CANYON

I was living between two homes, my parents’ and my wife and kids’, and so, really, living nowhere as a result. “You’re living a kind of nomadic life,” mother observed. “Yeah,” I said, “I quite like it.” I don’t know why I felt the need to lie, but I did. Maybe I thought it was cool to like living nowhere. But the truth was that I had reached a time of life when all I really wanted to do was sit in a room on my own, doing the little things I like to do, and I had no desire to make idle chit chat with people or listen to mother’s complaints about her friend from the church group who refused to do her fair share of the driving. I felt sorry for that friend and I felt sorry for myself. And the only consolation was that I’d always liked feeling sorry for myself.

I had this idea that maybe I should start playing snooker. I always liked snooker clubs when I was younger and they existed in my mind as netherworlds of the soul where anything could happen, but nothing ever did. There is only one snooker club in town so I call brother and arrange to meet there. I fill out the membership form and hand it to the woman behind the bar. She looks at my name on the form. “I used to hang out with you when we were kids,” she says. Things like this happen in small towns. You want to remain anonymous but you can’t. “Your dad’s a lawyer, right?” “Yeah, that’s right,” I say. “What’s your name?” She tells me. I don’t recognise her or her name. “I can’t remember much from those days,” I say. “Too much cheap cider.” “Yeah,” she says, “kids today don’t know what they’re missing out on.” All the reports say kids today are taking fewer drugs and having less sex. That’s what they’re missing out on then: drugs and sex. And snooker, judging by the age of most of the people here, who all look kind of middle-aged. Like me, although I don’t really think of myself as middle-aged. I still think I’m young. I think I’ll always think of myself as young even when I’m dying. I’m just kind of young at heart, I guess. “Have you got any tables free this evening?” I say. “No, I’m fully booked until about ten tonight. Midweek is always really busy here. It’s quieter at the weekends.” Nevertheless, I pay the membership fee and sit down without a drink waiting for brother to arrive, which he soon does. We decide to go to the pub next door. They have a pool table so we play a couple of games. It’s Free Pool Tuesday, but by the time we find out we’ve already paid, and so gain no advantage. Things Can Only Get Better is blasting out of some speakers, its naïve optimism now beginning to look, thirty years later, like thoughtless negligence. Things didn’t get better. Instead they just keep getter worse and worse. “I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” I say. I keep missing easy shots. “I don’t think your heart’s in it,” says brother. “I've driven past this place a hundred times,” I say, “but I’ve never been inside before.” A dog does a shit in the corner of the room. “Sorry,” says a drunk woman, “I’m training it.” I’ve had a headache for three days by this point. “It stinks,” I say. “Let’s go.”

Mother wanted to talk to me about the butter dish. I’d left “crumbs” in it. And coffee grains in the sink. And fingerprints on the fridge. I had my own butter dish now, she explained. “You’ll see which one is yours,” she said. I looked. Mine had crumbs in it. I was staying with mother while wife and I took some time out from the crumbling ruins of our marriage. “I think this arrangement,” I said, “could last indefinitely.”

We get up early to watch the sunrise at the castle, but it’s cloudy and we can’t see the sun. It’s the winter solstice, the longest night of the year. I wear my poncho as I always do when channelling my inner hippy. Wife complains of feeling sick. “Are you all right?” says J___. “Yeah,” says wife, “I’m OK. Daddy’s poncho just made my tummy go funny.”

The longest night of the year

Mother doesn’t think she’s going to like the new vicar. “Apparently,” she says, “he wants to turn the church into some sort of café, with croissants and coffee.” “That doesn’t sound too bad,” I say. “Don’t you like croissants?” “If I want croissants,” says mother, “I’ll go to a café. When I go to church I just want The Message. I don’t want all that other stuff. It just dilutes The Message.”

I’m in a state of deep confusion. Like I’m trying to find my way through a dark and tangled forest, like I don’t even know if there is a way through and I’m just taking it one step at a time. Wife wants clarity, but the only clarity I can offer is confusion.

Mother has now decided she doesn’t like animals. “I just don’t like them,” she explains. “I think they’re selfish.”

The smell of other people’s eggs is disgusting.

Idea for a t-shirt: Sometimes I just drive around listening to tapes.

Unable to find my camera, I think: Do I really need any more photos of the sea?

