Kicker conspiracy

Pete, Mo and I went for a lunchtime drink at The Jervis Arms, our old rambling local, and afterwards we went into Watermouth. I bought The Fall’s “Kicker Conspiracy” (I still say they should split up), and we had some tea in a tiny café near Attlee Square before Mo went off to try to find a flat. Pete and I remained there feeling very conspicuous; sometimes the conversation around us dropped, and it seemed as if all eyes were upon us.

We met Shelley outside, who’d just come back from a Siouxsie and The Banshees concert in London. Her latest craze is to regard herself as some sort of outrageous punk, which is utter crap. Pete was in one of his ‘wacky’ moods and so I left him to go over to Lee’s on the train.

Lee seemed pleased to see me; he said he’d been pissed off that I hadn’t gone over yesterday like I said I might. He’s still keeping his distance so far as making friends with the other people in his residence hall is concerned. In the kitchen he treats them disdainfully and with a kind of arrogance, setting out to be as deliberately irritating and annoying as possible: “I suppose it’s stupid really. I should try to make friends with the people I’m living with.”

Instead he stays holed up in his breeze-block, white-washed cell, watching his portable TV and talking to himself, and when he does venture out into the kitchen he kills the crane-flies which continually flutter in through the open window by squirting washing-up liquid at them and thereby annoying everyone else. Says he, laughing; “they daredn’t shout at me as it’s only the first week.”

We didn’t do much, just messed about really. I let Lee cut my hair, which was a mistake as it’s now painfully short.

Too little, too far

Since I arrived in Watermouth the days have drifted by, marked by lethargy and inaction. I haven’t seen Lee since Monday although I was planning on going over to Old Priory Road this afternoon, but we didn’t get up until dinnertime and the rest of the day passed quite quickly, with Pete, Mo and I sitting about and achieving very little.

Mo is still looking for somewhere to live. Barry and Stu may well be here by tonight. We plan to decorate this place eventually and I’m not nearly so pissed off as I was about living here.

What a feeble maze of indecision I tread when away from Watermouth. I thought about Claire again today and it makes me angry at myself when I look back and realise how I let months go by without phoning her up.

What is the source of this unnatural—almost neurotic—fear that has hampered me all my life? Will it ever be battered out of me? What is it I’m scared of? I can’t answer: something to do with that old inability to judge between ‘too little’ and ‘too far.’

Transitions

I woke up today with a headache.

One of the girls who lived here over the summer called round for some of her stuff with the cheerful opinion that she wouldn’t want to live here during the winter as “the last couple of weeks, we were freezing.” Virtually none of the windows shut properly, and the only heating we have comes from electric bar fires, which are expensive to run. The last two gas and electric bills were £9 and £4.

It’s been an idle day. Pete has finally wrought some sort of order in his room. I rang Barry, and he’s coming down tomorrow with his friend Ade, who’ll be staying with us until he finds a place of his own. Their new band has worked out seven songs which Barry says are “brilliant.” Stu should be down in the next couple of days too. No one seems to have changed.

The drunkenness last night gave me the tiniest glimpse of how things were last term and how, no doubt, they soon shall be again. In the last few transitional days between one world and another, I’ve tried to analyse the state of mind and being which allowed me to slide into such a totally obsessive condition.

It seems hard to imagine at the moment: I keep thinking of Lee, who is a sort of link between my worlds, a stabilising figure who gives me a certain perspective on my life here and how it may develop.

Limpid green, a second scene

Shelley, Lindsey and Shawn called at eleven this morning, getting us up out of bed, Shawn as uncommunicative as ever, Shelley all smiles and giggles, Lindsey quiet and confident-seeming.

Not much else for the rest of the day, Pete and Mo retreating into the chaos of the front bedroom and a great quiet descending on the house.

In the evening Pete and I caught the bus into Watermouth and met Mo, then Lindsey and Susie, in The Frigate. It was just like old times, as though three months had never been; the acrid tang of cigarette smoke hanging in blue wreaths above the table, the endless procession to the bar for scrumpy at 80p a pint (green when held up to the light), the same mood. . . . I could feel the months evaporate: what only a few days ago had been remote and almost unimaginable—a shadow of the past—was a familiar scene, again all around me.

We got a bit drunk and went noisily home on the bus, Mo teasing me because I dribbled my drink in the pub. More key problems when we got back, which Pete solved by scaling the fall pipe to the bathroom window, breaking the latter as he climbed in.

Combined arts

I was up at eleven and I set off to walk into Watermouth to meet Lee. Pete and Mo were still in bed. It was just like summer, not a hint of autumn, the trees full and green and the air warm, and it seems that here the season is a couple of weeks behind that in Yorkshire.

Lee was waiting outside the Art College on Maynard Gardens. We wandered around Watermouth and I paid off my overdraft with a £100 cheque from Mum and Dad. It was a little depressing to pay this in to the bank and still only be £40 in the clear.

I bought a black-and-white TV licence and we went back down to Maynard Gardens and I sat outside while Lee was introduced to his course and the other six Combined Arts students, who he characterised as “bristle-heads who all look the same.” He still sounds very excited by the course.

We did a bit of shopping at Sainsbury’s and collected my trunk before catching a taxi back to Jervis Terrace. We had a hassle as my key didn’t fit, so we borrowed a ladder from a neighbour and Lee climbed in through a back window.

Lee left at nine just as Pete and Mo came back from wherever they’d been all evening. He said he couldn’t imagine anyone but students living here.

Different world

Here I am, in my ‘different world.’

I’m writing this in my room at 44A Jervis Terrace; it’s nearly one o’clock in the morning and all is quiet. Pete and Mo are in the front room but silence reigns.

Today’s day of travelling was a little farcical once we had reached Watermouth. Dad dropped me at the station and shook my hand before returning home to Mum and Nanna P. Lee rolled up as the coach was preparing to leave, his Mum wet-eyed and full of tearful goodbyes. When we left Easterby the weather was dull but it picked up the farther south we travelled, and soon I was sweating in the full blaze of a glorious day, magnified through the coach window.

We got into Watermouth at teatime, getting off the coach at Wessex Road. It was chaos for a little while—indecision over what to do, where to go and how to cope with Lee’s huge amount of luggage. We eventually got a taxi from outside the aquarist’s shop near the bottom of Gaunt’s Hill View: I took my stuff to Jervis Terrace while Lee waited, but I discovered the flat locked and empty so I had to dump my stuff next door with a middle-aged neighbour and his doddering, ancient father.

I walked back to meet Lee and we got another taxi to Old Priory Road and Lee’s new home, the Varney Halls of Residence belonging to Watermouth College. Lee’s room was in a nearby block of ‘student residences,' in front of which were several pathetic-looking new students being helped by parents to unload possessions into unfriendly, sterile little rooms. I could sympathise. We found room 444, a white-washed, miserably small room with stone walls, a bed, a sink and wardrobe which made the rooms in Wollstonecraft Hall look spacious in comparison, and we lugged all his stuff up the several flights of stairs.

