The Beat Goes On

I did Catweazle again on Thursday evening. I performed for quite a long time but it seemed to go down really well. However, I think I will give it a break for a bit now. I like the place but just to dip into now and again. I appreciate them giving me a stage and they were a good audience though. Tuesday night (last night) I did ‘Anything Goes at Mangos’ again with Sparky. There were a few people in this week; I hope it is starting to build up. There was a problem with the PA so all the musicians had to do acoustic sets and the poets had to ‘project’. I did a poetry slot and played harmonica with Tony on beautiful blues guitar. For a small bodied acoustic, his Martin really punches out a sound! Special came along to the gig and some of her friends turned up too. That is probably why it seemed like a few people were in. Its early days for the Outcasts down in Mango’s basement bar. We are trying to build it up, get some more people in there, it really is a great venue with lots of potential. Try and make it sometime. It is every other Tuesday with the next one being on 3rd October 2006, and the next one two weeks after that on the 17th of October, and so on. It kicks off at about 8:45 and there is a bar in the basement too. The Mango bar is on the right hand side of the Cowley Road, Oxford, as you walk up from The Plain. It needs supporting and could be a fantastic place to see and hear very talented, creative musicians and poets. They even have piranhas in the tank now.

Over the next few days I am moving my boat down onto the river. It looks like it is going to be a mild winter so I may stay down there for the duration. The only problem with the river is if it floods you can wake up and find your boat high and dry in the middle of a field somewhere! Other than that it is the most magnificent place to be: wide, clean, and cool. Unlike the canal which is narrow, silty, and lately it has become not-so-cool. I am working a shift at the Moon on Thursday from 5 till 8 then I am off to perform at another club in Witney, “One Night Stand” at the Red Lion. The fight to preserve poetry as one of the nation’s creative forces never sleeps!

The Wave is coming down from Bristol on Saturday and I am spending the evening with him. An evening with the Doc. Special and me are cooking a meal for some friends, including the Doc, and then going to see a band at the Well. Somehow I have to fit in working two shifts at the moon over the weekend, one Saturday and one Sunday. Also, got a London trip penned in for Sunday to have birthday meal with Special’s daughter. Busy but the beat goes on my friends.

Being a Water Gypsy

Scene 1
Late summer, warm evening. Interior of stylish second floor west London flat. A man: smartly dressed, white shirt, no tie; and a woman casually dressed. are arguing about their relationship. Argument peaks and he leaves the flat.

He steps out into a tree lined Chiswick street, breaths deep, looks towards the soon to be setting sun and bleeps a locked black Mercedes coupe open, and walks towards it. He looks back at the curtains blowing in the open window of the flat, gets in the car and fires it up.

Continuation of the exterior shot tracks the car until it turns left out of shot at the end of the street, then pans back to the windows. Cut to interior of car dash, hands on wheel, radio on a London station’s late evening traffic report. Through the windscreen there is a view of the Thames heading towards Hammersmith Bridge, Sun is starting to set in rear view mirror. In the centre column of the car is a packet of cigarettes, a rack of CDs, a mobile phone, and a bottle of prescription pills. A hand pulls out a CD, discards the case on the passenger seat and pushes it into the CD player. Canned Heat’s “On The Road Again” plays and the car swings out into heavy traffic on the A4 Talgarth Road heading East. Music volume increases.

Ahh! But that was then and now is now. Where did all that angst go? I am not really sure but go it did. I am happier now than I ever have been, at least for as long as I can accurately remember. I had some happy times in my early youth but they are all faded memories now, faded but nice.

Being a water gypsy has many, many upsides to it, but it can also have its downsides. For example, when you are told to move on, you have to move on. That is what is happening to this particular water gypsy at the moment. I got back to the boat late. Sunday evening. A message was stuck on my door. I had spent a very nice weekend with Special. Early Friday evening I met up with The Wave, a very old mate of mine who now lives in Bristol. He had been awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Brookes University (The Poly as we knew it). I asked him what it was in but he didn’t seem to know. Is it that Honorary Doctorates aren’t actually ‘in’ anything? I dunno. I know that he had been awarded it for his outstanding achievements in charity work across the globe, work that he had done and continues to do for wheelchair users in many of the world’s poorest countries. The Wave deserves that award, much more than many do. Here’s to you Doc!