I must, I think, take my kids to the tree I used to climb when I was a kid.

“Are you going to go to the Grand Canyon?” one woman asks another this morning in a coffee shop.

I imagine that our lives are a tangle of cables and I’m just trying to disentangle them all, and I picture death as a huge canyon and I think that maybe it would be good for me to spend some time looking into it. Contemplating it.

ELEPHANT

I’m the crazy person in the room. Like the character John Givings in Revolutionary Road.

My toe was poking through a hole in my sock, like the first shoots of spring.

Spring

Today I stole a packet of the Florentines that wife likes and some frozen bao buns, which the kids are going to have for dinner this evening. I’ll be damned if we’re going to go without the little things we like just because I don’t have a job any more.

People don’t even ask me how I am any longer, because they think they know the answer. ‘Not good’ is the answer they think they know. And they’re not wrong.

People ask me about my medication, like it’s some kind of guide dog for the blind, and say things like, “When I spoke to you on the phone yesterday, you seemed OK.”

I thought I had a plan. I was going to be happy. I would work at cleaning the beaches over the summer, and then I’d get a job at the girls’ school. When I could no longer handle teaching I’d live out my days as a bus driver. But when I told wife I had an interview to clean the beaches she started deep breathing while stirring the tomato sauce and when I told her I was going to apply for a job at the girls’ school she said, “Why?”, and my plans started crumbling like an old biscuit.

Son just came along and cleared a space on the table. Some stuff fell on the floor. He just looked at me and shrugged his shoulders.

Stuff on the floor

Now he’s playing with his space-themed Lego, talking to himself in that sing-song voice he uses when deep in play. “Why’s there an anchor on the moon?” he says. “Good question,” I reply absently, while writing the first paragraphs of a new thing called ELEPHANT.

Today I stole some frozen chips. I had some potatoes in the fridge, but I just couldn’t face the thought of cutting them up and drizzling over the oil and the salt and pepper. Much easier to just open the packet and bung them in the oven.

When I had Covid recently, there was one excruciatingly blissful evening when I thought there might be a chance that I was dying. I was listening to a Radio Four show about last interviews. The final interviews that a clutch of writers had given before dying. And I wondered what, if anything, I would have to say on my deathbed.

“Don’t you think I look good in this hat?” I said. I had put on son’s woolly hat and thought I looked good in it. No one answered. They were all purposefully ignoring me. “Don’t you think I look good in this hat?” I asked again. No one answered. “Doesn’t anyone want to talk about me?” I said. “That’s all you ever want to talk about,” said wife. “Well,” I said, “I just feel that it’s the only subject on which I can speak with any authority.”

The laundrette slowly emptied until it was just me and an old woman dressed in a red coat, black trousers and red shoes, sitting there in the laundrette. I had just started reading SUICIDE by Édouard Levé. I looked around to see how long the tumble dryer had left. It was then I realised that none of the other machines were on. The old woman had no laundry.

No laundry

I saw a man walking down the street carrying a loaf of white bread and a box of eggs. No bag. Just the two items. And there was something about his carrying of the items without a bag that seemed to me a kind of nakedness, for a person’s culinary choices to be exposed in such a way. Watching him I almost knew exactly what he might be cooking when he got home. Eggs on toast? Scrambled eggs? Eggs and soldiers, as they say? A fried egg sandwich? Some combination of eggs and bread, at any rate. That much I knew.

“I wonder what it feels like to die,” said R____ when we got home. “Quite extreme, I imagine,” he said, answering his own thought.

Today I stole some paracetamol, some ibuprofen and some anti-viral cold sore cream from a B____ in Fakenham. I was holding them in my hand as I paid for something else. I’m getting good at this, I thought as I walked out of the store.

I felt like crying today for no apparent reason. And did cry a little while listening to Kate Bush in the car park at the supermarket. The headaches are getting worse. During a conversation I completely forgot what I had said moments before. I got a little high for the first time in a good while. I became very shaky when I undressed to have a shower and my whole body tensed right up. 

“You underestimate yourself,” said father, as we sat watching a man practise roller skating back and forth along the prom. Yes, I thought, you are right. I do underestimate myself. But the trouble is I also overestimate myself.

Sometimes I have to check my face to see if I’m wearing my glasses.

