Poet's Day

It’s Poet’s Day and whilst tomorrow to my dismay is not therefore Saturday, nonetheless we like to join in. Cope knows I’m no poet, but I do like nonsense rhyme. So swiftly so...

In the gaol where the guilty would wail as their tears,

Were mocked by the worst of poltroons,

That would pick at the scabs left by their fears,

Here where they hung one and all from balloons.

The gaol being a chimney that went mostly down,

The best of the guests would rise up.

Leaving the worst of the villains back down in the brown:

To catch at the tears with a cup.

Suspended, the best of them near the occasional light,

In the gaol this was the one sentence,

The worst of them hung in that brown beyond sight,

The balloons fuelled down here by repentance.

So a man that had wept and had suffered sufficient,

For the balloon of his guilt to rise high,

His villainy undone, his slyness deficient,

Would be freed to there openly cry.

This was true. It was written, and weekly declared,

By silhouette before that brief sun,

And though many there, their souls had repaired,

So far freed had been two less than none.

But such hope made for tears that never quite dried,

Such tears that would fall in a trickle,

Such tears that would succour of the worst of the tried,

And the worst of them all: Toby Prickle.

Navy Cut, Rough Shag. Cutlass!

Horatio Hornblower, being straight-estate 

The latest initiative at the Ministry of Defence (sponsored by Netto) is to consolidate the Royal Navy to the ‘new needs and anticipated threats in the 21^st Century’, as ships it seems are dead expensive. Plans for the Sea Scouts to form an integral part of the RNVR wavy-navy have already come under fire, albeit not too badly as there’s no money left for shells. With each ship now given a yearly target to achieve, the rank of captain replaced with ‘Manager’ what frigate navy remains has followed the ingenious plans for the Navy’s new aircraft carriers by acting as platforms for French missiles.

With anyone of the rank of Chief Petty Officer and below on a steady diet of white label potato waffles, own-brand Walls balls and blue fizzy pop the new Manager of HMS Aldi was said yesterday to be proud of the way his crew are to be seeking new solutions, thinking outside the box, and hitting the ground running. Due to further cuts whilst plans are afoot this year to dot the ‘i’s, the ‘t’s will remain uncrossed, and thus will be ‘l’s. Never (we are told) has the Royal Navy been so council estate.  

But most daring of all it has been confirmed that the Navy is to re-commission a number of formerly retired and fictional ships for the purposes of fighting piracy. The Indefatigable, the Hotspur, and the Sutherland all of whose records lie only in the exploits of Horatio Hornblower - himself listed as the Regional Manager that will lead lead them.

Hornblower more latterly known as what a lot of men read when they’ve read all the Sharpe novels is said to be grumpy and uncertain about the chance he is being given, also he is fictional. 

Lt. Steven Louch (RNVR) when asked his opinion on the changes professed to be satisfied with the return of the cutlass. 'For too long has the senior service been without cutlasses,' he said today from the Isle of Sheppey. 'We are now a whole lot more cutlassy, and they go so well with our big shorts and knee socks,' then, 'Cutlass!'     

Brighton Dog Green Beach, Peter Griff & I

Brighton Beach, Two Slides from True

The bones of Pier 1 are lit up by the Panda pop fizz of Pier 2. It’s burning with flares, fires pogo dancing. Some rise without a sound, not even a pop as they go off halfway between here and hell. Pier 1’s shadows are butterflies. Briefly the pier is dark, darker than the evening. Closer to the flares the Albion Hotel is lit orangeade, and bubblegum blue. We’re on the beach a mile from Pier 2. A Wessex blows by but out to sea, rotors turning but tired. There’s no sand, and the ice-cream though sticky doesn’t melt. We’re on a two day leave from the ‘Nam, Cheltenham and on the road Triffids in kiss-me-quick hats have staked out the gents.