Lee seemed taken aback at his fellow inmates, who seemed to be engineers mostly. “I came here to escape tap-room lads,” he said as a pair breezed past wafting clouds of aftershave in their wake. We went down to the kitchen to have something to eat and the enforced friendliness and false cheeriness as everyone tried to make friends was painful to watch—spike-haired student in Killing Joke T-shirt setting out unwillingly to the local student pub with a couple of wanky engineers, etc. Lee would have none of this, and with glassy eyes and monosyllabic answers rebuffed an attempt at conversation by a mechanical engineering Lee Cooper type. The rest of the meal was conducted in silence.

I left Lee packing his things away and arranged to meet him in Watermouth at dinnertime tomorrow. Pete was in when I got ‘home,’ watching TV and supping duty-free French whisky. The house hadn’t been touched by Mr. Harrop, Crown Racing, Colin or anyone else—no repairs even attempted apparently, although the place looks a little cleaner and certainly smells fresher.

We filled each other in on all the details of our summers and shortly after, Mo arrived and we all hit the sack.

Talking aloud as they sit round their tables

My last day in Easterby. A trip to Bethany was planned but it never materialised. Nanna P. was brought from Cross Green Road at dinnertime and she spent the afternoon at the table knitting doll clothes. Janet’s baby is due in eight or nine weeks and she’s been given conflicting reports by doctors which hint that all is not well, and that the kid could even have spina bifida.

My day has cruised by unspectacularly, listening to the football on the radio and trying to pack while outside the wind blew and the sun shone. Athletic won 3-2 at Ryburn United. It was nail biting stuff listening to it on Radio North. They went a goal ahead after just thirteen minutes, but Ryburn equalised not long after, then went ahead themselves before Athletic drew level again; I really didn’t dare hope that the Spinners would win. But win they did, and Dad and I had a whisky in celebration of the winning goal and prayed away the last twenty minutes.

I mobilised myself to desultory packing most of the day, and I’m just now finishing off. Lee rang earlier in the evening to announce that he’s got hold of a Third Reich board game from John. He’s all set to leave too, and his Mum is tearful at his departure.

I wonder how he’ll change? Claire reckoned in her letter that he’d alter a lot as he’s been “restrained” here.

One of those unavoidable and unpleasant pre-departure days, with no real motivation to do anything, and a feeling that I’m biding my time. In a sense, things have felt a bit unreal. To Nanna P., people must constantly come and go around her, and I know when I’m southward–bound on the M1 tomorrow she’ll be here talking and knitting and looking forward to a “run-out.” Eternal.

Life will go on as usual after I’m gone, and in a way this thought is a little odd to think, although to others it’ll seem too stupid and obvious to mention. Mum, Dad & Nanna P. are watching The Omen, but I’ve no stomach for that so I’m bodging about until bed-time.

When I next write, I’ll be in a different world completely.

Love what you know

I got up this morning to find Dad in a bitter blank fury, railing against “immigrants” and the policies of the past for bespoiling ‘his’ Easterby. “There was a time when Easterbians were proud to be Easterbians,” he said angrily, with hot-eyed bitterness.

It’s just been announced that cut-backs in education in Easterby will mean 400 job losses among teachers and nursery nurses and Mum is worried about her job. If she loses it then she and Dad are fucked and I don’t see how they’ll be able to afford to keep me at Uni. Dad worries more about Mum’s health than anything, because the greater the hardships the greater her levels of worry.

He lashed out with blind, angry bewilderment and declared that Enoch Powell has been proved right. It was announced the other day that Easterby has the third highest birth rate in the country, which is about the only thing that’ll keep Mum in a job, because it’s the Asian women who have their kids the fastest. I’m not too worried about Uni.: the main problem if I did leave Uni. would be seeing direction and justification in my life.

I’m going to Watermouth on Sunday and so today was taken up in part with preparations for my departure. Dad and I drove down to the Parcel's Office at the station with my trunk (and cheese), which cost me £7. Dad told me that Mr. Tillotson hasn’t used the trunk since 1937 and the early years of his marriage.

It was a hot day, a last evocative glimpse of summer before we are swallowed up by the wintry weather, and as we drove up Gilthwaite Road the moors away beyond Keddon basked under pale blue skies and I wished I were miles away over the horizon, walking amid vastnesses.

After dropping my trunk at the station we called up to see Nanna B., but she was out, so Dad and I went for a walk around his old haunts when he was growing up, stooping by an old wall overlooking the last of Kerforth’s common land, now a weed-filled field sweeping down towards Iredale's Mill, in whose dam one of my relatives once committed suicide.

Nearby, partly hidden by trees, Dad pointed out the dark squat shape of an ancient cottage where John Wesley once stayed and preached. New housing has encroached on the old, but the skyline beyond Flaxhall Top, punctuated by the silhouetted steeple of Flaxhall Church, can’t have changed much since the turn of the century when Dad’s Dad was a kid. There was a tinge of poignancy and hidden sadness in the way he showed me Charnwood’s dam, where another distant figure from the family’s past ended his life, and old Kerforth abattoir, soon to be demolished, now derelict and boarded up.

We skirted the fields and took a small snicket that ran alongside Iredale’s Mill. Dad showed me the spot where as a kid he would lift the large stone slab of a hidden well and gaze down into the cool dark depths. The mill, once empty, is now in use again and the clackety-clack of machinery was somehow reassuring. The path ran between red-brick sheds and yards full of building materials. Here when he was a lad, Dad told me, sheep grazed and over there, the farmer kept his horses, whose restless night-time snuffles unsettled Dad and Uncle George as they returned home from the pictures. No. 59 Pollard Road, where they grew up, looks empty and semi-derelict now.

We wandered back up through Kerforth and along the main street, passing the house where Dad’s Dad lived after the suicide of his father (to this day we own a sepia-brown photo of him looking like Al Capone, standing in the doorway, fag in mouth); the Wheatsheaf pub where one day in 1917 my Great Uncle Ernest slapped his newly awarded Military Medal down on the bar promising, “It’ll be the VC next time!”: he was killed in France a month later; no. 52, where Dad’s Auntie Florrie was found dead one morning, so thin and frail that George had sat on the bed for fully ten minutes reading the ‘paper before realising she was lying there next to him, lifeless, while upstairs her sister Olive rooted about for the insurance papers. The whole of the Martindale and Watkin family histories—great chapters of them at least—have run their course within those few acres of old Kerforth.

N.B. was still out when we got back to her flat so we made a cup of tea and watched the Liberal Party Conference for a while before leaving (David Steel quoting Cromwell: “Know what you fight for, love what you know”). We made a trip to pick up Mum from school, but she’d gone, so we returned home feeling that somehow the day had slipped wastefully by when perhaps we could’ve gone somewhere.

