Oil City Confidential Filming

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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...

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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.

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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.