                          ‘...The man’s enlarged my mind,’ says Harley. He’s educated, he knows all about the green. A farmer without a farm, worshipping the earth, he’s one of the Colonel’s children. We’re not far from the Downs here so there’re a few like him. I like that. Griff’s being condescending about the enthusiasm, but I like it that there’s fire still somewhere. You can see it in his eyes where the flares reflected light dies a little after it falls into the sea. He’s speaking with his hands, ‘He’s a warrior poet in the classic sense. I mean sometimes he’ll... ah... well you’ll say hello to him, right? And he’ll just walk right by you. He won’t even notice you. And he’ll suddenly grab you, and he’ll throw you in a corner, and he’ll say; do you know that if is the middle word in life?’

                          Griff’s not listening. On the beach and apart from he and I, and Harley, there’re two medics. Two surgeons. Girls too, one’s a Kiwi. The other’s married to Harley and she might be Greek. It’s the hair, like on a statue, only with beer. They're the only girls in a half mile not dressed for a parade and are all the prettier for it. Griff’s been taking aim at one of the Triffs for a minute now with a big old FN self-loading-rifle, metal and wood, chopstick bipod and iron sights. He pops a hole in the base of the Triff’s stem and the weight forces it to fold. The Triffs try and reach us but they can’t cross the pebble beach. Griff’s happy. He sits up and lights up, smile and a cigarette, leaving the rifle where it is. Naked but for a filthy pair of shreddies his canteen now empty was full that morning, vodka. Sometimes he slips into Russian. Mostly just a little, like nadsat, like a character too much for a Clockwork Orange.

                          The girls watch the flares, chins following each up and halfway to the sea. The Kiwi, Mel, is wearing sunglasses. Greek Helen’s stropping a knife, one of those funny curved ones you only see in surgery. It’s a rectal knife she said, before I asked Harley about Colonel Ray. They could be treating Triffid stings and shrapnel wounds. Earlier they told us about a man with a tennis ball up his arse. Thus the rectal knives. I’d asked if they couldn’t have cut the ball? But they’re surgeons and they cut people, and they’ve not got a tennis-ball knife.

                          ‘You heading back?’ says Mel most amused. She means the hotel. In the Albion travellers and investigators from the Slides are gathered together. There’s beer but it’s nasty, and the beer’s the best thing about the hotel. You can pay for the rooms by the hour. Handy for tarts, but there aren’t any tarts. The windows of the bar are cloudy where someone tried to wipe away a few pints of spunk, but not very well, and none of it human. The Albion is like Maplins, but without the class. I shake my head. It’s just one of many things I have to do here, and one of those is sit on the beach whilst Griff pops Triffs. I’m not staying at the Albion and for some leaving might not be an option. The rooms absorb people. The ghosts aren’t dead and I hear all the staff were residents at some point too. No, Modesty’s given us the run of her townhouse.

                          Griff lies down to shoot another Triff. We’re running low on beer. Everybody’s happy now, everybody’s singing, everybody’s happy now – we’re bulletproof.

                          It’s dark when Pier 2 goes up. Caught in the explosion the guests at the Albion can be heard cheering. Not so far away the Lanes will be jumping. It’s October and we’re dressed for summer. It’s late and the Albion is going up a treat.

                          We go for Tapas.       

Lay Grouter, Six For Fingers

And there hid with the angel upon his old throne

And asked why the angel was grey

And the angel replied with a twitch of his wing

That the Preacher had made him that way

I was painted, said the angel, and put on this throne

Like a statue set high on his roof

For if there’s one thing that the Preacher despise

It’s something as awkward as proof

And if then young Grouter would see to the chains

He’d then have a word with Messiah

For something as worthy as freeing an angel

Was doubtless worth Grouter’s desire

But if only for the moment, his desire had changed

He had escaped from the switch by a nose

And though soon he was sure his needs would return

At the moment his wish was for clothes

But he set free the angel by breaking the lock

Of the chains that held him in place

With a pick that he made from the end of his wing

And a jemmy of what remained of his grace

With a flash and a crack and a thunderous roar

Grouter was once more a dandy

His rags and his boots and now a chain for a belt

(It was just what the Master had handy).