When Mum came home from work deadbeat as usual, there were more niggles between her and Dad, as there often are nowadays. “I think we’re seeing too much of one another,” sighs Mum wearily, and then complains to me that she doesn’t think Dad is doing enough to relieve his isolation at home. A few weeks ago they’d both been full of enthusiasm about adult education classes and had even gone to the trouble of getting all the forms, but Dad backed out at the last minute, limply saying £17 per year was too expensive (the creative writing classes were free!).

It’s almost as if he’s scared of making any commitment and frightened to break the routine his life’s fallen into. He never meets anyone apart from Mr. Tillotson across the road and does nothing but write his diary and tend his newts and toads, although he’s often saying “I wouldn’t mind doing so-and-so,” and so on. “He’s just hot air,” says Mum, but I’m no one to harp on about lack of effort and motivation, and it’s obvious who I’ve inherited it from.

Stu, Pete and Shelley have all rung in the last day or so. Stu asked if he can kip on the floor at Jervis Terrace while he finds somewhere to live. The accommodation situation in Watermouth sounds pretty bad. Pete rang up just to talk and Shelley said she might be suffering from hepatitis; she doesn’t know yet. I’ll see her on Sunday evening.

I’ve casually started reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the last couple of days and I think Nietszche has a lot to offer.

Perfect at least as animals

In the early afternoon I went into Easterby with Andrew and Jay and we showed Jay the sights of the city. He was quite amusing and insisted on taking film with his home-movie camera of Andrew and I walking down Hutton Steps.

We had a curry at the Bahawal; the streets alive with students laughing and talking, wandering to and fro and posing. At three-thirty, after a drink at The Four Pigeons, I said goodbye and met Lee at the library. We bought our bus tickets for Sunday and, after seizing upon a copy of Kollaps by Einstürzende Neubauten, I came home. I rang Penny to tell her to remind Shelley not to bother getting me the LP.

Lee came round in the evening, supposedly to dye trousers black, but we spent the time playing darts in my bedroom. We’ve dreamed up a scheme to shower the Saturday-nite Jasper’s mating crowd with balloons filled with pig’s blood. Our vantage point will be opposite the club on the William Street multi-storey car park: visions of the white-clad dance floor shufflers spattered with the black, congealed blood proved too much for Lee, and he was full of noisy enthusiasm for the idea. “I’ll have to do it now,” he said laughing.

We even thought of sending pretentious letters to the Echo in support, signed “The New Puritans.” The only thing putting us off is the lack of a fail-safe escape route. It would be horrendous if it went wrong; we’d end up getting beaten into the ground or arrested—probably both.

“If only we had become perfect at least as animals! But to animals belongs innocence” . . .

Collapsing new buildings

I took a morning trip with Dad to the bank in Lockley, to the pet shop in Crossley and Farnshaw. As we drove, he regaled me with tales of 1960s Temperance Hotel stabbings and other Easterby murders. Yesterday’s feelings on encountering the poorer areas of Whincliffe were repeated today as we went through Woodhead Mills and Birkside Bank. Easterby has its own slummy areas too, their impact lessened no doubt through familiarity. We got back in the early afternoon.

It rained all afternoon and while Dad frantically hoovered and dusted in preparation for the descent of Andrew and friend I gave my boots another coat of dye. They rolled up at three or so; Andrew’s friend Jay is a Chicagoan, red-faced, acned and bearded and quite amusing to listen to as he drawled on, punctuating his conversation with “wow” and “I guess."

Everything was very correct for the guest; Dad pronounced his words properly and with care as he talked to Andrew, whereas normally he doesn’t bother.

Andrew and Jay went for a walk along the canal bank before tea, and in the evening, after a lavish meal by usual standards, they went for a drink in Knowlesbeck. Dad and I watched England lose 1-0 at home to a much-vaunted Denmark team while Mum dozed wearily in the chair.

It’s colder than of late tonight and the full moon has risen and now casts its icy brilliance across the sky. My departure for Watermouth looms ever nearer and I can feel my time here drawing slowly to a close. I’ve begun packing my trunk and I’ve hidden my £30-share of the cheese in a layer at the very bottom, concealed beneath records, books and clothes.

Shelley sent me another letter. She’s so self-confident, and rails against her fellow flat-mates for being “bossy” and “boring,” and Penny for complaining about being bored. P. has got a Mohican, done no doubt at the instigation of Shawn. Shelley has been trying to get the Einsturzende Neubauten album for me for a week now, but Virgin has sold out, so I’ll have to wait.

Oft have I stood

I did write to Claire. I posted my letter this morning; she should get it tomorrow.

I again made the trip to the ex-army store in Whincliffe with Lee. No black fatigues available until Friday so I bought a pair of khaki German ones for £4.50 and a pair of grey leather Luftwaffe gloves. I later regretted buying the trousers as they’re very baggy. We wandered slowly back into Whincliffe city centre; it was a grey drizzly day, gusty and cold, and we paused at the cemetery to look about.

We recorded a death-verse which particularly impressed us with its morbidity:

Oft have I stood as you stand now,
To view the graves as you view mine,
Think reader, thou must lay as low
As I, and others stand and stare at thine.

We also took the lift up to the very top of the nearest in a group of sixteen storey high-rise flats and got out onto the roof to admire the view.

The walk back us took us through miserable areas of tacky flats, grimy, oil-stained red brick factories, derelict warehouse buildings and, alongside the road, dilapidated—but still occupied—Victorian tenement-blocks. They were falling down around their inhabitants’ ears, a chaos of red-brick landings, filthy boarded-up windows, jutting walls and wrought-iron railings. I found these shit-holes incredible to see in 1983 and it was a picture more worthy of Dickens rather than late-twentieth century Whincliffe. The streets were awash with kids home from school and weary, haggard women pushing prams in the grey light—a miserable, heartless scene all around.

Whincliffe is an awful place, full of people whose lives seem utterly miserable, to me and Lee at least. We are expected to live out our lives in such circumstances and be happy? I have no taste for that kind of existence. There has to be more, and if Steve calls this negative talk then it’s a negativity I’m proud of.

When we got to Whincliffe city centre I bought leather dye for my boots and fabric dye for my trousers in the dreadful plastic James Street Shopping Centre. I thought of Claire, somewhere in Whincliffe as we walked, and in a way my letters, and all the hopeful energies I put into ‘em, seem very insignificant and futile in the face of the vast bustle of the world and the countless people she must meet.

Andrew rang in the evening. He had interview number two today for a haulage and construction firm’s in-house graphics department; he feels fairly confident. He’s back in Easterby tomorrow and is bringing an American friend to stay the night. I dyed one boot after dark, and came to bed after midnight.

The names of the dead

I met Lee in Easterby mid-morning and we took the bus into Whincliffe. Lee had seen some black army fatigues for sale at a militaria and army surplus shop there for £6.50. On the bus, Lee told me that before he left his Mum was crying as she remembered him as a “pink baby” . . . “Now you look grey . . . like a corpse,” she'd said, tearfully.

