing to stay off the dole.

The professor was keen

That he ought to be seen

As eccentric, and acted the role.

His own poems were snoringly average

He never took risks and it showed

He was all surfaces

Like the middle class is

You were writing to lighten his load.

So you couldn’t be heavy or complex

Or he’d put you down there in the room

Then he’d give you a C

While your friend got a B

For a thing about dogs and balloons.

Round the corner from my house a bloke lives

He’s a poet, though he’d never say

He performs what he writes

On his Drum & Bass nights

And they rhyme, and they sound like today.

Snow and Bad Wind at the Guildhall: Bedroom Tax Demo, Yesterday.

2013-03-31T10:28:00.001+01:00

“No attempt at ethical or social seduction can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party . . . So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin" - Aneurin Bevan.

The Bedroom Tax demonstration on the steps of the Guildhall in Northampton was like a Fellini-esque parade of political has-beens and hopefuls, main-chancers, radicals, honest testifiers and spectator freaks. I came away from it feeling naked and exposed because I wasn't any of those things; and more convinced than I'd been before I attended that we didn't have a hope in hell of opposing this tax or anything else, not in Northampton anyway.

Norman Adams, local organiser, local legend, was there. Paul Crofts was there too. In the Eighties Paul was the head of the Wellingborough Communists and an acquaintance of my mother's. I went to a party at the multi-cultural centre in town with Mum and the Communists once to celebrate the anniversary of the French Revolution. Won a Charles Aznavour album and a bottle of wine in a raffle and gave the Aznavour to a woman sitting in front of me; she thought I was very generous.

In addition to those guys I saw Dave Green, who chaired a union meeting I attended to listen to Dawn Primarolo's boy talk about setting up community groups affiliated to the union. Norman got the devil in him that night and slammed the guy about his mother's associations with Tony Blair. That got under his hundred and fifty quid suit.

At the demo there was Tony Clarke also, setting up behind a big Green Party banner with other local members, and people from the Socialist Workers, and at least one Labour councillor I identified, who I overheard saying, "If any member of the Liberal Democrats turns up for this today they have no shame, no shame." Sally Keeble, former Labour MP for Northampton, booted out by the electorate and now, inexplicably, selected to run again in 2015, was down on the pavement with a few young activists. I'd never seen her in the flesh before and I was surprised how short she was.

Norman told me he hadn't intended for the demo to turn into a party political affair. "It's about right and wrong, not party politics," he said. The others had blown that noble idea out of the water. It seemed like they saw it as a great chance to pick up a few stray votes and get their picture in the Chron. The political equivalent of going to the right nightclubs when you want to be famous.

But there was a lot of impassioned, if generally vague, talk about unity from the six or seven speechmakers who followed Norman, all of them talking through a megaphone as the snow fell on our heads and the steady urban hum of cars and shoppers carried on around us. I realised when I came away, though, that nobody seemed to have agreed anything.

There had been talk, at the start, about taking names, direct action to stop bailiffs from evicting people who couldn't pay the tax, but there didn't seem to have been any specific agreement about how these things, as necessary as they are, would be organised. Maybe it's because almost everybody there knew each other already and the communication network is already in place. I hope so. But what about the folks who'd just come along, if there were any?

It didn't look like there were lots of newcomers, to be fair. Actually, the speechifiers and the photographers probably outnumbered those who'd just come along to shout and clap and show their dissatisfaction with the Borough Council. And sadly, that's usually the way. Most people only get mad enough to turn out in the cold if the policy being protested against affects them. Look at how "political" people were when the poll tax was foisted on the country. Where had most of them been in the preceding ten years?

Norman Adams really cares. That guy would lay down his life for something he believed in. I think Tony Clarke cares too. He will take his conviction back into the Guildhall and make a profound nuisance of himself, regardless of the consequences. But what will Labour do, held back by the lillywhite leadership of Ed Milliband? They were there yesterday, making fine speeches, but they can't really be counted on to oppose the tax in any meaningful way.

Will Milliband want his MPs linking arms with Socialist Workers or Occupiers across the doorways of council houses to prevent meathead bailiffs from crossing them and dragging out the blind, the sick, the frail, the disabled, the scared, the poor? Do people attracted to the Labour Party these days even have the balls to put their bodies on the line? And, which is possibly more to the point, do I?

