Tat, Scarves and the Cocteau Twins

Nick Hornby writes in Fever Pitch, It was probably for this reason that I was so intrigued by her tastes and whims, and fancies, and her belongings induced in me a fascination for girls’ rooms that continued for as long as girls had rooms and I understand what he means. Fear not, I’m not tapping this out on some pink laptop by the light of a taped penlight. For reasons of Christmas I was checking what lurked in what packed boxes still the other day, and in one I found Q’s room. This does not mean she has a box to which she might retreat, for it is a box with little space in it, but one that smells of sandal wood, or jasmine, or whatever the hell that incense is that smells like girls did when you were a much younger man.

It’s true to say that even back then, then really being the 80s, the early 90s then just as music was finally getting a lot – a lot – better then so too were girls. The quality of both improves quite markedly between, say, sixteen and twenty-one. It couldn’t be us could it? Surely not, not with our records in a cardboard box and our tapes, our C90s with every album ever recorded, ever, taped, as long as every album is by Tull, Rush, Zeppelin and anything else from the 70s that got us through the 80s.

No in this box was a girl’s room. Boy’s rooms were not so nice. True we paid less attention perhaps to hygiene and similarly so girls had the funny idea that the only thing to constitute an ashtray, was the ashtray. Indeed, they had an ashtray. It was normally a pub ashtray in the same way that apart from one faded Danger Mouse mug the boy’s flat would otherwise have only many, many pint glasses from which to drink. Girl’s decorated everything with floaty scarves like everything was Stevie Nicks. They had small tape decks that played only the Cocteau Twins. They had bits of tat, of glass, or ornamental things, junk jewellery and a single copy of a single book. Greer, or The Unbearable Lightness, or bloody Mists of bloody Ava-bloody-lon. And their rooms would smell nice, and be all half lit, and of course there would always be a girl there (and let’s not be coy, young skinny-people’s sex too).

In contrast and despite owning far more stuff, boy’s rooms were far emptier. Tapes, records, a lot of paperbacks, and quite often the girl you were meant to be with. That was back home though, now, now. We were all young once. Or some of us were. Actually, a few of us were.

And all this was in this box. Bits of wonderful tat that boys don’t understand because they don’t do anything. Scarves and mirrors, random things for putting joss sticks in, and joss sticks. Ribbons and pins, a Strawberry Switchblade single and a single tape deck, and only one poster, The Cure or Alien Sex Fiend doutbless.

But what wasn’t in this box was the girl, because back home and she’s there already.

But snakebite still does not and never should have, black in it.    

Random Pencil, Mr. Bridger

The Invisible Museum

When I lived in the Lakes I scarce noticed the mountains that stood two miles from my window. Lakes I’d seen, but never recently. You don’t notice what’s commonplace. How often do chums in Bournemouth go to the beach? It is a very good beach after all, better than Brighton by far though Brighton has the Lanes and good tapas whilst Bournemouth has only the Lower Pleasure Gardens.

That’s a park by the way.

Which is why you who live in London, which is why it’s been so long since you’ve been to the Natural History Museum. I know there are a hundred other museums, oddities and more select. Museums for murderous dolls, for historical ribbons, for decaying sharks, for parks, and for the kicking boots of eighteenth-century pickeroons. But the Natural History Museum is the first my granda took me too, and to where I took my own sprouts but recently.

It’s more interactive now. There are buttons to push (always the preserve previously of the Science Museum – which no longer has a periscope, nor the impossible safe) and presentations to see. But there’s still the life-size blue whale, the creepy crawlies and of course, the Dinosaurs. Back when I was a sprout the dinos were but bones, now they move and the Rex roars – to which my youngest at four, taking this to be a challenge, roared back. And where we came across a young lad bawling his eyes out, frightened and lost – and ignored. People walked by, people looked away. People chose not to see this poor child. My better half was having none of it. She bent down, she spoke to him, she found out his name and his nanny – oh yes – was nowhere to be seen. I was dispatched to find some figure of authority but in all the dino halls there was none. I went right back to the main entrance before returning with someone in a sta-pressed jacket and laminated badge.

