Route 66 # 4

This is my other Hockney (see previous post). Isn't it a delight? The delights of life have been simplified somewhat by the present circumstances. Things that were taken for granted, travel, visiting friends, family, lovers, galleries, gigs, theatres, I can't remember when I was last on a train to Lewes even, it has all taken a back seat for the day-to-dayness of living. There is no other way because the option is to be reckless to others. Of course, I can take a trip in different ways. This week I have been reading, Alice of the North by my dear friend, Anne Caldwell and its about a place I recognise and yet not at the same time. The great thing about the collection is how the pages turn on surprises. "The Piano" leaves us with a picture of Mary Shelley's monster on the ice and then effortlessly slides in to "a beautiful Swedish man on the mail ship and the possibility of sex..." and then back on land with "Kippers" and "memories that stick in the throat..." I move around the shelves, randomly picking out old favourites, another dear friend, Jen Webb's Moving Targets, and "The Long Man of Wilmington" nestled alongside "Icarus" and other mythologies, having moved through the garden and basil and tomatoes and the reek of compost and blood... "Later the scent of leaves... And on and on, the shelves stacked neatly in chaotic disorder, 

Katherine Coles, Paul Munden, Philip Gross, (I know a lot of poets) Wallace Stevens, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Robert Burns, I don't know them, of course, but lordy, its been a journey since getting my first serious book in 1967 (picture aside). How time flies when you have books to read. Perhaps these simplified circumstances are just a reminder that the new normal isn't so bad if you just roll with it. But that means shutting out the outside and the crap that is rolling with it, people and heartache; not having live music, watching and playing, visiting an art gallery and even just strolling round to the pub with a notebook and pencil and sitting having a beer... all pales into insignificance. But och, give me back the old normal. I sang this song at Portslade Railway Roots Club the other night.

 

Route 66 # 3

 

This is one of my David Hockney's. He painted it on an iPad during a TV show and then said the first 200 people applying could get it as a free download. Needless to say I was pretty chuffed to get one and it continues to give me pleasure. Today (as I write) is Epiphany and for many it is a spiritual moment of awakening, of realisation, of revelation even. It isn't any of these things for me. Its simply a time which allows me to remember how fortunate I am. I didn't suddenly wake up and realise I remembered, it wasn't revealed to me, I already knew. That's what I think of art does, it reminds us, it speaks to us, becoming more than just the item on display. Wallace Stevens wrote, '[The artist’s] function is to make his imagination … become the light in the minds of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives.' What I feel is, if an artist, be it painter, sculptor, photographer, poet or what and whomsoever, goes to the trouble of switching on the lights, at least we can work with it. So when Rilke asked, 

    Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'

    hierarchies?

I'm not so concerned by the image of existential suffering he goes on to insinuate (which I care little about - there's too many people really suffering in the world), but by the light he switches on in making me think. Well that's how I see it anyway. Have your own epiphany, ultimately it really has nothing to do with me unless you wish to use it against me.

Route 66 # 2

This is the last day of 2020. It has been the strangest of years and yet I have finished it with a new record - on general release in the new year, which has been a source of creative joy to put together. It's called Fisherrow and is a series of echoes from the place and surrounding area. Fisherrow sits on the Firth of Forth leading out into the North Sea waves; waves which bring the Gothic quiet of the haar, where murder and love could stay secluded in equal measures. The Firth of Forth coastline, neither unchanged by centuries nor ignored by modernity, exists in my mind still as a place of restlessness, of longing, of escape and return; the sea can take us from and bring us back. The pubs, the streets, the shingled coves and sea-worn crevices in the cliffs which are fit only for seabirds to breed and exist and yet that familiarity is not. Coming back always feels like returning to a place which never existed in the first place. The sense of continuities is the illusion all of us carry for the places we leave. And the people too, especially those who are gone, come to exist as an echo - like when I took a last trip to Dunbar with my father:

Give me maps and a compass, some old bones,

a bag full of shells, beach washed pebbles, dried

seaweed, a clear stretch of water, a sunny day and a view

of the Bass Rock; it’s okay, you can sleep off the night

shift, while I plan the journey, there’s no rush,

I’ll no’ be far away.

 

Even now I think of you every day.

There will come a time when I won’t. Maybe later,

when dusk settles over the Firth o’ Forth, I won’t hear you

saying, ‘Think we could swim tae Fife fae here?’

‘Aye,’ I always said,

though we never did,

but that was okay.

 

Last year was the strangest of years and I started it by posting this picture, not knowing how fractured it would be. But it has also been a year for learning that life is for living. In a curious way, instead of losing the year to lockdown and all that goes with this strange C19 pandemic, I have made new friends, written new music, made new inroads into this new part of my life (since giving up work) and in many ways it feels liberating. I wrote this song for the record and recorded for the online Portslade Railway Roots Club - the half empty bottle on the table, can be half full... if you like.

A guid New Year tae yin an aw, an monie may ye see

An durin aw the years tae come, O happy may ye be

An may ye ne'er hae cause tae mourn

Tae sigh or shed a tear

Tae yin an aw, baith great an sma

A hearty guid New Year!