I want to think I do, but sometimes I suspect I'm all mouth. A political gobshite. A laptop Lenin. Do I have the guts actually to take a risk? I've thought about it, and I really don't know. When I saw the riot police coming at the student demo I went so quickly in the opposite direction any photograph taken would have shown just a blur. And I'm supposed to be one of the caring ones.

There are times - when the machinery of the State becomes truly wicked, as it is today - that peaceful civil disobedience is the only effective, honest way to do right. Everything else is just bad wind wafting around the ears of the dying. An exercise of conscience for the bathroom mirror.

History will judge, I suppose, whether we did any good by airing our principles like bedding on the line. In the meantime the evictions will begin next week.

You Keep Your Killers & Your Sterilisers Of Women, I'm Off

2013-03-19T10:03:00.000Z

The fliers for the Chinese art exhibition are appearing all around Northampton University this morning. I saw one as soon as I walked in to start doing some research for the fourth chapter of my dissertation.

Well, fine. We all go to Hell our own way and they have made their choice. Collaboration with the bloody occupier of Tibet, whose murderous behaviour, and whose attempted erasure of Tibetan culture and religion, runs so far back in recent history it even predates the birth of this cranky grey-haired old blogger.

I would post stats around the building about the number of people who've died under Chinese occupation but the last time I did that someone ripped them down. They have shown clearly whose side they're on.

So I have made a decision, albeit a rather neutered one. I'm going to the toilet, putting my bag over my shoulder and I'm going home; and I'm not coming back while the exhibition runs, which is roughly for the rest of my time here.

I only have a week and a half of classes left anyway, so it's not such a big deal. I'll just worker harder at home. And if I can hold my nose tightly enough I will return, like a thief in the night, to do my presentation next week and sit my exams.

But I refuse to be in this building, using their resources, when the hierarchy of the university is working hand-in-glove with the representatives of a government that kills, maims and sterilises to further its imperialist programme.

These Walls Run With The Blood Of Tibet (2)

2013-03-17T11:11:00.001Z

Reproduction of my post at the Facebook page of the local newspaper, the Chronicle and Echo, shared here just in case they remove it. There goes the degree.

The exhibition at Northampton University this March and April of artworks by the Naxi people of China will undoubtedly be fascinating, but it raises ethical problems about engagement with countries whose human rights record has been condemned persisten...tly and comprehensively by international monitors. This is especially so in the case of the present exhibition because representatives of the Chi......nese government have been invited to attend. More than a hundred people have self-immolated in Tibet in recent years to protest the Chinese occupation of their country, in addition to the hundreds of thousands who have perished in uprisings in the six decades since China's invasion. Reports of forced sterilisation of Tibetan women also persist. It is true that His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Government-in-Exile pursue a policy of constructive engagement with China, desiring only autonomy under Chinese rule, and consequently they probably wouldn't have a problem with the exhibition; but they are by no means reflective of the entire body of public opinion among the Tibetan people. The Tibetan Youth Congress and National Congress both want nothing less than full independence for their country, and many campaign groups call for a complete boycott of Chinese goods, businesses and cultural exchange. Whether this is or isn't reasonable depends on what a famous British politician once called your "moral compass" but I believe it's something that should be widely known at the very least. At the moment we only hear the voices of the coloniser and not the colonised. Perhaps the university, which has an exceptional postcolonial module for English students, will host an exhibition of Tibetan art or a human rights conference in the near future to redress the balance somewhat for this long-suffering, gentle people.

These Walls Run With The Blood Of Tibet

2013-03-16T11:44:00.003Z

I just had an email from The University of Northampton:

C H I N A ’ S
F O R G O T T E N
K I N G D O M

The University of Northampton, School of The Arts are proud to be showcasing traditional and contemporary artworks of the Naxi, ethnic minority people of China.

This exhibition focuses on the visual identity of the Naxi ethnic minority people from Yunnan province in China. Through traditional processes; carving, painting and drawing we share an understanding of the historical value of promoting and preserving the Naxi culture with its unique pictograph based scripts.

The School of The Arts is working in conjunction with the Communication University of China and the Lijiang Government to raise awareness of this unique culture. You may already have seen the coverage of this project on the ITV news, and the level of interest has resulted in the creation of a professional documentary covering the experiences of a team of staff and student from Northampton who visited Lijiang October 2012.

We are now honoured to welcome as our guests the Naxi artists whose work we are hosting, together with representatives from the City of Lijiang, guests from the Chinese embassy, and representatives of the Chinese and UK media.