Special met up with us at the flowing well. She was very taken with the Wave, who she said reminded her of her first boyfriend. I have never met anyone who didn’t like him (with the exception maybe of my ex-wife who appeared not to like anyone – especially me). At about 7:30 the Wave made tracks for London He had a meeting there the next day and was going to stay over with friends and save the trek back to Bristol for the next night. I had something to eat at the Well with Special then we went on to the Chester Arms and saw a pretty good ban whose name escapes me. They did a good selection of covers but not your usual pub fare. I remember the singer being particularly good. The pub, the Chester, I had never been to before, well apart from popping in for a half pint with Special the previous weekend, which is how I had ended up there on Friday. We had seen a flyer for the Friday night band. It is a very cool pub, in my estimation: live music, laid back people (a real mixture of), board games, and good beer. What more can a man out on the town want! For some reason I was drinking JD’s and I was asleep the moment I got home. Nice evening though.

“Can you move your boat NOW, another boat with a mooring needs your space”
That was what the message stuck to the door of my boat read. It was signed by the warden of the moorings. Time to go. Time to move on. It was good there whilst it lasted. I watched the field of what turned out to be corn (probably for animal feed) grow almost to harvest point. I had seen Buggsy the swan and his mate rear nine wonderful cygnets. They are still grey/brown but should be full on white swans in no time now. I had seen the seasons change, the ice thaw, the heat wave of the summer, the torrential rain of August. And now the autumn was knocking on the door again. A late show of sunshine was doing its utmost to keep it at bay a while longer but it is coming just like it always does. Soon the leaves will be changing colour and tumbling from the trees in multitudes. Soon smoke will be rising from every chimney on every boat, the evening will be dark, the skies clear, and once again Betelgeuse (can be pronounced Beetlejuice) will be plain to see in the top left of the constellation of Orion. If you are lucky, and the sky is clear, Beetlejuice may even look a little like orange juice.

I like the autumn; it has always been a time for reflection for me. Also a time for digging your boot heels in for the winter. Winters are lovely things; you just need to know how to ride them out. It has been a good year for me in many ways; even so, some of the worst things that could happen have happened. Losing my mum was tough to deal with, still is. But on the whole it has been a good hot summer. I haven’t really done a great deal but it feels like a worthwhile summer is now passing through autumn and eventually into winter. Whoa! It’s not winter yet, we have a harvest moon to go and all the autumn stuff, but it feels close. Less than a hundred shopping days to Christmas, so they said on the radio the other day.

I am actually looking forward to Christmas this year. Last year it was a bit strange. I spent the day with my mum in the care home she was in. She wasn’t long out of hospital and was very confused by everything. I was still trying to come to terms with her being so ill and being in the home. It wasn’t a good day for either of us. All I had to eat that Christmas day was a pork pie that I bought from a garage when I filled up the Prelude somewhere between Oxford and London. I got back to the boat late Christmas night. I didn’t have anything much in the way of food on board but I did have a case of beers that I scored in Bruges the week before. Ratty John (not the Ratty of Bel Air fame) was alone on his boat too so I invited him along to mine and we polished off the Belgium beers whilst watching a DVD, the Blues Brothers 2000. A strange day it all was. This year, however, I have been invited to Special’s for Christmas. I have offered to shop and cook and I am going to do the best fucking roast that Christmas has ever seen! And I hope it snows! I really am dreaming of a white Christmas!

Existential West

1972: I'm standing somewhere in the middle of the New Jersey Turnpike, it's starting to get dark. I have a small back pack with a few clothes in it slung over my shoulder, along with a sheet of plastic and a sleeping bag rolled around a Louisville Slugger baseball bat. I have just been dropped off there by two guys in a beaten up Oldsmobile that had picked me up on the John F Kennedy freeway heading out of New York City. I noticed that they had a handgun in the glove compartment when the one that wasn't driving opened it to take out a small bag of green and white capsules that I recognised as 'Christmas Tree' amphetamine caps. He gave me a couple, I swallowed them to help stay awake, and they dropped me off in what was not the best place to get another ride. I only have a couple of cigarettes left and I'm saving them for later. I have tied my hair back so that I look a little more 'respectable', better for getting picked up. I'd been here for about an hour when a guy in another beaten-up looking automobile pulls up. He is leaning over to the passenger side and winding down the window.

