http://notesfromthepolytechnic.blogspot.com/2008/12/tuesday-ring-road-supermarket.html
(or 'How I came to love Greater London's moribund outer limits')
http://notesfromthepolytechnic.blogspot.com/2009/01/westminster-worrying.html
(or 'How one young man can turn a potentially lucrative networking opportunity into a living hell')
http://notesfromthepolytechnic.blogspot.com/2008/12/my-brand-new-suburb-busting-anti-fox.html
(or 'The perils of fox hunting in the suburbs')
Oh, and remember to check out the 'DVD extras'
Wednesday 23 September 2009
Friday 22 May 2009
Last writes
The work proceeds apace, my friends, although I tend to watch far too much footage of Neil Young on Youtube, as well as endless episodes of Fawlty Towers and Green Wing; I drink a bit too much, a bit too often and spend far too long by the river and at Richmond Park. I've made some rather sizeable errors in my personal life, too, of late, and, for once, I do not really feel like logging them on my frivolorous, little piece of cyberspace. Instead, I will internalise it all and turn my inverted emotional range into more mournfully self-indulgent poetry, all ready to be rejected from every reputable poetry magazine in the country...
I wonder how long this blog has left; if I'm honest, I've lost my taste for narcissism and, in real terms, I've already had my last lecture at the Polytechnic. Significantly, I also somehow managed to wangle a certificate for Second Best Academic Achievement in the year. Kingston, I salute you! Thanks for the appreciation I never knew you had for my manifold inadequacies!
Well, if I never write on it again I would ask that you all remember the good times, when Notesfromthepolytechnic.blogspot.com peaked at a stage of tolerable averageness i.e. ignore March and April and linger over January and, perhaps, November...
I wonder how long this blog has left; if I'm honest, I've lost my taste for narcissism and, in real terms, I've already had my last lecture at the Polytechnic. Significantly, I also somehow managed to wangle a certificate for Second Best Academic Achievement in the year. Kingston, I salute you! Thanks for the appreciation I never knew you had for my manifold inadequacies!
Well, if I never write on it again I would ask that you all remember the good times, when Notesfromthepolytechnic.blogspot.com peaked at a stage of tolerable averageness i.e. ignore March and April and linger over January and, perhaps, November...
Tuesday 28 April 2009
"All too concise and too clear..."
A voice in my tired, over-stretched, little head has been growing louder of late, telling me to get out of London. Not for good, I still very much wish to take up my place at the London School of Economics for however long and continue my unusual academic odyssey but as I hear of friends going off on trains around Europe, to India and elsewhere, something inside of me (not envy you understand, but a kind of acute pathos) repeatedly asks if I really want to hang around Wimbledon all summer.
Yesterday an exploded biro destroyed a number of the clothes in my laundry bag and I saw the semi-famous comedians, Russell Howard and Dave Gorman (in the case of the former, for the second week running). You see, there are many advantages to London's suburbs but, in some ways, I'm already too weary to enjoy them; things like that biro incident (Pengate) keep occurring.
I have 18,000 words to write and a broken muse, at least where Literature is concerned. If I don't get this done, I won't be going to the LSE... or anywhere else much, for the matter.
I am worried.
Yesterday an exploded biro destroyed a number of the clothes in my laundry bag and I saw the semi-famous comedians, Russell Howard and Dave Gorman (in the case of the former, for the second week running). You see, there are many advantages to London's suburbs but, in some ways, I'm already too weary to enjoy them; things like that biro incident (Pengate) keep occurring.
I have 18,000 words to write and a broken muse, at least where Literature is concerned. If I don't get this done, I won't be going to the LSE... or anywhere else much, for the matter.
I am worried.
Sunday 26 April 2009
Blogging Dylan-at-the-O2 blues
A quick break from my blogging hiatus to mention I finally got to see Bob Dylan last night. Of course, he's no Graham Parker (Surrey Heath's equivalent and- I would maintain- superior answer to the latter) but Dylan's songs really do have power behind them; they truly must for his pretty much defunct voice to carry them over to the audience... especially when some of said audience (including yours' truly) are stuck far up in the gods, staring at a distant, blobby, white sixties' legend through a pair of binoculars. I made a few friends among the other suburban, white, Mr. Jones types, passing around said binoculars.
The main story last night was transport. Those idiots who call the shots on these things decided that the night of a sold-out concert in a massive arena, serviced by a single underground line, was the optimum one to close the same. Apparently, there was a bus replacement but this was up in Stratford (to paraphrase The Stereophonics: you've got to go up all the way up there to come back down. No way!!). Instead, I attempted to get across the city on various packed buses. At one point, I was waiting at a particularly hairy intersection near Elephant & Castle, one eye on my watch, the other on the local dealers. It did actually cross my mind that, rather than a comfortable journey from stolid middle-class Surbiton, along the Jubilee, Dylan would rather I have the authentic experience, nearly get trampled forcing my way on to a packed 188 and write a protest song about all the carnage. It also crossed my mind that he probably wouldn't give a shit and that this was the more likely of the two.
My highlights of the concert were: 'Things have changed' and 'Like a Rolling Stone'. During the latter, I started thinking about this American with a literary bent and an unusual voice who had become the voice of his generation. After that, and despite all the tribulations with TFL, I felt really, really good about going...
*
Right, that being that, I am back on blogging hiatus!
The main story last night was transport. Those idiots who call the shots on these things decided that the night of a sold-out concert in a massive arena, serviced by a single underground line, was the optimum one to close the same. Apparently, there was a bus replacement but this was up in Stratford (to paraphrase The Stereophonics: you've got to go up all the way up there to come back down. No way!!). Instead, I attempted to get across the city on various packed buses. At one point, I was waiting at a particularly hairy intersection near Elephant & Castle, one eye on my watch, the other on the local dealers. It did actually cross my mind that, rather than a comfortable journey from stolid middle-class Surbiton, along the Jubilee, Dylan would rather I have the authentic experience, nearly get trampled forcing my way on to a packed 188 and write a protest song about all the carnage. It also crossed my mind that he probably wouldn't give a shit and that this was the more likely of the two.
My highlights of the concert were: 'Things have changed' and 'Like a Rolling Stone'. During the latter, I started thinking about this American with a literary bent and an unusual voice who had become the voice of his generation. After that, and despite all the tribulations with TFL, I felt really, really good about going...
*
Right, that being that, I am back on blogging hiatus!
Tuesday 14 April 2009
Boring blogger takes a break
I am in the throes of the final essays of my (first) undergraduate career*. From now until they are over I am afraid that there will be little or no time to update this wonderful niche of narcissism. Don't cry my dears, be strong! Before you know it I will be back boring you all again!
In the intervening time, if you're worried what to do without your bi-weekly fix of banal balls, I recommend you go back and re-read some of my better blogposts. I, personally, recommend these:
http://notesfromthepolytechnic.blogspot.com/2008/12/tuesday-ring-road-supermarket.html
http://notesfromthepolytechnic.blogspot.com/2009/01/westminster-worrying.html
http://notesfromthepolytechnic.blogspot.com/2008/12/my-brand-new-suburb-busting-anti-fox.html
...they're about the measure of this bastion of conceit, anyhow!
Failing that, can you all ring up the offices of The Liberal, The New Yorker, Poetry and Magma magazines and demand that they print some N. F. Hampton? Tell them that you are sick of the current fashionable poetry and really want to read things about canals and the nuances of the county boundary system; the kind of poetry that wonderful, avant-garde N. F. Hampton is trailblaizing from his backroom in Surbiton!
I suppose the other way to get me a bit of publicity is to tell the newspapers that I've been saying nasty things about David Cameron, that I'm an intimate acquaintance of Draper and MacBride and that I'm on the Downing Street payroll, too. (I'm really only writing these things in the vain hope that the search engines will pick me up and deliver a few more unwitting readers into my sweaty, self-obsessed hands!)
Right, I'll return in a month or so!
Wait, what's that sound, like crickets chirping in an empty auditorium? What could that be...?
*Yes, my friends, I am barking and about to embark on a second undergraduate degree in September.
In the intervening time, if you're worried what to do without your bi-weekly fix of banal balls, I recommend you go back and re-read some of my better blogposts. I, personally, recommend these:
http://notesfromthepolytechnic.blogspot.com/2008/12/tuesday-ring-road-supermarket.html
http://notesfromthepolytechnic.blogspot.com/2009/01/westminster-worrying.html
http://notesfromthepolytechnic.blogspot.com/2008/12/my-brand-new-suburb-busting-anti-fox.html
...they're about the measure of this bastion of conceit, anyhow!
Failing that, can you all ring up the offices of The Liberal, The New Yorker, Poetry and Magma magazines and demand that they print some N. F. Hampton? Tell them that you are sick of the current fashionable poetry and really want to read things about canals and the nuances of the county boundary system; the kind of poetry that wonderful, avant-garde N. F. Hampton is trailblaizing from his backroom in Surbiton!
I suppose the other way to get me a bit of publicity is to tell the newspapers that I've been saying nasty things about David Cameron, that I'm an intimate acquaintance of Draper and MacBride and that I'm on the Downing Street payroll, too. (I'm really only writing these things in the vain hope that the search engines will pick me up and deliver a few more unwitting readers into my sweaty, self-obsessed hands!)
Right, I'll return in a month or so!
Wait, what's that sound, like crickets chirping in an empty auditorium? What could that be...?
*Yes, my friends, I am barking and about to embark on a second undergraduate degree in September.
Wednesday 8 April 2009
A perverse passion for the ill-advised
The horror! The horror!
It struck me a couple of days ago that, in reality, I might not actually be able to pursue something that I have wanted to pursue for a fair while. Loyal readers will know (if they exist) that I referred to this minor tragedy obliquely on the day, bandying hefty terms around, paraphrasing Plato and Neil Young, making out I didn't mind too much, when really my arrogant little bubble had burst all over the place and had left me feeling particularly lousy. The suburbs do not look kindly on a young man who consoles himself with a Will Self novel and old television footage on Youtube, when the only future which seems to await him is a return to working in a bookshop and, perhaps, in time, a postgradraduate correspondence course in Shelving Science. In all honesty, I was gutted, and, yesterday, I walked along the canal towpath beside my parents' bungalow sunk deep in gloom...*
It was actually my melodramatic misery which saved me, I've come up with a way to subvert the current difficulties; well, not much so much 'have come up with' as 'continued to do just as I bloody well want to do and always do', which involves, as it usually does, a fervent denial of anything that approaches the look of something vaguely like a legitimate difficulty with any course of action whatsoever. More importantly, I have also come up with an apologetic for all of us who continue to do just as we like in the face of every form of opposition- part-time degrees, unscheduled jaunts to Inverness, the whole shebang:
We, the lovers of the ill-advised will not be swayed by anything as mind-numbingly boring as a comfortable life spent pursuing sensible activities and having realistic goals. For, to quote Thatcher: 'No, no, no', and, to quote me: 'BORING! BORING! BORING!'
Roll on ruination, I'll probably be able to make a good cautionary novel out of it, after all.
*The kind of gloom to which the term followed by a mere ellipsis cannot really do justice!
It struck me a couple of days ago that, in reality, I might not actually be able to pursue something that I have wanted to pursue for a fair while. Loyal readers will know (if they exist) that I referred to this minor tragedy obliquely on the day, bandying hefty terms around, paraphrasing Plato and Neil Young, making out I didn't mind too much, when really my arrogant little bubble had burst all over the place and had left me feeling particularly lousy. The suburbs do not look kindly on a young man who consoles himself with a Will Self novel and old television footage on Youtube, when the only future which seems to await him is a return to working in a bookshop and, perhaps, in time, a postgradraduate correspondence course in Shelving Science. In all honesty, I was gutted, and, yesterday, I walked along the canal towpath beside my parents' bungalow sunk deep in gloom...*
It was actually my melodramatic misery which saved me, I've come up with a way to subvert the current difficulties; well, not much so much 'have come up with' as 'continued to do just as I bloody well want to do and always do', which involves, as it usually does, a fervent denial of anything that approaches the look of something vaguely like a legitimate difficulty with any course of action whatsoever. More importantly, I have also come up with an apologetic for all of us who continue to do just as we like in the face of every form of opposition- part-time degrees, unscheduled jaunts to Inverness, the whole shebang:
We, the lovers of the ill-advised will not be swayed by anything as mind-numbingly boring as a comfortable life spent pursuing sensible activities and having realistic goals. For, to quote Thatcher: 'No, no, no', and, to quote me: 'BORING! BORING! BORING!'
Roll on ruination, I'll probably be able to make a good cautionary novel out of it, after all.
*The kind of gloom to which the term followed by a mere ellipsis cannot really do justice!
Tuesday 7 April 2009
The green, green grass of (my first) home
I'm still writing essays, only now I'm doing them in the style of Sneil the snail, my former pet and semi-namesake from my primary schooldays.* (I wonder what ever happened to him, poor bastard! I used to take him everywhere with me but one day I must have just forgotten him, only to recall him now for an unamusing analogy a mere thirteen years later.)
Today, for want of things to do as a break from my exertions, I ventured back to my old house on the border with Eversley, Berkshire. When I write 'border' I do mean it; the stream at the bottom of my garden was the county boundary between Berkshire and Hampshire; the latter signifying the stolid housing estate upon which I lived and the former, wonderful expanses of greenbelt which have stayed stuck on my subconscious despite life since being almost entirely devoted to a world of overlooking flats, petrol-stations and the general suburban sprawl.
Briefly, walking back in the old fields this afternoon, I did feel 'something' awakening within me... perhaps a vague desire, oneday, to get out of all of this and return to the rapidly declining agrarian landscape. Whatever it was, I couldn't honestly tell you that it had much to do with memory- we left that house in 1990! No, my clearest memories from those days involve a bright blue dummy and, for some reason best known to Bob Holness, Bob Holness.
Still, I am deadly serious when I say that I will return there. I will be MP for Eversley or somesuch- maybe even a mere councillor so I can get there a tad sooner (although, on second thoughts, is such a position even open to people who have been absent from the community for eighteen years? I hope so).