We watched the sun set and then the moon started setting, and for a while there it just felt like everything was setting, and all we could think was, “What’s next? What the hell is going to set next?”

Endings are kind of ridiculous. You kind of feel that you always have to have someone dying or being shot, or learning a lesson, or facing the rightful consequences of their actions. But life doesn’t work like that. Life just goes on. Life goes on. There’s nothing more banal. Just going on and on. An old couple buying corned beef at the supermarket. A squirrel running up a tree. Rain pouring. Emptying the bins. 

I stole a blue glow stick from a church and it felt good.

The new medication doesn’t seem to be working, in case you were wondering.

JASMINE MYRA

JASMINE MYRA AT TURNER SIMS, SOUTHAMPTON – 03/05/24

Today I finally disposed of Fat Barry. Fat Barry was our Christmas tree. After being taken down and having his drooping branches trimmed, Barry had been sitting slumped in the yard for over three months. He had become a source of contention. I mean, not really, but a couple of comments, at least, had been made. Ultimately, it was just more evidence, to add to the copious amounts already amassed, that we were not, after all, proper people. And so, one day, my car already full of junk, I shoved him in the roof box and headed for the dump. But once there I forgot all about him. I emptied the car but forgot about the roof box and left Barry undisturbed. A month later I found myself back at the dump. As I waited in line I thought, I must remember about Fat Barry. Fat Barry in the roof box. And I did. I did remember. But I still couldn’t get rid of him. This time I couldn’t get the roof box open. The key jammed in the lock and the lid couldn’t be prised open. I began to wonder if I would ever be rid of Fat Barry. As the days passed I became more and more conscious of Barry, lying there just above my head as I drove to and from work, which was pretty much the only place I was driving to and from at the time. And then, today, I was giving Dave a lift home and he made some humorous comment about what I was keeping in my roof box. “Do you want to know what’s in my roof box?” I said. Dave didn’t exactly say he did but I told him anyway. “Fat Barry,” I said. And I told him the story about my failed attempts to dispose of him. Dave already knew who Fat Barry was because he’d read my blog. I decided to demonstrate how I couldn’t open the roof box. And, sure enough, the key jammed in the lock and I showed Dave how the lid couldn’t be prised open. But then the key shifted and the lid opened after all, and there he was, Fat Barry, just lying there, looking much smaller, thinner and frailer than I remembered him. I was seized by a sudden impulse. I can be quite impatient and I could no longer bear even one more journey with Barry lying prone a mere foot or so above my head. I seized hold of him and roughly yanked him from his resting place. It being after five on a Friday afternoon, the car park was empty, but Dave still wanted no part of it. “There’s CCTV,” he said. “What if you get done for fly tipping?” He walked a few yards away and faced in the opposite direction. I launched Barry into the undergrowth that skirted the car park. It was quite deep and not at all overgrown, so there was plenty of room for him.  He looked quite comfortable there and seemed to fit right in. I decided it was better that he was there where I would be able to keep an eye on him than at the dump where I felt sure Barry would have felt isolated and alone, surrounded by hedge trimmings and grass cuttings. On the drive down the hill I felt lighter. My burden was lighter because I was no longer transporting our Christmas tree around everywhere I went (to and from work). In the car Dave told me about how he disposes of his Christmas trees. He cuts off the branches and uses the trunk for firewood. Dave has developed a system. Dave is a real person. “What are you doing over the weekend?” he asks. “I’m going to a gig tonight in Southampton,” I say, “but, otherwise, no plans.” “Who are you going with?” he asks. “No one,” I say. “I don’t need other people.” “Are you going to write one of your reviews?” he asks. “No,” I say, “I don’t think so. It had begun to feel like a bit of a chore.” “Yeah,” says Dave, “that’s all right. You’re in a different phase now.” Yeah, I think, I am in a different phase. It’s post-Barry. The post-Barry phase. I can only hope that he doesn’t come back to haunt me.

