See What Tomorrow Brings

It’s not the screams that will do for me so much as the music. If they could play one LP forward then I’d be happy but Rob’s obsessed that there’s a message, somewhere, backwards and he’s trusting no one else to find it. I’m pretty sure it has more to do with Simon scratching the fuck out of the Dead when they started so that now Rob’s made a nest at the arse end of the library and he’s letting no one near.

Every time in the 60s and it goes wrong. I don’t know why we bother.

There’s gunfire outside which might be bad or might be Simon. He’s got those eyes here, too dry from not enough blinking and if we’ve been here a day he’s not slept for three. The last I saw of him he was laughing over by the door, naked to the waist but for a straw hat and scarf and packing more pistols than a pirate. This time it’s the Yardbirds and the same for the next, and the next. Outside and a tallyman sneaks by. It’s dark but his sunglasses reflect the fires, the scissors that make for his fingers not at all.

“Stop it!” says Moz, shouting. Rob’s looking angry but Moz decided on minute-one that this time – no piggy. It’s Duncan that's still screaming, hung half from the ceiling and half from the floor on phone flex and fishing line. Moz is red. His head is burning so that shouting and spitting it might be from the heat. I wish he’d put down the cricket bat. Half bat to be exact, he lost the end six inches on Duncan. I wish Duncan would shut up.

The 60s are rubbish. It’s not Austin Powers, and it’s certainly not the Monkees. The hippies you think you’ll find are nowhere to be seen. Everyone still dresses like their Dad, or at least here. Or not here exactly because this is the library. Good stone walls, sturdy, with narrow windows and built at the same time as the town hall - a moat. We should be safe and we would be safe but nothing’s got a paperback and the records started to skip.

The tides so far out we can’t even see the New Wave.         

Murdochs, eBays and H. G. Wells

After all the fuss recently they’ve finally found the entrance to the underground caves used by the Murdochs, I see in the news today. For twenty-plus years now the Murdochs have been emerging from their subterranean continent through tunnels that cross the globe. Vile, ugly but managing through ancient machinery and the idleness on our part to tell us what we want to hear (and then since we hear it, assuming that anything else is likewise the case) the Murdochs are... well, still here.

H.G.Wells warned of the Murdochs in Alan Parsons seminal work The Time Machine. There the unnamed inventor, a time traveller from Richmond, ventures into our far future where the Murdochs pluck at will the peaceful, childlike eBays from their gastro-pubs and Waitrose.

Whimsy it may be but the leader of the Murdochs (Rupert) despite the pretend-sacrifice of a ginger pig has evaded any further discussion on his recent misdoings by lying about it all from the safety of Nutwood.

Like Saruman did. Only not in the films.

Whereupon my allegory gland detonates.

Ow! 

Art: Kevin O'Neill

Totally Time Team

GRAMS                                             THEME MUSIC (END CREDITS)

ANTON:                                             So that was Totally Time Team. Very now, Very sexy. We’re very excited. Totally excited.

MATT:                                                 The presenter? Is she new?

ANTON:                                             Lara? A little film work. Some voice over stuff. She’s very cult. Now, but retro. Archaeologist obviously. Well, you saw that.

MATT:                                                 That was Archaeology? She was shooting lions. I’m not saying that shooting lions or… what where those lads in the body armour?

ANTON:                                             Henchmen for the Lux Corporation. We had a little trouble with them crashing the dig.

MATT:                                                 I noticed that, yes. Were they protestors? I know that the locals don’t always like having JCB’s carving up great chunks of their beauty spots?

ANTON:                                             I believe they were sent by the High Illuminati in order to prevent Lara from gaining the Fire of Promethea. Great tele. Totally great tele!

MATT:                                                 Totally.

ANTON:                                             So do we have a go? I’ve already lined up the next dig. Everyone’s tremendously eager. Lara most of all. It’s in Atlantis.

MATT:                                                 The mythical land that was destroyed in pre-Biblical times?

ANTON:                                             Who’s been talking?

MATT:                                                 It exists?

ANTON:                                             Totally. The Fire of Promethea revealed its location to the crew in a blaze of blue light. It’s in Wiltshire. BBC Bristol are very keen to be a part of it. Their nature programmes have been flagging a bit recently and there’s a sniff of alien life that they want to film.

MATT:                                                 I’m not sure this is quite what we’re looking for. The cost for example. How much did that towering pyramid and the thousands of worshippers take from the budget?

ANTON:                                             Cost? Oh no, we just let Lara unearth all that. We can’t cough for CGI. It’s just a presenter and a steady cam.