One thing's for sure, and I say it often enough: I have had enough of these bloody suburbs!
*How does one write this- 'primary school days' seems to atomize the term too much but 'primary schooldays' seems to imply that these were, somehow, the pivotal point in my academic career... I still don't think I've reached that (perhaps I never will).
Today, for want of things to do as a break from my exertions, I ventured back to my old house on the border with Eversley, Berkshire. When I write 'border' I do mean it; the stream at the bottom of my garden was the county boundary between Berkshire and Hampshire; the latter signifying the stolid housing estate upon which I lived and the former, wonderful expanses of greenbelt which have stayed stuck on my subconscious despite life since being almost entirely devoted to a world of overlooking flats, petrol-stations and the general suburban sprawl.
Briefly, walking back in the old fields this afternoon, I did feel 'something' awakening within me... perhaps a vague desire, oneday, to get out of all of this and return to the rapidly declining agrarian landscape. Whatever it was, I couldn't honestly tell you that it had much to do with memory- we left that house in 1990! No, my clearest memories from those days involve a bright blue dummy and, for some reason best known to Bob Holness, Bob Holness.
Still, I am deadly serious when I say that I will return there. I will be MP for Eversley or somesuch- maybe even a mere councillor so I can get there a tad sooner (although, on second thoughts, is such a position even open to people who have been absent from the community for eighteen years? I hope so).
One thing's for sure, and I say it often enough: I have had enough of these bloody suburbs!
*How does one write this- 'primary school days' seems to atomize the term too much but 'primary schooldays' seems to imply that these were, somehow, the pivotal point in my academic career... I still don't think I've reached that (perhaps I never will).
Friday 3 April 2009
Carthartic Conservatism
I'm writing, basically, for a little catharsis. Rather stupidly or, perhaps, incredibly sensibly, I've inducted myself into the whole essay game a little earlier than usual. All this has served to do so far though, is to bring the stress and obsession forward by a month or so, too. I understand the theoretical benefits but I still don't believe I'll be finished any earlier. In fact, I'm worried there is an even greater danger of going off the boil, talking about anything and everything vaguely literary and missing the point completely*. I'm overladen with books, the maximum loan from two libraries, along with a vast selection from my own bulging shelves but I really don't know if I'm making any headway...
Worried that life was taking a turn toward the unmitigatingly cerebral, tomorrow I'm off to meet somebody or other from the local Conservative association to try and get aboard the whole Euro election train. It should be a little safer now, things have changed since 2005 after all; then again, I'm not really one of these new-fangled 'Red Tories' who I've been reading about (mainly here at this fabulous Fabian Society blog: http://www.nextleft.org/2009/03/progressive-conservatism-or-democratic.html) nor am I any more of a Thatcherite than I used to be. In all honesty, I'm one of your dyed-in-the-wool cynical pragmatists and would be, to all extents and purposes, apolitical were it not for my armchair interest in politics (contradictory I know but most of my basic intellectual framework relies heavily on an extreme form of Orwellian Doublethink). The Conservative Party has never been actively hostile toward me however, and, in some ways, has been overly nice and so it's for this reason- along with my basically reactionary disposition- that I like to think I feel a basic loyalty to the Tories that goes beyond the average man's ill-informed, Sun-reading false consciousness. Whatever the reason, the essays aren't making it any easier for me to be prepared to meet this new and potentially important Conservative contact tomorrow, on the way toward getting bitten** and shouted at in honour of an election for a supra-national parliament that nobody really takes much of an interest in anyway.
Ho hum.
*Which has been the story of my experience of the whole course so far, actually
** By dogs... hopefully!
Worried that life was taking a turn toward the unmitigatingly cerebral, tomorrow I'm off to meet somebody or other from the local Conservative association to try and get aboard the whole Euro election train. It should be a little safer now, things have changed since 2005 after all; then again, I'm not really one of these new-fangled 'Red Tories' who I've been reading about (mainly here at this fabulous Fabian Society blog: http://www.nextleft.org/2009/03/progressive-conservatism-or-democratic.html) nor am I any more of a Thatcherite than I used to be. In all honesty, I'm one of your dyed-in-the-wool cynical pragmatists and would be, to all extents and purposes, apolitical were it not for my armchair interest in politics (contradictory I know but most of my basic intellectual framework relies heavily on an extreme form of Orwellian Doublethink). The Conservative Party has never been actively hostile toward me however, and, in some ways, has been overly nice and so it's for this reason- along with my basically reactionary disposition- that I like to think I feel a basic loyalty to the Tories that goes beyond the average man's ill-informed, Sun-reading false consciousness. Whatever the reason, the essays aren't making it any easier for me to be prepared to meet this new and potentially important Conservative contact tomorrow, on the way toward getting bitten** and shouted at in honour of an election for a supra-national parliament that nobody really takes much of an interest in anyway.
Ho hum.
*Which has been the story of my experience of the whole course so far, actually
** By dogs... hopefully!
Tuesday 31 March 2009
Lines on a young man's photograph album
You might infer from the title that I am about to do something wonderfully Proustian (or, to coin a term, Larkinian) and significant. I'm not. I apologise in advance but the following will just be a few seemingly irrelevant observations and so anybody not up for my usual predilection for the banal should give the game up right now... then again, who am I apologising to? This is, after all, my little piece of digital space (to advance upon a turn of phrase I picked up from The New Yorker) and if you're expecting anything even vaguely linear or literary then let me restate for the record: this is something more akin to a public diary.
'Oh Neil, why should it be public? You're so boring!'
Well, not because of any personal vanity if that's what you're thinking; it's just I know that if it were not on the Internet, and therefore at least having the hope of being read by someone, I'd give up the whole damn project and that would be a crying shame (for me) as it's such good practice for my... ahem... writing skills. I've kept little diaries before or, rather, I haven't kept them.
*
By happy coincidence, it turns out that the melancholy beauty of The Shins' song, 'New Slang' perfectly fits fifty photographs- in terms of timing, I mean- good for a Youtube video or a memorial slideshow. I found this out quite by accident however, and not, as you might naturally have been forced to conclude, owing to any over-indulgence of the sentimentally morbid on my part. Over the last few days I have been compiling some photographs on the computer- the fifty best- in order to transfer them from purely digital to corporeal reality. In a world like ours, so uncompromisingly paperless, I think that it's nice to have your memories all together in one spot and unfettered by Facebook (where most of them have been stored up until now).
For the record, I don't think that I would much like The Shins' music at my funeral. Although they're a wonderful band they are also a little too mass-market for my tastes, at least with regard to my final farewell. No, I think that I'd prefer The Prodigy's 'Firestarter', if I were being cremated or, failing that, something from my old friend Joe Jackson or maybe the Randy Newman song from Toy Story, the one they play when Buzz realises that he is not a Space Ranger after all, just a toy.
My pictures are wonderful: there's Killarney, Colombia University, Venice; so many places that I'd rather be seeing, things I'd rather be doing. In fact, isn't it the ultimate irony of the holiday snap that your mood on the day that it was taken no longer matters? There are a fair few photographs where I actually know that my disposition was less tolerable then than the rather bored mini-malaise of the present moment, sitting here updating my notes as a distraction from Kingston essays.
Still, even with knowledge of the transience of the ideal at the very forefront, aware that I was too hot or too cold or a little underwhelmed or whatever, I would rather be back there, in that moment of real significance and in the precise mood pictured, however disagreeable. A primal instinct in favour of the vacation wins out against my power to reason and forgive me but I can't help liking this, irrational creature that I am! I wonder what such a state of affairs says about the human condition though, or, at least, the human condition when in Surbiton...
Maybe it means that I just need a holiday.
'Oh Neil, why should it be public? You're so boring!'
Well, not because of any personal vanity if that's what you're thinking; it's just I know that if it were not on the Internet, and therefore at least having the hope of being read by someone, I'd give up the whole damn project and that would be a crying shame (for me) as it's such good practice for my... ahem... writing skills. I've kept little diaries before or, rather, I haven't kept them.
*
By happy coincidence, it turns out that the melancholy beauty of The Shins' song, 'New Slang' perfectly fits fifty photographs- in terms of timing, I mean- good for a Youtube video or a memorial slideshow. I found this out quite by accident however, and not, as you might naturally have been forced to conclude, owing to any over-indulgence of the sentimentally morbid on my part. Over the last few days I have been compiling some photographs on the computer- the fifty best- in order to transfer them from purely digital to corporeal reality. In a world like ours, so uncompromisingly paperless, I think that it's nice to have your memories all together in one spot and unfettered by Facebook (where most of them have been stored up until now).
For the record, I don't think that I would much like The Shins' music at my funeral. Although they're a wonderful band they are also a little too mass-market for my tastes, at least with regard to my final farewell. No, I think that I'd prefer The Prodigy's 'Firestarter', if I were being cremated or, failing that, something from my old friend Joe Jackson or maybe the Randy Newman song from Toy Story, the one they play when Buzz realises that he is not a Space Ranger after all, just a toy.
My pictures are wonderful: there's Killarney, Colombia University, Venice; so many places that I'd rather be seeing, things I'd rather be doing. In fact, isn't it the ultimate irony of the holiday snap that your mood on the day that it was taken no longer matters? There are a fair few photographs where I actually know that my disposition was less tolerable then than the rather bored mini-malaise of the present moment, sitting here updating my notes as a distraction from Kingston essays.
Still, even with knowledge of the transience of the ideal at the very forefront, aware that I was too hot or too cold or a little underwhelmed or whatever, I would rather be back there, in that moment of real significance and in the precise mood pictured, however disagreeable. A primal instinct in favour of the vacation wins out against my power to reason and forgive me but I can't help liking this, irrational creature that I am! I wonder what such a state of affairs says about the human condition though, or, at least, the human condition when in Surbiton...
Maybe it means that I just need a holiday.
Sunday 29 March 2009
How Doctor Who went out of his way to mess up my life
This week, I have been amazed and impressed by my brain's ability to repress the unwelcome or the uncool. What am I talking about I hear you ask (or am forced to ask myself, sitting in an empty room, writing on a blog devoid of readers or even the hope of readers)? No, not some dark past of parental neglect and juvenile Heroin addiction... quite the reverse in fact, parental over-indulgence and an addiction to Doctor Who.
It's been bothering me for a while. There's a picture in my Great Aunt's house of me, age 11, dressed in a cravat and cradling in my arms a model Tardis.
No, I was cool! My cerebral cortex inwardly screams: when did this happen? The answer: at home, in private, among consenting... er... well... me.
Talking to a new friend while walking up to one of my lectures last week, I inadvertently dropped the phrase: "predictable as ever", to which he responded in an undertone, "...Doctor!" Let me tell you this is the equivalent of the secret handshake among members of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society and I had completely forgotten, now I had a lot of explaining to do...
"Yes... er... yes... I did like it but now I... er... I gave it up. No, no, I don't want a hit! I'm over it! No... no... keep that DVD from me!"
You see, the sort of Doctor Who I liked wasn't the cool, contemporary family-viewing on a Saturday evening; the Doctor Who that can be featured on Comic Relief and Red Nose Day. No, mine was the real hardcore shit- the Doctor Who of fan-produced spin-off videos, of little newsletters and endless petitions demanding the show be returned to television. It was a bit like how I imagine it must have felt being in the Labour Party after 1979... you wanted so desperately to get the whole project back on its feet but, when it eventually was resurrected, it was nothing like you imagined... they had made it all glamorous and acceptable. You didn't want any of this!
Before Doctor Who, there was Star Trek (not so well hidden- when I was eleven these guys who were into WWF- itself, not the coolest piece of televisual entertainment- chased a friend and I around the playground, demanding we engage in what they were billing as a 'Battle of the Trekkies'. I think they all got afterschool detentions in the end). To paraphrase Terry Pratchett, I liked anything that had the promise of a laser gun in it somewhere! Science-fiction was my life and I had forgotten (for forgotten, read wilfully repressed) it all up until this week.
Around thirteen I decided to 'get cool' (or, at least, ever-so-slightly cooler... a bit like the Tory Party wanting to get progressive... it'll never really work; ideologically that's not what they do)... It worked for me after a fashion though, at the end of school my contemporaries put me in the yearbook as 'Most likely alcoholic' and also gave me a certificate for 'Clown of the year 2003'- obviously I was now a much better adjusted and more enriched member of society. In so doing, I dropped all the sci-fi nonsense- almost a requirement- but without it I don't think I would be studying literature now! Doctor Who lead on to weird and wacky Doctor Who novels which, in turn, lead me on in search of better science-fiction and fantasy, the works of Michael Moorcock and Neil Gaiman. Furthermore, I had wrestled, since the age of about nine or ten, with complex theoretical, moral and ethical conceptions, of time-travel or whether or not it was right to give a primitive alien race advanced technology which, along with my Catholic upbringing, contributed to my interest in philosophy...
... So, to conclude, basically, even now, silly science-fiction is still messing up life and making me pursue frivolous subjects like philosophy and literature, instead of getting a real job (or a qualification that might lead to a real job).
Curse you, Doctor!
It's been bothering me for a while. There's a picture in my Great Aunt's house of me, age 11, dressed in a cravat and cradling in my arms a model Tardis.
No, I was cool! My cerebral cortex inwardly screams: when did this happen? The answer: at home, in private, among consenting... er... well... me.
Talking to a new friend while walking up to one of my lectures last week, I inadvertently dropped the phrase: "predictable as ever", to which he responded in an undertone, "...Doctor!" Let me tell you this is the equivalent of the secret handshake among members of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society and I had completely forgotten, now I had a lot of explaining to do...
"Yes... er... yes... I did like it but now I... er... I gave it up. No, no, I don't want a hit! I'm over it! No... no... keep that DVD from me!"
You see, the sort of Doctor Who I liked wasn't the cool, contemporary family-viewing on a Saturday evening; the Doctor Who that can be featured on Comic Relief and Red Nose Day. No, mine was the real hardcore shit- the Doctor Who of fan-produced spin-off videos, of little newsletters and endless petitions demanding the show be returned to television. It was a bit like how I imagine it must have felt being in the Labour Party after 1979... you wanted so desperately to get the whole project back on its feet but, when it eventually was resurrected, it was nothing like you imagined... they had made it all glamorous and acceptable. You didn't want any of this!