ROCKSTARS

 

THE SICK POET

“I’ve been sick recently,” said the poet. “So I haven’t been able to write any poems, and I’m looking for someone to cover for me.”
  “You’re looking for a supply poet?” said the other person.
  “Yes, that’s right,” said the poet.
  “What does the job involve?”
  “Well, you just have to write some poems and publish them on Twitter or somewhere.”
  “What kind of poems?”
  “They don’t have to be very long. Just short observational stuff really. Like, you might see a horse in a field and write about that. Something like, ‘Horse standing in a field/I wonder what you do all day/Or if there’s anything left to say’, something like that.”
  “OK, and post it to your Twitter account?” 
  “No, not mine, no. Your own, I think it should be. I’m not looking to take credit for someone’s else’s work.”
  “I don’t understand. What difference does it make to you if I post poems on my own Twitter account?”
  “I just think it’s important that poetry doesn’t suffer because I’m ill. It’s important. People need it.”
  “Right.”
  “So will you do it?”
  “Um, what’s the pay?”
  “There’s no pay.”
  “Oh, well, in that case, I’m afraid the answer’s no.”

SMALL WHEEL (2018)

Walking down Lordship Lane this morning, I encountered a man. The man was pushing a wheelbarrow along the pavement towards me. The man was thickset. He had strong arms. He could probably have lifted me off the ground with just one of them. Inside the wheelbarrow was a small wheel, such as might be found on a pram or a child’s bicycle, and a blue plastic bag. The man walked past a tyre shop. On Lordship Lane, you see, there is an abundance of tyre shops. If you’re ever on Lordship Lane and you need a tyre you’re in luck. The man stopped and offered the small wheel to the men that worked in the tyre shop. He held the small wheel aloft with one of his strong arms, and raised his broad shoulders in a questioning manner, but the men in the tyre shop did not want the small wheel. The man placed the small wheel back into the wheelbarrow and continued on his way, pushing the wheelbarrow along the pavement, down Lordship Lane.

DEIRDRE AND THE MAN (2018)

I am sitting next to a man who is texting a person named Deirdre. I try to read the texts over the man’s shoulder but all I can make out are the words "it won’t take me long to pack". Maybe Deirdre and the man are going on holiday. That’s nice.

FAT BARRY

We called our Christmas tree “Fat Barry”. “Fat” because it was particularly broad and big-bottomed, and “Barry” because, well, just because it made us laugh and seemed to fit. Barry’s one of those names that’s not popular any more. You don’t see many new people being named Barry, let me tell you. The name is just gathering dust, like old jam on a shelf, and one day you’ll turn around and all the Barrys will be gone.

NIGHTFISHING, OR FISHING AT NIGHT

Some men fish at night.
They have lights and everything.
The funny thing is you never see them fishing during the day.
Maybe the fish only come out at night.
Maybe the men only come out at night.
I think they call it “night fishing”, or “fishing at night”.

Lights and everything

CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS

It’s too early for Christmas decorations, and I know it’s a cliché, but it gets earlier every year. And I say it every year. Every year I say, “It’s getting earlier every year.” It’s getting earlier every year. And earlier and earlier every year I say it, every year, earlier and earlier. It gets earlier and earlier every year. And I think soon we’ll be living in a perpetual state of Christmas.

Earlier and earlier, every year

LONDON BREW

LONDON BREW AT THE BARBICAN, LONDON – 19/11/23

The new frying pan is made of a strange material. Some sort of space age plastic and a type of rubber that I want to call “vulcanised” though I have no idea what vulcanised rubber is, or if it’s even a thing at all, and I wonder when the world became so hard to understand, and I conclude that there was no single moment, it just happened gradually.

Happened gradually

At the soft play centre earlier there was a boy called A_____. He seemed like a nice kid but he whinged a lot. He started crying. It was loud, too loud to ignore. “Are you all right, A_____?” called the boy’s mother. “He’s faking it,” R____ called back. 

R____ forgot his water bottle. Oh well, I think in a Brooklyn accent, he ain’t gonna die of thirst, is he. People don’t just die of thirst these days.

The kids are all right, I thought, still in the accent, it’s the adults that are the problem.

Sometimes, these days, I think in a bad Brooklyn accent. 

I looked up at the tree, stark against the ashen-faced sky, and there was a magpie sitting on one of the branches, and I thought that if I had a camera with me I might have taken a photograph of the magpie and the tree and then maybe everything would have been all right. So I went and fetched my camera but when I got back the magpie flew off and sat somewhere else. Oh well, I thought, and took photos of the magpie and the tree separately. And there’s still a chance that everything will be all right.