Northampton University really does like its pals in the merciless Chinese Communist dictatorship, doesn't it? My exasperated reply was:

Dear --------,

I hope while we are entertaining guests from the Chinese Embassy someone from the University of Northampton mentions China's appalling human rights record and raises at least a polite objection about its brutal sixty-year occupation of Tibet, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, the forced sterilisation of Tibetan women, the plunder of Tibet's natural resources and the attempted erasure of the Tibetan language and religion. These are matters of fact rather than opinion and I would find it extremely troubling if a university which instructs against the evils of colonialism and the oppression of women chose to ignore them.

Regards,

Bruce Hodder
BA English 3rd Year.

When I think about the naked tango Northampton has been doing with China since I got here (and probably long before), I feel like throwing my postcolonial dissertation in the river at the bottom of my road. Because the actions of the university grading my work render them completely unqualified to have an opinion on it.

Frantz Fanon would be turning in his grave.

Collaboration Cyber-Nation

2013-03-12T13:28:00.001Z

Facebook continues to censor images of self-immolations in Tibet on the frankly ludicrous grounds that they are an incitement to self-harm. No, they are the only form of protest available to a gentle, peace-loving people who have lived under brutal Chinese occupation for sixty years and whom Western politicians, businesses, academic institutions and ordinary citizens have callously abandoned. Get real, Facebook, and stop doing the work of the murdering Chinese Government for them.

Polymorphously Perverse: Tangling with Dr. Freud

2013-02-26T13:12:00.000Z

I'm currently working on an essay about psychoanalysis and lesbianism for the degree. And obviously, when you deal with psychoanalysis, you have to deal with Freud. That well-known genius, failed doctor, misogynist, cocaine addict, cigar smoker and/ or sex pervert (choose your myth according to your preference).

I described him on Facebook as resembling a blindfolded man with a bow and arrow. "With one shot he hits the bullseye," I wrote, "and with the next shot he kills your neighbour's dog."

There is a surprisingly wide range of views about his work in literary circles, thanks, it seems, to the development of his theories by French obscurantist Jacques Lacan. And some of it, to be fair, makes sense. There is still the thorny problem, however, of the other bits.

What Freud was concerned with was children’s responses to their discovery of physical differences between the sexes. Briefly, he argues that a boy, seeing that girls lack a penis, thinks they have been castrated and fears that this will happen to him as punishment for desiring his mother and his rivalry with his father. This leads him to resolve his oedipal complex (his desire for his mother and hatred of his father) by giving up his desire for his mother. A girl on the other hand, seeing the penis, is overcome with envy, feels she is castrated, blames her mother for this condition and therefore turns away from her mother towards her father - Stevi Jackson.

That isn't how it was at all, not for me anyway. I wasn't remotely convinced the first naked woman I saw had been castrated. I was smarter than that even before I began to talk. What I recall was an interest from a very early age in the mysteries of what the girl or woman concealed. The space between the the legs of the female was something compelling and interesting because I didn't know what was there.

I was never afraid of being castrated either. How could somebody who has never had any experience of violence conceive of the forced removal of his genitals?

It's just nonsense. Complete and utter. I don't know how anybody could ever have been dumb enough to believe it. But hey, what do I know? I'm just an invisible, penniless blogger whose work will be forgotten by the few people who were ever aware of it. Freud changed the world.

Hiding the Bodies: Facebook Plays Footsie with China

2013-02-24T09:47:00.001Z

Sorry to harp on about this Tibetan business. I know most of you are busy frying other fish and there's nothing more boring than someone else's politics. It's just that to me this isn't politics at all. This is about humanity, suffering humanity. People are burning themselves to death on a weekly basis in Tibet because they reject military occupation by an economic superpower we in the West routinely trade with. To me it just doesn't seem right, and when something doesn't seem right I was brought up to think that it's my responsibility, as much as anyone's, to fix it.

Something else about the occupation isn't right. It's Facebook's censorship of aspects of the campaign against the Chinese presence. Dossier Tibet, the Facebook sister page of the website of the same name (http://www.dossiertibet.it ) has been locked by FB, which means that the account holder can't access it, and photographs of self-immolations that it posted have been removed. On what grounds could they do such a thing in the supposedly democratic world of the internet? (Of course, we know it's not that anymore. Hasn't been for a long time.)

