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.
Tuesday 31 March 2009
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.
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About Me
- N.F. Hampton
- An aspiring writer trapped in the never-ending suburbs at the edge of G. London