FiftyFive ~ # 162

My blue-eyed baby of the lowlands has left these Sussex shores for the week. She has gone, oop north to Sunderland to play tennis. This picture comes from the SussexSport magazine and the text isn't clear but the yellow caption at the bottom (under her racket) says: "Sussex's Abbi Melrose is No.1 ranked under-18 in the country" - not so bad for a squirt. But she is much stronger than she looks - yesterday she was doing squat thrusts with 95 kg of weight on the bar. That's 1.5 of me and just a shade off 15 st in old money - blimey! One strong baby - almost as strong as Avocado Baby, which was her favourite book - aged 2 - little did we know then what we know now - though I guess that's a pretty daft thing to say. As Alfred Lord Tennyson has said, "I am a part of all that I have met." She has become what she read - a super strong baby! She wants mascara, eye-liner and girlie stuff for Christmas - hoo, my baby is growing and I swear she has her eye on someone (I hope). Though she has a better idea of where she is going than I ever did at her age: "Alice came to a fork in the road. "Which road do I take?" she asked. "Where do you want to go?" responded the Cheshire cat. "I don't know," Alice answered. "Then," said the cat, "it doesn't matter." Ah Lewis Carroll and Alice in Wonderland, its been a long time since we dallied. Though these days I am with Ursula Le Guin, "It is good to have an end to journey towards, but it is the journey that matters, in the end." A couple of months back she was sitting in my study while I was typing. She said, I like the sound of you working. When she was a baby I was finishing my PhD and used to type while she was asleep in a sling and strapped to my chest. So part of her is still part of me (I like to think). She is also a fan of this band, as am I - it must be our Celtic ancestry - see the pictures, these play in my head at times. Nostalgia is the ultimate in discplacement and a return to a place that never existed - except in oor heids - love this track to bits:

FiftyFive ~ # 161

Dan and Dad share a moment and a chat but not hair. There is 67 years between them which is quite remarkable when you consider it. And Dad is still married to my mum - and they have been together for 56 years (thank goodness - cos I was a honeymoon baby, conceived on the night of their wedding). Though I don't suppose I would care if it was only 55 years and they had been teasing me all this time. After all, I think we all get along and turned out fine and all that stuff. But I have been thinking about Dan today because I am editing his Jekyll and Hyde essay for GCSE English. Although I have to say, if I gave my undergraduates the same instructions Dan was by his teacher, they would be well confused because the essay question doesn't square with some of the things they were expected to look at and discuss. Odd indeed, but I guess complaining might do more harm than good - after all, I should hate to come across as a smart ass or even a bit like Paul Kelly singing careless:

FiftyFive ~ # 160

This week I have been out of sorts - probably something to do with the looming Halloween, ghosts and ghouls and that kind of stuff when all I wanted to do was sit on a beach and read and chill with my belly folding over my shorts. But I was thinking back to something I wrote away back when this blog started - about writing and thinking and creating and songs and all kinds of stuff. And I wrote this, "when I was a boy I used to try and imagine what life would be like in the year 2000. That's not unusual I suppose. I am of that generation. Post war, baby boomer, watching the sixties happen, the Beatles and the Stones prodding me into looking forward to my teenage years, though of course 1966 ruined my life. And that time of my growing was marked by events; Neil Armstrong walked on the moon; I played in my first band; took a train to Marseilles then St Tropez; saw the Ziggy Stardust tour; Neil Young in Glasgow; Bruce Springsteen in Edinburgh; kissed a girl or two; learned to play the harmonica; learned to play a 1960 Fender Stratocaster which I still have; kissed another girl or two or three or more. But this is a list which is as long as its subjective and each event on the list is a nostalgic memory, probably less interesting than I remember - for isn't nostalgia a return to a place that never really existed, events become better in the re-telling. However, at no time did I ever anticipate who I would become and indeed what and where I would be now and had I decided not to fly would my creative life have happened at all?" Sometimes we have to STOP and say STOP, STOP and let me off, I need a break, a breather, a chance to rewind, wind up, recharge, re-energise - sounds pathetic, I know, but my batteries are flat this week and I need them to be charged because I don't have time for them not to be - if I was a dog, I would lie on my back and go, "hooo..." enough. But you don't need to read that - look at this instead. Isn't it amazing - I love glass, I always have and when I was in Australia I was introduced to some work. But it all takes me back. When I was 16 I hitched around Scotland with a guitar, with the intention of taking in as many folk clubs as I could during the Easter break. When I arrived in Oban the club opened at 10pm - a lot of hours to kill at 16, so I took a tour around the glass works. They were making little animals, you know the kind you could buy for your mum in the tobacconist/newsagents for only £2 - even though they were all hand made. But I had no money so I nicked a piece of glass from the "broken bin" and I still have it in the souvenir shoe box with the rest of the little treasures, like shells and stuff I collected, picked up and nicked (oh yes). But one day I hope I can see the glass of David Traub in the flesh - cos the pictures are great and I love pieces like this. Once when I was living alone in London I bought a hand made bowl in Greenwich market, from the maker who was very cute (for a few weeks). I still have the bowl (its blue and sits on a table in the living room) and it is still superb, still not a mark on it - one day I will post a picture. I should play Phillip Glass here, of course, but Glass bores the arse off me... honestly! When I first saw this video it was just the BFK - the bees-fucking-knees - "The eggs chase the bacon round the frying pan..."