In Whincliffe we caught the 88 bus to Cartbeck and then walked. We passed street after street of ornate red brick Victorian terraces, countless shabby second-hand electrical and junk shops, and the occasional late-Victorian church, whose spires soar everywhere above the chimney tops. Eventually we reached the shop, but we were out of luck. “Come back tomorrow,” said the middle-aged mother of the owner. “He’s gone to get some new stuff in.” The shop was a treasure trove of post-WW2 military clothing and hardware: a Nazi flag (genuine I was assured) was on sale for £25.00. Tacked to the ceiling was an enormous hammer and sickle flag alongside the stars and stripes.

We walked back via the overgrown and neglected Ivywood Cemetery, which was filled with black tombstones. We wandered through the long grass and sturdy trees, reading morbid Victorian verses on the stones. Lee found a glue sniffing hang-out—an empty can of lighter fuel and evidence of a fire between two gravestones. We were puzzled by four gravestones inscribed on either side with a name, date of death and age: it contained seventy four names altogether. The occupants of the graves had all died in February and March 1908. Was it an epidemic, or just poor people who couldn’t afford separate tombstones? When I asked Dad later he seemed to think perhaps it was a ‘flu epidemic.

Soon we found dozens more, containing hundreds of names, the dates of death all ranging from 1914-18, 1920 and 1923-24, so perhaps they were all ‘flu victims who had had to be buried together, and apart from everyone else. As we walked to the exit, Lee found some mushrooms which he thought were psylocibin, and we saw two hippies obviously scouring the ground nearby for the same. We ate one each and picked a few more but threw them away because we couldn’t be sure, and we didn’t want to be poisoned.

It’s now twenty-five minutes past midnight and I’m sitting at the dinner table. Mum and Dad are long since in bed. All is quiet save for the tick-tick-tick of the clock & the hum of the ‘fridge in the kitchen. It’s been an odd weekend. I’m planning on writing to Claire before I sleep, but tiredness might foil me. I now want to see her before I go away—but then I remember how wooden and awkward I am when I’m with her.

I’m back at square one. “Perhaps we could go somewhere?” Perhaps we could, Claire. . . .

The damned

In the early afternoon, Lee and I left Jeremy to pack for Bristol and we wheeled Lee’s bike (loaded up with the cheese) back to Lee’s house, calling in on John on the way.

We all played Diplomacy again until five thirty, and then we finished walking home.

Tonight I went out for a drink with Lee and Grant at The Red Grouse and then The Windmill. We ended the evening in perverse hilarity. “We must be damned,” says Grant, smiling.

Slices

Yesterday morning I was woken up by Mum, shouting that I had a letter. Claire had written back within two days.

She begins, “I really like receiving your letters—you’ve been in fact my most consistent correspondent.” She’s depressed and discontented with her social life (“what’s new?”) and she says that “the only thing lacking is male company, but then I’m very wary of men; you meet so many who think that they’re marvelous.” My lack of letters has stopped her getting in touch because she’d heard I found my Farnshaw friends “boring.” She says she thinks about me often and that “perhaps we could go somewhere?” It was scented too.

I was transported into ecstasies of speculation as I poured over this—I really am stupid. Jeremy says he can’t believe there hasn’t actually been anything between us; Lee says it was “obvious” she fancied me, and even Deborah brought her up the other night.

Do I misread the situation as badly as I did last May?

I spent most of the rest of Saturday in a bit of an odd, distant mood and I couldn’t stop thinking about her. God forbid that anyone should ever read this. I’m a fool, wrapped in my own rosy delusions. . . .

Anyway, Dad and Mum went blackberry picking and then Robert rolled up at eleven and he and I went to see Athletic. It was a pretty dismal game of football, scrappily played out in front of less than fifteen hundred people. Croft Perseverance went ahead early in the second half and we all felt that that was it. Relegation is in the air, and although Athletic equalised a few minutes from time, which cheered us a bit, I still think we could go down. Gavin Bressler was superb. The reaction to Athletic’s goal was more befitting of a vital Cup match—the crowd roared (well, as mightily as fifteen hundred can roar) and everyone leaped into the air in jubilation. Athletic are second from bottom.

At 7.30, Dad gave me a lift on to Jeremy’s, and on the way we picked up Steve Bates. Nick Gaunt, Tommy Whelan and Lee were all there when we arrived, and we quickly trooped out to the pub.

Earlier in the day Lee had rung me to tell me that he’d pulled off a “heist” of £60-worth of Kraft cheese slices (sixteen boxes) from Tesco and he wanted me to help him retrieve them from their hiding place in the warehouse yard; we decided to pull it off tonight, and so we furtively discussed it in the pub while Jeremy entertained Steve and Nick.

Nick is a friendless, tie-all-the-time workaholic who like Jeremy goes to Uni. at Bristol. He has a ‘nervous disorder’ that probably accounts for his isolation, but he’s also very conservative and I could see him casting looks in our direction. Steve was his usual wooden self, coming out with his quiet ‘one-of-the-lads’ routine, playing the part of the bitter-swilling student. While Jeremy and co. moved on, Lee and I hurried up to Tesco for the cheese.

I was nervous at first as we slipped round the back of the supermarket to the warehouse yard, flitting anxiously across each pool of orange light and hugging the safety of the black shadows. Lee quickly uncovered the loot and I helped him carry it to the hidden darknesses at the back of the building, where we split each case and jammed the packets of cheese slices into a bag, cramming our coat pockets full. We walked swiftly back to Jeremy’s house and met up with the others. If we’d been caught I’d have fallen apart completely.

We all rounded the evening off in The George Inn—Nick had gone home—and then Jeremy, Lee, Steve and Tommy and I went back to Jeremy’s.

Steve and Jeremy started discussing politics. Steve's a member of the SDP and Amnesty International. He told me he’s sent the odd letter off to the odd dictatorship telling them he thinks it unfair that they treat their political prisoners like scum. He does it, he says, “to placate his conscience.” He and I got into a huge argument that ranged from quiet debate to impassioned mudslinging. In usual hasty fashion I slagged him off for being “sanctimonious” and blind and he in turn brought down accusations on my head, calling me “negative, destructive and lazy” and telling me I was the “most negative person” he knows.

It was a strange out of focus argument, much to his (and my) bewilderment. There was no structure to what I was saying.

But I warmed to my theme and said that his frigging about with letters and M.O.R. politics was just an extension of his desire for power and desire to placate his greedy ego—he uses these torture victims to make himself feel good. He said that if he even fractionally aided in the release of just one person, then he’d have made two people happy. “And that can’t be a bad thing . . .” Humanising capitalism?

