That's Rock 'n Roll

Since my voluntary glass washing stint at the Eight Bells Charity Gig I have been roped into working a few shifts at the Bells. SAB has become a good friend and we work well together. Also as a result of the Charity Gig I ended up playing harmonica with the Pete Fryer Band at the Magdaline Arms on Friday night. Special Needs drove me there which meant I could have a drink and not worry about driving. It was like a sauna in the Magdaline when we arrived. Sparky was propping up the bar watching Canadian ice hockey on the pub’s cable TV. Special and I sat in the garden for a while; it seemed to be full of care in the community cases. I wondered how this gig would pan out. When I got up to perform I realised they didn’t have any monitors and it is nearly impossible to play if you can’t hear yourself. I mentioned this to the guitarist who just said, “That’s rock ‘n roll man, just blow!”. I didn’t know most of the numbers I played on but I think I got away with it. By the end of the evening everyone was up dancing, including yours truly, and having what looked like a lot of fun. By the end of the evening I was drunk, not slaughtered but happy-drunk. I was happy to be driven home, very happy.

There is much more to working behind a bar than meets the eye. You need to know what you are doing and it can be hard I did an evening shift and a Sunday shift at the Bells. I also did a Saturday shift at the Half Moon. There was the biggest storm and the hardest rain for many years that Saturday. So bad it was that water gushed in under the front doors of the pub. The boat took a bit of a soaking too but I didn’t find out about that until Sunday night when I eventually got home. After the afternoon shift at the Moon I went round to see my mate SB who has just had a bad motorcycle accident. Which has left him with: a 15” pin in his shin bone; a fractured vertebra; a chipped vertebra; and numerous metal staples in his legs. He had hit a freshly gravelled bend on his Suzuki at some speed and the back wheel span out sending him into a ditch at the side of the road. In an attempt to stabilise the machine, and try to stay on, he instinctively pulled back on the throttle. This wasn’t the best thing to do as the 11,000 racing engine responded, instantly throwing SB another 25 yards and through a double barbed wire fence, narrowly missing a solid metal farm gate. The barbs tore the shit out of him and one leg, the one that has the pin now, got badly busted up, not to mention the cracks and chips in the neck. SB was thrown through the fence and into a field; the Suzuki wasn’t far behind him. Fortunately he had his mobile on him as he could no longer be seen from the road. He called an ambulance and his wife and waited, passing the time by taking photo’s of himself and his injuries on his mobile. He saw the ambulance go by without noticing him. A cyclist eventually spotted him and after about an hour of laying in the filed he was being morphined up and strtchered out by the paramedics. Amazingly SB was in fine spirits; we got an Indian meal delivered and watched the Bourne Conspiracy on DVD.

I left his place at about 10:30 and went over to see Special Needs. Things have grown with that situations and before I knew it I am now having what you may call a relationship. It is a good time though and I am even happier than I was. She came from out of the blue and at a very difficult time for me but has become a silver lining to that cloud that descended on me when mum died.. We are taking it as it comes and enjoying the moment. What will happen and where it will go? Only time will tell. I think it is now an appropriate juncture for me to tie up loose ends with those other women that have been floating about in my recent life: I never did get back to the Zimbabwe Army Captain I met via that useless dating service on the internet. Maybe I should, I wouldn’t like to be dropped like that, but then again that is what it is like in that virtual reality; if you can’t take the heat stay out of the cyber space kitchen. I dumped my subscription to all that cyber-shit; it may work for some people but it wasn’t for me. Call me old fashioned but I would much rather meet people face to face then get to know them. I wrote to Yahoo Personals, canning my subscription, and basically telling them what I have just said. They wrote back saying that they were pleased I had met someone one through their service and understood that I no longer wished to use them. What part of ‘virtual dating got me virtually nowhere’ didn’t they understand! Still, it was fun for a week or two. Sylvie: I haven’t seen much of but she did sing some beautiful songs in the Half Moon the other week. She has a boyfriend now and seems happy; we were really only just friends, and still are, so no worries there. My ex-girlfriend I have seen a couple of times; she was at the Bells on Sunday when I was working. No pasa nada with her and best let it lay in the past. We have both moved on. SAB, as I have already mentioned, has become a good friend and workmate. I had a couple of emails from my other ex-girlfriend, the one I hadn’t seen for 23 years who turned up in the Half Moon the other week, but our days of passion date back that far too and we are now friends catching up with each other. Anyway, she is married now and has three kids and I don’t do that affair with married women thing, and more to the point I have checked in with Special and I am a straight player. So, I have made a few new friends, reacquainted myself with some old ones, and met a lovely, beautiful person and am very happy. Not bad for a month’s work, even by water gipsy standards!