The magpie

The tree

P.S. THE NEW MOON VISITED

After ten years of living within a hundred yards of it, and setting a novel largely within its walls, but never once setting foot inside, I just walk straight in. As simple as that. It smells exactly as I expected. Like a pub. Exactly like a pub. Yeasty, old meny, beery. I had been intending to sit at the bar, like in the book, but all the seats are taken. It’s definitely busier than I had imagined. I had never imagined it being busy. There’s hardly even room to stand and order a drink, so I stand at the corner between two drinkers. The drinkers are filling out a ‘bonus ball’ sort of raffle/sweepstake thing. They’ve all chosen their numbers and paid their two pounds. “There’s only one number left,” says one of the drinkers, addressing me, “why don’t you take it?” “OK,” I say, “how does it work?” The drinker explains how it works and I agree to take the last number. I pay the money and give them my name (my real name) and I’m in. Just like that. “I’ve never won a raffle before,” I say familiarly, like I fit right in. “Maybe this is your lucky night,” says one of the drinkers, a grey-haired, slightly drink-damaged man with a friendly glint in his eye. “Yeah,” I say, “it could be. You never know.” The grey-haired drinker eyes me with a friendly smile. “And where’s your better half: Eve?” he says with a chuckle. “She’s at home with the kids,” I reply, assuming the role of a male chauvinist with ease, or maybe I really am a male chauvinist after all. Maybe in this environment I would be, at least. It certainly is a predominantly male environment. I got that right. I ask for a ginger beer, meaning non-alcoholic, but the barmaid serves me Crabbie’s (alcoholic). I don’t quibble. I haven’t come here to quibble. But then I haven’t come here to drink either. I’ve come here for personal reasons. To prove something to myself. To close a circle. To see what it’s really like. To face the truth and compare it with my fiction. I won’t drink the Crabbie’s. I consider standing there at the bar with the other drinkers, but ultimately decide against it. I’ve done really well getting this far and I don’t want to push it. Go easy on yourself, I think. I sit at a nearby table, where I can observe without being part of the action. I text S__. “Guess where I am,” I text. He doesn’t text back straight away, so I tell him, “The new moon!” I text. “For real this time!” I sit at my table writing in my notebook. One of the drinkers smiles at me as she goes out for a smoke and I smile back. There’s a kind of fug of chatter and pub noise, which is pierced by the barmaid exclaiming, “I’ve just got a coin with the king’s head on it!” This is greeted by a mixture of cheers and boos from the assembled drinkers. “Can I have it?” says one of them, a middle-aged man who seems to have been roused momentarily from the edge of consciousness. “You should keep it,” advises the grey-haired drinker. “That’s worth money.”

JJULIUS/LOOPSEL

JJULIUS/LOOPSEL/CATE KENNAN AT MOTH CLUB, HACKNEY – 27/10/23

So, it turns out I’m the kind of guy who stops in a layby on the dual carriageway to take pictures of a rainbow. I tell myself it’s the most vivid rainbow I have ever seen. I am quite taken by it. I feel like it is emanating from me, like I am the beating heart of rainbow land.

Nice rainbow

Sometimes, I think, it seems that everything is inevitable, that everything that is happening was always going to happen, so there’s no point trying to influence the course of events. It’s better just to be swept along by it all and look about you as much as you can whilst.

One thing I’ve learned from my kids is that nothing has to be perfect.

CATE KENNAN makes the kind of music that makes you feel silly just standing there watching it. “What are you looking at?” it seems to be saying. “There ain’t nothing to see here.” OK, I think, fair enough. I close my eyes a bit. I look around. There’s a guy nodding off by the stage. A_____, my friend from T______, thinks she should be doing this in a fancy restaurant while people eat fancy dinners, and I think he’s absolutely right. 

Nothing to see here

I’ve not really connected with any new music over the last few years like I have with the sounds coming out of Gothenburg recently, and watching LOOPSEL create her spidery webs of sound it’s clear to see why: it’s otherworldly, dark, dreamy and downbeat, which is what I think I’m just like. At times her music reminds me of undergrowth. On top of Engström’s soundscapes another woman tells stories in Swedish and English that are impossible to follow but still sound nice. In a slightly sinister way, of course.

