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...

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.

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...

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!

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.