A poem featuring Mick Jagger....'It's got rhythm'.

It's got rhythm

We found Mick Jagger's corpse:

it was next to the computer,

tastefully screened by a curtain

with a William Morris print

Strawberry Thief, I think.

No foul play was involved

or even suspected.

I checked the paperwork.

Everything was in order,

The corpse was legally ours.

We noted the slim ankles,

sculpted, atheletic,

that had twitched and jived

through so many gigs.

We noticed the bulge in the crotch,

and considered, with

respectful wonderment,

all the places the limp gristle

it concealed, had been.

The face was an albino prune.

We nodded with interest

at the famous Jagger lips,

the saliva dried to a crust,

lips that had quivered and pouted,

sneered, drawled, kissed even.

We admired the hands,

the nails so perfectly manicured,

though the skin was now acquiring,

the texture of tripe.

On the third day,

the corpse started

to show signs  of  life,

the contents of the gut

fermenting we assumed.

But then the muscles

started moving too,

flexing and ticking.

It was all the rhythm

coming out.

It was then that we

grew afraid.

We drew the William Morris print

curtains, with care,

and tiptoed away.

All that rhythm

had to land somewhere.

At our age

it could be lethal.

Toe Stories

I'm squeamish about injuries to toes. Sharon and I talked about this over a bottle of wine. We discussed various mishaps our toes had suffered over the years. She once had a woman tread on her big toe in stiletto heels which caused her excruciating pain. When I was about  nine years old I a bully, Billy Miller, a big red haired brute of a kid whose name is etched on my psyche for ever, stamped on my big toe . This hurt a lot. I felt something crack but never went to the doctor and whatever injury I'd received healed on its own. I can't remember the pain very well but I do remember the feeling of humiliation that went with it.

I'm writing a book [probably unpublishable due to bad grammar and weirdness] about my childhood in the West of Scotland. This has thrown up some wonderful memories and some bad ones such as the encounter mentioned above.

This is another bad one [sorry, I'll write about the wonderful ones another time] : Ronny Smith, who was sometimes my best friend, told me his father had been in Holland as a prisoner of war and was forced to dredge silt from a canal in the company of some Dutchmen. They used spades and wore no boots on their feet. One Dutchman chopped his spade into his big toe. He crawled onto the dyke. The big toe was hanging by a piece of skin. The Dutchman cut through this with his penknife. Then bled to death.

This story haunted me. I used to think about it when I was on  my own in my bedroom.

I wished I hadn't remembered it. But it helps me understand why I'm squeamish about toes.

One hundred million opinions.

I'm horrified by the rioting but I  can't say I'm surprised at it. Trouble has been simmering away in the background for years.

Before I go any further I apologise for adding my opinion to the 100 million opinions on this topic that have already been expressed in print, on blogs, in pubs, amongst friends and so on. 

I would also like to remind anyone who reads this that explanations are not justifications. Just because I try to understand why people riot does not mean that  I condone their actions. In fact I'd definitely fight back if my community was threatened.

What I am curious about is the mindset of the rioters. What is going on in their heads? How do they justify their actions? They no doubt do; they might not be educated but they are not stupid. How do they see the world they find themselves in?

These are uncomfortable questions for us all because we love to demonise others. It is one of the great dirty pleasures of being human. I do it myself. Three or four pints of beer and  I 'm saying all chavs/NOW reporters/social workers/traffic wardens/public school boys/fruit and veg traders/ local council officials/Daily Mail readers/Co-op Bank staff/psychiatrists/Jeremy Clarksons or whoever else has happened to upset me during the day should be shot, tortured, castrated, sent to live in Coalville, and worse. Ranting is such fun! No doubt a scientist will tell us 'research shows it activates the pleasure centres of the brain'. But scientists are just a bunch of f...g geeks aren't they?

Demonising is a process that is opposed to empathising. Empathising is what I'm talking about. What would be interesting would be to hear what rioters say about themselves and their actions. Of course this would not be popular, but it might help us to diagnose the sickness that afflicts our society.

Another note: empathy is not sympathy.

In the course of adult life I've talked to quite a lot of bad and mad people and have found it illuminating to discover their paranoid views of the universe, that is the real or imaginary entities that are their demons. These include Galactic conspirators, the Mekon, Muslims, anyone from Africa, Social Services, the Illuminati, the Marcone, Communists, Capitalists, Zionists, the Insect People, Irishmen...It's hard to distinguish the insane from the political and the religious.

Likewise with the rioting tribes: they will have a shared view of the world , they will have their demons. Knowing what these are will be help solve the problems we face collectively. We can guess what some of these are: the police, immigrants, the middle classes and so on. The rioters are part of the great stinking, sticky mass of discontent, anger, frustration, depression, envy, greed, that sits in the middle of our society, that we all contribute to. It needs to be dealt with before - and this is my great fear- it is exploited by political extremists. Check out history and be frightened.

Apologies if I sound like a vicar or an opinion column in the Independent.

The Fable of the Eyeglass. Lee Brilleaux 1967.

It's L.B. Memorial Concert  this week so
here is something for those that like Lee's surreal side.

Age fourteen.  Sweyne school  exercise book. 1967.