There’s a moment before JJULIUS take the stage where it seems that Julius Pierstorff has gone missing. There are whispered conversations, shrugged shoulders and phone calls that go unanswered, before he finally appears, tall, dressed in a cheap-looking suit, overcoat and hairstyle, bristling with nervous energy. There were supposed to be four of them, he explains, but the lead guitarist broke his wrist so they’re muddling through and it will just be a little more awkward than usual. It’s a kind of fidgety, uptight sound with moments of rainy melancholy. Their party song is called “Grief in Gothenburg”, or Sorg I Göteborg to give it its proper title. It’s gloomy as fuck, just the way I like it.

Gloomy

IRONIC HILL WAS HERE

ME LOST ME

ME LOST ME/GWFAA/VELOUR AT THE RAILWAY INN, WINCHESTER - 19/10/23

Winchester used to be the capital of England, and it still seems to think itself quite important. It seems like a place where rich people belong, cushioned from the world beyond, living in a sort of fantasy. Outside it’s raining, but inside it’s cosy as can be.

Fantasy

VELOUR make exactly the kind of music that I really don’t like. It’s a kind of anthemic, melodramatic eighties-style soft pop, accompanied by torso dancing and miming synthetic drum fills with index fingers. It reminds me of Spandau Ballet, to my mind one of the worst bands to have ever shat upon planet Earth. Sorry, I don’t want to be mean. I mean, if the goal is to sound like Spandau Ballet then it’s a big success. Towards the end of the set I am disliking it so acutely that I start to feel quite uncomfortable. During the last song I actually feel nauseous. Sorry. I would like it if I could.

Feeling sick

GWFAA consist of two men with lots of gear. There’s something about men with gear that is so completely serious. It’s a solemn sort of play, as if solemnness justifies the amount of gear, and, anyway, they’re not really playing at all, but working. This gear, their solemnness suggests, is not going to use itself. So someone’s got to do it. So it’s justified. I start to feel sleepy, which I think is the idea. I may even doze off once or twice. I can’t be sure I don’t.  

Solemn

ME LOST ME has her fair share of gear too, or “tech” as she calls it, but without the accompanying solemnity. She’s a strange combination of the ancient and modern, with her mix of old English style folk singing and fancy modern gizmos. One minute she’s talking about monks hiding things in bibles and the next about staying up all night playing video games. And there’s a smoke machine that always seems to know the right moment to let itself off, as if it's connected to something, somehow. That’s the kind of vibe, I guess. It shouldn’t work but it does, or maybe it doesn’t work but it should. Maybe it’s the weather, but I’m not really sure about anything this evening.

Something, somehow

EARLY LUNCH

The sense of humour of other ages has always seemed bad. 

David Berman

We stopped for lunch at twelve. We’d been smoking weed since six and were burnt out. I don’t remember eating much, maybe some chips. Our boss drank four pints of lager and then feasted wantonly on a packet of beef flavoured crisps. We never did much work in the afternoon.

On rainy days we would sit in the break room watching daytime TV and smoking fags. It was a small room and there were five or six of us. We drank tea. No one drank coffee in those days, apart from my parents who drank Nescafe out of a jar. Our boss was a racist and every time Trisha came on the screen would refer to her racistly as “That black cow”. The room would slowly fill with smoke, and somehow we used to think that was better than being outside in the rain.

Our boss had a boss. He was called Angus. I always thought he was Scottish but I don’t think he was. I don’t remember him having a Scottish accent, and Scottish accents were things I remembered in those days. His occasional visits would send our boss into a panic. “Angus is coming down!” he would say in a strangled voice. It was always unclear, however, exactly what we were supposed to do with this information, and without specific instructions to guide us we would just sit up a bit straighter wearing expressions of readiness like an ill-fitting coat.

It was in the days when a group of friends could all get the same job together. I don’t remember any process being involved. You just had to go to an office - which was above one of those shops where everything was really cheap because it was useless and badly made - tell them your name and where you lived, and you were in.

Sometimes our boss would stay out all night and turn up to work in his evening wear. On those mornings when he inhaled on his cigarette his whole face would scrunch up until it looked like an arsehole, and he would carry on drinking from imported cans of lager that he’d bought off a guy in a car park. I’ve never seen anyone drink lager before breakfast and was secretly quite impressed.

The pub where we used to spend our lunch breaks is a Tesco now. Oh, how the times have changed.