MATT:                                                 (MUCH WARMER) Indeed? I hadn’t realised. I thought they were our lions.

ANTON:                                             No, no. This is archaeology on the cusp. On the line. Pushing the edge. It’s not all three trenches and Baldrick nowadays. 

MATT:                                                 (ENTHUSIASTIC) What other sites have you sketched in for the rest of the series?

ANTON:                                             Well, there’s the Grail. Obviously. Very big now what with the Da Vinci code. That’s a bit further away though.

MATT:                                                 Scotland?

ANTON:                                             Scotland, yeah. King Arthur’s grave after that. Lara’s going to make him rise up and fight once more for England. Against terror.

MATT:                                                 A tie in with the Glastonbury Festival?

ANTON:                                             Phil Jupitus interviewing the Once and Future King? Totally. We can find out what a 6^th Century warlord thinks of the Arctic Monkeys.

MATT:                                                 I’m very excited.

ANTON:                                             We’re all totally excited.

MATT:                                                 Totally.

ANTON:                                             And lastly we’ve lined up the last resting place of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Shrewton. That’s in Wiltshire too.

MATT:                                                 Christmas Special?

ANTON:                                             Totally.

Major Eazy

I managed lunch at the Supreme Being & Templar today, Q’s ever changing shifts as a monster-hunting-tank-grrrl such that I was able to sneak out for a pint and a best-not-ask pie. But you know how it is sometimes when you’re alone in the bar with a book and a half hour only, there’s always someone without the first and a lot more of the second that wants you to know his opinion. Scruffier even than I and old enough to claim his children’s pensions this old soldier launched into his war stories whilst I still had my pulled glass up and still checking for small fish within. I listened because you have to, until coming to his story about making a German Obert shave him in Italy I began to recognise who this must be.

“Major Eazy?”

He didn’t deny it. It was there when I looked closely, a sort of shrivelled In Like Flint and still in the same mountain cap. Back in the 70s and the Battle comic alongside Action (and to a lesser extent Warlord) was what we read. This was before Starlord, 2000AD and the very last gasp of war comics on rough newsprint. If you know of whom I speak then like me your parents were either born around, picked over the rubble in or in a few cases served during WWII. It was deep in the psyche of every young boy. We had Airfix kits and a bucket of tiny plastic soldiers. We had to one degree or another, Action Man. And we had Major Eazy.

Major Eazy rather typifies Battle. Somewhat left-field these stories weren’t just Sgt. Pluck, the Hun To Fuck but included stories involving German characters too (albeit honourable, Sharpe-style heroes who would be hated by the SS whilst they saved cor-blimey Tommies or beat up the French). Rat Pack was the only serious rival to Major Eazy, who would sleep when he wasn’t fighting, wore a leather jacket and looked like James Coburn. Carlos Ezquerra drew every central character in any strip he illustrated to look like James Coburn, and since he designed Dredd I don’t see what the mystery is regarding who it is beneath the helmet.

So I listened with respect because this then was Major Eazy, and where Major Eazy went the nasty SS would be bound to follow. Although never Panzer G Man, who was an honourable sort wrongly accused and who had to fight to clear his name, as well as an awful lot of Russians.

No one English though.

Our Weirdstone, This Brisingamen

I came here with Q a few months after we’d got together, so fourteen years and about now. We hitched whilst still that was possible and got all the way into Alderley Edge. Because of a certain age as I am, I wanted to be near to the Weirdstone of Brisingamen. She only recently shown them was happy too, but happier for me who here was again the boy with wonder in his eyes. Because she cared, and still does.  

I was eight I think when in junior school my teacher would of a Friday afternoon read us a chapter of Alan Garner’s quite wonderful novel. For what is considered a children’s story and with the trope of wizard, and dwarves and goblins it is still (and perhaps because of it) all the better. The tales it draws on are local, the places too – and all about here, on Alderley Edge. It’s a dark story for young ‘uns, and good. There’s danger and blood, and the Morthbrood witches don’t cackle much there in the houses now occupied by footballer’s wives. Little changes perhaps.

We were there and were turned away from the hoity-toity pub, no room at the Inn. But down the road and about the Edge and the White Horse was considerably better anyway. We slept in an enormous bed, the breakfast was if anything larger. Our host chatted away and when we left gave us a lift to the services, to hitch back home. But for two days we roamed the Edge and we found everything. We ate in the Wizard pub, we found his face in the rocks, the entrances to the mines and the servants of the Morthbrood who knew nothing of direction, or place, or tale. They would scowl and off the track the trees were very quiet.