In tune with the Zeitgeist.

The Green Man

We do lots of Green Men in pewter. Here are some Sharon has done recently. They include a smiling Green Man we did as an order. Personally I don't think the Green man ought to smile but this one was done for a special occasion so I suppose an exception is acceptable.

I usually have a pewter Green man as the centre piece of our display on the market or craft fair. He always attracts attention. This goes beyond fashion. He strikes a chord with how many people feel about the world. People ask me: What does he mean? I can't give a straight answer to that  because I don't really know. Books on the subject give all sorts of answers to this question from the full blown New Age interpretations in which he is seen as a Pagan deity, to the prosaic, scholarly ones that ascribe no meaning to him at all.

My view is that we invest him with with the deep feelings we have about Nature. We are animals that have lost touch with our senses and, therefore, struggle to connect with the natural world. We yearn to be reunited with it. The Green Man offers path by which we can do this. He invokes that sense of the numinous that we get hints of now and then from walking in the woods, watching the sun set over the sea, creating a garden or watching birds.

Personally, trees give me that special feeling of connection with Nature particularly oak trees such as these ones in an area of old parkland near where I live. These trees and others like them are the source of our inspirarion for our Green Men  pictures. I took this photo on a bright misty morning last winter:

And here's a real live Green man lurking in a thicket in Belvoir Woods last summer:

As caught by Sharon .  Note Green Man T Shirt.

Oil City Confidential Filming

.

Cold Day Bare Trees

Hadleigh Castle, Chris Fenwick with the Thames Delta in the background.

Interviewing Rico. Julien Temple & George Hencken to the left.

Rico. The Salvager.

Myself watching ...apologies for anorak with asymmetric hood.

A cold day in march 2008. The first time I'd met up with Rico for decades. Just experienced that shock you get when someone you knew well in your teens appears and you find them totally changed. Then you blink and they are exactly the same person. No doubt it was the same for Rico. Who was this grey haired guy with funny ideas that got into trouble with him at Sweyne School!? Bleedin' 'ell it's 'arry! You all right mate? Odd memories sneak back. I recall Rico and I sniggering as we watched Lee write PHALLUS [a portent of things to come, eh?] in large letters on the back of the school notice board just before we all got caught and hauled up in front of  Mister Bowman, the Headmaster,  for interrogation and punishment.

Hadleigh Castle is a potent psychogeographical location for me. I used to go there on a summer's evening after it had been locked up, climb over the railings and ascend the tower, the one behind the sound guy in the above photos, and sit there and look down at Canvey and all the oil installations along the estuary. You could smell the burning oil from the cat crackers when the wind blew from the south west and as the sun set the 'towers burning' would become brighter and more ominous and more like the last panel - Hell- of the Bosche Triptych. I think we made this comparison even then.  Fancying myself as a yogi, I sometimes sat in the lotus position and chanted Om Mani Padme Hum. We did things like that in those days. It was the late Sixties after all. Looking back I can still sense the strange romantic optimism of the time. I still feed on that feeling. It helps dispel the sense of gloom that the current world gives me.

I was pleased that Julien and George tuned into the atmosphere of the place and the period. Almost uncanny it was.

Hull, the Hull Boat House and a Happy New Year

Scenes from the Boat House.

For New Year some people go to Costa Rica, some to Las Vegas, some to Trafalgar Square, some to the cupboard under the stairs [a sensible choice if you ask me] others to bed early. Us? We go to Hull, Kingston on Hull, an exotic location on the North Bank of the Humber. I am not using the term 'exotic' ironically. Hull is like Glastonbury, a place where the Dreamtime mingles with the Mundane, only it's darker and more sinister, absinthe to Glastonbury's cider and Magic Mushrooms.

*

Psychogeographically Hull is near the edge of the world which you can find, if you are interested, between Spurn and Bridlington at the crumbling clay lip of the Holderness coast beyond which there is nothing but sea and mist.

*

Hull has always attracted poets, mystics and maniacs. It's cheap to live there and there's plenty of urban and maritime dereliction to inspire an avant garde art work or two. However it ought to come with a Health Warning: Living in Hull can induce psychosis, drug dependency or alcoholism. That is not meant as a criticism of the place but simply a testimony to its mystic power. I love the place. I lived there for three years and those three years haunt and inspire me still.

*

Mike Bisby, one of my oldest, dearest and craziest friends, is our host whenever we visit Hull. Mike is the guy to talk to if you want to get beyond guidebook platitudes to the real stuff of the place. Currently he is working, with some friends, on a project to turn the old Hull Rowing Club into a centre for artistic activities, particularly those of a more adventurous kind.

*

The building was the home of Paul Burwell an experimental musician, Wikipedially defined as 'a thaumaturge and percussionist', who, sadly, died in 2007. I understand that there was some mystery around the exact circumstances of his death but it is certain that the Demon Drink had an involvement.

*

Mike and his associates are having to work hard to realise their dream. They have had to contend with many difficulties in their work. Vandals, leaking roofs, Japanese Knotweed, boats stuck in trees and the general disorder of the site have all been problematic.