Route 66 # 1

 

This year I am travelling on Route 66. Life has a way of lining our journey along this road with milestones; age is another. In official pages I am a pensioner, an OAP and all that goes with that, and this and that and whatever is, is of no real consequence. Some say age is but a number, that may be so; others suggest it is a signifier of something else, experience perhaps and that is also so; I'm not sure what it is for me, except, perhaps, a sense of contentment. Well in the first week of Route 66 I will be releasing a limited edition of my new record and chapbook called Fisherrow. Fisherrow is a small harbour town at the delta of the River Esk where it meets the Firth of Forth. I lived there for seven years. The record and chapbook isn’t in any way a biographical account of my life there, or a travelogue of the place, but echoes I heard during the time of Covid (2020) when I had lockdown and quarantine time to listen out for them. Like all echoes they are imprecise and often only loosely attached to the source, so it’s only a true story, maybe... Only a true story maybe, echoes of a past which like nostalgia is a return to a place which never existed in the first place - and yet... and yet the echo persists. So on Route 66 I propose a new echo every month. It will be my milestones on that road. Because on the very first day this also occurred - I gave a poetry reading in Patros, Greece. 

Yesterday we travelled to Patros, in the northern Peloponnese; Jen Webb, Anne Caldwell and me. There wasn't an Odysseus sailing us there, or a Circe to delay our journey (that would have been such a swine); neither was there a Daedalus father providing wings for guiding us away from the hot sun, those flying days are suspended for now; but it was warm all the same, and we read poetry and listened to the thoughts of colleagues scattered, far flung, across Europe, Australia and the Indian sub-continent. It was my birthday, what a special way to say how much we all cared.

At the time of writing we are still in the middle of the 'pandemic' - no point in saying its not a pain in the backside, it is no way to travel, but it is what it is - the future is no longer what we thought it was. 

This is a track from the new record which I recorded for an 'episode' of Portslade Railway Roots Club, online.

65 # 5 Eddi Reader in a shopping mall in Japan

My dear friend Phil (sometimes known as Ian for no sensible reason) McCutchion took this picture at Portslade Railway Roots Club. Its not a nod at narcissism to post it, its because its relevant to a story I heard twice inside two days from two different sources. Boo Hewerdine, who was heading the bill at the club, told us how he was playing with Eddi Reader and her band in Japan, when Eddi announced a new entrance for herself. The band (with Boo) were to go onstage and start playing and Eddi would come on, open her arms wide and the lights would come on just as she was about to start singing. Yay, 'show business' - it doesn't happen at Portslade Railway Roots club - however, it was all going to plan, the band got on stage, made a start and waited... and waited... and waited - it seems Eddi opened the wrong door and instead of walking onto the stage she ended up in a shopping mall attached to the venue. Subsequently she had to run out of the mall, round to the front of the venue, get inside and then run down the aisle while the bewildered band were playing and playing, waiting for her entrance. We laughed, of course, Portslade Railway Roots club is a friendly place. Boo went onto sing his song, Bell, Book and Candle which Eddi had recorded (a fine song it is too) and it should have been the end of the story. However, on Saturday my friend Ray Knight (a very fine harmonica player) said he had a spare ticket for Transatlantic Sessions at The Brighton Dome, would I like to go? I had meant to get tickets, the cast was hugely impressive, Gerry Douglas, Aly Bain and a host of some really special players. One of those was John McCusker who announced he had written a new tune called Eddi Reader in a Shopping Mall - and then proceeded to tell a story about being in her band in Japan... and well you know the rest, I nearly shouted the punchline but didn't want to spoil it for the other 1699 people there (it was full). But it got me thinking about stories and tunes and songs and how we carry them around as part of our own cultural identity, as part of our own story. Who can claim to own them at all. I always try to write with an underlying social concern and meaning, and sometimes it hinders my own writing process. Sometimes I wonder if I should worry about this at all. I mean a song never changed the world, all it can possibly do is expand life with a range of observations, a depth of empathy, sentiment and expression which might make a difference to some. As the poet Wallace Stevens once put it (I'm paraphrasing his idea) poetry, songs, music, all art gives us ideas about the thing, not the thing itself. As Simon Critchley says, it's, 'an experience of meditation that occurs not through a retreat from the world, but by relearning to see it in all its quotidian banality and violent beauty.' So whether you're lost in a shopping mall or confronting your world with thoughtfulness and humility, take a moment to enjoy the experience - unlike the story of Eddi Reader in a shopping mall, it may never come round again. Here's a poem from a compatriot of mine, that became a song featuring John McCusker, Boo Hewerdine and Eddi Reader - take a moment:

65 # 4 Sonder

Sonder is a word which defines the idea that everyone we encounter in life are leading lives as vivid and as complex as our own; lives populated by visions and hopes and friends and the inherent agency of love and lovers and families and dreams and desires. Pondering this while looking back on what you know of your own mother’s life is fraught with its own problems. Do we ever really know our parents or our children? Or indeed that of our friends and lovers? And yet it’s hard to escape the influence and impact they had and continue to have on our lives.  Its with this in mind that I ponder the life of this young woman, pictured left. Born in 1933 and so I reckon this must have been taken around 1950-ish, sitting on the cusp between teen and womanhood. Before she was married, before I was born, because she was 21 and I was a honeymoon baby - 9 months and a day after their wedding. Such memories I hold of her, and yet this period reveals nothing except the joy of the moment - I'm reading a pony and candy floss. It could be Portobello and the beach, or equally the miner's gala or some other such fair. But she looks happy and I remember this look from my own childhood. Its nice to reflect. It is said Harry Houdini grew up as a witness to his own father’s failings, a man who was always haunted by the shadow of his own past. Yet evading that past was probably Houdini’s greatest escape, as he guided himself into the culture of the new world that had left his father so disappointed. We all escape our own pasts to some degree because we all move on - and its what we want for our own children, is it not? I suspect Houdini's father would have been proud of his boy. One of the things that has helped me to move on is music, which I have a passion for. And today we can grab this out of the ether. Take a moment and listen - I have tried in vain to translate it, but does it really need that because its just lovely. Take time to sonder about the people in your life.