"Where you wanna go kid?" he is asking without taking the cigarette out of his mouth.

"West" I answer.

"You're in luck kid. Get in. Put your stuff on the back seat."

2006: This wasn't another one of my dreams floating around in my dream soup head. This was a memory returning as the wind in Oxford, England, blew my not-so-long hair into my eyes as I turned the corner to my office. It was me then, in 1972. A younger me, twenty years old. Twenty years old and heading West. Heading for San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge. All my life I had wanted to see that bridge.

I'm sitting in the front of the car now. I place my bedroll with the Louisville Slugger carefully on the back seat so that it is 'accessible' should the situation become 'difficult'. The Christmas trees are kicking in, a lot stronger than I'm expecting. I offer him a cigarette and light one for myself. Only two left now. My hands are shaking from the speed rush. The dash lights and cats-eyes glow brighter the darker it gets. There is nothing to be seen out of the windows now other than the freeway in front and a few signs that are getting picked out in the car's main beam.

"D'ya like baseball?" he is asking.

"I don't really know much about it. I'm English. We don't really get to see any there," comes my speed-driven reply.

I had never really travelled before. This trip to the States was the first time I had ever been out of the UK. I took a ferry to the Isle of White to see Jimi Hendrix once, but that didn't really count, it was at the time however, about the furthest I had ever been outside of East London. The states trip was also my first ever experience of flying. Something that I would have a love hate relationship with from then on, erring more to the hate. I landed at JFK a few days before the start of my big trip west and stayed in a cheap hotel for a few nights while I got my bearings and had a look at New York City. Having spent all my life in London at that time, cities I knew a bit about. It was leaving the city and heading out into that vast continental expanse that the USA is, that unnerved me. Space I wasn't used to. New York was eating my money up pretty fast, so after a few days of eating pizza slices and walking the streets of Manhattan, I got the courage up to start my journey. I packed my bag and bed roll, took my last hotel shower, got into my clean pair of personally distresses 501's, a white cotton T shirt and a thin blue velvet jacket with small white polka dots. I had been given the jacket by my sort-of then girlfriend in London. It was her jacket, a girl's jacket, but in 1972 this didn't matter, not to me anyway.

"No baseball, huh! Too bad about that. When I was a kid it was....." he is stopping in mid sentence and telling me that there seems to be a problem with car he is going to have to pull off the freeway and take a look at it.

I'm not sure if he has seen me looking into the back seat for the handle of my Louisville Slugger but we are pulling over and driving down an exit slip road into the darkness. I'm lighting up a cigarette, my hands are shaking, as he is getting out of the car. The headlights are still on and he is round the front but I can't see him as he has lifted up the hood. I'm looking around but there is nothing but black. My mouth is dry, my heart is beating fast, I'm regretting haven taken the Christmas Tree caps. My hand is now on the baseball bat, just for reassurance. The hood slams down and he is standing there in the main beams, rubbing his hands together as if washing them. He has a grin, distorted by the headlights, on his face. This is making him look like an American psycho, the ones we get to hear about all the time back in the UK.

Jimi Hendrix was good at the Isle of White Festival. I didn't have enough money for a ticket so I stayed for a week on what was dubbed by the press as 'Devastation Hill'. Jimi came on late on Sunday night, at least I think it was Sunday. I can't be too sure about that. Whenever it was, he was amazing. That must have been a year or two before the States trip. I think the trip to that concert gave me the initial desire to travel, or maybe we all get that desire when we are in the rush of youth. The summer after that I hitched down to Cornwall with my mate Mick Summerfield. We were close friends and sort of long-haired look-a-likes at that time. That was the trip that showed me that you can travel without much money and you can hitch hike without getting killed. Actually I don't think I had even considered the possibility that it could be dangerous. That thought first occurred to me when I caught a glimpse of the gun in the glove compartment, just before I was dropped off in the middle of the New Jersey Turnpike. I was feeling the speed very strongly when the hood slammed down and my latest ride was back opening the driver's door.