Before Doctor Who, there was Star Trek (not so well hidden- when I was eleven these guys who were into WWF- itself, not the coolest piece of televisual entertainment- chased a friend and I around the playground, demanding we engage in what they were billing as a 'Battle of the Trekkies'. I think they all got afterschool detentions in the end). To paraphrase Terry Pratchett, I liked anything that had the promise of a laser gun in it somewhere! Science-fiction was my life and I had forgotten (for forgotten, read wilfully repressed) it all up until this week.
Around thirteen I decided to 'get cool' (or, at least, ever-so-slightly cooler... a bit like the Tory Party wanting to get progressive... it'll never really work; ideologically that's not what they do)... It worked for me after a fashion though, at the end of school my contemporaries put me in the yearbook as 'Most likely alcoholic' and also gave me a certificate for 'Clown of the year 2003'- obviously I was now a much better adjusted and more enriched member of society. In so doing, I dropped all the sci-fi nonsense- almost a requirement- but without it I don't think I would be studying literature now! Doctor Who lead on to weird and wacky Doctor Who novels which, in turn, lead me on in search of better science-fiction and fantasy, the works of Michael Moorcock and Neil Gaiman. Furthermore, I had wrestled, since the age of about nine or ten, with complex theoretical, moral and ethical conceptions, of time-travel or whether or not it was right to give a primitive alien race advanced technology which, along with my Catholic upbringing, contributed to my interest in philosophy...
... So, to conclude, basically, even now, silly science-fiction is still messing up life and making me pursue frivolous subjects like philosophy and literature, instead of getting a real job (or a qualification that might lead to a real job).
Curse you, Doctor!
Lead us not into introspection and deliver us from Surrey!
One of the three places where I lived while I was growing up, in fact, the place where I spent the most time of all, was a small Surrey/Hants border suburb, consisting of a large council estate, a corner shop cum supermarket, a bus-stop (from where I would board the bus to leave each morning) and a petrol-station which, in characteristic defiance of all sentiment, bordered my back garden. Of the three houses of my youth, and almost despite myself, I feel the most loyalty to this one...
Why? I had no friends in the village (well apart from a few weird eunuch boys from the local church with whom I was on nodding terms)- all my school friends lived in Guildford and I never went into the nearest town, that horrible military conglomerate, Aldershot. Bizarrely though, I have a number of cherished memories from my time here: kicking a football round the garden or running about with a plastic sword pretending to be a Jedi, walking or cycling along the old Railway line in winter with my Dad, watching Last of the Summer Wine in the front room with a fizzy ribena...
In a very limited sense, if you take away school and both sets of grandparents and all the days and holidays in Sussex and the West Country, then this was my childhood: a small, isolated one spent in some suburb of nowhere. Suddenly all the dots start joining up. Why I am at Kingston? Well, I refer to you the last sentence. Why do I get so much satisfaction from writing a blog which nobody reads? Well, I used to play on my own in a garden, inventing little TV series and giving imaginary interviews to myself about what was about to take place in Season Four... Is it really that much different, pretending that I am to be a great writer when I can't even place a comma correctly and, more importantly, no one much cares anyway?
Editor's note:
I'm going to cut this little piece off here. Yes, that's right guys, I've done it again... made a blog which, at its best, aspires toward the charming and quirky, quite aggravatingly self-obsessed and rubbish. My bad.
Why? I had no friends in the village (well apart from a few weird eunuch boys from the local church with whom I was on nodding terms)- all my school friends lived in Guildford and I never went into the nearest town, that horrible military conglomerate, Aldershot. Bizarrely though, I have a number of cherished memories from my time here: kicking a football round the garden or running about with a plastic sword pretending to be a Jedi, walking or cycling along the old Railway line in winter with my Dad, watching Last of the Summer Wine in the front room with a fizzy ribena...
In a very limited sense, if you take away school and both sets of grandparents and all the days and holidays in Sussex and the West Country, then this was my childhood: a small, isolated one spent in some suburb of nowhere. Suddenly all the dots start joining up. Why I am at Kingston? Well, I refer to you the last sentence. Why do I get so much satisfaction from writing a blog which nobody reads? Well, I used to play on my own in a garden, inventing little TV series and giving imaginary interviews to myself about what was about to take place in Season Four... Is it really that much different, pretending that I am to be a great writer when I can't even place a comma correctly and, more importantly, no one much cares anyway?
Editor's note:
I'm going to cut this little piece off here. Yes, that's right guys, I've done it again... made a blog which, at its best, aspires toward the charming and quirky, quite aggravatingly self-obsessed and rubbish. My bad.
Monday 23 March 2009
Craving the crumbling
With the onset of spring, I have had quite a constructive period: didactic and rejuvenating. As I think I have already mentioned, the last week (away from Kingston, in the city) has acted as a restorative for my flagging sense of self-worth, devoid of the sickly-sweet sentimentalising such a state of affairs would normally entail. I was adjusting the figurative television, only not fiddling with the colour this time but with the definition...
The one area where a little of my characteristic over-romanticising has been allowed to slip back in have been my plans for the summer. Continuing the pretence of being 'a little more than your-run-of-the-mill-twenty-something'- living with unfamiliar old ladies or in a converted Irish mansion, taking trains across continents and the like (or maybe this is your run-of-the-mill-twenty-something, I don't know)- I've decided that, this summer, I either want to visit the Falkland islands or St. Helena, where the British Navy, famously and finally, deposited Napoleon.
There's no real reason, although conceptions of the last crumbling bits of old imperialist acquisition have inspired a daydream or two of late. If anything, I guess I think a jaunt to one of these far flung demi-colonies out in the middle of the South Atlantic is probably more fitting for someone of my background than some kind of egalitarian mercy mission to Guadalupe, Timbuktu or Kazakhstan; I am not Che Guevara, much as might I want to be- I'm a kid from south-west Surrey. Plus, it is only a £932 round-trip flight out to the Falklands, where they promise a 'friendly welcome' and 'big skies' (but as to whether or not the horizon is actually demonstrably bigger out there, I must confess I don't know).
We will have to see anyway, my thoughts on such matters fluctuate daily. Still, one thing I do know is that such a venture could only help my portfolio. Just imagine: pale but promising kid from the suburbs, formerly resident in Ireland and once published in the Daily Mirror, pays a visit to St. Helena and vows to lobby Parliament to build them an airport once he returns to Britain to take up his position at the London School of Economics, reading Policy. A few years later, he goes back to the island triumphant (and knighted) and is quickly made the feudal lord of all he surveys, only to be assassinated by someone jealous of how rapidly he had turned his mundane life into motion picture material...
...We all have to dream...
The one area where a little of my characteristic over-romanticising has been allowed to slip back in have been my plans for the summer. Continuing the pretence of being 'a little more than your-run-of-the-mill-twenty-something'- living with unfamiliar old ladies or in a converted Irish mansion, taking trains across continents and the like (or maybe this is your run-of-the-mill-twenty-something, I don't know)- I've decided that, this summer, I either want to visit the Falkland islands or St. Helena, where the British Navy, famously and finally, deposited Napoleon.
There's no real reason, although conceptions of the last crumbling bits of old imperialist acquisition have inspired a daydream or two of late. If anything, I guess I think a jaunt to one of these far flung demi-colonies out in the middle of the South Atlantic is probably more fitting for someone of my background than some kind of egalitarian mercy mission to Guadalupe, Timbuktu or Kazakhstan; I am not Che Guevara, much as might I want to be- I'm a kid from south-west Surrey. Plus, it is only a £932 round-trip flight out to the Falklands, where they promise a 'friendly welcome' and 'big skies' (but as to whether or not the horizon is actually demonstrably bigger out there, I must confess I don't know).
We will have to see anyway, my thoughts on such matters fluctuate daily. Still, one thing I do know is that such a venture could only help my portfolio. Just imagine: pale but promising kid from the suburbs, formerly resident in Ireland and once published in the Daily Mirror, pays a visit to St. Helena and vows to lobby Parliament to build them an airport once he returns to Britain to take up his position at the London School of Economics, reading Policy. A few years later, he goes back to the island triumphant (and knighted) and is quickly made the feudal lord of all he surveys, only to be assassinated by someone jealous of how rapidly he had turned his mundane life into motion picture material...
...We all have to dream...
Thursday 19 March 2009
On holiday at home
Trailing along the path that leads to the end of the estate this evening, I found myself reminiscing about all the times I have walked along there and in such varying states... From the three in the morning wheel of the suitcase off to the city that never sleeps, to the passive subjugation by the Germans back in the summer, then there's all the quick nips home to see my family, as well as all those frantic rushes to the House of Commons in late January. Most recently however, it has signified trips in and out of Central London to see my American friends.
I miss them- they made the city come alive for me. Now I traipse along the path without purpose, remembering what I can only describe as 'the contact high' in the Dominion Theatre (I kept that one under my hat, I don't really want anyone to know that all the hypnotism with the squiggly lines may have had an effect).
It's very rare you meet people who make you feel life is truly worthwhile and, by implication, worth living but, possibly through a combination of circumstances: near-perfect weather, a range of things to do, my timely win on a premium bond... they did! I feel like I've been on holiday in my own city, a bizarre but welcome feeling.
I have so many wonderful memories: the zebra crossing at Abbey Road*, picnics in St. James' Park, a couple of hours remembering what it was like to be a kid in Hamley's toyshop and endless, endless tubes... Brilliant!
*I was desperate to make my title a Beatles' reference ('Happy- with a little help from my friends' or some such tripe) but resisted this urge.
I miss them- they made the city come alive for me. Now I traipse along the path without purpose, remembering what I can only describe as 'the contact high' in the Dominion Theatre (I kept that one under my hat, I don't really want anyone to know that all the hypnotism with the squiggly lines may have had an effect).
It's very rare you meet people who make you feel life is truly worthwhile and, by implication, worth living but, possibly through a combination of circumstances: near-perfect weather, a range of things to do, my timely win on a premium bond... they did! I feel like I've been on holiday in my own city, a bizarre but welcome feeling.
I have so many wonderful memories: the zebra crossing at Abbey Road*, picnics in St. James' Park, a couple of hours remembering what it was like to be a kid in Hamley's toyshop and endless, endless tubes... Brilliant!
*I was desperate to make my title a Beatles' reference ('Happy- with a little help from my friends' or some such tripe) but resisted this urge.
Sunday 15 March 2009
Southern Belles, Posh English Schoolboys, A Welshman And Some Big-Hearted Northern Balladeers
I have Americans staying with me. I always find that visitors (of whatever nationality but, for some reason, especially Americans) refresh my view of little England and, temporarily at least, subdue all my fear and loathing.
The night before last, in their jet-lagged state, I forced them to a party... while, yesterday, in my ever-so-slightly hungover state, I returned unto myself the favour by forcing the three of us out to Windsor for a day trip. In truth, despite a bit of moaning in the morning when I had to wake up (oh yes, I forget to mention, I was sleeping on the wooden floor of my little backroom downstairs), I think I may have enjoyed the day just a little bit more than they did. Now that I'm twenty-one, and about to complete my flimsy little degree- education almost over and my destiny decided, I can gaze at picturesque but snobby places like Eton sans seething jealousy. In fact, all I had was a sense of reverence for the vast amount of history that, in embryonic state at least, got underway within those walls; it's a similar feeling to the one that one gets in a thousand-year old cathedral, all that prayer and for so long, irrespective of whether or not there is a God, makes the place a holy one...
Windsor Castle is a feat in architecture of almost fairytale proportions but as usual with English tourist attractions, we could not gain access as it was prohibitively expensive. Meanwhile, further adding to our distress, they were done with the changing of the guard by the time we got there. Still, I am firmly of the belief that in this country you make your own fun. We messed about for a bit taking pictures and I showed them the crooked house and the town hall with the pillars which, in defiance of the laws of physics, do not support the ceiling as they don't quite reach it... It looks like the kind of building I would design if I were an architect: resolutely, dangerously imperfect.
For lunch, my guests wanted to go to 'Gourmet Burger Kitchen' (Weatherspoons was apparently no good because... er... they have THOSE everywhere), I granted them permission to do as they wished but, in a nod to the weekly budget, which is so out of the window this week that I think it's about to hit the pavement and run off down the street, I, too, dashed down the high street and got myself a 'Donalds. I was then told off by the manager of 'Gourmet Burger Kitchen' for returning with said 'Donalds and trying to consume it on a table outside her establishment. I can understand why as my three cheeseburgers, chips and massive coke did put the- no doubt superior, although much smaller- 'Gourmet' delicacies to shame.
We left Windsor about mid-afternoon and, after more breathless running and some swapping of shirts and keys, the Americans went off to meet an old friend and I went to see Elbow at Wembley. It was the last day with G-, he has appeared on the blog before but will probably not do so again, as he is going back to Wales for good! It was a sad but tender moment, united in our love for a bunch of big-hearted, middle-aged northerners; me largely because of all their catholic-esque angst. I even felt a couple of grimy tears trickle down my stony cheeks during the encore but this is categorically because I like the song as it reminds me of my family NOT because I'm going to miss my friend... which I am. No, on second thoughts, the bastard is making me pay for my ticket- I KNOW YOU'RE READING THIS- so I'm not really going to miss him at all. Only joking, I'll try and get that twenty pound in the post as soon as I have it, oh tight-fisted one! REMEMBER DUKE SPECIAL!!!
I'm off to see the Americans in a bit, they left my house early this morning so that they could go to church, Speakers Corner and to some more desirable accomodation, away from these god-forsaken suburbs...
I only wish I could do the same. I console myself, paraphrasing Eliot:
Wales, North London, Vienna...