*

Mike took me for a tour round. I found the atmosphere intense and disturbing as though all kinds of invisible forces were tussling with each other in the ethers. I felt odd little nervous twinges in my body and a simultaneous feeling of attraction and repulsion to the place. It made me want to embark on some grand artistic enterprise but I couldn't formulate anything in words. The influence of the place is still gestating in my mind. I feel like I might enter a trance and start speaking in tongues in my attempt to express it. So here I am waiting for something to emerge...

*

I took some photos during our visit which, I think, convey some sense of the Boat House. The ambiance of the surrounding landscape is in harmony, if that is the right word, with whatever it is that the Boat House is. On one side there is the sluggish River Hull on the banks of which are various derelict buildings and industrial sites. On the other a rather uncared for park, scrubland featuring assorted inner city detritus and a huge wind generator nicknamed, Mike tells me, Anubis, the Jackal Headed God, because when one of its blades is momentarily pointing straight down the other two blades look, respectively like Anubis' snout and the ears. Anubis was the Egyptian God who protected the dead and brought them safely to the Afterlife.

*

Our visit to the Boat House took place on the last day of the decade. A day of endings but also a day from which to look forward to new beginnings.

 *

Writing this nearly two weeks after our visit, I find myself beset with a complex set of emotions that include both gloom and optimism. I feel that what I've written is incomplete. I want to say more, but don't know what that more is...

Carol Singing round the Village: a vermifuge for Xmas earworms. And why I feel sad every Festive Season.

Tuesday Evening: carol singing around Eaton to raise money for Dove Cottage.

Nothing like a bit of rousing carol singing for expelling ear worms. I had suffered an infestation of Slade's Merry Christmas Everyone which I'd picked up on Melton Market earlier in the day but few verses of 'We wish you a Merry Christmas!' and it was subdued. No doubt it is still lurking ready to strike again. Strict aural hygiene will have to be observed: earplugs if I venture into shopping centres, no TV, care exercised when I try to tune the radio.

I really enjoyed the singing. No doubt a scientific paper somewhere demonstrates that we sing because it releases a special hormone, enhances social cohesion, produces vitamin B12 or whatever, but such explanations are really just the verbal reductionism of obsessive geeks who want to put all kinds of raw human experience into manageable boxes. Singing is good, it's nice to be with other people who are also singing, makes you feel connected: it's as simple as that.

It was stunningly cold around the village, but that was part of the experience, as was looking into other people's houses, which is always fascinating. In most houses the phantasmagorical flickering of coloured lights could be glimpsed through windows: the product of the big TV screens. It worried me [ me being me this is the kind of thing that worries me] that so many people were just sitting there in an hypnotic stupor sucking in the banal nonsense that 'viewing' consists of these days. Shouldn't they be reading books, writing bad poetry [my options], practising hobbies, meditating, feasting, participating in orgies, taking drugs, planning world domination...? No they just appeared to be slouched on the couch. This gave me one of those moments of angst that arise in me every Christmas. I can't help it. I can't help seeing [surely we all can?] the dullness and loneliness beneath the noise and bright lights and, in particular, the isolation of the old.

This feeling was intensified when we sang 'Silent Night' in front of Mister S's door. His wife died a few weeks ago. He listened to us and when we finished, wept. We were going to conclude with a noisy chorus of We Wish you a Merry Christmas. But we were struck silent. The stark sorrow of Mister S crushed our jollity. We stood and looked at Mister S. He stood and looked at us, not only sad, but embarrassed too. An Englishman crying. Had we been Italian we would have rushed to him and hugged him and wept with him. But we were English. We muttered goodnight and continued our rounds.

The incident is with me still, making me feel sad. I don't want anyone to cheer me up either. That would be false.

Christmas:underneath the glitter, the horror. The horror which we should all acknowledge and then do something about. The plight of the sick and the homeless is obvious, but that of the lonely is hidden away in rooms in warm houses all round the country.

Sorry if this sounds bleak and sermonising. Anyway my resolution for 2011: do something about the loneliness we all share.

Choir Practise. Perhaps that's what we need.

Midsummer 2010

 

Today, at Waitrose, I thought that I'd passed on.

The broad aisles gleamed, the punters in a daze

drifted, eyes glazed, about their retail maze.

The chillers chanted mantras OM & OM & OM…

 

At dusk I sip my 'Best Shiraz', eat cheese

and fruit,  savour my new Amazon books…

Oh? Gaia's heading for disaster…bees

bumble in the catmint. On Cat's Hill rooks

murmur like bored football fans…

                                                     …a sudden gust

shakes trees, a dog yelps, sheep bleat, somewhere

a child shrieks. The rooks caw like a goal's been missed.

The World Cup's on: I hear somebody swear.

 

I drowse, then wake. Moths flitter, the moon's bright:

I raise my glass and toast the Earth, Good Night.

---

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Remembrance Sunday

Reminiscences of a Desert Rat on Remembrance Sunday

Last November on the way to Church, the War came back,

Anointed with Old Spice, Brylcreemed, in trilby and Mac

I paused. An amber haze from the lamp set in the wall

Did something to my eyes. It seemed to me a pall

Of mist drifted amongst the quiet lichened graves

And coalesced into a shape, an animal, a dog, Dave's

Dog, a yellow scrawny tyke, that arrived

From out the desert somewhere near Tobruk. How it survived,

God only knows. It had a taste for rotten meat

A bit like Dave, we joked. She licked his feet,

Size twelve, he didn't seem to mind.