We can only presume it was because of the graphic nature of the images. Anyone stumbling across them might find the sight of a burning body upsetting, even offensive. Yes, me too. But it's more offensive, much more offensive, that this boy or that old man had to set fire to himself because a foreign army is occupying his country, sterilising his women, destroying his language and religion, arresting and torturing dissenters, turning neighbour against neighbour. And I would go so far as to say that it's even more offensive than all of that to see the United Kingdom and the U.S.A., both cradles of freedom and democracy, trading so scurrilously with the nation guilty of all these horrendous crimes.

We citizens of the windy, self-righteous West need to know what's happening out there. The immoral things being done by our leaders in the name of traditions and principles that demand for them to do the very opposite.

It is an insult to the monks and lay people who have sacrificed their lives for Tibetan freedom to conceal the horror of their last moments from those whose conscience it was intended to arouse.

If you agree with this, why not drop an email Lord Allan of Hallam, who is the Facebook Director of Policy in Europe? He can be located at: allanr@parliament.uk

Tibet: Rangzen Or The Middle Way

2013-02-19T09:22:00.003Z

For many years I have said that only Tibetan independence can serve as a safeguard for the preservation of our heritage, culture and national identity. Talk of “autonomy” masks a sad defeatism and an acceptance of the inevitability of China swallowing our country; it is unworthy of the descendants of the great Emperors (tsenpo) who made Tibet a powerful and enlightened state. I call on all Tibetans to join us and our brothers and sisters in Tibet, in the pure and sacred struggle to free our country -

Thubten Jigme Norbu / Taktser Tulku
Former Abbot, Kumbum Monastery
Professor Emeritus, Indiana University, USA
23 November 2001

The annual raising of the Tibetan flag over the Guildhall in Northampton is due to take place in March. Every year, in a ceremony organised by local people and attended by the Mayor, speeches are made about the continuing horror unfolding in Tibet; songs are sung, and then the Tibetan flag is raised outside the nineteenth century Gothic-style building. The local paper takes pictures. The people in attendance wave miniature Tibetan flags.

It's a nice ceremony, and you feel good attending it - especially because you know you wouldn't be able to do the same thing in Chinese-occupied Tibet. The question is, does it help? or is it just, as Bob Dylan once said about protest music, a personal (and rather self-righteous) act of disassociation?

I went last year. You can probably read about it in the Suffolk Punch archives, if you have nothing better to do. Then, fired up by the spectacle of the Tibetan flag flapping high up in the wind over a busy street as it should do in Tibet, I formed a Tibet group on Facebook, which most of the people who came to the Guildhall joined.

Unfortunately, joining a Facebook group was all most of them were prepared to do. Assuming, naively, they would be behind me, I wrote a manifesto for the group promising non-violent action against politicians, businesses and institutions (like Northampton University) who maintained close associations with China when people were dying in Tibet. I said we would embarrass them publically. Bombard them with emails. Protest outside their buildings.

And within hours the people in the Facebook group began quitting in their droves.

I don't doubt that the majority of those people earnestly want to end the suffering in Tibet. The problem, as I have since realised, is that the power behind the annual ceremony is an uncritical follower of His Holiness The Dalai Lama, whose strategy of patience, of attrition, of good faith in the ultimate kindness and wisdom of the Chinese Communists, has helped to perpetuate the holocaust in his country. The Dalai Lama doesn't even seek independence from China. Speaking on behalf of his people on his own website, he calls the imagined national disinterest in this "a historical fact". Despite the colonisation of Tibet, the arrests, the torture, the forced sterilisations, the self-immolations, the stripping of Tibet's natural resources, His Holiness persists in the belief that his people can live autonomously under the Chinese.

As I have said before (and as a Buddhist I take no pleasure in thinking it) that view is either naive or stupid. But the organiser of the Guildhall ceremony and the many people who cluster around her are ardent admirers of the Dalai Lama like almost everybody in the West. He is a charming, intelligent man and to some extent he meets our Orientalising need for a quirky little Eastern guru to replace our discredited Popes and Archbishops.

What they are about, the Guildhall people, is seeking solutions that satisfy all. Asking our politicians to talk to their party leaders who in turn gently persuade the Chinese to change. They are about the right prevailing because it is right and everybody being good deep down. They don't want action. They don't want antagonism. Which is all very well when you live a comfortable middle class life in England. Or a comfortable 'simple' monk's life in India.

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

Surprisingly, the Guildhall ceremony organiser has invited me back this year with a note that says, "Sorry about the misunderstanding." But the misunderstanding was on my part, not hers. I didn't have as clear a picture then of where the fault lines lie in the Free Tibet movement. They are prepared to wait another sixty years for it, so it seems, while weeping big salty tears over the names of the dead, and I'm not.