It all ended well I’ll say now. Nanny was found, the Museum were alerted and thanked us roundly. And the crowds still ignored this young lad as they had done where he was so clearly frightened and alone. If there’s a moral to this then either you have drawn your own, or won’t be interested in mine.

But this made me think, of my first visit some thirty-five years before. My Granda Bill the Lambeth-lad-done-good knew everybody. Everybody that held doors or shouted from a stall, that walked a corridor or hefted meat, he knew. And so here too where soon he had vanished through one of many mysterious doors to have a smoke, and a cuppa, and left me to wander about by myself. I remember one peaked cap coming up to chat to me, I was ‘Bill’s’ y’see but otherwise I wandered and at about the same age as the lad who had lost his Nanny. At times my Granda would reappear, with a packet of sandwiches, with a cup of tea for me in a proper mug, or most oddly a small rock, and a wink, which meant nothing to me at the time (and I’ve no idea what became of it) but in hindsight was probably a piece of something frightfully important someone had fetched from a drawer.

No cultists caught me up and no devilish villainy was performed in my presence. Certainly no dinosaurs went missing, which was a shame as I would probably have enjoyed that. But then had I alone stumbled upon wickedness or the rough henchmen of a foreign power it was probably odds-on that even a revived Fu Manchu would have suddenly dropped all the cruel laughter to say ‘Oh ‘ello, ain’t you Bill’s boy?’

And I would have been too.   

Random Ink

From way back in 1998.

Mars Mission Returns!

After 18 months the six-man crew of the practise run to Mars have emerged to see their first sunlight in all that time, albeit in Moscow. The experiment to see what happens when grown men are kept in a sealed environment ended with the curved floors of the replica space capsule six inches deep in garage-porn and empty tins of all-day breakfast. The mission has already been awarded the Guinness World Record for the largest single concentrated fart. Scientists still examining the results of the 520 day mission are already speculating more positively on the possibility that in the near future a genuine mission might be undertaken to send a crew to Mars, to stand around a bit, and then return.

The European Space Agency the lesser partner in the enterprise, Britain’s contribution was unveiled yesterday when by lot two of the volunteers were chosen to be melted by heat ray, one was trapped by the red weed and the remainder were swept away to live underground with David Essex. Richard Burton narrated.

Endemol are suing over similarities to the format of their groupthink television show, Big Brother. Doubleplus-ungood.

The Bomb, and I (Pt 4)

I’m not entirely convinced my earliest memory is my own. I am in the family pram (my mother would have insisted on ‘perambulator’) and it is going very fast. Propelled with her polio-limp it is however the fast of a speedboat on choppy water. I can see blue sky and the tea-and ivory sides of the pram are high about me. She recalls this later, or recalls it to me so that as I say I cannot be certain it is my memory at all. My mother is hurrying because the thub-thub-thub of a doodlebug has cut out above. It is late in the long years of the second war. A decade later and my geography master Captain Donald insisted on his wartime rank as if in recompense for the hook that had replaced one hand. Inevitably we called him Captain Hook when we thought him out of earshot and us all the braver for it.

            ‘It is a very nice bomb,” says Cecil.

            Mme Roux smiles tightly. She is a very well brought up bomb. Never has a bomb looked more bombish. She spends a moment or three painting a picture of how sad she will be without her bomb, without her Bon-Bon. But even bombs must fly the nest, although of course all but for Bon-Bon who stayed behind when her leaner, younger sisters eloped with the V-Bombers a decade before. I’ve heard it before, twice indeed, in the cab of the big Bedford QL where I drove and she rehearsed on the way here with the bomb tightly tied and full in the mirror.

            ‘And yet you’ll forgive me,’ says Cecil, ‘If I ask how I can know for certain if it is the bomb?’

            Mme Roux pretends surprise though she is already clicking her fingers for me to fetch the Geiger counter previously collected from Old Mr Bittersweet.           

Los Ninos Des Dios: Dona Ruidera (pencil)