FiftyFive ~ # 159

Sometimes a post comes from an idea, an inspiration, or just because there is a great track waiting to be played. Then again, sometimes the world goes too quickly and you can't escape the thoughts bubbling away there. And of course on other times you just figure your fingers can think without your brain engaging, ie just let them type away and sense will unfold - so here goes, eyes shut, hshdahrheuwib hc\ji i obj BFJDRO ABCIO NUGTM dfwue e which means sometimes we can think without actually making sense to anyone but ourselves (of course I know what it means) - so here is MCC with a new track - just because... I felt like listening to it and posting it and I am doing nothing else because its 8.25 pm on Sunday night and I am too tired to work and too tired to play and I will go for a walk in the autumn air and kick some leaves - and hope a hedgehog hasn't buried itself where I swing my boot... lordy, that would never do. I have a need for solitude...

FiftyFive ~ # 158

Last night's "perigee" * moon wrapped itself in midnight blue and the prematurely, icy chill of the coming winter. But it didn't stop me from taking a stroll, scuffing the gold and red scraps of autumn leaves and stomping through the piles that had blown into the corners of Blaker's Park. There is something quite satisfying about autumn and I confess to it being a favourite time of year for me - I suppose because I am autumnal myself, I guess. Still, no point in being maudlin. One thing does concern me though. I haven't written anything creatively this month. Imagine, the whole of October and nothing but academic stuff to credit it with. Maybe I should rectify that by writing a new song - every time I pick up the guitar a new tune comes around but the words just seem to take such an effort that I never get round to developing them - note to self, must do better. But at one point this week I found myself thinking about Egon Schiele because I received a note from my friend Kate, who used to work at Sothebys and when she was cataloguing a Schiele collection for sale she invited me to view it. Kate was pregnant with Laura at that time, and Laura is now 21 and at Oxford and how the years have flown by. But here is a curious one, if you spellcheck Schiele you are offered Schiller, and that is a coincidence because I was reading his idea that "Aesthetic matters are fundamental for the harmonious development of both society and the individual." And I was thinking about this in light of the tory/lib/dem budget cuts where they seem too stupid to realise, as Schiller also says, that " Art is the right hand of Nature. The latter has only given us being, the former has made us [wo]men." I swear to god, those tory/lib/dems will suck the life out of us all; so all we are left with is work for working's sake. Of course, Freddy Schiller also said, "Great souls suffer in silence!" Fuck that, he can't be right all the time. I intend to suffer loudly. Besides, I'm with Marilyn Monroe when she said, "I am not interested in money. I just want to be wonderful." I am a town!

* The Moon’s remarkable luminosity sprung from its proximity – about 50,000 km closer to Earth than other full Moons of the year. This can happen because the Moon’s orbit is not a circle but an ellipse. Last night, the Moon was on the near side of the ellipse – a place astronomers call “perigee” – making it a big, bright perigee Moon - often called a "wolf moon" - just thought you would like to know.If you hear me howl its because..

FiftyFive ~ # 157

Some days are just blue days whether we like it or not and indeed do we have a choice - I think not really. Melancholy is something we need to remind us of all the other times, I guess. But surely far from it being a reflex, a natural reaction, it is also something constructed. It could be both a recognition of pleasure (and/or pain) in which we give ourselves time to acknowledge that we are still alive to varying degrees of living; which at different times are both elusive and irresistible. So I guess we are allowed to explore our inner thoughts and moods and indeed to indulge and even wallow if we like - moods, after all, are only temporary for most of us - well me anyway. So I am wearing my blue jumper and my new blue suede boots (that I bought six weeks ago but never had time to wear) and later I will wear the old Levi jacket that was bought for me yesterday to replace the one I lost 15 years ago. Am I too old for it - hmm I think not if I wear it well - in fact its almost as if my old one has been returned after all this time and its nice to have it back - I guess these things happen too though, but for me its just once in a very blue moon:

FiftyFive ~ # 156

Today I wrote this, which is the beginning of a piece to be published in Writing in Education, entitled, In conversation with Anna Perera about Guantánamo Boy and other ideas on writing:

One cold, autumnal evening in 1990, I was walking down towards Bond Street in London. The stroll was relaxed and as carefree as a stroll in central London’s busiest streets can be. During the day I had been working on the voiceover of what was to become The Story Keepers, in a recording studio at the BBC and so was in a fairly buoyant mood. Although, as many may know, emerging from a recording studio into the street is an odd affair; you are immediately aware you had been in a soundproofed room, cocooned and isolated, even from basic things like the news – which, I am sure you will agree, is an odd thing to happen when you are at the hub of international news at the BBC. So while I walked I couldn’t help but wonder why there was such a huge police presence on the streets. It certainly hadn’t been there on my way in. But more than that, the police seemed to be picking people up at random and herding them into vans.