They were, we all concurred, two of a bloody kind.

~

Rita, he called her, she sat in the truck

On the retreat to Alamein. Said she brought him luck.

At Hellfire Pass strafed by a one-o-nine

They emerged without a scratch. Later, a mine

Went off by the truck. Bert Allsop got the blast

Dave and Rita were unscathed, Bert didn't last.

Rita sniffed Bert's ruined guts. Dave grinned,

Nerves, I suppose, tugged Rita back. The wind

Blew tyre smoke in our faces as we buried Bert,

Digging by the roadside, deep in the 'gyptian dirt,

Beyond the reach of dogs, of foxes, flies.

Poor Bert, a fine spin bowler, rests under foreign skies.

~

We got to Alamein where the War turned round,

Followed the tanks, recovered our lost ground.

We left Dave in the cab, heard him talk to her,

He seemed to forget she was a scabby, desert cur.

At Mersa Matruh, we got shelled by eighty eights

One hit the Mess tent, smashed five of my mates.

That night we couldn't find Dave. He'd gone,

Over the scrub, towards the German lines alone.

I had a shufti, found Dave, well what was left of him

He'd trod on a debollicker, been ripped limb from limb.

Found Rita too, well she'd got a tasty treat…

I stabbed her with my bayonet, made sure she was dead meat.

~

The bell had ceased to toll as I approached the gate,

I heard the murmur of the organ, I was bloody late,

Not like me, I thought, and thought of Dave and Bert,

The mist had dispersed, but not the bloody hurt.

The church door opened and I took my musty pew

I knelt on my dusty hassock and prayed to start anew.

This poem is dedicated to my Dad who never told me what he saw in North Africa in the war.

---

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Hitler's Brain

Last night I dreamed of Hitler's brain. It had been sliced up roughly and put in a casserole dish. I looked down at it and felt privileged to view the tissue that had ordered the invasion of Russia.

As I came to and hovered in that pleasant realm between dreams and morning cups of tea, I thought there must be a set of neurones that when fired, make one invade Russia and do all sorts of other crazy things, such as watching Celebrity Come Dancing or Eastenders. Between those that induce watching the latter and those that make one invade Russia there must be an overlap, as surely, the neurones for 'East', 'End', and 'Murder' are involved both activities.

Which makes me think- or sets off lots neurones abuzzing-  that a Mad Neuroscientist might infiltrate the Eastenders script writing team and devise a means of inducing some kind of electronic glitch in the viewers' brains so that they collectively rush out and invade Russia.

Or perhaps I've got it all wrong. Perhaps we just bully our brains into doing bad things. What would Hitler's brain say? I said to him, Adolf, you dumb schmekel, use your brain [i.e. ME] ! DO NOT invade Russia. It'll all end in tears. Don't say I didn't warn you! But that schmuck went and did it any way and now I get the blame. You don't know what it's like being inside the head of a madman!


Then if his brain wrote his [or her] Confessions the other organs might want to cash in. We might, for example, have The Dropped Bollock: I was Adolf' Hitler's lost testicle.

Just had a nasty thought [well another one]: if brains are to blame and there is a brain cell for everything, would it be possible for our Mad Neuroscientist to fire off the set of neurones that would make me think I am Sarah Palin, don a Grayson Perry frock, climb up a telegraph pole and sit up there singing 'I'm forever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles in the air'? And would I be sectioned or would I win the Turner Prize?

Anything is possible.

The Predictors of Beaconicity

Lovely day on Cambridge Market yesterday: air crisp and chill, ringing of church bells, low sun creating shadow patterns in the intricate details of the buildings, the scent of bacon and fresh coffee wafting across the market place, people strolling about looking relaxed, blue skies above with the occasional cauliflower of white cloud evoking a mystic thrill.

The only spoiler was the information from Phil on the cheese stall that the church bells are Ersatz: produced by a recording not by real live sweaty campanologists toiling away in their church towers. Fortunately there is still plenty of the real in Cambridge to counterbalance this disturbing deviation into Disneyesque territory. However the local Tourist people need to be on their guard in case they start presenting Cambridge as 'The Cambridge Experience'. That, is as an expensive non-experience. We have enough of that sort of thing in Melton with Ye Olde Porke Pie Shoppe. Perhaps our local council will devise an 'old pork pie experience' for visitors. Might bring a smile to touring Cockneys...?

In the afternoon I was delighted to receive a visit from my old and dear friend, Dick, who initiated me into the deeper mysteries of Local Government Bollixspiel. Dick works for a Housing Department. We are now a Predictor of Beaconicity, he tells me and grins as a look of total perplexity contorts my face. I think he's made it up but he's not. There is Beaconicity and organisations can become Predictors of it. Dick explained what it meant but I could not grasp the concept; it was too nebulous. I think it was something to do with people in offices showing people in other offices how to go about things properly. Houses didn't seem to come into it.