"Just like ah thought. Loose lead. I'll get around to buying a new distributor cap one of these days. That's if it don't break down completely before then." he says.

His smile has broken out into a laugh now and without the headlights it looks warm and genuine. Not a trace of psycho left. I'm still shaking but I am relaxing again. My heartbeat is slowing down, well as much as the speed will allow it to. I am smiling with him as we pull away and head back up to the freeway. I hand him another cigarette and light one for myself and screw the empty packet up.

"Do you ever hear of the New York Yankees over there in England?" He asks me as we pull onto the freeway.

The lights from the dash and the glow of the cigarettes feel comfortable. I have even stopped shaking and for the first time since I left New York City I am starting to relax and the speed rush has calmed down. I'm talking much more freely and loosely now.

"Yeah, I've heard of them. We don't get much baseball on TV but most people would have heard of the Yankees, Babe Ruth and all that." I'm much happier now but he doesn't seem to have noticed, well he is not letting on if he has. Why not just roll with it. He is turning turns towards me with a smile on his face.

"Well, I used to play for the Yankees. A long time ago now, twelve years, but I played for them alright, 1955 'till 1960." He puts his cigarette back in his mouth and waits for my reaction.

"Wow!" I am a genuinely impressed. I'm not much of a sporting person but like I told him, even I know the Yankees.

Nearly 35 years later and I am still impressed: Imagine playing for the New York Yankees when the game was a game of legends. What happened after that? Well, from what I remember I fell asleep once the caps had worn off and we drove through the night. It was just starting to get light when he dropped me off outside a shiny steel and neon lit diner at the side of the Interstate 80, the second longest highway in the United States, connecting Downtown San Francisco to the suburbs of New York. We must have been somewhere inside Pennsylvania; I still remember the breakfast: hash browns, crispy strips of bacon, two eggs over easy, and a thick bottomless mug of dark brown coffee. The Yankees player? I never saw him again. And after breakfast, I started hitching once more.

Some weeks later, I was sitting in the back of a red Chevy Pick-Up truck with two Jesus Freaks, squinting in the early morning sun and smelling the sea air as we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco. My summer of youth had begun.

Piranhas In The Tank

Well, we didn’t expect the sun to shine so brightly and so warmly in September as it has in the last few days. T Shirts and shorts were out in abundance again. Saturday was hot, clear and sunny. I went with Special to see the Sir John Betjeman exhibition at the Bodleian Library (if you are interested in the details:”Summoned by Bells, John Betjeman and Oxford”, 15 June to 28 October 2006. Opening times: Monday to Friday 9:00am to 5:00pm - Saturday 9:00am to 4:30pm - Free). 100 years since dear Johnny was born. He lived, he wrote, and he died with his two stuffed teddy bears, one under each arm. I don’t know about you, but if I had been around him at the time, alarm bells would have started ringing. Still, he did bang out a few good poems, and a fair amount of dirge. I like this one, but then autumn is one of my favourite seasons:

Business Girls
by Sir John Betjeman

From the geyser ventilators
Autumn winds are blowing down
On a thousand business women
Having baths in Camden Town

Waste pipes chuckle into runnels,
Steam's escaping here and there,
Morning trains through Camden cutting
Shake the Crescent and the Square.

Early nip of changeful autumn,
Dahlias glimpsed through garden doors,
At the back precarious bathrooms
Jutting out from upper floors;

And behind their frail partitions
Business women lie and soak,
Seeing through the draughty skylight
Flying clouds and railway smoke.

Rest you there, poor unbelov'd ones,
Lap your loneliness in heat.
All too soon the tiny breakfast,
Trolley-bus and windy street!


Trolley busses! Remember them? Neither do I really but I remember my dad talking about them. He told me that when the pea-soupers (the fog of legends that smothered post industrial revolution London in smog throughout decades – untill someone came up with the idea of smokeless fuels),…..when the pea-soupers came down on our city, on one occasion a trolley bus, or ‘tram’ as they were also know, lost its connection with the power wires above and people climbed on top and manoeuvred the power arm through near zero visibility to try and get it reconnected and the bus moving again. I don’t know why but that stuck in my memory. Dad also told me that a blind man used to stand outside Barking train station in the evening when the pea-souper was on us, and offer to walk people home. He didn’t need to see you see, if you see what I mean.