And the angel declared that if Grouter agreed

He would accompany him for a while

For the Preacher was already entering his house

And his wife had a wicked, wet smile

So the pair left the roof and the angel suggested

That they call on a friend called the Boffin

And as an aside, though the Preacher then died

They never could get the lid on his coffin.



Bill Bryson's 'Being Disappointed Somewhere Else'

And my axe!

I was recently sent a preview copy of Bill Bryson’s new travelogue, Being Disappointed Somewhere Else. I include for now the extract below concerning the morning after Bill arrives in Fritz Lieber’s Lankhmar.

The pub was filled with middle-aged thugs still trying to look dashing in tights and tiny daggers. They had a certain rakish quality to them (ie. they were thin and moved rubbish from one place to another) but in the last fifty years fashion had moved on and they refusing to move with it were left in the same bars, discussing the same crimes, whilst their children had left for grander places that looked a lot like Rome and where fate had a big magic sword in mind for them. The thugs nearest looked back at me, but not from suspicion I realised so much as hope that I might recognise them. Might have heard of them, might even perhaps have delighted in their adventures, from when stories were sly, and clever and often enjoyed a glorious failure more than some dour victory. I did not and apologised with a shrug that I hoped conveyed a certain worldly air, but which I hastily converted into an attempt to settle my jacket more comfortably when my elbow caught the teapot.

I had taken a room in the Silver Eel because when I had toured mythical places with my boyhood friend Katz, the Silver Eel had been cheap. It did not allow rooms for more than a night, though you could take it again the next morning. Young men as we were then both of us were entranced by the bustling sea port and thought nothing of a city that had a Guild, for Thieves, that controlled crime, and nowadays survived (like the city itself) due to an understanding with the City of Ankh Morpork when the latter had gone from parody to comedy, to best-seller. There was no particular ill-will I knew, but a lot more people went to Ankh Morpork without ever having heard of Lankhmar at all. Which was just awful.

Similarly awful I felt was what had happened to this city, and probably because of this. The rows of New Wave fantasy alleyways about the Plaza of Dark Delights had been demolished to be replaced by an indoor mall to equip much longer stories where much less happens. Also, a Holiday Inn of astonishing ugliness. The smoky shadows of the Bazaar of the Bazaar had been cleared out and replaced with great sheets of plate glass and a Nehwon Building Society. Why such a place needs to advertise what it does continues here as elsewhere to befuddle me, with the entire window taken up with a fan of pamphlets, and a dancing girl in a cage.

But today I looked forward to being disappointed again, drinking alone, eating unsatisfactory meals and whining on, and on, and on about lightbulbs.

Which I thought was just wonderful.        

Censored Ink!

Mary's Day Off

He’s the last of the hitchers and that makes him the king. Tall he is handsome, albeit only as nature intended. Wild, hungry and awful he is often invisible. There is a sign, cardboard, that time and the rain has left blurred so he could be heading anywhere. The King would have tossed it had it not been true. He is heading anywhere, and especially now anywhere but here. Here is Illbourne Services. The King has been here for three days.

“You’re like that old man,” says Mary.

“I am,” says The King who agrees over a burger-n-cheese (no cheese). Sometimes he dreams of shepherd’s pie.  

Illbourne Services has three restaurants, only one is open. There is a newsagent that mostly sells chocolate, and a chocolate shop that only sells coffee when each is open, which since he has arrived they have not been. Mary (though she was laid off six weeks before) still comes in to open up. She has told The King she has three children. Two that have left home and one that she wishes would. She misses the youngest most, though the youngest is the one that remains. The King had listened to Mary’s whole life that first night and in the six hours that had left they had filled in the mazes and coloured in the cartoons on the kid’s menus. Let go by memo no one has come to take back her keys. She wipes down a table already clean. She says, “Like on the radio. People spot him, walking the land.”