Aldershot, Surbiton,
Unreal
The night before last, in their jet-lagged state, I forced them to a party... while, yesterday, in my ever-so-slightly hungover state, I returned unto myself the favour by forcing the three of us out to Windsor for a day trip. In truth, despite a bit of moaning in the morning when I had to wake up (oh yes, I forget to mention, I was sleeping on the wooden floor of my little backroom downstairs), I think I may have enjoyed the day just a little bit more than they did. Now that I'm twenty-one, and about to complete my flimsy little degree- education almost over and my destiny decided, I can gaze at picturesque but snobby places like Eton sans seething jealousy. In fact, all I had was a sense of reverence for the vast amount of history that, in embryonic state at least, got underway within those walls; it's a similar feeling to the one that one gets in a thousand-year old cathedral, all that prayer and for so long, irrespective of whether or not there is a God, makes the place a holy one...
Windsor Castle is a feat in architecture of almost fairytale proportions but as usual with English tourist attractions, we could not gain access as it was prohibitively expensive. Meanwhile, further adding to our distress, they were done with the changing of the guard by the time we got there. Still, I am firmly of the belief that in this country you make your own fun. We messed about for a bit taking pictures and I showed them the crooked house and the town hall with the pillars which, in defiance of the laws of physics, do not support the ceiling as they don't quite reach it... It looks like the kind of building I would design if I were an architect: resolutely, dangerously imperfect.
For lunch, my guests wanted to go to 'Gourmet Burger Kitchen' (Weatherspoons was apparently no good because... er... they have THOSE everywhere), I granted them permission to do as they wished but, in a nod to the weekly budget, which is so out of the window this week that I think it's about to hit the pavement and run off down the street, I, too, dashed down the high street and got myself a 'Donalds. I was then told off by the manager of 'Gourmet Burger Kitchen' for returning with said 'Donalds and trying to consume it on a table outside her establishment. I can understand why as my three cheeseburgers, chips and massive coke did put the- no doubt superior, although much smaller- 'Gourmet' delicacies to shame.
We left Windsor about mid-afternoon and, after more breathless running and some swapping of shirts and keys, the Americans went off to meet an old friend and I went to see Elbow at Wembley. It was the last day with G-, he has appeared on the blog before but will probably not do so again, as he is going back to Wales for good! It was a sad but tender moment, united in our love for a bunch of big-hearted, middle-aged northerners; me largely because of all their catholic-esque angst. I even felt a couple of grimy tears trickle down my stony cheeks during the encore but this is categorically because I like the song as it reminds me of my family NOT because I'm going to miss my friend... which I am. No, on second thoughts, the bastard is making me pay for my ticket- I KNOW YOU'RE READING THIS- so I'm not really going to miss him at all. Only joking, I'll try and get that twenty pound in the post as soon as I have it, oh tight-fisted one! REMEMBER DUKE SPECIAL!!!
I'm off to see the Americans in a bit, they left my house early this morning so that they could go to church, Speakers Corner and to some more desirable accomodation, away from these god-forsaken suburbs...
I only wish I could do the same. I console myself, paraphrasing Eliot:
Wales, North London, Vienna...
Aldershot, Surbiton,
Unreal
Thursday 12 March 2009
A series of self-portraits by Cézanne
I actually planned this piece, in my head and on my dictaphone, upwards of a week ago but I've only got around to forcing it out and modifying it now...
Firstly, a confession, I have not so much written this post as declaimed it, deciding to experiment and taking my 'Notes' with me, out of the musty backroom in Surbiton and on to the Surrey Hills. Even so, I've not quite made the leap to radical Impressionist writer yet, as I'm finishing my sketches from life back in my dingy studio, with a mug of coffee and the Rolling Stones on loop.
Listening back to the recording's breathless murmur, I gather I am on the path through Denbies' vineyard in Dorking, attempting to disguise, so as not to alarm passing dogwalkers, what would otherwise look like a madman talking to himself as a particularly involved mobile-phone call. Looking back however, I was really just a madman muttering into a mobile out in the wilderness where there's probably not even any signal anyway. Still, one of the inadvertent benefits of modern technology, in this case phones with dictaphone functions, are that they provide wannabe-writers and other assorted crazies with the comfortable illusion that somebody is listening. A bit like the Internet, too, I guess- if a tree falls in the woods and a guy blogs about it later, is anybody really paying any attention? I'm sorry folks but probably not.
Back in the vineyard, I am looking at the sky and noting the mishmash of effects God is experimenting with today in Sistine Surrey. On the far left, as if in microcosm, a stormy, classical and dark grey scene- one of those which you easily imagine as a Romantic painting or positioned above suitably gothic subject-matter. To the right, a completely different view, tucked in between the general morass of light grey, a Turner in miniature: pale sunlight streaming into a patch of brightest blue and out over the hills. Lovely, I thought, I'm heading out that way so I should be able to avoid the...
...But, no, even I as mutter on at the dictaphone, the rain begins- only it isn't rain, it's really, really violent hail (in March?). Well, it explains the abnormalities in the skyscape at least and will, perhaps, dissuade any more dogwalkers from setting out to disturb me but it certainly doesn't do any good to my, already somewhat muffled, recorded observations. From here on in then, I am relying on a mixture of memory and damp, distorted murmuring.
Looking down through the faux-Mediterranean landscape and across to Box Hill, the recorded me is struck by how much it reminds him of the little caravan site he and his parents used to visit, with its view over the Ax Valley and the entrance to the Undercliff, down in Devon. It's true, actually, right down to little details, like the road and even the railway (although down in Axmouth it's a- far more picturesque- tramway) running beside the hills. I love this scenery. It turns out that my romanticism, which I once thought magnificent and all-encompassing, is of a very English and provincial sort. I am as happy with Devon and Dorset, as I am in San Diego or New Mexico or any of those other places I have visited. In many ways, my time on Box Hill or the Old Railway path at Ash Green are equal in my affections to my memories of stumbling up Macgillycuddy's reeks. I'm a walker, yes, but not a hiker or an adventurer, more a Sunday afternoon rambler. How despicable, I belong in that banal book of Home Counties poets that I derided on this blog just last month...
Oh no, it's all got incredibly self-indulgent and the levity's drained out of this previously quite charming set of observations; I'm not even listening to my nature walk impressions anymore. Still, I guess I should carry on regardless as I suppose I'm still covering the same broad, narcissistic turf. For example, the pompous reason I give on the recording for titling the post 'A Series Of Self-Portraits By Cézanne', is, ostensibly, because, in all the recent entries here and across most other aspects of my, extremely limited, creative endeavour, I seem to be working from the figure outward i.e. seeing the world through the prism of that same sickening self-indulgence. Determined to be a writer but in the absence of what I regard as a life befitting a writer (a childhood in the Lake District or in a tenement block in the inner-city), I have become obsessed with altering my own biography.
There's a Just William story where a violinist called, and you must forgive my phonetic spelling as I don't have the book in front of me, Zevreay turns up and ends up going off to a barn to play to William, altering it all later so it will fit as a picturesque episode in his memoirs, when, in actual fact, William wasn't ever that interested. Well, increasingly of late, as I consider the excesses of mundanity in South London, 'Zevreay' is me and anyone who has the misfortune to cast their eye over these musings is Just William. Even in the above, where I am giving details of picturesque holidays and walks in the Surrey Hills, I am being narcissistic, pure and simple.
The truth is, and as I have said before, I am a mundane, pseudo-intellectual also-ran who couldn't get it together and go to a good University at the correct time (hence all the LSE business now) and now pays the price every day by trying- and failing- to make something interesting out of the daily dirge so he can sell himself as some sort of idiosyncratic writer! The real reason I gave this post such a knobby title, for example, isn't to do with high-folluted theories about art but because I was reading my little paperback about the Impressionists on the way to Dorking on the bus. I'm a great big bullshitter.
There I said it, although I don't feel any better. Never study literature, or read books generally in the suburbs (unless, of course, they are about the suburbs). The incongruity between the characters' lives and your own is so stark that it is almost inevitable that it will make you depressed or give you cabin fever. Far better to set your sights on a mundane but realistic job and maybe go to a few galleries of a weekend (although, not for the culture but as a means to impress people at little parties).
*
Well, the recording played itself out long before I finished my hour-walk to the top of Box Hill but I got there in the end; there's a lot of steps up and it was very slippery but it was hardly adventurous. Still, as I said, I like that... I am a provincial with silly limited opinions and perspective. I am a provincial who has gone to places and done things and read things and written things and has all sorts ambitions but remains a provincial all the same...
Look, here's the definition of the term, from the Oxford dictionary, and it's this blog all over:
Provincial: Of or concerning the regions outside the capital city of a country, especially when regarded as unsophisticated or narrow-minded.
*
As I say, I got to the top of Box Hill and I looked out over lovely, green nowhere. I should, as Robin Williams suggests in Dead Poets' Society, sounded my barbaric yawp across the Home Counties... but my yawp gets less and less savage and primitive everyday...
... so down with enigmatic, creative sorts- I'm off to make another cup of coffee!
Firstly, a confession, I have not so much written this post as declaimed it, deciding to experiment and taking my 'Notes' with me, out of the musty backroom in Surbiton and on to the Surrey Hills. Even so, I've not quite made the leap to radical Impressionist writer yet, as I'm finishing my sketches from life back in my dingy studio, with a mug of coffee and the Rolling Stones on loop.
Listening back to the recording's breathless murmur, I gather I am on the path through Denbies' vineyard in Dorking, attempting to disguise, so as not to alarm passing dogwalkers, what would otherwise look like a madman talking to himself as a particularly involved mobile-phone call. Looking back however, I was really just a madman muttering into a mobile out in the wilderness where there's probably not even any signal anyway. Still, one of the inadvertent benefits of modern technology, in this case phones with dictaphone functions, are that they provide wannabe-writers and other assorted crazies with the comfortable illusion that somebody is listening. A bit like the Internet, too, I guess- if a tree falls in the woods and a guy blogs about it later, is anybody really paying any attention? I'm sorry folks but probably not.
Back in the vineyard, I am looking at the sky and noting the mishmash of effects God is experimenting with today in Sistine Surrey. On the far left, as if in microcosm, a stormy, classical and dark grey scene- one of those which you easily imagine as a Romantic painting or positioned above suitably gothic subject-matter. To the right, a completely different view, tucked in between the general morass of light grey, a Turner in miniature: pale sunlight streaming into a patch of brightest blue and out over the hills. Lovely, I thought, I'm heading out that way so I should be able to avoid the...
...But, no, even I as mutter on at the dictaphone, the rain begins- only it isn't rain, it's really, really violent hail (in March?). Well, it explains the abnormalities in the skyscape at least and will, perhaps, dissuade any more dogwalkers from setting out to disturb me but it certainly doesn't do any good to my, already somewhat muffled, recorded observations. From here on in then, I am relying on a mixture of memory and damp, distorted murmuring.
Looking down through the faux-Mediterranean landscape and across to Box Hill, the recorded me is struck by how much it reminds him of the little caravan site he and his parents used to visit, with its view over the Ax Valley and the entrance to the Undercliff, down in Devon. It's true, actually, right down to little details, like the road and even the railway (although down in Axmouth it's a- far more picturesque- tramway) running beside the hills. I love this scenery. It turns out that my romanticism, which I once thought magnificent and all-encompassing, is of a very English and provincial sort. I am as happy with Devon and Dorset, as I am in San Diego or New Mexico or any of those other places I have visited. In many ways, my time on Box Hill or the Old Railway path at Ash Green are equal in my affections to my memories of stumbling up Macgillycuddy's reeks. I'm a walker, yes, but not a hiker or an adventurer, more a Sunday afternoon rambler. How despicable, I belong in that banal book of Home Counties poets that I derided on this blog just last month...
Oh no, it's all got incredibly self-indulgent and the levity's drained out of this previously quite charming set of observations; I'm not even listening to my nature walk impressions anymore. Still, I guess I should carry on regardless as I suppose I'm still covering the same broad, narcissistic turf. For example, the pompous reason I give on the recording for titling the post 'A Series Of Self-Portraits By Cézanne', is, ostensibly, because, in all the recent entries here and across most other aspects of my, extremely limited, creative endeavour, I seem to be working from the figure outward i.e. seeing the world through the prism of that same sickening self-indulgence. Determined to be a writer but in the absence of what I regard as a life befitting a writer (a childhood in the Lake District or in a tenement block in the inner-city), I have become obsessed with altering my own biography.
There's a Just William story where a violinist called, and you must forgive my phonetic spelling as I don't have the book in front of me, Zevreay turns up and ends up going off to a barn to play to William, altering it all later so it will fit as a picturesque episode in his memoirs, when, in actual fact, William wasn't ever that interested. Well, increasingly of late, as I consider the excesses of mundanity in South London, 'Zevreay' is me and anyone who has the misfortune to cast their eye over these musings is Just William. Even in the above, where I am giving details of picturesque holidays and walks in the Surrey Hills, I am being narcissistic, pure and simple.
The truth is, and as I have said before, I am a mundane, pseudo-intellectual also-ran who couldn't get it together and go to a good University at the correct time (hence all the LSE business now) and now pays the price every day by trying- and failing- to make something interesting out of the daily dirge so he can sell himself as some sort of idiosyncratic writer! The real reason I gave this post such a knobby title, for example, isn't to do with high-folluted theories about art but because I was reading my little paperback about the Impressionists on the way to Dorking on the bus. I'm a great big bullshitter.
There I said it, although I don't feel any better. Never study literature, or read books generally in the suburbs (unless, of course, they are about the suburbs). The incongruity between the characters' lives and your own is so stark that it is almost inevitable that it will make you depressed or give you cabin fever. Far better to set your sights on a mundane but realistic job and maybe go to a few galleries of a weekend (although, not for the culture but as a means to impress people at little parties).
*
Well, the recording played itself out long before I finished my hour-walk to the top of Box Hill but I got there in the end; there's a lot of steps up and it was very slippery but it was hardly adventurous. Still, as I said, I like that... I am a provincial with silly limited opinions and perspective. I am a provincial who has gone to places and done things and read things and written things and has all sorts ambitions but remains a provincial all the same...
Look, here's the definition of the term, from the Oxford dictionary, and it's this blog all over:
Provincial: Of or concerning the regions outside the capital city of a country, especially when regarded as unsophisticated or narrow-minded.