I think I might write I sci fi story: The Predictors of Beacon City in which the Predictors, a malevolent priesthood, dressed in steampunk robes, swan about in an Egyptian cityscape which features a dramatic Tower at the top of which burns a Mysterious Fire. The Predictors job is to go around being nasty to homeless people. These latter, wretched but nice, are eventually redeemed by a maverick Predictor, who having endured an arduous climb to the top of the Tower, has a Divine encounter with Horus and realises his Divine Mission is to set things right. He then descends, eyes glazed with Righteousness, and kills the bad guys in a orgy of divinely sanctioned fury. The climatic scene would involve lots of blood and entrails being flung about. Afterwards all the homeless people get a nice Council flat to live in. People would be able to understand that.

Economics

Economics is a subject I don' t profess to understand, particularly the 'macro' version. I suspect most politicians are in the same boat but daren't admit it. Hence they have no idea what the outcome of the policies that the Government are now pursuing will be. They just cheer and boo according to their tribal loyalties.

I do suspect, however, that some politicians, the rich ones to be specific, know very well where these policies are leading, that is to the impoverishment and degradation of many people, and this they find delightful. They find it delightful because they enjoy feeling wealthy and this sensation is enhanced by the increasing the level of poverty of amongst the majority of us. The feeling of 'I am rich' relies on this relativity. This feeling is the most wonderful thing in the world to this group. It makes them glow with self satisfaction and self importance especially when they indulge in a titillating and conspicuous act of charity.

A1 Revelations Part 1

One of the worst things about doing what I do for a living is that I have to get up very early on a Sunday morning and therefore cannot go out on a Saturday Night and drink myself into a drooling sentimental stupor with my fellow Englishmen.

The pain of getting out of bed at 5.30 A.M. is intense. Sharon's Blackberry makes a cheerful little calypso noise that chops through my dreams like a guillotine. The feeling is, I imagine, like that of the child in Philip Pullman's 'Northern Lights' being separated from his daemon. I do my ablutions, go downstairs. I wander around the kitchen, drink tea and stare about me, fart, look at the backs of my hands, fill my flask, scratch my nose, examine stains on the kitchen table with an idiotic intensity, rustle about for a CD to play in the car...Then Sharon shoves me out of the door and cold air hits me. This is another moment of pain. Followed by a sharp moment of pleasure as the early morning scents of damp meadow engulf me along with the soft sounds of early morning: scufflings in the hedge, a murmur from the rookery on Cat's Hill, a breeze softly rustling the yew tree by the shed.



Sorry, these words don't do justice to the sensation I get: it's a jolt, a thrill; it's raw and chunky; it's a revelation. There I am in stale early morning domesticity of my kitchen ...then [roll of drums and guillotine noise]...out into the world, the real world. A very remarkable and beautiful place, in case you hadn't noticed. And when you have it all to yourself early on a Sunday Morning this fact seems to be cavorting about in the trees, yodelling.

And, I know saying this puts me [unjustifiably] in the 'old Hippie' niche by those out there who think in cliches, but I have to say it:

WOW! AMAZING!

And WOW! and AMAZING because it's wow-worthy and amazing and beautiful and ineffable and incontrovertibly there and alive. And why, I wonder, are there not more people out there applauding and cheering it, this Real World? Is it uncool or do they just not notice? Answers on a postcard please.

Sorry haven't got anywhere near the A1. Haven't even started my old Fiat or scrapped the ice of the windscreen.

Cambridge Market, Sunday 10th October.

Naama Yaron, a photographer from Israel sent me the two pics above of my stall. She cheered me up. I had a bad morning. No one wanted to buy anything. On the market you can sometimes feel the mood of the country [or so I imagine] and it was fear on Sunday: Cameron's cuts, jobs, the economy, the state of the World. Perhaps these currents are more tangible in Cambridge, pulsing, as it is, with some of the World's Best Brains.

I had also spilt ostrich burger juice down my shirt and this left a nasty brown stain. This caused me intense irritation. That's why I'm in my Tshirt.

Thank you, Naama, for buying the bangle which I hope you are enjoying wearing. Hope to see you next time you are in Cambridge.

The bangles are great colours [see top pic]. We've put some on our website: archivescrafts.co.uk.

Railway Lines & Ley Lines.

Curious how you pull one memory out the hat and it tugs another out after it. After writing a blog entry a few weeks ago about Lee and I doing a 'play' in our RE class, I recalled that we were assisted by a classmate by the name of Stuart Lynn. He played a very creaky melodic accompaniment to our rendition of 'Yessir that's my Saviour' on his violin.


Then, tugging again at the Hat of Memory, I recalled that Stuart and another lad in our class, Trevor Wherret, went out cycling each weekend around South East Essex on their Raleigh bikes, [with Sturmey Archer three speed gears in the rear wheel hub, of course]. It's forty odd years ago but I presume, probably correctly, that they were clad in navy blue anoraks, black leatherette gloves and flapping grey flannel trousers held in check by cycle clips. I suspect that pockets held neatly folded linen handkerchiefs, Vic inhalers, neatly coiled pieces of hairy string, blue Bic pens, leather purses containing florins, half crowns and threepenny bits and other useful items.