Sunday morning I woke up at Special Need’s, we had some tea and toast and marmalade, showered and both went our different way. She had things to do and so did I. My shift at the Bells was starting at midday. But it was still only 10am so I called Jamie and we met in town at St Giles for breakfast. I waited for him in the St Giles Café but it was full of American summer students wining away and that was the last thing I needed on a Sunday morning whilst having breakfast. So when Jamie arrived we headed off with our choice of newspapers to Café Rouge. French don’t really do English breakfast but it was on the menu and it turned out to be something approaching acceptability The eggs were a bit hard, the sausage was a bit fancy, the toast was butterless, and they had no brown sauce for Jamie, but other than that it did the trick, all be it a tad on the pricey side. We took a seat by an open window at the front of the place and poured two large cups of tea. Jamie ran an idea by me for a small film script he had been working on. It incorporated some of my poetry and I wasn’t really sure about the idea; he will need to pitch it too me again, it was Sunday morning after all.

I got to the Bells at just after midday. It started quiet but there were a lot of people eating so I lent a hand with the dishes. They go through a dish washer but still need to be wash quickly first. I seemed to spend the next three hours with my hands in warm soapy water! We had a few customers in the bar but not as many as most other Sundays. At the end of my shift I pulled myself a cold pint of 1664 and sat in the garden. Tricky had turned up, Socket had been there all day, Silly Billy had been coming and going, Bob the Builder and few other were milling around outside, Jamie was with his daughter and her small lad, chucking a few lazy Aunt Sally sticks at the practice doll. It was about 7:30 when I left.

I grabbed a Pizza on the way back to the boat and sat by the edge of the canal eating it. I was beginning to feel very tired. The boat had been locked up since Saturday morning and was, consequently, very warm. I opened up all the windows then laid on the roof watching the evening slowly turn into night. I fell asleep up there for a while and it was nearly midnight when I got into bed. I don’t remember setting my alarm; I don’t remember anything else.

Becoming an Adult

The charity Gig on Saturday was a great success. More people than expected turned up, many of them I have never seen before which proves advertising works. SAB managed to lumber me into working, collecting glasses, washing them, stacking, changing barrels, etc., so I was busy most of the day. Busy? It was fucking mental! At times it was 10 deep at the bar and we were running out of glasses on a regular basis as the beer flowed like mountain streams. The sun shone long and hard on the Eight Bells that day and sweet rock ‘n roll music filled the Eaton air. The last couple of weeks were a bit of a blur for me. I still haven’t come to terms with what has happened; mum’s death put me in a strange place. I have also had chest infection for two weeks, which was impetus for my vague attempt to give up smoking. Last Wednesday I was on compassionate leave and used the time to visit my doctor. I told him I was having trouble fighting off the infection, I also told him about mum dying and that I thought the shock and stress of that hadn’t helped. He agreed that it would have had an effect on my recovery and went on to tell me that he had lost his mother and father, both in the last two years and that he knew how I was feeling. “It’s strange” he said “but when both parents are gone, at some point, you think ‘fuck! I will have to be an adult now!’”

I went out on my dinner date with Special Needs and have seen her a couple of time since. It has all been a bit of bad timing but seems to be going OK in spite of that. I just haven’t had much space in my head for anything lately so only time will tell. Friends and work colleagues have been really good to me and very supportive. My ex-girlfriend cancelled her night out and came over to see me the day I got the news about mum. I really appreciated that and it helped to be able to share that load with someone, I thank her for that from the bottom of my heart. I was on the boat alone, on my way back from Heyford when I got the telephone call. I was about an hour from anywhere and anyone and I felt like the loneliest person in the world. The trees, blue sky and birdsong pulled me through that hard place. The first person I saw was my mate who lives next to the lock. We have never had much in the way of physical contact, being British men and all that, but when I told him the news he put his arms around me and hugged me. That hug was just what I needed; it was given with genuine feeling for all the right reasons and received in the same way. Thank you too my friend.