Shit! He infuriated me with his so-decent middle way, and his bland liberal conscience and I raged emptily at him, making Jeremy laugh with my wordy metaphors. Steve got very angry when I called torture an abstraction: he misinterpreted me – I meant it could only be an abstraction to him and me – I don’t know what point I was pushing. He snorted contemptuously when I said that ultimately I wanted to be “content & to know everything”: “You’re all talk,” he said—and as he shoved his reddening face close to mine, I felt utterly contemptible for railing so futilely against everyone and everything. He even accused me of being completely nasty to him whenever I’ve been around him, which annoyed me because it’s utterly untrue.

Is being a member of the SDP and Amnesty International and writing token protest letters to Pinochet so wonderfully constructive? I called him blind. “Name one constructive thing in your life” he whinged triumphantly, and I couldn’t (I am positive about things deep inside!). Do I really sound so negative and destructive?

Meanwhile, Billy had vanished unnoticed and Lee had fallen asleep in the other room. Steve left too, storming off into the rainy darkness with his mental image of me no doubt underlined. This annoyed me and I suppose my pride was hurt. Jeremy and I talked long into the night and I grew to feel hopelessly cheap and empty. Jeremy says he feels the same as me.

Again I’m forced to pen those hated words; “I don’t know what to think.” My whole life is before me and all I can do is moan and despair to people who don’t understand what on earth I’m on about, while Time gallops on.

I slept on Jeremy’s bedroom floor feeling unhappy, thinking of Lee asleep so soundly on the sofa downstairs and wondering if he’s ever troubled like this.

Diplomacy

At dinnertime I went to Lee’s and he, Duncan Verity, John and I played Diplomacy, yet another board game, which went on all afternoon until we were interrupted by the return of Mrs. Hoy.

I walked home and it rained all the way; I got soaked. Duncan was irritating—petulant when losing but flapping his hands and rubbing his legs in excitement when he was on top.

Everyday life

I did go out last night; I met Deborah and Jeremy in the virtually empty Moon. Despite promises, Steve, Nick Gaunt and Lee didn’t turn up. It took me an hour or so and a few pints of cider to overcome shyness and self-consciousness; it’s quite depressing the regularity with which this occurs, and no doubt I’ll be similarly hampered for the first few days and hours of the new term.

Deborah looked very smart and respectable and she hasn’t changed a bit; she’s working at a solicitor’s for a year and going on some law course at Brynmor next September. She seems very content with the way her world is going. She told me that when she first met me it was as if I was “someone to look up to”!

I hide my true self behind a mask of pleasant superficialities, so that people often gain a totally inaccurate picture of me.

Both Jeremy and I told her of our dissatisfaction at what we’re doing at university, and she made me feel a bit guilty by telling us both how lucky we are; it was clear just from her demeanour and attitude that she’s happy with her lot and has unpretentious desires. She said it annoyed her when girls who want houses and husbands were condemned: “Why shouldn’t they want these things?” . . . to which we could only vaguely counter that if they really looked about them then they would want more, but what that ‘more’ is we were totally unable to say.

What right have we to condemn and shoot to pieces other people for wanting something from their lives which we don’t? At least they’re sure of themselves and don’t waste time with pointless frustrations and empty questions. I’m sure I came across to Deborah as unhappy, which really I’m not. I haven’t anything to be unhappy about.

“What you need”, she said to me with final certainty, “is a love affair,” and she even suggested Claire (who I wrote an apologetic letter to the other day). It sounded so self-indulgent to admit to being “bored all the time,” but it’s the truth.

Perhaps I don’t try hard enough?

Last orders were being called when Deborah finally gave us a lift home in her gold VW beetle. The previous evening’s talk must’ve affected me because when I went to bed I had really odd and disturbing dreams, akin to a nightmares; I was back at Wintersett Crescent and I kept on seeing the ghosts of brutally murdered children in the back garden. In a frenzy of fear I locked the doors trying to keep them out and even took a photograph of them running between the motionless standing figures of other (unidentified) family members. They stared out of the photo with frightening, intense eyes . . . A dimly recollected image of a body hanging in a cupboard . . .

I woke up in the grey light of early morning gripped by fear, the covers pulled tightly over my head lest the ghosts get me. Half asleep, I couldn’t imagine the daytime and being free of my fear. It was pretty bad and left me feeling quite odd.

I finally got to Farnshaw and the dry cleaner’s this afternoon, and Dad and I got caught in a terrific cloudburst which swept away the sun and sent workmen at the site of Farnshaw’s vast new supermarket complex sprinting for cover; we had to shelter in a ‘phonebox.

I really enjoyed the mundane wandering about amid streets \and shops: everything seemed vibrant and alive. Last night, Deborah asked me what excited me and I couldn’t really give her a specific answer. Today I would say that it’s life which excites me, with all its myriad permutations, unexpected rewards, wonders . . . which is probably the most positive thing I’ve said all summer.

Middle class revolt

This morning Dad gave me a lift up to Admiral Street and I signed on for the last time. I was anxious in case I met anyone from the RCP again (they’ve been harassing one of Lee’s friends), so I slipped into the office and out again very quickly, but the coast was clear.

In the car back I was congratulating myself; it’s so stupid, this self-inflicted anxiety. I’ll be OK now until Barry or Carl Cotton dredge the unpleasant sensations back to the surface and I have to face them again . . .

Dad went up to Nanna B.’s in the afternoon. She rang earlier to ask if he'd take her to Gillrigg to visit a friend; he’d intended giving her a run out, but not taking her all the way to Gillrigg, and so for half an hour or so before he set off I was treated to his aggrieved complaints about the selfishness of his mother: “If I ever get like that you have my permission to get rid of me.”

Yet he takes it all lying down. He says this is because there’ve been countless rows between her and us in the past and he wants no more, but his desire for general calm has led him into a cul-de-sac of personal misery. Both he and Mum are burdened by their respective mothers.
Our relatives seem such a drag. I dislike most of them.

With a sigh, Dad set off, dropping me in Farnshaw so I could go to the dry cleaner’s. It was very pleasant just wandering about in the mild air, everything seeming very leisurely and unhurried, but my journey was unsuccessful (half-day closing) and I had to walk home empty-handed.

After a bright start, the day has degenerated and it’s colder. Rain threatens. There’s a big dispute going on in the pages of the Echo and on local news over the introduction of halal meat into Easterby Schools. To pre-stun or not to pre-stun? There’s much debate over the morality of animal suffering and the “cheek” of minority groups “imposing their alien cultures on the majority,” and thereby (presumably) subverting white Protestant England.

It’s a pretty immaterial question really. The smug millions whose consciences are eased because “at least my Sunday joint doesn’t cause anyone any suffering” should take the time to visit an abattoir and see the room where the animals die, watch the skilled killers at work and smell the stink of fear and crap and blood. But all this said, vegetarianism smacks of odd priorities to me. I wonder how many bask in muesli-ridden middle-class meat-less self-righteousness unmindful of the millions who die worse than animals in other, larger slaughter houses across the globe? But I’m no different and the fact that I eat meat doesn’t separate me out from the vegetarians because I’m as blind to the world’s problems as anyone.