Not an unusual activity for schoolboys of the period. All over the country similarly clad lads on identical bikes were pedalling away in all weathers burning off their adolescent energies. However the Wherret and Lynn* outings were unusual. They were conducted according to a strict timetable, the timetable of Avery Rail.

Avery Rail was a transport system that comprehensively covered every town and village from Wickford to Shoeburyness. I believe that Canvey Island was excluded for technical reasons - not suitable terrain for track laying- and also, I surmise, because of the steepness of Benfleet Hill and the wildness of the natives.

Avery Rail rolling stock, naturally, went along at the speed of a Raleigh bike. There was a summer timetable and a winter timetable. There were branch lines, termini, bus links, Sunday and Bank Holiday services. Stuart and Trevor made maps and painstakingly wrote out pages and pages of timetables. These were complete with asterisks and addenda, and so just as confusing as real timetables. At each station Stuart and Trev would dutifully halt their bikes for a prescribed period of time so that passengers would have sufficient time to embark and disembark.


An immense amount of work went into their project. It was a magnificent, if obsessive, feat of imagination, a psychogeographical artifice of the finest kind. It was also admirable because it was so useful for the community providing, as it did, safe, affordable, reliable transport. It was a stark contrast to the contorted cartography that Lee and I developed with our 'Map of the World' but we, nevertheless, considered their project to be a thing of wonder worthy of a wider audience.


However I have to confess I am not entirely free of obsessive behaviour. I used to spend an inordinate amount of time studying Ordnance Survey Maps. Actually, to be honest, I still do, especially when I'm a bit under the weather. I find examining, say, a tract of moorland in the West of Scotland soothing. I find going for imaginary walks around rugged declivities and along meandering burns strangely fulfilling. There are the delightful names you come across, too, Nick of the Balloch, the River Stinchar or -my favourite- Ferret of Keith Moor. The latter is a tract of drab heather moor just south of Greenock in case you want to know.


Essex O.S. Maps do not reveal much in the way of spectacular scenery. However if you take a ruler and a pencil you can find lines of mystic power, Ley Lines. There seem to be lots of Ley Lines in the Southend area with Rayleigh and Rochford as particularly significant foci.

After I first found these in the early Seventies, I pointed them out to my friend Roy Carrington , the Thundersley Mystic, who nodded knowingly and said 'there's definitely something there'. They confirmed his contention that South East Essex was an area where 'The Higher Energies' traditionally manifested themselves. Hence the the Canewdon Witches, Cunning Murrell, the Black Dog and the traditional name for the area: The Witch Country. There certainly is something in the air but whether or not it corresponds to Roy's spiritualist/theosophical viewpoint I've no idea. Until the coming of the railways in Victorian times it was a backward area of marsh, woodland and scrub well off the beaten track, a fecund area for the breeding of superstition.


My researches included treks across the area in straight lines. This helps one induce the psychogeographical trance prescribed by Iain Sinclair for such expeditions and brings to your attention all kinds of previously unnoticed trees, graffiti, buildings and so on. I found these treks an enjoyable and welcome distraction, on my periodic visits to see my parents after I had left home, from the sense of suburban claustrophobia I used to endure in their Hadleigh bungalow. But the mystic revelations they I hoped they would induce never materialised. Interestingly [well to me] years later I was visited by dreams of brick pathways stretching from East London [Ackroydish, eh!] down to Essex. So the area does have a strong hold on my imagination.


Curiously, there were no ley lines going through Canvey Island. Roy Carrington was perceptive on the matter of Canvey. It's a low place, he remarked, nodding knowingly. Perhaps that's why it produced such amazing music.


I googled Trevor Wherret in the process of writing the above. Sadly the first item that came up was his obituary. He was a keen numismatist and had planned to make a film on the coins of Essex. I remember him as another outsider at school. The book in my satchel was the Tibetan Book of the Dead, in Lee's, The Good Soldier Svek, and in Trev's Tristram Shandy. He was a unique individual. I'd like to say something like God bless you or rest in peace, but I can't find the right words. All I can say is that I feel sadness. Here we are in this strange, ugly, beautiful world in which we occupy ourselves for a few years with work, reproduction and fantasy, then we leave. I've no idea where to, perhaps back into the strange imaginative matrix from which our souls originally emerged.

* I always remember school friends by their surnames, as we were called by them by our teachers. We used elegant variations amongst ourselves, 'Slashcroft' in my case,for example.

Indulging in meandering ruminations...

Just in from a wet windy day [ you don't have to read this, it's just the meandering ruminations of tired marketeer] and feel as though I'm about to drop. [ Add your own self pitying whinges here, about half an hour's worth]. OK that's moaning done with.

Sausages and mash now, with onion gravy.

'I'm a Hog for You Baby...' / 'To His Coy Mistress'. Compare and contrast.

Mister Cunnington, my English teacher in the Sixth Form, is someone I feel very grateful to. He opened my eyes [or should that be ears?] to the Metaphysical Poets, Andrew Marvell, in particular. I remember reading Marvell's 'The Garden' in one of his classes and discovering there a magical world of wit, sensuality and mysticism. Here is the fifth stanza of the poem:

What wond'rous Life is this I lead!