Special knew quite a few of Johnny’s poems even though he wasn’t one of her favourite writers from that period. She knew a lot more that me, that’s for sure. We spent about an hour or so looking through the pages of Sir John’s life then went back out into the warmth of the sunshine. At the back of Christ Church there is a tea rooms. The small garden has rickety tables and chairs set up around the ancient tomb stones of the grave yard that sits in the centre of Oxford town. The queue for tea was too long so we didn’t actually buy a cup, we merely sat over the slab of a dead one and drank the small bottle of mineral water Special had purchased from the Italian deli in the covered market.

Refreshed and happy we made tracks to the Cowley Road, via a devious route that took us inside the Bear for a quick pint. The route ended on the elevated terrace of the Corridor, a pub in the Cowley Road, that used to be called the Queens Head or some other forgettable name. Special bought a pair of hand made sandals from a stall outside the Cowley road Community Centre opposite that was manned by a white Zimbawdian lady. Lovely sandals, well made, good leather, neat bead work, and only a tenner!

I had been in the Cowley Road Community Centre a few nights before. There is a club there called Catweazle, which provides a stage for poets and musicians. I had heard of it and thought I would check it out; see what the audience were like. They didn’t know me from Adam, just a random poet who had turned up out of the blue. Probably because of that, they put me on second, the worse space to go on, maybe even worse than first. I did “Sid and Nancy Do Sainsburys”, “The electricity Thief”, “Everything Is Overrated”, and another one I can’t remember. Much to my surprise I went down a storm! Who says people don’t like shallow! I left Catweazle as it was getting into full swing. It was good fun doing that gig and I will return (if they will have me back). About 10:15 and dark it was, when I stepped out onto the street. When I first gone into the club it had still been light; actually, on leaving, it wasn’t really that dark due to a huge full silver moon hanging still low in a clear night sky. By the light of the full moon I wandered down to the Half Moon to catch up with the Flying Circus and my old mate Sparky.

.

The full moon seemed to have done a good job; the Half Moon was full of madness! A table full of loud Americans were drowning out some sweet music from JT when I stepped into to the bar. The atmosphere was strange, not like a usual Circus Thursday night. Sparky launched into some of his poetry trying to give them “Remote Control Girlfriend”, “One in Every Pub” and “The British”. His shouts and screams were making them flinch but still they didn’t shut it. Eventually, after a brave and persistent attempt, a defeated Sparky hung his poetry up for the night and sought solace in Guinness. A brave man, it just wasn’t a night for poetry! I have to say that it was the first time I have seen poetry frighten anyone – I think it was that they didn’t know what he would do next, he came across as madder than them and twice as angry. Here’s to you to you Sparks my old son!

On the previous Tuesday Sparky and me had done a gig at a new venue that he has managed to get hold of for every other Tuesday in the month. It’s called “Anything Goes at Mangos”, at Mangos bar in the Cowley road. This was the second time out for this gig. Sparky said the first one was packed and it was a fantastic evening. This one, maybe because of the clash with the last night of the St Giles’s fair, was empty. In fact, only performers and a couple of friends turned up. The whole bar was empty, devoid of all customers. But the show must go on so we performed to each other. In the end it was a great night with some wonderfully creative, original music and, hey, don’t forget the poems! The next occurrence of “Anything Goes” will hopefully attract a few punters. It is a fantastic venue and as Sparky said: “They haven’t even got the piranhas in the tank yet!”

When I walked along the tow path, much later that night, long shadows of the boats were cast by the now high in the sky full moon. “This is what it must be like in Iceland” I thought to myself. I don’t know why. I was drunk.

Special put her new sandals on and her old shoes in her bag. We sat and talked for an hour or two. Time just passes when we are together. She is lovely company. We laugh a lot. We finished our beers and left the Corridor. I had to be at work in the Half Moon by 5pm and Special needed to get some food shopping done and go collect her car from the park and ride. We walked down to the centre of Donnington Bridge where we held each other close and kissed for several minutes. Blue sky above us and the Thames flowing under the bridge below. Sir Johnny would have had a field day with that one. All I can say is it was dreamy and I am a very, very happy bunny!