My cousin Tom had worked there longer than the rest of us. “Tom’ll tell ya,” our boss used to say whenever the past came up in conversation.

One of our tasks was to keep the prom clear of sand. Our boss used a petrol blower, but all we had were brooms and we would sweep in neat little rows. The pointlessness of it was immensely soothing. “That’s a job for life,” passing wits would comment. But no, it wasn’t. It was seasonal work. In the winter months, much to our dismay, they just let the sand pile up.

The last I heard our boss was working in a bar in Spain. Tom told us that he’d died there. His name was Paul.

BEYOND THE PALE

 

John was glad when the queen died. He thought it was about time. He had this idea that people shouldn’t hang around too long, becoming a burden to others, and preventing the younger generation from receiving their rightful inheritance, and thought generally that people should just let themselves die when the time came. Medical treatment, he believed, should be denied to those over eighty, maybe even over seventy-five. He – he was sure – would deny any treatment offered to him once he reached old age. “Just let me die,” he imagined himself saying when the time came. And, besides, he was taking steps to ensure that he wasn’t even around to receive such offers. He smoked heavily at every opportunity, and, though he ate rather healthily (only because he wasn’t a child and preferred healthy food, not because he wanted to be healthy), never exercised. On the day of the funeral, distressed by the wall-to-wall coverage on the television, he went for a walk. Breathless after walking for ten minutes or so, he stopped at a bench outside one of the supermarkets for a cigarette. From where he sat he couldn’t see another living soul. “Fucking morons,” he said to himself, thinking of all those stuck inside, glued to this pantomime, this fairy tale of national history. He sat there for a few minutes smoking and wondering what was wrong with everyone. Then, his cigarette exhausted, he crushed it underfoot, immediately lit another, inhaled deeply, and coughed.

JOHN AND THE TEACHER: A TALE

 

John hates the outside. He once wrote, “I hate the outside, Dad always says let’s go to the park, but I hate the park, especially the trees which are stupid and are just a waste of time, when I go to the park I just sit there bored until its time to go home”. He wrote this because a teacher asked him to write about going to the park. John thought the teacher was wasting his time. He was right. The teacher thought it might help John to write about going to the park. But it didn’t. It didn’t help at all.

YUSSEF DAYES

YUSSEF DAYES AT VINILO RECORD STORE, SOUTHAMPTON – 13/09/23

I stop at the Rufus Stone on the way for a wee. It’s here that William II was killed by an arrow that “glanced” off an oak tree. A stone commemorates the spot where the oak tree once stood. 

"Glanced"

It’s a quiet place. There’s no one else around. Not a single other person. I’m the only person here. Being a sort of popular legend the incident is most probably fictional, or at least partly so. Life is never as interesting as people want it to be. Or maybe it’s too interesting, so people retreat to a safer world of make believe, stories and legends. But as the sun is setting through some trees, it certainly feels like the kind of place where a king could die.

A king could die here

When I arrive at VINILO it’s already quite full and there’s no way of getting near the front. It’s funny, but in my head I had imagined that I might be the only person here too. But I’m not. Not by a long shot. YUSSEF DAYES is here promoting his debut album called Black Classical Music, a reference to the Nina Simone quote about jazz being a white term to describe black people, so I’m guessing that he’s not a fan of the j-word, with its implications of the colonisation of a Black art form. But the music doesn’t feel “classical” to me. It’s inherently modern twenty-first century music, a deep and heady mix of styles and influences, free, funky, and virtuosic. Dayes has never played in Southampton before, so he says, though he does seem to remember passing though as a child and facetiously celebrates its great history as the birthplace of Craig David. Whether you call it jazz or not, it’s hard to argue with the fact that we are currently living through a golden age of Black British music, and Dayes is now another name to add to the long list of incredibly gifted UK-based musicians doing something that feels genuinely original, progressive and vital.

Golden age

There’s a big queue for signing so I go and have a look at a ruined fourteenth century church that’s just around the corner, and the past the present and the future dwell within me. When I return to the car Dayes is still in the shop so I dash in and ask him to sign my record. “I’m guessing you don’t like the term ‘jazz’,” I say. “It’s not that deep,” he says. “I don’t mind it. I’m just questioning. It’s not that deep.”