Ripe Apples drop about my head;

The Lucious Clusters of the Vine

Upon my Mouth do crush their Wine;

The Nectaren and curious Peach,

Into my hands themselves do reach;

Stumbling on Melons, as I pass,

Insnar'd with Flow'rs, I fall on Grass.

It has a gorgeous, lip smacking texture. It's a verbal opiate carrying one off to Eden. Every so often, when no one is around, I indulge myself and read the whole poem out loud in a big, booming, slightly slobbery, voice.

Mister Cunnington was old and tweedyand spoke with a gruff voice, like Badger in Wind in the Willows. His wife taught Domestic Science. She had silver hair and a little daub of red lipstick on her thin pursed lips. I don't know why but one of our gang wondered, in the way callous schoolboys do, whether or not they ever had sexual, ahem, whatsits. This lead to some detailed discussion. Various conjectures were developed over several weeks. Lee, being an energetic and imaginative lad, worked on a kind of speculative choreography of what their sexual encounters might consist of. This grew steadily more obscene and surreal as he responded to the approbation and applause of his chums. I don't want to go into too much detail, but will say that the final performance involved lots of rolling up of sleeves, the ejaculation of faux Yorkshire exclamations such as ' EEE LASS! COOM HERE!' , much sprinting up and down and some violent jerky movements that left Lee sweating. It was the kind performance that critics refer to as 'bravura'.

After watching Dr. F. perform the quintessential 'I'm a Hog for you Baby' on the OCC film, I experienced a sense of deja vu. Then made the connection. Lee was using some of the same choreography that he had developed at School in response to our conjectures about Mr. & Mrs C! I was delighted at this thought. I, sort off, stretching the truth a little, could now claim that I'd watched Lee develop his act. Contributed a smidgeon even!

So thanks to Mr. Cunnington and his Missus for providing such diverse inspiration. And apologies, too. I'm sorry that we were such horrible schoolboys. I have to admit, though, that I still grin like a Cheshire Cat whenever I see a recording of Dr. F. , in their pomp, doing 'The Hog'.

The final lines from Marvell's ' To His Coye Mistress' come to mind:

Let us roll all our Strength, and all

Our sweetness, up into one Ball:

And tear our Pleasures with rough strife,

Through the iron gates of Life.

Thus, though we cannot make our Sunne

Stand still, yet we will make him run.

An appropriate sentiment for the band in their prime -and Lee especially.

From the South Side Jug Band to the Incredible String Band.

!Warning: philosophical reflections!

A brief note on my worldview. To me there is no such thing as a time or a place without a person present. Hence psychohistory and psychogeography are the proper subjects for human study and contemplation. A time and a place are just hypothetical constructs without the presence of a person, that is someone present to experience whatever is there. Likewise there cannot be a person separate from a time and a place. The concepts of time and place are unfathomable. None of us really know what they mean. Experienced directly time and place can exhibit a delightful and numinous quality.

!End of philosophical reflections!

My parents were typical East Enders: they aspired to semidetached respectability, never did the Okey Kokey, never used Cockney slang, considered punctuation, grammar and a knowledge of Scripture to be essential ingredients of the good life. My father was a devoted fan of West Ham. Leyton Orient was his second team. Cricket was his greatest pleasure though; he was a devoted follower of Essex County Cricket Club.

I was a great disappointment to him. I had no interested in sport in my teens. What's more when I was fourteen I started making visits to Canvey Island. A place that my parents regarded as 'common'.

However I found my visits to Canvey refreshing. The sea air, rural squalor, anarchy, and jollity provided a kind of vitamin supplement for the soul. You could hang out on the sea wall and there'd be people to chat to and banter with. In Hadleigh, where I lived, there was no street life. There were trips to 'the shops', to Belfairs Woods and Sunday School. [ I was made to go to Sunday School until I was fifteen! That shows we are talking of 'an historic era' now!]. But there was nothing happening for a teenager. So getting the 3A bus down Benfleet Hill and crossing over to the Island was a treat, an escape. Playing with the Jug Band in the Canvey Club was simply great. I loved walking around there and just looking at scruffy shacks that some people still lived in and was intrigued by strange manifestation of religion present there. I recall the Jug Band having its photo taken outside 'The Assemblies of God'. Crazy evangelism intrigued Lee. It was part of the world of the Blues he was exploring.

My Jug Band career was intermittent. Lacking musical talent and not doing my homework for Lee - he wrote down chords for me to learn and lent me books and records- it petered out after a year or two.