We swore we’d return and yet as yet, we never have.

But my eldest daughter is old enough to hear the stories, my youngest not quite, but soon. When the world will be a little darker, a bit of early rural horror for young minds, who will listen doubtless rapt on this first step into tales of adventure, of danger and a hundred worlds like it.  To read without cynicism, alone but not lonely, with a book then another, with the rain loud but unheard and their heads ever able to find the wonder.

Though Cadellin never came no matter how much we called. 

Mr. and Mrs. Formby

When in 1946 George Formby played to black audiences in to-be apartheid South Africa and refused to play segregated venues he was called by the-then premier Daniel Malan personally, who complained and who wished to make of him demands. Formby’s wife Beryl Ingham (who took the call) is reputed to have replied, “Why don’t you piss off you horrible little man?”

Turned out nice again!

Me & Eddie Shoestring

I have had a proper job, and for about three weeks. I was seventeen at the time and thereafter I’ve ever since been doing one thing or another to do with games, such that even when I was ligging about being thin and pretty I still worked when I was not working. But back then and this the 80s, I was a civil servant.

It was in the suburbs and not having anywhere to live or a job to change that (being seventeen I had little recourse to benefits) I was offered a room from a new friend who was himself moving out. I wandered to the Unemployment Office to check out the wall of woe. I took a few cards to the desk, where they asked me to wait. A terribly busy lady appeared to ask me a few questions that I forget but were probably along the lines of ‘do you like dogs’ and ‘if you must masturbate can you manage it quietly’, and an hour later I was employed by the DHSS. The same day I was offered cheaper accommodation than that thereabouts. A good day one might think.

But the journey from the one to the other required going from one suburb into London, then out again. The two, home and work, were not all that far apart but busses did not marry up and there is still to this day no ring-railway about the capital. Should be too. But I’ve never been a fellow to stay in his bed, so I was never late, though it was three days before anyone knew what to do with me. Indeed and apart from a little light filing I was mostly left to sit about reading The Warhound And The World’s Pain whilst about me middle-aged people smoked. I did not have a desk and no one was too sure who I was. They didn’t like to ask and I didn’t want to look the fool. For all I knew I was there until someone retired or dropped dead, there to hasten it a little like those coin-shoves you might still get in some seaside arcades. It was only towards the end of the week when a youth a few years older than I in the sort of suit that usually sees its first use up before the Magistrate decided that I was his replacement.

He was leaving, and on Friday.

This was before computers, in the sense of being widely used. Back then and every claimant had a cardboard envelope with a bit of paper that they signed. Then each was conveyed to this young man’s office – my office I supposed then. Kept there was a machine of cogs and hammers, with great keys to be depressed and which sent out the numbers of those who had signed on that day. It was all done in code, and there were replies on ticker tape. It was stunningly complicated and no less so because this young man couldn’t be arsed to explain it. So we sat through Thursday drinking tea and on Friday he didn’t come in at all.

And by Wednesday the week following I’m still sitting there when someone comes to find me.

“Good God,” he said. He was important in a flustered sort of way. He was also in a hurry. He called me ‘Bill’ I remember. He wanted to know why none of the important ticker-tape messages had been sent off along the wire. Presumably to an office block in Whitehall in the 1920s. I explained, he panicked and spent an hour pushing levers and clearly not understanding anything himself.  

I was moved to interviewing people for them to sign on, or because they hadn’t, or just because. I think I was meant to find ways to stop their benefits only and again no one told me. So generally we would chat for a little while. Some big boozy brickie to a shitty little seventeen year old with too much hair. Mostly we’d find out what else could be claimed for. Which at the time was quite a lot. Bedding allowance I recall most clearly. Come the third week and no one came to my office door at all, not for all of Monday when I mostly read The Final Programme. Tuesday and I coming back from lunch and an old couple I had never seen before were having rather horrid, grunty sex behind my locked filing cabinet. I did not have the key, as an aside. It did not conceal them and it all sounded very unpleasant, desperate, sort of old. I gave them half an hour, returning to find only a single Argyle sock to show they had ever been there at all.

With nothing to do I took to visiting the common room more and more. In which therein was always Trevor Eve in his role as the detective Eddie Shoestring. Clearly on an important case he would be sat there, knees apart and shirt untucked, reading the paper. I was found there by Mr. Flustered before the end of the week, who asked who we both were? Shoestring ignored him. I sort of just stopped going in after that and a bit later they sort of stopped paying me.

So don’t tell me it’s been a hard day at the office.

And I won’t tell your wife where you left your sock.