*
As I say, I got to the top of Box Hill and I looked out over lovely, green nowhere. I should, as Robin Williams suggests in Dead Poets' Society, sounded my barbaric yawp across the Home Counties... but my yawp gets less and less savage and primitive everyday...
... so down with enigmatic, creative sorts- I'm off to make another cup of coffee!
Friday 6 March 2009
Testimony to mundanity
Today, I walked from Kingston (or, more correctly, my front-door in Surbiton), along the river, to the centre of London- Trafalgar Square. On the way, with the river meandering along in no apparent hurry to reach its destination, I passed a number of picturesque villages, seemingly untroubled by the sprawling urban mass that, apparently, was around the next corner. Led blindfold to Richmond, I could have easily believed that it was Guildford with Kew doubling as the neighbouring village of Shalford; Putney could have, at a pinch, passed for another Kingston. Even Fulham, with Craven Cottage tipping its toes into the river so audaciously, seemed to be from a bygone era, back when the boroughs were but fields...
Hazlitt or, for that matter, any of my heroes (up to and including Gandhi) probably wouldn’t have even blinked but, for me, the seventeen or so miles walking that made up the west of London were a revelation. Importantly, I came to a realisation about stamina, namely that tiredness IS a mindset. I was so pleased to find this other Greater London, away from the endless housing, and so ready for the challenge of covering such a distance, all in the name of adventure, that I let my feet carry me...
Afterwards, sitting in the pub and nursing a pint of bitter, it was my feet that ached while my head felt absolutely fresh. Even now, writing these words, I am still fairly awake and, most importantly, I know that I am alive! As regular readers must be aware, I find the suburban condition so stifling. Given half a chance, I could walk down the A3, across the fields to Guildford, else, the other way, along the Thames, to Oxford; although perhaps not tonight...
I’m very happy. I’ve remembered how much I love the freedom of walking and my potential, with good company, to cover any distance.
... I do think I’ll take myself off to bed now, however; no point in any foolish displays of bravado...
Hazlitt or, for that matter, any of my heroes (up to and including Gandhi) probably wouldn’t have even blinked but, for me, the seventeen or so miles walking that made up the west of London were a revelation. Importantly, I came to a realisation about stamina, namely that tiredness IS a mindset. I was so pleased to find this other Greater London, away from the endless housing, and so ready for the challenge of covering such a distance, all in the name of adventure, that I let my feet carry me...
Afterwards, sitting in the pub and nursing a pint of bitter, it was my feet that ached while my head felt absolutely fresh. Even now, writing these words, I am still fairly awake and, most importantly, I know that I am alive! As regular readers must be aware, I find the suburban condition so stifling. Given half a chance, I could walk down the A3, across the fields to Guildford, else, the other way, along the Thames, to Oxford; although perhaps not tonight...
I’m very happy. I’ve remembered how much I love the freedom of walking and my potential, with good company, to cover any distance.
... I do think I’ll take myself off to bed now, however; no point in any foolish displays of bravado...
Monday 2 March 2009
Famous Blue Hoodie
You know that feeling when you just want out? Well, I have it. It is not a fervent desire to escape so much as an absolute frustration with my circumstances to the point where escape seems the only faintly desirable option. I was bored in Surbiton at the beginning but I really detest it now! I know that I have played around with the concept on the pages of this blog but these affluent suburbs really are nowhere; just hinterlands, functional little hubs for functional people... not places to be young. We, who are numbered among the unremarkable, have been pushed out here to keep us off the unemployment register, while our ostensibly luckier counterparts lounge around at Bath Spa or sedate themselves under the slate-grey skies of Liverpool or Preston.
It could be worse I suppose but don't tell me that this is 'it'. I may not be a one of those hopeless young-people in a dead-end job, wandering the streets of a Staines or a Stevenage but nor am I happy or fulfilled or even, dare it say it, useful. The course doesn't train me to do anything- I know how to read already and reading Ian McEwan or J. G. Ballard will have no discernible positive effect on this most basic of academic abilities. I am a glorified Culture Studies student, with nothing more than an increased chance of answering related questions at a Pub Quiz (and I am rubbish at Pub Quizzes).
Once upon time, I had a dream that I would be (don't laugh) a Mental Health Nurse... I had the forms and everything; it came out of my awe for a medical student I met while volunteering during an election campaign: his gravitas, his workaday saintliness. After that, I came to Kingston for the first time to begin a part-time degree in Politics and Applied Economics, started reading Iris Murdoch and Jean-Paul Sartre and then gradually lost interest in anything that smacked of the vocational or utilitarian, in favour of the narcissistic. As you may have expected, I dropped out of the latter, eventually taking up an OU course in Literature, almost on a whim, while I was away in Ireland.
Well, after all that has occurred in the interim, I am about to finish the aforementioned- albeit, having returned to Kingston- and, in the time it has taken me, everything vain and self-obsessed (including, I guess, 'Notes from the Polytechnic') has, itself, begun to lose flavour. What is the use of keeping a record of your time spent reading the records of others? In the same way that the study of philosophy simply spawns more intellectuals- all a little dimmer, a little less original than their forbears, I am beginning to defer that the academic study of literature, to the exclusion of all else, simply spawns second-rate, secondhand and, in my own case, selfish writers...
As I said at the beginning, I want out now, if only to do something with the force of the teleological behind it, instead of that navel-gazing analysis of the same in books which, to paraphrase Geoffrey Howe, I have been performing for, perhaps, too long.
It could be worse I suppose but don't tell me that this is 'it'. I may not be a one of those hopeless young-people in a dead-end job, wandering the streets of a Staines or a Stevenage but nor am I happy or fulfilled or even, dare it say it, useful. The course doesn't train me to do anything- I know how to read already and reading Ian McEwan or J. G. Ballard will have no discernible positive effect on this most basic of academic abilities. I am a glorified Culture Studies student, with nothing more than an increased chance of answering related questions at a Pub Quiz (and I am rubbish at Pub Quizzes).
Once upon time, I had a dream that I would be (don't laugh) a Mental Health Nurse... I had the forms and everything; it came out of my awe for a medical student I met while volunteering during an election campaign: his gravitas, his workaday saintliness. After that, I came to Kingston for the first time to begin a part-time degree in Politics and Applied Economics, started reading Iris Murdoch and Jean-Paul Sartre and then gradually lost interest in anything that smacked of the vocational or utilitarian, in favour of the narcissistic. As you may have expected, I dropped out of the latter, eventually taking up an OU course in Literature, almost on a whim, while I was away in Ireland.
Well, after all that has occurred in the interim, I am about to finish the aforementioned- albeit, having returned to Kingston- and, in the time it has taken me, everything vain and self-obsessed (including, I guess, 'Notes from the Polytechnic') has, itself, begun to lose flavour. What is the use of keeping a record of your time spent reading the records of others? In the same way that the study of philosophy simply spawns more intellectuals- all a little dimmer, a little less original than their forbears, I am beginning to defer that the academic study of literature, to the exclusion of all else, simply spawns second-rate, secondhand and, in my own case, selfish writers...
As I said at the beginning, I want out now, if only to do something with the force of the teleological behind it, instead of that navel-gazing analysis of the same in books which, to paraphrase Geoffrey Howe, I have been performing for, perhaps, too long.
Saturday 21 February 2009
Portrait d'une banlieue
A pleasantly sunny and unseasonably warm day today which could have been called an 'Indian Summer' had it fallen on the right side of winter. I met my friend J- up at Clapham Junction and we took a bus to Putney Bridge, where we walked out beside the river. I like Putney; my first impressions were that it bears a passing resemblance to Kingston and it certainly helps join the dots as to what lies between here and Hammersmith and how Greater London hangs together generally. I'm glad I saw this on the way in however, because the bus journey home was a protracted voyage through a bunch of housing estates, as well as those contingent little districts which I love to fetishise, like Roehampton Vale, New Malden and Tolworth Broadway.
Today was not the first time this week that I've had a chance to update my patchy, suburban pirate edition of 'The Knowledge', as I also ventured up to Lee, near Lewisham on Thursday, helping my friend G- shift all his worldly possessions from Farnham. At the moment, seismic shifts seem to be occurring in the social life that I never really considered myself as having, with these two big guns among my Surrey friends (J- and G-) both upping and heading into London in the last year; the latter, as reported, out to the south east and J- smack bang in the centre, in a flat a few feet away from Harrods.
I, too, having managed so far to hold steady out on the boundaries, look set to be sucked into the vortex once and for all in the coming months, that is, if the LSE offer is allowed to come to fruition. Apart from a few typical passing comments in my teenage years, London was never really where I saw myself but, as I have slowly come to understand (and as I have discussed with my two friends and even on the pages of this blog), there seems to be little by way of another option.
I often knock the Polytechnic but it has allowed me a fairly comfortable middle ground- one shallow spot in a swimming pool of Olympian proportions. Up until now, I have been having my Sainsburys' Basics cakes and eating them, too. I wonder how long this will be allowed to continue before I am swept out and away from this suburban equivalent of the Sargasso Sea...
Today was not the first time this week that I've had a chance to update my patchy, suburban pirate edition of 'The Knowledge', as I also ventured up to Lee, near Lewisham on Thursday, helping my friend G- shift all his worldly possessions from Farnham. At the moment, seismic shifts seem to be occurring in the social life that I never really considered myself as having, with these two big guns among my Surrey friends (J- and G-) both upping and heading into London in the last year; the latter, as reported, out to the south east and J- smack bang in the centre, in a flat a few feet away from Harrods.
I, too, having managed so far to hold steady out on the boundaries, look set to be sucked into the vortex once and for all in the coming months, that is, if the LSE offer is allowed to come to fruition. Apart from a few typical passing comments in my teenage years, London was never really where I saw myself but, as I have slowly come to understand (and as I have discussed with my two friends and even on the pages of this blog), there seems to be little by way of another option.
I often knock the Polytechnic but it has allowed me a fairly comfortable middle ground- one shallow spot in a swimming pool of Olympian proportions. Up until now, I have been having my Sainsburys' Basics cakes and eating them, too. I wonder how long this will be allowed to continue before I am swept out and away from this suburban equivalent of the Sargasso Sea...
Thursday 19 February 2009
More Ontological Insecurity in the Home Counties
I had lunch with a friend in Farnham today, an old colleague of mine from the bookshop and, as usual, we discussed everything from the state of contemporary health care provision to the dearth of contemporary poetry. After this I had to go and wait for another friend down in the town- from where, incidentally, I am currently penning this little epistle- as I am meant to be helping him shift some of his stuff from the quaint beauty and cobbled streets of Lower Church Road to the unknown pleasures and hidden terrors of Lewisham, South London.
I'm writing because while waiting there's been a new development which I thought merited notation in these hallowed pages. Following on from yesterday's somewhat despondent little piece about growing up in and around Surrey, fate has delivered a wonderful little book into my hands called 'Poets in London and the Home Counties' (I'll pause as you gasp, no doubt wondering what circle of formerly unrecognised poetic genius has escaped the notice of the wider academy)...
Now, having given you enough time to blow a little bubble, let me burst it immediately by telling you that the book is absolutely hilarious, although it doesn't mean to be. One poem, by Judy Parfit, begins as follows:
'Countryside full of natural beauty
Skies wide open, views expanding
High on the North Downs, walking gazing...'
so far so good, sufficiently picturesque if a little hackneyed, but the poem continues...
'Horses grazing, or with riders passing
(wait for it)
Roaring of the M25 and A217'
...
There it is! She couldn't avoid it; starting with seemingly innocuous, pastoral subject-matter, Parfit can't help but bulldoze through her own tender sublimity at the sixth line, so apparently pernicious is the smell of exhaust fumes in her nostrils.
Another guy, who obviously sees himself as a bit of a political poet, a Stephen Spender-like figure, has a problem with the authorities in his town:
'But Epsom's not a pleasant place
To work or make your home
Because Epsom Borough Council
Won't leave the town alone'.
He has a rival, an Orwell-fancier over in Guildford:
'Dogs allowed to the foul the pavement'
(oh dear, surely not?)
'This is not an understatement'
(my God!)
'Big brother all over Guildford watching you'
(well obviously not effectively enough if there's dog crap everywhere!)
'It gets you in a right stew!'
(yes, no doubt!)
There are a heap more examples, from a veritable menagerie of Surrey's finest, all apparently dsylexic but articulate and misanthropic enough to put the underclass in The Lyrical Ballads to shame! My personal opinion? 'The Surrey School' won't be bothering the editors of Norton any time in the near future but, hey, it shows I'm not the only struggling writer in these parts...
...and, boy, some of these writers are really struggling.
I'm writing because while waiting there's been a new development which I thought merited notation in these hallowed pages. Following on from yesterday's somewhat despondent little piece about growing up in and around Surrey, fate has delivered a wonderful little book into my hands called 'Poets in London and the Home Counties' (I'll pause as you gasp, no doubt wondering what circle of formerly unrecognised poetic genius has escaped the notice of the wider academy)...
Now, having given you enough time to blow a little bubble, let me burst it immediately by telling you that the book is absolutely hilarious, although it doesn't mean to be. One poem, by Judy Parfit, begins as follows:
'Countryside full of natural beauty
Skies wide open, views expanding
High on the North Downs, walking gazing...'
so far so good, sufficiently picturesque if a little hackneyed, but the poem continues...
'Horses grazing, or with riders passing
(wait for it)
Roaring of the M25 and A217'
...
There it is! She couldn't avoid it; starting with seemingly innocuous, pastoral subject-matter, Parfit can't help but bulldoze through her own tender sublimity at the sixth line, so apparently pernicious is the smell of exhaust fumes in her nostrils.
Another guy, who obviously sees himself as a bit of a political poet, a Stephen Spender-like figure, has a problem with the authorities in his town:
'But Epsom's not a pleasant place
To work or make your home
Because Epsom Borough Council
Won't leave the town alone'.
He has a rival, an Orwell-fancier over in Guildford:
'Dogs allowed to the foul the pavement'
(oh dear, surely not?)
'This is not an understatement'
(my God!)