I was, anyway, getting into other things. A book on Yoga, James Hewitt's 'Teach Yourself Yoga', to be precise set me off on the quest for Spiritual Enlightenment. I also discovered 'The Incredible String Band' and spent many hours listening to Robin Williamson warbling away mystically in a thin quavering voice All this world is but a play, be thou the joy..oooo...ful play er....Ducks on a pond, ducks on aaaa... pond.....It's the Haaaaalf Remarkable question. I loved it. I know lots of rock fans will think it fey, naff, daft and worse, but I loved it, and importantly it got me out of the chronic existential gloom that afflicted me.
As I'm writing this I'm Youtubing some old ISB stuff. It's bringing a smile to my face. That's quite something for a cynic like me who habitually talks with his tongue in his cheek.
Last year an oldish bearded Scotsman in a tartan waistcoat stopped at my stall on Melton Market to buy a present for his wife. It was Robin Williamson, and a very nice chap he was, I'm glad to report. Lovely musical cadences ran through his speech. We went to his gig in the evening at a local village hall. I enjoyed it. Robin's principal instrument was the Welsh Harp, the sweet romantic tone of which contrasted nicely with Robin's voice which was, I am glad to say, no longer the thin hippy thing it had been but grown up, gruff and flecked with experience, some of it, no doubt, hard.
And all a long way from Canvey Island. But Robin has that quality that Lee had, even if their music was so different, of a having a special energy and colour. I'm trying to think of other people who I've met who have this same quality: they are few and far between. I must make a list.

Psychogeography, Sweyne School and an Armpit

There's times and places I return to when I'm half asleep.

Fairlie Glen in Scotland, for instance, when I was twelve. Where I used to crawl about in bracken, guddle for trout, climb trees and play 'commandos' with my friends. The rocks there fascinated me: grey basalt -frozen lava- towards the Kaim Hill, the waterfall over the Old Red Sandstone outcrop, boulders covered with bright green lichens, mosses and liverworts. The air was redolent with the aroma of pine trees, sodden peat, rotting leaves, fungal growth. There seemed to be a magic there that I could never get hold of, a magic that went beyond the merely rural and picturesque to include the terror of geological timespans, the power of Vulcanism and the bloody story of Scotland. This magic feeds my soul to this day.

When I was thirteen my family moved to Essex. I felt lost. The new landscape had none of the hard rocky bones of Scotalnd: it was clay, gravel, sand and mud which induced in me anomie and fretful boredom. In my new school, Rayleigh Sweyne, I felt out of place. Having a mild Scottish accent didn't help. Inevitably there was piss taking of the Where's yer kilt 'aggis? variety, but nothing as bad as what I had endured in my Scottish school. Words are just not as bad as the street ju-jitsu of the Scottish playpark which includes advanced spitting techniques. I was a victim somtimes because, in Scotland, I sounded English, my mum being from Forest Gate and my Dad being from Upton Park. It's hard to fit in the West of Scotland when your Dad's brought you up to sing 'I'm for ever blowing Bubbles' and those around you are singing 'Scot's wha hae wi Wallace bled.'

The horrible feeling of being an outsider I felt seemed part of the landscape visible from my new classroom: ribbon development, sour pony paddocks, stunted oaks, thickets of thorns concealing refuse chucked from passing vans, transport cafes...The only verticals were the electricity pylons that looked as though they had wandered in from all over the country for some tedious meeting. Sweyne was OKish academically I suppose. But it's Headmaster's humanistic vision of his pupils becoming good citizens who wouldn't litter, who had nice careers, who played the violin in their spare time who knew who T.S. Eliot was and understood the Periodic Table, just added to my sense of alienation.

I felt trapped. Fortunately in class 3B I made some good friends; John Wardropper [aka 'Crusher'], Roger Hare and Lee J. Collinson. Thirteen year old Lee loaned me his copy of Catch 22 , a thick Corgi paperback with a black and red cover. I just did not 'get' what it was saying at first. Then I had one of those great penny dropping moments of my adolescence. I 'got it', as they say these days.* Catch 22 become a reference book. With it's help we could chart our way through dull school days. Lee was Yossarian, of course. He had the same intelligent scepticism, the same sense that institutional life was crazy and that, for the sake of one's soul, must not be accepted as reality.

Our gang developed, called variously the Lovely Club, the Weasel Club or the Utterly Club depending on our whims and fancies. A uniform of waistcoats, pocket watches, cufflinks, ties worn like cravats emerged. There was some fighting, vandalism and general antisocial behaviour, but nothing really serious. The main thrust of our activities was the indulgence in gags, jests, mockery and the creation of little acts and stories. Lee and Crusher used to do an American style Evangelical rant preaching the saving graces of the Deity Charlie Pill . It was deeply offensive to anyone with strict and conventional relgious views and meant to be. There was elaborate Scotish rant that Lee and I developed featuring, myself as Hellfire preacher. We persuaded our RE teacher to allow us to perform it as a short play. This included a version of 'Yessir that's My Saviour!' with Lee playing the banjo and astounding the class with amazingly high energy solo. I concluded with the old gag about God on His Throne being distracted by the shrieks of Sinners burning in Hell. They bang desperately on the hatch next to throne. God opens it. The Sinners cry: Oh Lord! We didna' ken! God looks down at them, screws his face up into a Glaswegian grimace, tells them: WELL YE KEN NOO! And slams the heavy hatch shut, trapping a few fingers as He does so.

This stuff filled a void for me. I found a new kind of magic, one to do with words ideas and fantasies. The secret was: You can imagine anything you like!

Somehow the dreary landscape receded and I felt better. In fact I think the landscape helped. It was so soul destroyingly dull we had to create our own world. And we remapped the real one too! [ See previous entry 'The Map of the World'.]

The armpit? I'll have to talk about that next time.

*I don't actually like this phrase 'getting it' but it's useful little cliche and I can' think of another expression just now.