As I said, the last couple of weeks have been a blur, I barely noticed the amazing hot sunshine days and clear starry, starry nights. I remember one evening I was walking back to the boat and I saw Em looking at something in the grass. When I reached her she told me to mind where I trod and pointed out thousands of small toad, the size of a little fingernail, jumping in the grass and over the towpath. I have never seen anything like that before, there really was thousands of them, new lives, new toads. How many would make it more than a day or two? How many would become big toads? Em told me she had seen some swimming in the canal and a big fish had pigged out on them. Calliope later told me the tail of a winter past when a six inch blanket of snow had fallen over the fields of Gloucester. Whilst he was out getting coal from his farmyard, he heard a high pitched screeching, like small baby. He looked down in the snow, and at his feet was a small freezing toad, singing its death song. Calliope gently picked it up and carried it into the warmth of the house. “Was it scared?” I asked. “It was in no condition to feel anything but grateful” was Calliope’s answer. It survived the night without croaking and looked a lot better in the morning. Calliope put it under a stone on a protected part of the yard and wished him luck.

Soaked in Moonlight

What a time to give up smoking!

We sat in an Indian restaurant in East Ham, two of my nephews, their kids and me. It was a hot Tuesday evening and had been an even hotter day. Mums funeral had been at 10:30 that morning and was held in St Patrick’s Church, opposite the council house where she had lived since 1958; the house that I had grown up in during the 50s and the 60s; the house where my dad and I had spent many summers evenings sitting on the back step, shooting at tin cans at the bottom of the garden with the Webley air rifle I had saved up my paper round money to buy; the house where mum had worked for long hours and many years machining ties for a few pennies each; the house where mum knitted thousands of jumpers and completed a million crosswords; the house where my big sisters surreptitiously bought back their boyfriends when mum and dad were out, bribing my silence with cigarettes; the house where we all lived, mum, dad, my four elder sisters, and me.

When mum had to move into the care home the house returned to the council. It was boarded up for a few weeks while they painted it inside and out, chopped down the privets that I had cut since I was eight years old and pulled down the old asbestos garage that one of my eldest sister’s boyfriends had built to store his sports car in but since the 60’s had been full of junk, mostly mine. I could have bought the place at a hugely discounted price at one time. I must admit that I did think about it but in the end I didn’t think it was right to buy council houses so I let the opportunity pass. A new family have moved in there now and life goes on. I hope they find love and happiness there as we did.

I am not and never have been a religious person, but my mum was. She wasn’t overly religious, she never talked about her beliefs, never mentioned ‘God’ or ‘Jesus’ to me, and she didn’t mind my agnostic stance in the slightest. But she was associated, in one way or another, with St Patrick’s Church since the early 50’s, so it was a fitting place for her funeral ceremony to be held. The Vicar (a self confessed x-heroin addict who had found god and taken to the cloth) knew mum for several years and had visited her many times at home and later in hospital. He both cared for her and liked her, and consequently delivered a very lovely eulogy, which described snapshots of mum’s long life. I cried during the service, but I don’t really know or understand how I was feeling, I still don’t. I think it is still too early it hasn’t really sunk in.

The funeral procession followed mum’s coffin towards the new Hainault Crematorium, my sisters and I sitting in silence in the first car. We drove past both Upney and St George’s hospitals where mum had spent much of the last eight months of her life. Onwards, over the A12 and up towards Hainault. We passed the country pub where we had all celebrated mum’s 90th birthday the previous year. A field of yellow wheat drifted by bathed in the July sunshine, mum would have liked that.

I declined the offer, from one of the nephews, to stay the night and drove back to Oxford in silence. There was no traffic along the North Circular and very little on the M40. I don’t know what I was thinking about; none of it seemed real. By the time the Prelude pulled into the Rock car park a big white full moon was low in the clear night sky. It was a mild night and I lay on my unmade bed at the front of the boat soaked in moonlight as I drifted off to sleep.

Rest In Peace Mum

Mum died yesterday afternoon. She was one of the good ones. Rest in peace Mum, love you forever.