So I won't be going to the flag raising, although I hope they have a nice day. Frankly, I'd do just as much good for the people of Tibet by staying in bed. Not that my own more direct and cantankerous action in the past year has helped a hell of a lot. They're still burning their own bodies to get someone to listen. And universities are still making big sums of money by nestling down in the lap of the Communist killers.

Tibet: The Honour Roll That Shames

2013-02-18T12:23:00.002Z

Just saw the Northampton University Vice-Chancellor in the building. A rare sighting. Characteristically, he was showing around someone in a suit. Here's a message for him.

Self-Immolations in Tibet Since 2009
Last Updated: February 17, 2013, 15:06 EST

NamlhaTsering
Drugpa Khar
Lobsang Namgyal
Konchok Kyab
Tsering
Tsering Tashi
Wangchen Kyi
Kunchok Pelgye
Pema Dorjee
Lobsang Geleg
Sungdue Kyab
Kunchok Kyab
Tsering Namgyal
Wande Khar
Sanggye Tashi
Kelsang Kyab
Gonpo Tsering
Kunchok Tsering
Wangyal
Sangay Dolma
Tamdrin Kyab
Tamdrin Dorjee
Lubhum Gyal
Tsering Dundrup
Wangchen Norbu
Sangdag Tsering
Chagmo Kyi
Khabum Gyal
Tenzin Dolma
Nyangchag Bum
Nyangkar Tashi
Gonpo Tsering
Jinpa Gyatso
Dorjee
Samdrup
Dorjee Kyab
Tamding Tso
Tsegyal
Dorjee Lhundrup
Tsewang Kyab
Lhamo Tseten
Tsepo
Tenzin
Dorje Rinchen
Dhondup
Lhamo Kyab
Tamdin Dorje
Sangay Gyatso
Gudrub
Yangdang
Passang Lhamo
Lobsang Damchoe
Lobsang Kelsang
Lungtok
Tashi
Chopa
Dolkar Tso
Lobsang Tsultrim
Losang Lozin
Tsewang Dorjee
Dickyi Choezom
Ngawang Norphel
Tenzin Khedup
Tamdin Thar
Rikyo
Dargye
Dorje Tseten
Choepak Kyap
Sonam
Chimey Palden
Tenpa Darjey
Lobsang Sherab
Sonam Dargye
Lobsang Tsultrim
Jamyang Palden
Gepey
Dorjee
Rinchen
Tsering Kyi
Nangdrol
Damchoe Sangpo
Lobsang Gyatso
Tenzin Choedron
Sonam Rabyang
Rinzin Dorje
Losang Jamyang
Sonam Wangyal
Tsultrim
Tennyi
Tenzin Phuntsog
Palden Choetso
Dawa Tsering
Tenzin Wangmo
Norbu Damdrul
Choepel
Kayang
Kelsang Wangchuk
Lobsang Kelsang
Lobsang Kunchok
Tsewang Norbu
Phuntsog
Tapey

courtesy of Save Tibet dot org.

Stalker

2013-02-15T14:10:00.000Z

I just heard two girls at the university talking about their stalkers. I would never wish to undermine the seriousness of stalking when it happens - it must be terrifying - but for the young and beautiful these days a stalker seems to be almost a fashion accessory. Anyone whose gestures of friendship are unwelcome is a stalker. Everyone who smiles at you in the street more than once wants to fuck you. That is the presumption. It is casual, cruel and extremely arrogant.

I was accused of stalking once myself, by a woman who I thought was my friend. A serial fantasist, she told everyone I knew stories about me hanging around on street corners or hiding behind hedges waiting for her, and watching. None of which ever happened; we didn't even live in the same bloody town. But nothing I can ever say or do will take the seed of doubt out of the minds of people who heard those stories. Who saw those texts. So I don't even try.

I did make a pass at her once. I was sad and lonely; I needed a little more than friendship. I didn't think she'd say yes, but I had a go anyway. Even the embarrassment of being turned down would be better than the in-between space my life was occupying at the time. I've never denied that I made a move on her. I wish I hadn't, but I did. In some ways I think I was supposed to, so she could feel better about herself with her husband gone.

If it was a trap I walked into it. If it wasn't a trap I did it anyway. But I didn't stalk her. I've never thought highly enough of any woman I knew to stalk her. The only woman I like enough to stalk is the woman I am with, and I don't have stalk to her.