I dislike the naïve tone of this sermon-rant, and really it’s no big anger that seizes me, just the merest of thoughts.

I don’t mention any of this with a view to saying ‘stop’ in any real, practical sense, but merely to acknowledge that all ‘civilization’ is the flimsiest of foils, and that civilization's sustaining principles are those of crass ignorance and brutality. Billions of devotees take these to heart and uphold them with a savage loyalty. What hope is there for man as a whole? We’re all cut off from one another anyway, in real terms. . . .

And with this, I’ll climb down from my podium because I’m going out to meet Deborah, Steve and Jeremy at The Moon Inn.

Blue phantoms

It was very cold this morning. I jumped out of bed shivering. There was a heavy dew on the lawn and condensation on the windows, outside the smell of frost, frozen canals and cloudless, glittering days.

We’re going to suffer this winter in Jervis Terrace.

Grant rolled up at one o’clock and after playing a few records we went out to the Windmill in Moxthorpe for a drink. I bought four cans of Stella Artois lager at the off-licence and we drank these sitting at the top of Glenbank Lane, our backs against a young oak tree, overlooking the spread of Egley’s red-roofs and secluded gardens. Keddon Hill loomed across the valley: to our left lay Knowlesbeck.

We got very fresh and loud, helpless with laughter at a bizarre comment one or the other of us made and stumbled back towards my house—I felt like going to a party—but within half-an-hour of having tea, as we sobered up, our alcohol-fired enthusiasm, conversation and high spirits died. I fell into a drowsy torpour and Grant felt the same, and it wasn’t until eight that I felt lively again.

Grant and I amused ourselves by listening to old ‘60s/early ‘70s records. Which of my records will people be “amusing themselves” with in ten, fifteen years time? The Fall? We came upon a classic, a 1972 effort called Distortions by Blue Phantom, which has the worst cover of nearly any LP I’ve ever seen. The music is ‘progressive’ (utterly bland and monotonous) rock embellished with synthesizers and ‘special effects,’ and test-card muzak. The tracks all have names such as “Psycho-Nebulous,” “Violence” and “Equilibrium” etc.

Grant and Nik have finally got their magazine together and had it printed; thirty copies at 50p each. In the pub, Grant suggested that I write something for it, and he hopes it’ll be a continuing concern that’s kept going with contributions from more people, perhaps some of Nik’s Camberwell Art College friends, and Grant’s friends-to-be at Gloucester. They’ve called it The Spike because “we couldn’t think of anything better.”

He left at eleven to walk home. He goes to Gloucester on the 28th. Lee rang shortly before he left, full of a trip to Whincliffe he made with John and a hat he’s brought.

There’s quite a big contingent of people from Easterby at colleges and poly’s in the South: Tommy is at Camford Poly, Nik's in London, Grant at Gloucester, Lee and I at Watermouth; there are probably more. Grant still can’t believe that he’s actually going to escape the clutches of his home situation after so long and so much uncertainty. I often thought that he’d end up drifting into a crummy job in Easterby and a flat of his own (it’d have to be in Lockley).

He’s feeling fed up with his group Eat People and told me that he’d been embarrassed listening to their latest tapes because they sounded “so contrived.” The guitarist has become the dominant influence on their ‘musical direction’ and Grant is glad that going to Gloucester will give him opportunity to quit, no doubt to get involved in something stranger there.

Witnesses

I’ve done nothing again today; I got up at eleven after planning to go have my hair cut first thing in the morning. I’m so lazy. Dad went out in the morning and again mid-afternoon leaving me half-heartedly flicking through books, still obsessed with what to do when I go back to Watermouth.

I alternate between periods of decision and good spirits, and uncertainty and gloom, often all within the space of a day. But I keep all of the latter feelings bottled up inside and don’t make any show of them to anyone else. I keep my own counsel and trundle on through my life scarcely revealing the inner traumas I go through every day. That’s why people are surprised to discover I’m not as calm and cheerful as I seem.

Tonight the Middle East is in the grip of crisis, with Syrian-backed Druze militiamen threatening to overrun the Lebanese army and sweep on to Beirut. All that stands between the rebel forces and Beirut are a few hundred UN troops and the possibility of massive American military involvement grows nearer. Off the coast, two thousand US Marines await the order to go ashore, and if they do, the Russians won’t be pleased, although Dad says they’ll not do anything.

Mum said grimly that Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that the world will end following an escalating crisis in the Middle East. And to all this add the already bad East-West relations because of the Korean Airliner massacre  (it was announced today that the Russians expelled a US diplomat from Moscow for spying), and things look bleak. Mum is worried. She sat through the news looking very tense.

Against this darkening backdrop, and just for an instant, all my wrangling over my course and life look insignificant. But tomorrow, as always, the global perspectives will recede with the daylight and mundane bustle of another fatuous day.

Great unsolved doubt

I was awake for only half the evening last night. I went upstairs at about eight and next thing I knew, I was in bed and it was morning; Nanna P. was in Mum and Dad’s room; the latter were downstairs and had had a miserable night. I just couldn’t remember getting into bed!

So today passed its featureless course: an afternoon trip with Dad to the bookshop in Beatrice Avenue where I bought a copy of The Brothers Karamazov. We returned to a grey Sunday afternoon house, to the TV and to Nanna P.

She’s returned to her normal vocal self after arriving yesterday in a silent, sullen mood. Mum and Dad had gone to Kenneth and Shirley’s, taking N.P. with them to enquire after the latter’s pension, which Shirley is supposed to collect. There ensued a bitter conflict between K. & S. because S. claimed to have lost N.P.’s pension book. Angry shouting, accusations, kids screaming, culminating in an attempted knife attack on Kenneth by his wife, which K. repulsed with a well-aimed blow leaving Shirley on the ground. Pandemonium; hysteria from the children, tears from N.P. and Kenneth, a ruined day for everyone else.

This incident cast a shadow across the whole of yesterday.

Athletic lost 3-2 at Ringway after clawing their way back from 3-0 down and they’re now bottom of the league. Rob rang and said that he thinks they’re going down. Gloom from Dad and cries of “where’s our luck?”

This evening I’d planned on writing a letter to Claire but it’s ten past midnight already and I’m feeling tired. I haven’t talked to her since June. Today was tainted somewhat by an antagonism between Dad and I. We don’t understand one another at all.

A vague, vague plan has always existed in my mind that one day, I’d like to write, and nothing else. I don’t know why I think this. Does it really matter what course I do at Watermouth?

Risk

At half-past nine yesterday evening I got a phone call from Lee who wasn't, as I’d thought, careening through Easterby with wacky friends, but was in The Bridge with his friend John, who’s doing History at Christminster Uni. Did I want to come out? No asking necessary, for I’d donned my coat and hurried out into the downpour within minutes, much to Dad’s surprise.