'Big brother all over Guildford watching you'
(well obviously not effectively enough if there's dog crap everywhere!)
'It gets you in a right stew!'
(yes, no doubt!)
There are a heap more examples, from a veritable menagerie of Surrey's finest, all apparently dsylexic but articulate and misanthropic enough to put the underclass in The Lyrical Ballads to shame! My personal opinion? 'The Surrey School' won't be bothering the editors of Norton any time in the near future but, hey, it shows I'm not the only struggling writer in these parts...
...and, boy, some of these writers are really struggling.
Wednesday 18 February 2009
Ontological Insecurity in the Home Counties.
The other day, my parents and I decided to take a walk out by Winchester Hill Fort: 2, 500 years old, with a terrific view of a fair bit of the Hampshire countryside and out across Southampton water to the Isle of Wight... On the way back, only a mediocre football match on the radio, I fell asleep, face-first, on the passenger door, lost in uncomfortable dreams about what the future might hold for me...
One of the subjects playing in my head was my background. I'm one of those silly people who believes where you're going depends, to a greater or a lesser extent, on where you're from. It has dawned on me of late that (if we take Surbiton as de facto if not de jure) all of my direct family: uncles, aunts, cousin, mother, father, grandparents (alive and dead), live or lived in Surrey. I can't help feeling that this has and will continue to have, a manifest effect on my destiny... not necessarily on my prospects but on the scale and the realisation of my ambitions.
Now don't get me wrong, my family are not some unusual breed of indentured peasants; all of the aforementioned, at some point or other, have a pretty big connection to somewhere else: Oxford, Bognor Regis, North London, Southern Ireland but, right now, one way or the other, they've all chosen the safe option, spreading themselves one end to the other across this comfortable, conservative little county. For myself, I spent my first few years (well, until I was 3) living beside the green fields of Eversley, Berkshire but I, too, despite a couple of half-hearted extended jaunts in Killarney and frequent arguments concerning Kingston's dubious claim to Greater London status, have also preferred to pass my days in London's back garden. God.. why? It is lovely but it's so... so... difficult to fit with an appropriate adjective.
Now, back to the point of this piece, I emerged from my empty dreams, all this swirling home-counties nihilism, to find we were back on the drive at my parents' house. My face and neck hurt a little owing to their being uncomfortably squashed against the door for a half-hour but I was okay, just a little disoriented and more than a little disheartened to boot. Still, I went inside and made myself a cup of tea, only to discover, not five minutes later, that I had received a conditional offer to study Social Policy at the London School of Economics...
Reading the words 'Conditional Offer' and 'LSE', I must confess my first thought was: 'Who gives a coconut about background? It's not about where you're from, it's about where you're going!'
*
Glancing back over this, I can't helping thinking that R. D. Laing would have had a field day with me...
One of the subjects playing in my head was my background. I'm one of those silly people who believes where you're going depends, to a greater or a lesser extent, on where you're from. It has dawned on me of late that (if we take Surbiton as de facto if not de jure) all of my direct family: uncles, aunts, cousin, mother, father, grandparents (alive and dead), live or lived in Surrey. I can't help feeling that this has and will continue to have, a manifest effect on my destiny... not necessarily on my prospects but on the scale and the realisation of my ambitions.
Now don't get me wrong, my family are not some unusual breed of indentured peasants; all of the aforementioned, at some point or other, have a pretty big connection to somewhere else: Oxford, Bognor Regis, North London, Southern Ireland but, right now, one way or the other, they've all chosen the safe option, spreading themselves one end to the other across this comfortable, conservative little county. For myself, I spent my first few years (well, until I was 3) living beside the green fields of Eversley, Berkshire but I, too, despite a couple of half-hearted extended jaunts in Killarney and frequent arguments concerning Kingston's dubious claim to Greater London status, have also preferred to pass my days in London's back garden. God.. why? It is lovely but it's so... so... difficult to fit with an appropriate adjective.
Now, back to the point of this piece, I emerged from my empty dreams, all this swirling home-counties nihilism, to find we were back on the drive at my parents' house. My face and neck hurt a little owing to their being uncomfortably squashed against the door for a half-hour but I was okay, just a little disoriented and more than a little disheartened to boot. Still, I went inside and made myself a cup of tea, only to discover, not five minutes later, that I had received a conditional offer to study Social Policy at the London School of Economics...
Reading the words 'Conditional Offer' and 'LSE', I must confess my first thought was: 'Who gives a coconut about background? It's not about where you're from, it's about where you're going!'
*
Glancing back over this, I can't helping thinking that R. D. Laing would have had a field day with me...
Monday 9 February 2009
Few words (for once)
I don't really have words so I will copy and paste the transcript of an email which I have just sent to my cousin and then a few subsidiary comments; apologies for the punctuation etc I can't type anymore...
*
I miss you... I read somewhere that you might be featuring on a Hip/Hop album, is this true? If you are then I'm very happy for you. Anything feat you would be the ultimate album for me!
I'm just writing because, sometimes, I hold you responsible for my keeping going with writing in general (you said something to me in that Mexican restaurant at The Crossings that made me believe I could do it anyway, you might not remember...) and recently, without realising it, I have been published in the American magazine: Poetry which, I think, is a big deal in that kind of field. It's national, at least, and in the United States that's a lot of nation. Anyway not only did they print my letter, which doesn't usually happen but they also printed this long, long reply from this poet I criticised (he's in my course textbooks) slagging me off! Hampton this, Hampton that.. For one moment I felt like I was a real writer... I just wanted to let you know, sorry to come out with this out of the blue!!!
Love,
Neil
*
These are the links: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/letter.html?id=182589
and the response: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/letter.html?id=182590.
*
I don't know what it means but I'm happy it happened... 'Poetry' are the guys that used to publish the letters of Pound and Eliot! Just this morning I was lamenting the fact that my only literary feat to date was a reading of a bit of my juvenelia at an 'evening' in a south-west Surrey bakery, aged 16....
*
How do I feel? Aside from happily neurotically insignificant- these weird words of Dylan's sum up today's minor victory:
"Across the street they've nailed the curtains
They're getting ready for the feast
The Phantom of the Opera
A perfect image of a priest
They're spoonfeeding Casanova
To get him to feel more assured
Then they'll kill him with self-confidence
After poisoning him with words"
...and there we have it!
*
I miss you... I read somewhere that you might be featuring on a Hip/Hop album, is this true? If you are then I'm very happy for you. Anything feat you would be the ultimate album for me!
I'm just writing because, sometimes, I hold you responsible for my keeping going with writing in general (you said something to me in that Mexican restaurant at The Crossings that made me believe I could do it anyway, you might not remember...) and recently, without realising it, I have been published in the American magazine: Poetry which, I think, is a big deal in that kind of field. It's national, at least, and in the United States that's a lot of nation. Anyway not only did they print my letter, which doesn't usually happen but they also printed this long, long reply from this poet I criticised (he's in my course textbooks) slagging me off! Hampton this, Hampton that.. For one moment I felt like I was a real writer... I just wanted to let you know, sorry to come out with this out of the blue!!!
Love,
Neil
*
These are the links: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/letter.html?id=182589
and the response: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/letter.html?id=182590.
*
I don't know what it means but I'm happy it happened... 'Poetry' are the guys that used to publish the letters of Pound and Eliot! Just this morning I was lamenting the fact that my only literary feat to date was a reading of a bit of my juvenelia at an 'evening' in a south-west Surrey bakery, aged 16....
*
How do I feel? Aside from happily neurotically insignificant- these weird words of Dylan's sum up today's minor victory:
"Across the street they've nailed the curtains
They're getting ready for the feast
The Phantom of the Opera
A perfect image of a priest
They're spoonfeeding Casanova
To get him to feel more assured
Then they'll kill him with self-confidence
After poisoning him with words"
...and there we have it!
Morning coffee, late lie-in mumblings
The Houses of Parliament are well and truly out of my system now and I have returned to that strange nether-limbo of ex-polytechnia which constitutes the bulk of my existence. I'm back to making boring plans, all the while, dreaming of Dorset, Devon, Ireland and spring-time; seeking to bottle old feelings the way that the BFG bottles dreams in the book by Roahl Dahl. A part of me knows that it would probably be a good idea, come graduation, to set up home in Richmond or somesuch sensible South London location but if, as I suspect, such a course would only increase the mollification of my spirit then, to put it bluntly, what's the point?
*
A funny thing: I was talking to my Mum yesterday and she told me that she had just had coffee in "the place where you publicly declaimed your poetry..." to which I instantly, unthinkingly replied, "oh yes, I remember, Camberley..." (it was a little bakery and I was a runner-up in the teenage category of a competition at a local bookshop). The fact that there is only one place and, worst of all, that it is that place- a bakery in Camberley- should be enough to put a conclusively negative stamp on any remaining poetic ambition! Either that or, as I have said before, there are going to be a lot of pretty incongruous blue plaques in a few years time...
*
For posterity, yesterday, I kissed a girl and played a bit of scrabble, before going on to have a protracted dream about Chertsey, Weybridge and Oxford.
*
A funny thing: I was talking to my Mum yesterday and she told me that she had just had coffee in "the place where you publicly declaimed your poetry..." to which I instantly, unthinkingly replied, "oh yes, I remember, Camberley..." (it was a little bakery and I was a runner-up in the teenage category of a competition at a local bookshop). The fact that there is only one place and, worst of all, that it is that place- a bakery in Camberley- should be enough to put a conclusively negative stamp on any remaining poetic ambition! Either that or, as I have said before, there are going to be a lot of pretty incongruous blue plaques in a few years time...
*
For posterity, yesterday, I kissed a girl and played a bit of scrabble, before going on to have a protracted dream about Chertsey, Weybridge and Oxford.
Friday 30 January 2009
Whitehall Woefulness
Well that's over... albeit prematurely! I am left with the memories of my many mistakes, as well as the pernicious doubt that I did not, in fact, manage to reverse the impression they built up of me in that office back in 2005, namely that I am careless, apathetic and one of life's natural botchers. Instead, I think I only confirmed it with yet more examples of heinous incompetence. In the end, frequent misordering of stationery, along with an inability to perform even basic mathematical calculations were my undoing; no doubt now compounded by leaving early and with little warning on the penultimate day. In my tortured psyche, by forgoing the last day I was cutting my losses but now I see that it might be sensible for me to lie low, at least where the Tories are concerned, for a fair while...
But what about the greasy pole? I hear you ask. Well, let me tell you, it needs a bloody good wipe! I may be twenty-one and almost a graduate but a literature graduate and a work-experience boy. I don't think it's too much of an admission of weakness to say therefore, that I am unable to calculate the expenditure of a government department in the late nineties (running into billions) at the drop of a hat. As I was explaining to somebody last night however, it is my fault for forcing my way back into a field of which I have only a partial understanding, derived, in the main, from erratic reading of Guardian columns while travelling on the train. The kind of competent, well-adjusted interns I rubbed shoulders with up at Westminster made me feel that I would be better off jumping in front of a train, rather than getting on one!
As I said at the beginning, it's over now and I have been beaten- although I'm not sure quite how or who by. In my defence, I'd say I do not flourish in an atmosphere where knowledge is assumed and it is impossible to ask questions but, again, I knew what I was getting into. Last night, I had one of those fitful sleeps, the kind you have when you have just been jilted or before a big exam; I guess I was expecting some sort of fallout from yesterday's wimpy, forlorn cancellation, today. Nothing has happened, even so I feel terrible but, as my primary school teacher said to me when I got caught calling someone 'a great big willy' when I was about 8: 'he's punished himself enough'.
I really have. I worked so hard these last two weeks- treading water, not swimming- and I've gone and fluffed it...
But what about the greasy pole? I hear you ask. Well, let me tell you, it needs a bloody good wipe! I may be twenty-one and almost a graduate but a literature graduate and a work-experience boy. I don't think it's too much of an admission of weakness to say therefore, that I am unable to calculate the expenditure of a government department in the late nineties (running into billions) at the drop of a hat. As I was explaining to somebody last night however, it is my fault for forcing my way back into a field of which I have only a partial understanding, derived, in the main, from erratic reading of Guardian columns while travelling on the train. The kind of competent, well-adjusted interns I rubbed shoulders with up at Westminster made me feel that I would be better off jumping in front of a train, rather than getting on one!
As I said at the beginning, it's over now and I have been beaten- although I'm not sure quite how or who by. In my defence, I'd say I do not flourish in an atmosphere where knowledge is assumed and it is impossible to ask questions but, again, I knew what I was getting into. Last night, I had one of those fitful sleeps, the kind you have when you have just been jilted or before a big exam; I guess I was expecting some sort of fallout from yesterday's wimpy, forlorn cancellation, today. Nothing has happened, even so I feel terrible but, as my primary school teacher said to me when I got caught calling someone 'a great big willy' when I was about 8: 'he's punished himself enough'.
I really have. I worked so hard these last two weeks- treading water, not swimming- and I've gone and fluffed it...
Thursday 22 January 2009
Westminster Worrying
My third day in the Houses of Parliament and things, while not exactly going terribly, frequently totter along upon a tightrope suspended above tragedy. The major problem is that while I am absolutely in love with the place, I am also terrified of it in an equal measure- hardly a good recipe for an individual of naturally neurotic temperament and blundering, inept method.
A major incident today and an example of my deficiencies: I was charged with picking up four coffees from the bar four floors below. Well, not only did I confuse which required an 'extra shot' (the cappuccino) with the one which required 'extra milk' (the americano- a little strange, you must admit!) but I obviously spoke too slightly for the guy behind the counter who smilingly provided me with medium, instead of the requested large, size. I discovered this to my consternation on the way back up in the elevator so immediately had to head back down to the ground floor where I wrangled with the guy to place the original drinks in bigger cups which, to his credit, he eventually did. I hardly noticed the latter however, for now the chocolate powder in the cappuccino was everywhere and the four drinks were too heavy to take back upstairs...