Taking the time to stop and look, I soon realized this wasn’t a case of random selection. None of the people being rounded up looked anything like me. In fact, to say they looked more middle-eastern would have been a fair assessment. When I asked a policeman what was going on, he replied that we were now at war with Iraq and they were clearing Oxford streets of “potential troublemakers”! My Scottish accent and fair skin didn’t categorise me thus, though my indignation didn’t go unrecorded.

Why this comes back to me twenty years later in 2010 may not be immediately obvious but just recently, on a cold autumnal morning this time, I was walking along the same stretch of London to meet Anna Perera, a former student of mine on the MA Writing for Children at the University of Winchester and author of Guantanamo Boy where "picking up people" is a common thread in our thoughts.

But now I think it might be time to rave on, John Donne, rave on, rave on, don't you agree?

FiftyFive ~ # 155 special

And thinking this blog could simply be fifty five posts at the age of fifty five has been eclipsed because today's posting is number 155 - here's a hymn to the silence from Van the Man to celebrate. It's a terrible video but hey, listen with your eyes closed and think about the silence as a hypothetical postulate; in the silence lies the possibilities, in the silence there is space for dreamers to dream and dream on... (actually I never dream or if I do I never remember them - but I love the silence...)

FiftyFive ~ # 55

There are days when the world is not quite what we think it is. And on those days I confess, I retreat into doing this - simply playing guitar and singing for myself. But this other picture on the left is where my eyes just went wrong. I was lost in Sydney's Kings Cross, I had a rough Idea where my hotel was but just couldn't get my bearings and I saw this sign that said "Girl and Noodle Bar'. How bizarre is that, I thought, until after finally finding my hotel and organising to go out I took my camera with me to take a picture of the sign. Which didn't say 'Girl and Noodle' but 'Grill and Noodle' - and I felt a bit of a fool - well only for a second. But it just goes to show how hard this can be - you see while narratology is, I suppose, etymologically, the science of narrative - if narrative can indeed be scientific - it is surely flawed when we consider that not everything we see, or read (as examples) actually make sense or indeed are that which we thought they were. Narrative is, after all, only a semiotic representation of of a series of events or images. So this posting is entitled "Noodles and Girls" just for noodling's sake! It isn't trying to say anything except this - narratology is suspect because representation is not an exact science but merely a point of view. And there is no evidence to suggest that the "original" sign didn't, indeed, say 'Girls and Noodles' like I suspected all along - besides, it sounds like a Tom Waits song, does it not. But never mind that - this is how to do something great with very little effort - so good - but if this doesn't swing yer boat - the sad news that Soloman Burke died today should switch you onto it, cos he wrote itl this is great cinema: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCTJeT2i9QU! I couldn't clip it - but hey click...

FiftyFive ~ # 55

Yesterday something remarkable happened on the way to my study at the University. It was quite unbelievable really, but I was strolling along not really thinking about anything in particular when I came across a grass snake slithering, very slowly, across the car park. Fearing for its safety (and the oncoming wheels of car park users) I moved it onto the grass where it could slip away (how brave am I - picking up a perfectly harmless snake - and I must say it looks much more intimidating in the picture, above, than it really was. That picture must have been taken by a man - how to make a pencil look like python). I confess to have been quite taken by its appearance though, such a rare occurrence and it fair made my day. But it shouldn't really surprise anyone, the campus is full of surprises and delights, just like the rest of my life. The great thing was I was able to put the snake in the Peace Garden, which seemed appropriate and then I sat there for a few minutes in the autumn sun while we could both be grateful for being alive. And I was listening to this on my iPod at the same time, which made me feel - hmm - complete is probably the word, enfolded in a moment of bliss. Or was it jouissance? Hmm, a significant part of the game of life is in chasing jouissance. And while it might be suggested it can never be fully gained, the anticipated pleasure of hope makes the pursuit a very exciting experience indeed. But what needs to be considered is this question: is bliss the brief moment of heightened attainment before we are reigned back to rejoin the daily chores of life, which we endure so we can start chasing it again? This music comes to me like a sigh and I absolutely adore it - close your eyes and let it move you. PS - if you spellcheck joussance it offers nuisance.