So please, get over yourselves and be careful how you use that word. You may be wrongly labelling somebody just to feed your own ego. And you risk debasing the word so that when somebody really is being stalked, the people who can help keep her safe don't believe her.

Do we want a world, anyway, of such snobbery and spite? where if you're not "in" you're a freak to be debased and insulted? Where if you misread the social cues in a world full of falsehood you're immediately suspected of being a rapist-in-the-making? I know I don't. I'll leave you to think for yourselves.

BING!

2013-02-12T12:32:00.002Z

I'm putting the finishing touches at the moment to an essay on William Blake. Four poems about childhood from Songs of Innocence and Experience. It's a topic I'd be happy to write about usually, maybe for a book or a poetry magazine, but because it's for my Romanticism module at the uni the bloody thing is driving me mad.

At the start of the year the lecturer Jon Mackley gave us a list of the tenets of Romanticism. I think there were seven, although there may have been four, or sixteen. I've no idea where the notebook is that I wrote them all down in.

Anyway, ever since that first lecture the idea has been that when we analyse a poem in the class or write an essay we're supposed to identify these tenets of Romanticism in the text we're considering. At first Mackley would even say a chirpy BING! and raise a finger in the air every time we named one. Thankfully, he's cut that out now.

I didn't name any of the Romantic tenets in my last essay. I still got a B+ but he said, "Your writing was excellent. It broke my heart not to give you an A." I can't say it broke my heart, Jon, although it did annoy me. I didn't come to university to learn how to parrot other people's words back at them.

Of course, I didn't really come to uni to learn either. I came to get off the dole and put a bit of money in the bank without working. I was too burned out to work, after the ugliness of my last fight with Cruela and the Forces of Mammon.

Now I'm here again, as I say, sitting in an overheated I.T. room with another Romantic essay that has to be submitted by tomorrow. It's written, but I'm having to bend my fine words into contortions to get these goddamn tenets in (the ones I can remember). And my essay will be uglier for their presence, not their absence.

This is education? Afraid so. Like I wrote somewhere, "Monkey do what monkey see, monkey get a nice degree." Which doesn't suit my curmudgeonly, stick-in-the-mud, anti-authoritarian style one bit.

Calling for a New Coalition of Interests

2013-02-08T10:44:00.001Z

Oliver Twist asking for more in the workhouse.

In two years there will be a General Election, and it may be more significant than any since Margaret Thatcher's first two victories. If the Conservative Party win an outright majority it could signal the death knell of the NHS and any recognisable (and fair) form of Welfare State. Don't even mention what is left of workers' rights, which isn't a heck of a lot. Employees are already working twelve hour shifts without sick pay and getting fired on the whims of their bosses.

The Tories, if they win, will be dragging the country back to a pre-1945, maybe even pre-1845, darkness in which poverty is equated with moral weakness, a good man is expected to know his place and the rich dance on the bodies of the dead. I fully expect the return of the workhouses too, although naturally they won't call them that. They'll be rebranded, a "PLUS" will be affixed to whatever anodyne name they're given, and the poor and the sick will be pushed into them like cattle.

In the light of that, I feel, it's time we formed a coalition of interests to stop them. Most people don't vote because there's "no point" and then complain on their fag breaks because they're on six pounds an hour. And since the Iraq invasion at least - although for some it happened long before that - people on the Left have refused to vote Labour because they cut loose the unions and look after the middle class instead of the poor.

It's a valid point, as far as I'm concerned. Labour isn't "the party of the people" anymore. Not entirely. You could argue that it hasn't been since 1945. I have been disappointed by Labour too many times since I first started voting in the early 80s. But as much as I don't feel they represent me or my interests anymore, they are not the Tories. They are men of good conscience and good instincts, broadly, who have been corrupted by their own idealism as much as their personal ambition. I believe Ed Milliband wants to make Britain a better place, for everybody. Aneurin Bevan cared more about fixing things for his own.

Labour hurt people when it turned away from its roots. When it abandoned specificity to be a party for all. But do we go on nursing our hurt and resentment of the hijacking of our beautiful vehicle while the Tories dismantle the last remnants of it? Do we stand back in splendid purity, showing those posh Labour bastards, while the Tories fuck Britain all the way back to the workhouse?

I say no. Let's get behind Labour, even if we don't fully support them, and give the Tories the biggest hiding they've had since 1997. Let's do it for the poor. Do it for the disabled. Do it for the NHS and the shade of Aneurin Bevan. A Labour victory won't fix everything; there will still be injustice. But at least we'll be fighting back with food in our bellies.