...Things weren't looking so good in the lift so I crossed my fingers but, on my return to the office, I realised that not only had I, indeed, mixed up the order (as outlined) but that, furthermore, I had forgotten the crisps! Down I headed again, all the while conscious of what a ridiculous figure I cut, preparing to be gunned down by the anti-Terror police (Village Idiot Branch) at any moment. I had to go to the big restaurant this time and it was extremely busy but I pushed my way through and grabbed a packet of Walkers, concerned about the negative sentiments, no doubt spreading like wildfire upstairs. Well, you wouldn't credit it but as soon as I had lobbed them at the checkout assistant and taken my change, a little nagging voice began speaking up at the back of my brain telling me that I might have picked up the wrong packet...
Guess what? It was right!
Barging back through, I found the larger, sea-salt variety for 65p and instantly the voice of the guy who had given me the money flashed back across my brain:
"The big packet, Neil, yeah? Are you listening?'
Desperate now, I was back in the lift, shooting up to the fourth floor... Luckily the connecting door between the main part of the office and the place where I worked was closed and nobody was about so I dashed to the cupboard, got my own money out of my duffle-coat pocket and returned to wait for the elevator. It was about now as I recall, tapping my foot impatiently, I turned and was absolutely astounded by a marvellous view of the toppermost part of Big Ben just across the road. It was so close, like the moon at its largest, all its ornate, golden bits flashing in the light of the winter sun... but there was simply no time!
I finally sorted everything out but not without some damage to my already well-tarnished reputation in the office. Suffice to say, there were some twisted, unconvincing near-grimaces levelled at my person when I finally got to return to my desk with my own cup of coffee and continue to fudge the constituency mailing list.
How much longer I have in this exciting, stimulating, stressful environment is debatable...
A major incident today and an example of my deficiencies: I was charged with picking up four coffees from the bar four floors below. Well, not only did I confuse which required an 'extra shot' (the cappuccino) with the one which required 'extra milk' (the americano- a little strange, you must admit!) but I obviously spoke too slightly for the guy behind the counter who smilingly provided me with medium, instead of the requested large, size. I discovered this to my consternation on the way back up in the elevator so immediately had to head back down to the ground floor where I wrangled with the guy to place the original drinks in bigger cups which, to his credit, he eventually did. I hardly noticed the latter however, for now the chocolate powder in the cappuccino was everywhere and the four drinks were too heavy to take back upstairs...
...Things weren't looking so good in the lift so I crossed my fingers but, on my return to the office, I realised that not only had I, indeed, mixed up the order (as outlined) but that, furthermore, I had forgotten the crisps! Down I headed again, all the while conscious of what a ridiculous figure I cut, preparing to be gunned down by the anti-Terror police (Village Idiot Branch) at any moment. I had to go to the big restaurant this time and it was extremely busy but I pushed my way through and grabbed a packet of Walkers, concerned about the negative sentiments, no doubt spreading like wildfire upstairs. Well, you wouldn't credit it but as soon as I had lobbed them at the checkout assistant and taken my change, a little nagging voice began speaking up at the back of my brain telling me that I might have picked up the wrong packet...
Guess what? It was right!
Barging back through, I found the larger, sea-salt variety for 65p and instantly the voice of the guy who had given me the money flashed back across my brain:
"The big packet, Neil, yeah? Are you listening?'
Desperate now, I was back in the lift, shooting up to the fourth floor... Luckily the connecting door between the main part of the office and the place where I worked was closed and nobody was about so I dashed to the cupboard, got my own money out of my duffle-coat pocket and returned to wait for the elevator. It was about now as I recall, tapping my foot impatiently, I turned and was absolutely astounded by a marvellous view of the toppermost part of Big Ben just across the road. It was so close, like the moon at its largest, all its ornate, golden bits flashing in the light of the winter sun... but there was simply no time!
I finally sorted everything out but not without some damage to my already well-tarnished reputation in the office. Suffice to say, there were some twisted, unconvincing near-grimaces levelled at my person when I finally got to return to my desk with my own cup of coffee and continue to fudge the constituency mailing list.
How much longer I have in this exciting, stimulating, stressful environment is debatable...
Tuesday 20 January 2009
Parliamentary Pondering
Well, day 1 is accomplished and I am enjoying an evening and a morning to myself before I waste the little bit of free time that I have been awarded this week on another day in London... Sometimes I go nowhere near the city for weeks on end and then, suddenly, I find I am there each and every day.
It all went well- I agonised over the wiring of fax machines and the filing of various constituency records and the making of teas and coffees in impossibly cramped, cupboard conditions. Although their office has both expanded and moved to the modern adjunct thing over (and under) the road, the numbers of people in it have also grown and space is at a premium. If ever a Tory government considered cutting office space as a tax relief initiative, the nation would grind to a halt...
One of the notable features of the day was when I mused about writing a story set in an old, gothic palace with a modern extension... but what would such a story be about? And how long before it got rejected (AGAIN!)? Dear readers, please note that, although I do not write about it so much, my creative work is still being turned down right, left and centre! Oh look, a political pun...
In the evening I began feeling like a proper twenty-something as I went out for cocktails in Covent Garden or somesuch (well one and a half plus a beer - Mother!) with my recently graduated friends. It is the second day of such mingling, as a subtly different selection of people, along with the core of my 'group' came out yesterday; strangely, there were a fair few Fins on both days!
Unfortunately, unlike my time in London in general, last night was the last of such meetings and- it's funny- I didn't expect to feel so sad when they were over! It was that specific variety of bittersweet melancholy reserved for the ends of holidays or your 'leaving do', when you realise how much you enjoy the company of people who, gradually, are slipping away from you. Although there are vague promptings from the Dylan Thomas inside, to rage against the dying of the light, usually, or, at least, in my case- you can never find the appropriate time for such an outburst. In my opinion, situations are often a lot more subtle than the poets give them credt for!
Two more things: as I was crossing Charing Cross road yet again, the old Dr. Johnson adage came into my mind: 'The man who is tired of London... yada yada yada'. Well, I already am, perhaps prematurely, and, for the record, I am a little tired of life, too... He obviously knew what he was talking about!
... Thinking about it, not really life- just life in and around these dirty Southern towns and cities (and London in particular). I better have another think about LSE- not that they'll accept me- before I commit myself to yet more urban drudgery...
Oh and the second thing was some half-remembered anecdote from the previous afternoon, about an oriental lady who would not give my friend a roll with his soup... but that has faded now and would probably have come across as mildly racist, anyway. She was a sweet person and I made her laugh a lot when I went up for my own bowl and she asked, mildly fearful: 'You wa- bread, too??' to which I indicated that I thought my friend was mental and that I had never heard of this bizarre custom!
Well, that's all for now...
It all went well- I agonised over the wiring of fax machines and the filing of various constituency records and the making of teas and coffees in impossibly cramped, cupboard conditions. Although their office has both expanded and moved to the modern adjunct thing over (and under) the road, the numbers of people in it have also grown and space is at a premium. If ever a Tory government considered cutting office space as a tax relief initiative, the nation would grind to a halt...
One of the notable features of the day was when I mused about writing a story set in an old, gothic palace with a modern extension... but what would such a story be about? And how long before it got rejected (AGAIN!)? Dear readers, please note that, although I do not write about it so much, my creative work is still being turned down right, left and centre! Oh look, a political pun...
In the evening I began feeling like a proper twenty-something as I went out for cocktails in Covent Garden or somesuch (well one and a half plus a beer - Mother!) with my recently graduated friends. It is the second day of such mingling, as a subtly different selection of people, along with the core of my 'group' came out yesterday; strangely, there were a fair few Fins on both days!
Unfortunately, unlike my time in London in general, last night was the last of such meetings and- it's funny- I didn't expect to feel so sad when they were over! It was that specific variety of bittersweet melancholy reserved for the ends of holidays or your 'leaving do', when you realise how much you enjoy the company of people who, gradually, are slipping away from you. Although there are vague promptings from the Dylan Thomas inside, to rage against the dying of the light, usually, or, at least, in my case- you can never find the appropriate time for such an outburst. In my opinion, situations are often a lot more subtle than the poets give them credt for!
Two more things: as I was crossing Charing Cross road yet again, the old Dr. Johnson adage came into my mind: 'The man who is tired of London... yada yada yada'. Well, I already am, perhaps prematurely, and, for the record, I am a little tired of life, too... He obviously knew what he was talking about!
... Thinking about it, not really life- just life in and around these dirty Southern towns and cities (and London in particular). I better have another think about LSE- not that they'll accept me- before I commit myself to yet more urban drudgery...
Oh and the second thing was some half-remembered anecdote from the previous afternoon, about an oriental lady who would not give my friend a roll with his soup... but that has faded now and would probably have come across as mildly racist, anyway. She was a sweet person and I made her laugh a lot when I went up for my own bowl and she asked, mildly fearful: 'You wa- bread, too??' to which I indicated that I thought my friend was mental and that I had never heard of this bizarre custom!
Well, that's all for now...
Saturday 17 January 2009
Those whom the gods wish to annoy...
Next week I return to that palace where I spent a week or two once before, although, this time perhaps, a little more mature or, at least, a little more guarded with the most naive among my impressions. As I remember, it is a magical feeling walking across that bridge into what remains of the Victorian morning mists. I cannot wait. Whatever life brings me as I drag on toward obscurity, my memories of my work-experience at Westminster will, no doubt, stay with me forever!
A strange thing- although I purport to have changed, an incident from the last placement still sticks on the inside of my skull. I was walking through a courtyard with the Research Assistant assigned to look after me; on our way to lunch, I think. We were talking about the future. I don't know what he expected me to say- something about politics, maybe; business, perhaps, on the periphery. Instead, I told him that I wanted to be a poet. I don't know where it came from. I may have only been 18 but I had enough sense to comb my hair and keep stum on my unforgivably extreme political opinions so why didn't the brain's automatic 'Sense not Sensibility' mechanism kick in?
In all honesty, I cannot say. Blame can be laid at the door of Pugin's architecture, all the history, my own distorted sense of romanticised self-worth... I would be a little less perturbed had that particular juvenile impression just faded with time or less embarrassed, at least. It hasn't. Whether I'm walking beside the river or through the Bentalls Centre; in Kingston, Killarney or Aldershot town centre, I still feel that it would be preferable to leave this life a poet. What little of the transcendental touches upon the ordinary details of my existence seems to lift me higher than any career ambition or work placement to date (no matter how special)...
I would be lying if I didn't mention that these days I guess I want the other things, too- hence the LSE application, the renewed interest in politics, all the work I do on essays etc- but, were it to come down to a brutal choice, I would still go for poet (or, at least, Guardian columnist and poet) and end up with one published pamphlet, a cardboard box and a bottle of gin. I no longer have religion and, currently, nobody to love and lust after... without these things aren't careers mere totems, after all? I don't know.
In all honesty, the whole 'writer' thing has messed me about so long that it really doesn't deserve to stay on the crumpled, yellowing scrap which I jokingly call my agenda. It stays however, though I continue to mess about, too- just a little less conspicuously than in the past!
A strange thing- although I purport to have changed, an incident from the last placement still sticks on the inside of my skull. I was walking through a courtyard with the Research Assistant assigned to look after me; on our way to lunch, I think. We were talking about the future. I don't know what he expected me to say- something about politics, maybe; business, perhaps, on the periphery. Instead, I told him that I wanted to be a poet. I don't know where it came from. I may have only been 18 but I had enough sense to comb my hair and keep stum on my unforgivably extreme political opinions so why didn't the brain's automatic 'Sense not Sensibility' mechanism kick in?
In all honesty, I cannot say. Blame can be laid at the door of Pugin's architecture, all the history, my own distorted sense of romanticised self-worth... I would be a little less perturbed had that particular juvenile impression just faded with time or less embarrassed, at least. It hasn't. Whether I'm walking beside the river or through the Bentalls Centre; in Kingston, Killarney or Aldershot town centre, I still feel that it would be preferable to leave this life a poet. What little of the transcendental touches upon the ordinary details of my existence seems to lift me higher than any career ambition or work placement to date (no matter how special)...
I would be lying if I didn't mention that these days I guess I want the other things, too- hence the LSE application, the renewed interest in politics, all the work I do on essays etc- but, were it to come down to a brutal choice, I would still go for poet (or, at least, Guardian columnist and poet) and end up with one published pamphlet, a cardboard box and a bottle of gin. I no longer have religion and, currently, nobody to love and lust after... without these things aren't careers mere totems, after all? I don't know.
In all honesty, the whole 'writer' thing has messed me about so long that it really doesn't deserve to stay on the crumpled, yellowing scrap which I jokingly call my agenda. It stays however, though I continue to mess about, too- just a little less conspicuously than in the past!
Steerpike goes to auction
"Publication - is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man'
So said Emily Dickinson and, you know what, she was probably right... It's no doubt a good thing therefore that nature conspires to keep this sleazy little phenomenon at such a healthy distance from the purity of my art. In the meantime however, there are a few little spots of notoriety; for example, I popped up on this blog:
http://mervynpeake.blogspot.com/
on January 12th with a heavily derivative piece of poetry penned in a melancholy mood on New Year's eve. I'm afraid I cannot claim credit for the fantastic opening line, 'O love, O death, O ecstacy'- (in fact, it turns out I can't even spell it right and I've kept the heinous attempt at the last word here for dyslexic posterity); it's a shame though, really, as they are the verse's only redeeming feature. The wonderful apostrophe belongs to Peake himself, one of my greatest inspirations- remembered as a talented writer and an artist but also a good friend of Dylan Thomas and a poet in his own right. Mervyn Peake's poetic output falls somewhere between the liberating nonsense of Lewis Carroll and the practical existentialism of a war poet like Wilfred Owen! Notably, it is some of the only verse that I know by heart...
...In my defence, the blog in question is maintained by his son so I must have done something right. Perhaps, like Peake's own character, Steerpike, this is the first sign that my mundane apprenticeship will soon be over and I can head for the 'pinnacle of the itching fancy - some wild, invulnerable eyrie best known to [my]self; where [I] can watch the world spread out below [me], and shake exultantly [my] clotted wings'.
Perhaps. I doubt it.