I got soaked on my way to the pub and I staggered into the warm glow to find Lee and John with Egleyites Andrew Boyd and Adrian Barlow. Andrew is going to Ecclesley Poly, and Adrian to do a History degree at Cambridge (“I was forced into it”).

Lee’s friend was stocky and leather-jacketed with brown curly hair who pronounced ‘th’ as ‘f’ (“fanks”) and is OK. He isn’t anything like Lee. I was quite surprised, and I suppose I’d expected someone more visibly ‘arty’ than down-to-earth John. We moved to a crowded pub down in Farnshaw and then got fish and chips and went back to John’s house on Edgestow Road.

His Mum was away, so he brought Campaign down from the loft and we played that until half-past three. Risk followed, and in a mammoth five-hour game I built up an empire spreading from the Americas across Europe and W. Africa, before John won. It was light outside when we finally stopped.

I stayed at John’s until four o’clock this afternoon and left with Lee after we’d played another game of Risk, Escape From Colditz and an art auction game.

The art of self deception

I went to the library and the books I got out reflect my changing heart: The Art of Self-Deception (an “anti-modernist” attack on abstract and performance art, etc.), Concepts in Modern Art, Conversations with Marcel Duchamp and The New Avantgarde.

I had the germ of an idea that reading these will help me decide one way or another. I want to decide for myself whether I want to change to Art History, and by this I mean whether I want the change deep down, decisively, right to the bottom of my mind and heart, and not want to do kit because of Lee's influence and a feeble desire to be 'in.' “Won’t you get bored of that though?,” says Sean and I have got to concede that, knowing me, I probably will. Art History, the Cinderella subject. . . ., 'cos I'm not good enough, I don’t think, to do justice to an Art College. Lee even suggested I borrow his work to get on a foundation course at Watermouth.

My forté is writing and I write better than I paint or draw, although I'm aware of how second-hand and remote writing is as a medium medium for expression. It's the only thing I do with any particular skill or flair and I wish I had the motivation to force myself to write more imaginatively than this repetitious daily round of faces and events and my miserable mental musings.At this stage I think I'd enjoy it more if I was instead writing about art history.

None of this sounds very convincing and I'd have a job making out a case to my tutors at Watermouth. Do I want to write about art for three years? Is my dissatisfaction with my American Literature course simply a dislike of the circumstances in which I first came into contact with it?

I’ll always associate Kate Chopin and Thoreau with that bare bleak room overlooking the tangled quadrangle of Wollstonecraft Hall, with a mood of deadened frustration. A feeling grew that what I was doing had nothing whatsoever to do with my life and my hopes. It became something I had to do, and every part of me cried out in rebellion. Most of what I read nowadays is unconnected with my course-work anyway.

I’ve slowly got to swing my mind back towards an essay for Black Americans and the numerous books I have to read, and I’m doing it without a shred of enthusiasm. I’ve two weeks to make up my mind.

Monopoly

At one I went to Lee’s; he was out when I arrived, and I was ushered in by Mrs. Hoy. A fierce uneasy silence seemed to settle on the house until I was saved by the arrival of Lee. He got a verbal lashing from his Mum over going out without telling her. Her voice rose to an angry scream while I sat there awkward and embarrassed.

I was hurriedly (and gratefully) hustled upstairs. Jonas Venckus showed up and the three of us played Monopoly. Jonas is a maniac; he got really worked up during the game and as he laughed and shouted, seizing money from us; he bared his teeth and gums like a manic chimpanzee.

I was allowed to stay for tea; a knife edge feeling, sitting there hemmed in with every nerve taut as Mrs. Hoy bawled at Lee over some fresh misdemeanour. I was relieved when at last Lee and I could leave and go to Farnshaw for a drink.

He told me that tomorrow night he and seven friends from Art College are “hitting Easterby” for a final drink together before they all go their separate ways. Lee sat in bored silence wearing his new (second-hand) beige crombie with tartan waistcoat; he told me that he thought I’d made an error going to University and that I should’ve gone to Art College with him instead. “We could’ve got up to some real pranks together” he said, and for an instant I felt that I had been robbed, and cursed the chance that has gone forever. It was almost as if I was choked off for an answer as to why I am at Watermouth and why I’m ‘studying’ American Literature.

I couldn’t speak.

I walked home through the blustery darkness in a turmoil over my future. It yawns like an abyss of uncertainty and inevitable dissatisfaction. I’m lost at this moment.

Maze

I feel saddened and pessimistic that Dad should so accurately have plumbed the depths of my 'crisis.' I can't use the word 'crisis' on second thoughts, as that implies a knife-edge life or death situation; rather this is a long drawn-out feeling of emptiness and blank confusion.

He says my signposts have been painted out. Were they ever painted in? I thought they were once, but not anymore. Dad says “he is not the Paul we once knew” and he attributes this change to the “Watermouth experience.” He's assessed me very accurately and paints a picture of my endless lounging, my plucking of books from the shelves - “a maze of no choice” - but rarely if ever doing anything productive or serious. I have been locked in this maze ever since I went to Watermouth.

When I first went to there, my plan, as naïve and romantic as it seems now, was based on the hope that the mere act of going to University, the inconceivable widening of horizons, the encountering of scores of new ideas and meeting new people, would somehow allow me experience and more experience. It sounds incredible to look back on, but it’s true. I’d read Colin Wilson and it all somehow became clearer, all the strands of thought and desire entwining, giving hints of a way forward. Before I went to Watermouth I started to get obsessed with unlocking the mystery of what we are here for and why. My thought was, ‘go to University, it will all happen there.’. . .

This intuition flung me to University with high expectations of what it was going to do for me; I discovered, with a kind of despair, that it didn’t change anything. I came to realise that the change must come from within me; I must Will it to happen. Now, having finished year one of a course which, if I’m ruthlessly honest, I don’t really enjoy, I find myself wondering what the hell I’m doing. I yearn for a change of some sort. I hop from tree to tree like a monkey in search of bigger and better pleasures, but I’m discovering that the pleasures are all ephemeral. Each time, I’m left only with the bare, ugly bones of what I’ve come for.

Perhaps I’m about to begin a lifetime of these empty struggles? I won’t ever find the ‘pot of gold’ because the pot of gold is an illusion. Could it be that this world of streets and cities and cars and fields, of laughter and tears and conversations, the occasional dark glimpses of deep despair but more often than not a mundane bustle and nothingness of feeling—could it be that this is the sum total of existence?

“Ought oughts are ought.” Where am I going? But all this is like so much coffee table philosophizing . . . I can’t accept that the questions I ask have no answers.