“Hitching.”

“Well quite. Some don’t believe it. I do. Are you going to be sick?”

She won’t let him help so he looks out at the world, embarrassed. The world is empty but for Mary’s black Cinquecento. Spoilers and a boot full of speakers. It had been her second sons, but he’s doing time for getting caught. The King catches the eye of a cat. The cat looks down and hurries away. The cool kid spied in Matalan.

The King had once been just another barbarian. From Scratchwood to Fleet, Charnock Richard to Sanbach he had stood in the 80s with a dozen others at each stop, on every A road, at every services. Students, drop outs, and people – mostly people. Ten years on and all alone, unless it was Stonehenge or Glastonbury and the highway to hell, the A303. Then last year and there had been just the two of them and when they had met on the slip for Watford Ennio Morricone had been playing, all dust and narrowed eyes. There they had stood neither moving but for the wasp that had dipped between them. An hour until there had come a ride, and that for the other. That one had nodded, understanding. He had his ride home and he touched a finger half to his cap. Now there was only The King.

He turns back. His lunch has gone, so too the mop and bucket. Mary looks at him in interest. Having to say something he says, “My Walkman.”

“Goodness, I remember them. I had one, Sony. Blue.”

“I need new batteries. I don’t suppose?”

He can suppose but there are none for sale here. In the newsagents no doubt, but the newsagents is closed even for last year’s best seller or a giant bag of jelly bears and Mary does not want to get into trouble for breaking in. So she says and in any case she is sure she would not know how. But Mary remembers she has some herself and waddling away returns with two from the cheap vibrator she keeps in her bag for the quiet shifts. They are old and flat but the Walkman is broken anyway, choked months before on Julian Cope still tangled and torn within. Sometimes the radio works but The King has never heard himself discussed.

Later and folding her knickers up to put in her bag Mary promises that she will look up the hitcher of whom they had spoken when she gets home. She makes him move to mop the floor where he still lies. She leaves him in the forecourt. She can’t when he asks give him a lift, she is a woman alone and it isn’t safe for her to pick up hitchers.

“It’s you,” Mary says next day, delighted. Her eldest child’s second laptop sits between them. She shows him the site, one of several, where he is under the Loch Ness Monster but two above the Limehouse Ratboy. The last photo like many is a blur, a phone job on the move. According to the site he is Lord Lucan, Marc Bolan or more likely Richie Edwards – the last offered as proof The King seen in the rain, blurred, at the Severn View services. The King knows they are all wrong. Mary says, “Don’t you have a home?”

She does he knows and comes here because of it. He did too but he hasn’t seen it since Castle Morten. Ever since he has been on the road, and ever since he has been looking for it. A converted horse box and a week-long rave with his family and his home, and then they had gone and he left to walk and (with his thumb) to follow. He can still remember his wife’s final words to him, ‘Look, who the fuck are you?’ very cruel. So The King tells Mary, without their names because he remembers not a one. There might be children.

Mary goes to fire up the grill. Today for breakfast The King will be treated to the last of the cheese, orange and tasteless but for once the ‘with cheese’, will be. When the restaurant had been newly opened they had attracted a mouse. Mary had baited a trap with cheese just like this and the mouse had been caught neck broken and the cheese untouched. Meeting the cheese it seemed likely that far from being murdered the mouse had committed suicide. Mary cooks two burgers from the four hundred that remain in the cold store. Two burgers but hold the lettuce, pickle, onions and special sauce. The buns here never grow stale or hard like cake, but become crumbly like biscuit.

Returning she says, “I wanted to travel once, more than once obviously, when I was young. You must have seen some places. This,” she sprays the laptop with a bottle she will later clean with another, “says that you’ve been on the road for twenty years. I wanted to go to Istanbul. I wanted to go to Machu Picchu, I wanted to go to Brighton, when I was young.”

