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.
Tuesday 28 April 2009
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!
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About Me
- N.F. Hampton
- An aspiring writer trapped in the never-ending suburbs at the edge of G. London