Sometimes I wonder if the trials Peake elaborates upon in the kitchens of Gormenghast would be preferable to the sketchy drudgery of stolid, old Surbiton!
So said Emily Dickinson and, you know what, she was probably right... It's no doubt a good thing therefore that nature conspires to keep this sleazy little phenomenon at such a healthy distance from the purity of my art. In the meantime however, there are a few little spots of notoriety; for example, I popped up on this blog:
http://mervynpeake.blogspot.com/
on January 12th with a heavily derivative piece of poetry penned in a melancholy mood on New Year's eve. I'm afraid I cannot claim credit for the fantastic opening line, 'O love, O death, O ecstacy'- (in fact, it turns out I can't even spell it right and I've kept the heinous attempt at the last word here for dyslexic posterity); it's a shame though, really, as they are the verse's only redeeming feature. The wonderful apostrophe belongs to Peake himself, one of my greatest inspirations- remembered as a talented writer and an artist but also a good friend of Dylan Thomas and a poet in his own right. Mervyn Peake's poetic output falls somewhere between the liberating nonsense of Lewis Carroll and the practical existentialism of a war poet like Wilfred Owen! Notably, it is some of the only verse that I know by heart...
...In my defence, the blog in question is maintained by his son so I must have done something right. Perhaps, like Peake's own character, Steerpike, this is the first sign that my mundane apprenticeship will soon be over and I can head for the 'pinnacle of the itching fancy - some wild, invulnerable eyrie best known to [my]self; where [I] can watch the world spread out below [me], and shake exultantly [my] clotted wings'.
Perhaps. I doubt it.
Sometimes I wonder if the trials Peake elaborates upon in the kitchens of Gormenghast would be preferable to the sketchy drudgery of stolid, old Surbiton!
Tuesday 13 January 2009
An academic discussion
My relationship with the University of London shares faint fibres of analogy with Derrida's dealings with the wider academy (and I say this as I undertake a paper in Lit Theory involving him which may kill me).
Like him, I am an ill-informed, ill-prepared, pseudo-intellectual chancer stuck out on the peripheries of knowledge and, like him, it is also unusual for me to get out of my bathrobe (well, dressing gown) unless I need to go down to Londis.
... then again, during his lifetime at least, everybody loved Derrida- he was cool, dangerous, a linguistic anarchist! I, on the other hand, have now been rejected from the University of London four times and, this year at least, have a mere four more chances. The closest I get to linguistic anarchism is when I do a joke at the back of a critics class in Kingston.
I'm a bright kid! Why don't they want me? (At least for philosophy-based courses). The furthest I got was the interview stage a couple of years ago, where they tested me for clarity of thinking and I, apparently, failed... Well, just judge the clarity of this rant about Deconstruction and make your own mind up.
Most importantly of all, why do I still crave acceptance there at any cost? I am about to be awarded a degree, give or take a couple of months, am I mental?
Ho hum. Well, I have to get back to work now...
Like him, I am an ill-informed, ill-prepared, pseudo-intellectual chancer stuck out on the peripheries of knowledge and, like him, it is also unusual for me to get out of my bathrobe (well, dressing gown) unless I need to go down to Londis.
... then again, during his lifetime at least, everybody loved Derrida- he was cool, dangerous, a linguistic anarchist! I, on the other hand, have now been rejected from the University of London four times and, this year at least, have a mere four more chances. The closest I get to linguistic anarchism is when I do a joke at the back of a critics class in Kingston.
I'm a bright kid! Why don't they want me? (At least for philosophy-based courses). The furthest I got was the interview stage a couple of years ago, where they tested me for clarity of thinking and I, apparently, failed... Well, just judge the clarity of this rant about Deconstruction and make your own mind up.
Most importantly of all, why do I still crave acceptance there at any cost? I am about to be awarded a degree, give or take a couple of months, am I mental?
Ho hum. Well, I have to get back to work now...
Friday 9 January 2009
Countryfiles
I haven't written much recently, I keep wondering if my muse has been broken by all this time in Kingston... It was never meant to be like this! When I boarded that National Express bus at 18, I had some kind of notion I was never coming back. I got as far as Killarney in one direction and Inverness in the other before I realised that, for me at least, life wasn't going to work like that...
Owing to the peculiar circumstances of my existence, my social position at present involves being caught between graduates and soon-to-be-graduates. Unwittingly therefore, I am being drawn into parallel discourses in the realms of escapism and fantasy- those of the optimistic and those who have already had a few months experience getting their dreams trodden on mercilessly by the big, bad world.
The way I see it, there are two sorts of people. They are both drawn from those desperate to get out at any cost, be it away from whichever tinpot academic institution, or out of the menial conditions they've fallen into post-graduating...
The aim of the first group is that they spend any amount of time away and at any price: worthless jobs, loans, passionless volunteering. In a way, the aforementioned appears to me the more sensible course- especially for those who have never fully escaped their parents' sphere of influence (or their bankbook). As I say, I got out early but only for a short time- but I managed to go all the way across America in the process!
On the other side of this discussion however, are the people who are not just bored of suburban polytechnicdom (or, in the case of the graduates, sublondon menial labour) but fundamentally sick of it. These guys are full of fear and loathing, fed up with their present paltry existence- at odds with all their childish expectations. A few of these, I'm reliably informed, have already purchased a pair of wellingtons and are 'going back to the country'; not home I might add, as this might make a little sense, after all, especially during the recession. No, a friend was telling me of a mutual acquaintance who is actually thinking of upping and evacuating to North Yorkshire.
North Yorkshire??
If I have one piece of advice based on my very limited experience of life it is this: however badly you have been infected with the urban disease, it is not sensible to head for somewhere with no roots, no plan of campaign... nothing. These are the British Isles, not the Wild West. Ok, its slightly better when you have a car which is more than I had in Ireland but, let me tell you, when the rain is coming down heavily in some remote, semi-rural location, the wind-buffeting you and with the threads of intellectual companionship (or companionship of any sort, for that matter) wearing thin, the Thoreau / Wordsworth dream starts to pall; shrivelling, along with what little remains of your rational mind. Trust me, Tony Joe White was bang on with his song, 'A Rainy Night in Georgia'... stuck somewhere like that in a storm and you'll have the soul music on, feeling 'like it's raining all over the world'.
Say what you will about the suburbs- and I frequently do- but there's ample opportunity to work here, good transport links into the city etc. Furthermore, if you're yearning for a bit of countryside, you can move out to somewhere like Guildford for a bit, tire yourself out with the train journey and, inevitably, shift your personal items back in somewhere more central...
There is a recession on! Some kind of limited travel is probably ok if you can fund it but romantic dreams just don't cut the mustard anymore. Moving to the country is for grown-ups, not for twenty-somethings. Read some Hardy, Dickens, Bronte... all their characters were doing their damndest to get the heck out of those green and unpleasant pastures!
*
Ugh! I'm beginning to advocate the kind of dull conventionalism that I most abhor... perhaps my muse is, indeed, broken. I do know of one person who succeeded, after all. When I was out in Ireland- the cool odd-job man told me of how he had left Luton on a bus in the late 80s and had never looked back. He had an Irish wife, two kids and played acoustic folk-rock down in the town every Friday night...
... So, you see, I can't speak for everyone. If you think you can do it then try it but heed my warnings, for, if you're anything like me and you decide to undertake an ill-advised adventure like this sans planning, you'll end up very wet and very lonely- think of Withnail and I. Plus, you'll just have more ground to make up when you get back!
Owing to the peculiar circumstances of my existence, my social position at present involves being caught between graduates and soon-to-be-graduates. Unwittingly therefore, I am being drawn into parallel discourses in the realms of escapism and fantasy- those of the optimistic and those who have already had a few months experience getting their dreams trodden on mercilessly by the big, bad world.
The way I see it, there are two sorts of people. They are both drawn from those desperate to get out at any cost, be it away from whichever tinpot academic institution, or out of the menial conditions they've fallen into post-graduating...
The aim of the first group is that they spend any amount of time away and at any price: worthless jobs, loans, passionless volunteering. In a way, the aforementioned appears to me the more sensible course- especially for those who have never fully escaped their parents' sphere of influence (or their bankbook). As I say, I got out early but only for a short time- but I managed to go all the way across America in the process!
On the other side of this discussion however, are the people who are not just bored of suburban polytechnicdom (or, in the case of the graduates, sublondon menial labour) but fundamentally sick of it. These guys are full of fear and loathing, fed up with their present paltry existence- at odds with all their childish expectations. A few of these, I'm reliably informed, have already purchased a pair of wellingtons and are 'going back to the country'; not home I might add, as this might make a little sense, after all, especially during the recession. No, a friend was telling me of a mutual acquaintance who is actually thinking of upping and evacuating to North Yorkshire.
North Yorkshire??
If I have one piece of advice based on my very limited experience of life it is this: however badly you have been infected with the urban disease, it is not sensible to head for somewhere with no roots, no plan of campaign... nothing. These are the British Isles, not the Wild West. Ok, its slightly better when you have a car which is more than I had in Ireland but, let me tell you, when the rain is coming down heavily in some remote, semi-rural location, the wind-buffeting you and with the threads of intellectual companionship (or companionship of any sort, for that matter) wearing thin, the Thoreau / Wordsworth dream starts to pall; shrivelling, along with what little remains of your rational mind. Trust me, Tony Joe White was bang on with his song, 'A Rainy Night in Georgia'... stuck somewhere like that in a storm and you'll have the soul music on, feeling 'like it's raining all over the world'.
Say what you will about the suburbs- and I frequently do- but there's ample opportunity to work here, good transport links into the city etc. Furthermore, if you're yearning for a bit of countryside, you can move out to somewhere like Guildford for a bit, tire yourself out with the train journey and, inevitably, shift your personal items back in somewhere more central...
There is a recession on! Some kind of limited travel is probably ok if you can fund it but romantic dreams just don't cut the mustard anymore. Moving to the country is for grown-ups, not for twenty-somethings. Read some Hardy, Dickens, Bronte... all their characters were doing their damndest to get the heck out of those green and unpleasant pastures!
*
Ugh! I'm beginning to advocate the kind of dull conventionalism that I most abhor... perhaps my muse is, indeed, broken. I do know of one person who succeeded, after all. When I was out in Ireland- the cool odd-job man told me of how he had left Luton on a bus in the late 80s and had never looked back. He had an Irish wife, two kids and played acoustic folk-rock down in the town every Friday night...
... So, you see, I can't speak for everyone. If you think you can do it then try it but heed my warnings, for, if you're anything like me and you decide to undertake an ill-advised adventure like this sans planning, you'll end up very wet and very lonely- think of Withnail and I. Plus, you'll just have more ground to make up when you get back!
Thursday 1 January 2009
Hangover music
New Year. Dreadful business! I'm overtired, understimulated and traumatised, listening to gentle music and trying to get over it. This always happens, I always convince myself I should be excited on the 'eve and then spend the following 24-hours rueing the day!
A tense and difficult night all round, we managed to squint and see a few crackles and pops (from what, admittedly, was a lovely spot in St. James' park) but a combination of low cloud and the recession meant that the- alleged- 12 minutes of licensed pyromania was more than a little anticlimactic. Furthermore, various fences and mounted police meant it took us over three hours to get back to Surbiton, most of which was just getting through the centre of the city to Waterloo. In the process, the atmosphere suddenly turned from jolly albeit cold, to jolly freezing and tense. After coming into sight of Waterloo we were forced to lap it- in my view, unnecessarily- three times and, in the process, were subjected to more spewy, shouty action from the various drunks and then the minor horror of somebody being bottled by a gang of louts a few feet away.
Short conclusion, no more New Years in Central London. Just like a renaissance play, the carnival atmosphere of transgression and broken boundaries soon gives way to violence and disorder! When you are in a crowd and hemmed in by police in the city you cannot feel more trapped and/or more pissed off with life in general!
***
Anyway, here are the songs I am mumbling along to today, all efficiently hyperlinked:
Bob Dylan: Things have changed ... the sentiments in these lyrics are mine exactly, today especially but most other days, too!
Silver Jews: Suffering Jukebox ... this guy is a poet (no really!) The New York Times or somesuch declared one of his books a work of genius... and his music isn't bad either, sort of Leonard Cohenish!
John Lennon: Jealous Guy ... well known and overplayed but still sublime!
Graham Parker: Protection ... catchy tune from a local boy; almost impossible to get out of your head once in!
Joe Jackson: A Slow Song... just what it says on the tin
***
Happy New Year!
A tense and difficult night all round, we managed to squint and see a few crackles and pops (from what, admittedly, was a lovely spot in St. James' park) but a combination of low cloud and the recession meant that the- alleged- 12 minutes of licensed pyromania was more than a little anticlimactic. Furthermore, various fences and mounted police meant it took us over three hours to get back to Surbiton, most of which was just getting through the centre of the city to Waterloo. In the process, the atmosphere suddenly turned from jolly albeit cold, to jolly freezing and tense. After coming into sight of Waterloo we were forced to lap it- in my view, unnecessarily- three times and, in the process, were subjected to more spewy, shouty action from the various drunks and then the minor horror of somebody being bottled by a gang of louts a few feet away.
Short conclusion, no more New Years in Central London. Just like a renaissance play, the carnival atmosphere of transgression and broken boundaries soon gives way to violence and disorder! When you are in a crowd and hemmed in by police in the city you cannot feel more trapped and/or more pissed off with life in general!
***
Anyway, here are the songs I am mumbling along to today, all efficiently hyperlinked:
Bob Dylan: Things have changed ... the sentiments in these lyrics are mine exactly, today especially but most other days, too!
Silver Jews: Suffering Jukebox ... this guy is a poet (no really!) The New York Times or somesuch declared one of his books a work of genius... and his music isn't bad either, sort of Leonard Cohenish!
John Lennon: Jealous Guy ... well known and overplayed but still sublime!
Graham Parker: Protection ... catchy tune from a local boy; almost impossible to get out of your head once in!
Joe Jackson: A Slow Song... just what it says on the tin
***
Happy New Year!
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About Me
- N.F. Hampton
- An aspiring writer trapped in the never-ending suburbs at the edge of G. London