“But you had kids?”

“But I had a big, fat arse. No, the mysterious and the ethical are not for me. Every time I thought about going something would come up. Ten years ago and it was my first rabbit. I’d almost got to packing my bags, I’d got a one way ticket to Worthing. I’d told my husband I was off to the bright lights, to the big city, to find myself.”

The King likes the sound of that. He says, “To find yourself?”

“To find myself a nice big cock. But he begged and he whined. He bought me a new coat and we got Sky, and inside six months I’d worn my rabbit down to a pencil. I almost went again then but you know, there’s always another rabbit. It was glamorous, like Sex In The City. I went on line last night, I said you were here.”

The King ignores the last. He stopped listening after the word ‘cock’. Outside it is raining, it looks warm, hello the summer. He ought to try and catch a ride but the only car he has seen since arriving here is that same black Cinquecento. Used to the silence he reacts slowly to it now. Mary waits for an answer so he says, “I’ve been all over. Motorways and A roads, I’ve seen places you wouldn’t believe. People too. Most used to be hitchers,” he describes those who once had been older but nowadays were of an age. They too had hitched and had always promised that when they had a car, well then. He tells of truck drivers wanting company. There is the odd genuinely nice person, and every so often a kid in a stolen Merc. He has sung hymns. He has been so badly beaten he pissed blood for three days after. He has listened, but mostly now he speaks because people want to be talked to, often not saying much beyond their name and so The King now plays a game. When taking a lift he will always use the name of the last person to have stopped. He spins a tale because people want him to, the rules; he has to use whatever he has learned but add whatever else he has not. “Once I spent the whole of the A66 being an old lady called Agnes, I’d been in the SOE during the war, captured and tortured. But still and after all that, chin up eh?”

“A66?”

“Right through the Lake District.”

“Ah,” says Mary, “My second son once sent me a postcard from Devon, Dartmoor anyway.”

“It’s a wild and beautiful place.”

“Not the prison.”

They come the next day and earlier than Mary so that they find The King (where facing more summer rain) he has made himself a shelter in the play area. The sides both protected by and advertise exclusive membership of the RAC the little hut at the top of the slide has gained all the charm of a bus shelter. Coming out for a piss The King is knocked by a sound boom, recoils from a camera and is hedged in by optimistic summer jackets sharing umbrellas complaining about the opening times of the empty Costa. He pisses in a knee high hedge and does so on camera. A girl asks if they can do that again. A man with earphones and a special-forces vest sneers. Another with a serious face nods seriously and asks four times the same question until it is judged he has done so seriously enough. It takes a fifth attempt and then only once the make-up girl is satisfied they have the right sort of rain on The King do they allow him to answer.

“No one calls by. Anyway it’s hot and it’s raining.

The journalist can see that. The King has a large brolly above him and out of shot. More rain is applied from an atomiser between takes. The King continues, “They roar by waving a thumb, they laugh and call out abuse. Sometimes they stop and then drive off when you’ve run up. I lost my pack that way once. I learned a lesson that day.” Now and though no one else is on the road it’s harder, he tells the news crew. No one hitches and increasingly no one ever did. Students don’t drive clapped out heaps, everyone’s middle class except for the working class, who hate hitchers - bloody scroungers. “I’ve been here coming up for a week now. I can’t go up on the motorway and no cars are coming in. The rain makes it worse.”

“They call you The King, but in case anyone out there can help, might know you even, can you say what your real name is?”

The King caught, he plays his game, “Mary, I’ve got three kids. I work in the burger bar.”

An hour before the news crew are satisfied. Another and they are packed and loaded to go. Ahead of them already and warned that the camera would be on him The King waits up the slip, thumb out. He holds out his notice as the two vans slow to get their shot before rolling away and to the distant sound of the world.

Laughing, the sound man jerks his hand at The King.

It’s Mary’s day off.