By not voting all we do is empower the Tories. And that's a high cost to pay for self-righteousness, comrades.

25 Things You Didn't Know About Me. Possibly.

2013-02-07T12:50:00.002Z

I saw somebody else do this so in a spirit of pure plagiarism, and to take my mind off Hanif Kureishi for ten minutes, I'm now going to list 25 little-known facts about me. If I can think of 25. All of these, despite my reputation for being a smart arse, are 100% true.

1. I was once made captain of my primary school football team. The other ten players promptly went on strike.

2. I wrote my first novel when I was ten, a 33 page revenge western called "Blood Lust".

3. I had a crush on my first teacher Mrs Bevan.

4. I once almost choked on bacon and had to pull it up out of my own throat to survive.

5. At primary school three girls asked to see my "winkie" and when I showed them I got in trouble.

6. I am actually very shy.

7. I once tried to learn Russian so I could read Dostoyevsky in the original. I could only ever remember the word for "fox".

8. I feel sick when I smell beetroot.

9. I once saw a ghost.

10. I have never taken any illegal drug other than marijuana, but mainly because I'm too scared and too cheap.

11. In my twenties I had a pierced ear. I let it grow out when it went crusty.

12. When I was 18 I bought a Wham! record.

13. I once had driving lessons, but I gave up when the instructor shouted at me.

14. I cry frequently. The provocation is usually music.

15. I feel there is something nightmarish about the silent tapping of computers in an I.T. room or an internet cafe.

16. I have a guitar and a flute but I can't play either.

17. I once bought weed from someone who delivered it to your door. He called his business "Deals on Wheels".

18. My greatest fear when I was younger was that I'd go bald in middle age.

19. Once I had an ear infection so bad my ear bled.

20. I first heard my favourite song "Freebird" when I was awake all night with food poisoning.

21. I am not allowed to go near the china at home because I am so clumsy I will definitely break it.

22. I have forgotten what meat tastes like.

23. I nearly drowned once in the shallow end of the swimming pool.

24. I let my neighbour in Earls Barton call me "Graham" for two years because I was too polite to correct his first mistake.

25. I don't talk about my problems because I have a horror of sounding self-indulgent. Although I am.

Dropped Kebabs and Despots: The Last Term of the Last Year Starts to Hurt

2013-02-07T10:33:00.001Z

from Toothpaste For Dinner.com

I'm nearly at the end of my three years of university now. That's probably a good thing. I tried so hard to be positive about the degree, returning for year three after my summer scrape with the Grim Reaper, but by Christmas the effort had almost done more harm to my psyche than pneumonia did to my lungs.

Why not just be honest? I haven't enjoyed the third year at all. The time I've spent wasting time or getting to know certain people in the corridors and the canteen has been nice. But I wouldn't have done any of the classes, even the ones I chose, if I'd been properly informed about my choices. In fact, the ones I did go for, not really knowing how the modules would be structured, have turned out to be the biggest drag of the lot.

For my dissertation I'm writing about Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi and Meera Syaal. That's fine, in a way. I chose that because the Post-Colonial module was the only one I enjoyed in the second year. But what's the point of writing analyses of other people's books, really? I mean, these in-depth structural breakdowns?

Academics make a good living picking over other people's work like ants on a dropped kebab, so for them you can see the point. But I'd rather write my own book. And when my university is dancing a naked tango with the third worst colonial despot in modern, China (I'd say the United States and Britain were number one and two), everything I write about the aftershock of Empire and our nation's perfidy in India feels rampantly hypocritical.

Whatever. I only have a few more months to do it, and then I'll be shoved out into the world again. Maybe (who knows?) with a BA after my name that will help me get a job I can stand to do when I'd much rather be writing. Then, perhaps, the last three years will all seem to have been worth it. Right now I feel more flat and uninspired mentally than I ever did back in the care work days.

The Wizard and the Boy

2013-02-03T09:50:00.000Z

I was in the queue at my local Co-Op yesterday (buying a lottery ticket, phone credit and a bar of chocolate, if anyone's interested), and in front of me were a woman and a boy. I presume he was her son. The boy was probably five, six years old. And I noticed he was staring at me, utterly transfixed, to the point where I became not only embarrassed but also angry at his mother for not reminding him of his manners.

Anyway, he'd been staring at me "for what seemed like an age" (as writers say), when his mother did the worst thing she could possibly have done. She left the boy there to go and fetch something she'd forgotten from the other end of the shop.

The boy continued staring. I wanted to knock him down. But since I couldn't do that, I stared back. This went on for several moments and then the boy relented, curling his lips back over his missing teeth in a nervous smile. Just then his mother returned.

"Hello," said the boy.

"All right mate?" I said.

The boy thought about this for a while. "What's your name?" he asked, a little tangentially I thought.

I was even more embarrassed now. Here I was, a complete stranger, having a conversation with an infant boy in a line in the Co-Op.

"My name's Bruce," I said. "What's yours?"

Again the boy gave the question some thought. Then he turned away from me without speaking. His mother shoved him in the back.

"The man arksed you a question," she said.

"What did you say?" the boy arksed me.

"I said, 'What's your name?'" I reminded him.

Another pause for consideration. He was a reflective boy. "Tyrrell," he said.

The shop assistant shouted, "Next please!" then and they moved away from me to make their purchases. I noticed Tyrrell immediately falling into a conversation with a tall young man at the next register. He told his mum that the man had bought gum and could he have some.

"No you can't!" said his mum. And groceries bought and packed, she hustled him out of the shop.

I've always been jealous of other people's ability to talk to kids. It requires a lack of self-consciousness to be able to relate to someone of Tyrrell's age, and I don't have it. When he was staring at me, I felt exactly as I would have done if I'd been five myself and he, the tough boy in my class at school. That's why I wanted to make him cry.

When I think about it for a moment, though, what must I have looked like to him? A five year old has no sense of time. There are grown-ups, which are his parents and people like them, and there are old people. To Tyrrell I was old, and not only old, but probably strange too. Had he come across men with long hair before? and thick white beards?

I bet he thought I was a wizard from one of the dvds he got to watch on Sunday mornings when his mum had headaches.

Old possessor of the magic arts, queueing in the Co-Op with a big Dairy Milk and a lottery ticket.

The Elephant Man: Joseph Merrick Gets a Lynching

2013-01-29T08:50:00.004Z

I saw David Lynch’s ‘The Elephant Man’ for the first (and I would imagine the last) time the other day. I was more interested in watching Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds movies when it was released in 1980, being a late developer culturally in some ways, but I thought, at 48, that I was ready. Friends had told me it was terribly sad. Harrowing even. They said that the suffering of the famously disfigured John Merrick was almost unbearable to witness. Hmmm.

Call me a callous old bastard if you like but I didn’t find it that at all. It might have been, and I’m sure it was for the real man the movie was based on (who was actually called Joseph Merrick), but Lynch and John Hurt laid on the pathos of the Elephant Man’s existence with a giant trowel. He was so completely pitiful in his vulnerability I expected a syrupy children’s movie chorus from lamby glove puppets after every beating he took and every disappointment he sustained.

I would have liked to see how Merrick’s suffering had twisted him. It doesn’t matter whether the contemporaneous accounts they used when writing the screenplay gave any indication of this. Those accounts were written according to the conventions of their time just like anything else is, and the people who met Merrick ‘saw’ him with an agenda of their own. Being harshly treated makes people cruel and angry. I would bet money that once doctors and nurses, and then society folk, began to be kind to Merrick he responded with occasional bursts of temper and spitefulness.

The real Joseph Merrick. Photographer Unknown.

The movie has, of course, dated. Merrick’s make-up would have been more convincing if the film had been made in the last ten years; and Lynch’s Victorian-barkers-and-midgets-in-top-hats kind of surrealism, though undoubtedly a filmic surprise 33 years ago, when realism was more commonly used by directors, just looks transparent and precious now. It's something we’ve all seen before. The language of alternative cinema has been absorbed into the mainstream since the 80s. It’s routinely regurgitated nowadays in the form of music videos that flash by unwatched on tv while we’re talking to our friends.

So anyway, that’s one unanswered question from my youth finally answered. Is ‘The Elephant Man’ any good? For a slow afternoon when you have nothing better to do, yes; but don’t expect the grand emotion of an opera. I wonder if I should answer the other great question hanging over from those long-gone days and watch ‘Star Wars’. See what all the fuss was about there.

I think not. At the last reading Alan Moore gave, the great bearded one said 'Star Wars' was when SF started going downhill. I'll just take Alan's word for it and save myself the time, the money and the inevitable dribbling, remote-control-dropping, two hour nap that the movie would almost certainly cost me.