In the evening I couldn’t decide whether to go to Lee’s or to go see Athletic v. Caygill at Cardigan Park. I eventually opted for the latter. Dad and I met Rob and Carol inside the sparsely populated ground a bit before six. In the first half, Caygill were playing in red and yellow towards the Easterby End and looked the better side, but Athletic went closest to scoring in the opening minutes when Scarborough fired a shot in from a Bressler cross, which the goalie saved superbly. Athletic also had a shot cleared off the line with the Caygill ‘keeper beaten. At the other end, Nussey saved Easterby’s bacon a few times. Our best spell came with five successive corners and a couple of throw-ins nearly on the by-line which spurred the thin crowd to hoarse enthusiasm, but a red and yellow shirt headed away every time.

In the second half Caygill put on some pressure and it was desperate defense for Easterby. Right on the final whistle Nussey fumbled a cross and Scarborough headed it narrowly past his own post for a corner, but before it could be taken the referee blew for time. As we all surged for the exits the crowd seemed relieved; no one would’ve believed the home side had just been held 0-0. As we walked on for the cars, a large contingent of Caygill fans came flooding up a side road onto Lockley Lane but were chased away by an Easterby mob and the two groups continued rushing backwards and forwards shouting at one another until a police van arrived.

In the evening, Gromyko’s shame-faced defence of the Soviet downing of the Korean airliner riled Dad into a blazing mood and he adopted a look of fixed fury as Mum and I said that all sides were as bad. Dad: “That ruddy lot stink of death and evil,” he snarled.

Says Mum: “I’d love to have your mind which sees everything so black and white,” and Dad glares at her in angry bewilderment. . . .

Stabmental

I had one of those 'romantic' dreams which  haunt me from time-to-time, about a girl I once knew at Lodgehill School a long time ago called Marion Rutkowski (or something similar). My dreams are very vivid. Why should she (never a friend of mine) come into my dreams all these years later?

In the morning Dad and I took Andrew’s boxed up records and record player to the parcel department at the station: they cost £21.30 to send.

We then drove up to Hancock’s pet shop for some daphnia and blood worm and then on to another pet shop in Crossley, amid a vast warren of terraced back-to-backs and dingy corner shops.

We parked alongside Lane Close Mills (the date above the archway said 1835). The pet shop was overflowing with animals and foodstuffs and in the corner a monkey paced its dark filthy cage restlessly, twittering every so often in frustration, pausing now and then to lick jam from a piece of bread in the bottom of the cage or leap to and fro in anger. In the middle of the shop were rows of lizard and snake tanks and a couple of green immobile praying mantises which regarded me with their pinprick black pupils as they hung from the top of their plastic prisons. Mice and rats were priced at £1.00 each.

Later, Mr. Tillotson from across the street turned up with a trunk after Dad had mentioned that I was after one. It was a fibreglass, wood and metal affair dating from the early ‘30s, covered in stickers announcing that the fare from Jersey to Whincliffe was 3/- (the airfare 5/-). He hasn’t used it in years, and at teatime he tottered back across with keys he’d dug up from some forgotten corner.

I read four fanzines I borrowed from Grant last night; two issues of Vox from Ireland, plus Stabmental and Chainsaw, while Dad listened to a record of Prince Charles’s wedding ceremony, complete with the vows. Where is the enjoyment in that!? Jeremy phoned from Purswell; he comes back on Friday.

I stayed up to listen to John Peel and Mum and Dad were in bed by 11.

Dirty old men

In the afternoon I went into Easterby with Lee for the millionth time this summer. There was not a lot doing; it was cold, windy and bright, and we visited all the usual 2nd-hand shop haunts. . . .

Dad dropped me at the top of Gardner Place at eight and I met Grant in the Woodhead Hotel, a place I much prefer to the Albion. Grant’s pale unshaven face was framed with dark greasy hair, knotted, untidy and long over his collar at the back. He was wearing the same brown untidy jacket, spare blue sweater and rumpled jeans - fag in hand, he was intense and somehow awkward, but meditatively composed. He narrowed his eyes slightly against the cig smoke and the light and inclined his face upwards thoughtfully, half-hidden behind hands and cigarette.

Behind him in the window I could see the back of his head and my own face.

We spent our time typically, shaking with laughter at the perverse imaginings we're reduced to every time. After an hour or so in the bar we wandered back through Woodhead Park. I was wearing my new overcoat and some wanker on the street bawled “dirty old man” at me from his van.

We bought fish and chips at the bottom of Fearnfield Drive and went back to his house to listen to John Peel’s Einsturzende Neubauten session. It was after eleven when I left to walk home across Castlebrigg playing fields; I hurried through the windy dark casting nervous glances either side of me. Quite a few branches down. . . .

Lee and Grant are gearing themselves up for the adventure ahead and I fall into the guise of ‘old hand.’ I warn them that the first weeks might be pretty rotten, but then I don’t suppose they’ll be affected in the same way I was, especially not Lee, who’s independent, like a cat.

Three weeks left before I go back to Watermouth and there’s work to be done and questions about what the fuck I’m actually doing to be wrestled with. What do I do?

Some nights my writing feels constipated and the words come with painful and frustrating effort, but tonight they flow with an imperfect ease.

Staged

I met Lee in The Oakdale pub up Gladden Road at seven. He brought colour photos I took of him as a corpse: although they all came out I was disappointed in them. There wasn't enough gore and they looked too staged and phony. Perhaps the black and whites will be better.

The Oakdale was too terrible a place to stay for long, so we decided to go into Farnshaw, stopping at his house on the way so I could borrow a coat which, after much haggling, I eventually persuaded him to sell me, but only at the lunatic price of £10.

Lee told me that I wouldn’t exactly be welcome in his house as “there’s an anti-Paul feeling at the moment” as a result of the downing of the Korean 747. Somehow, my supposed ‘red’ politics have been translated in his Mum’s eyes to open support for the shooting down of the airliner. Like me, Lee gets the “You dance to his tune,” etc. . . .

We didn’t do much worth noting in Farnshaw. We walked the windswept streets aimlessly, trying to decide whether or not to scale the scaffolding around St. Anne’s steeple (which Lee has done already) and which pub to go into. We had a drink and ate a Chinese before walking home. Lee stayed the night because he couldn’t face going all the way home again.

Say yes to everything

Robert came in the morning for the match. I was treated to a monologue on Buddhism and the need to say Yes to everything; this reminded me of The Outsider. “You can't be a true Buddhist until you’ve accepted rebirth,” says Robert, and claims he has.

I can’t accept that all beings—insects, animals, even humans—will be reborn in different form. If ninety-nine percent of humanity are ‘animal minds’ who live, eat, sleep and fuck for generation after generation without seeing, as Robert claims, then what of the other fraction? I suppose those who are aware of the impermanence of all things are the ones who see suffering as self-inflicted misery that results from an inability to see the world in its true perspective. All suffering springs from this lack of Yea-Saying qualities in the self and it’s like this because we ignore the flimsiness of the foundations on which we’ve built civilization: we deny our own mortality and forget that all material wealth and power and happiness is impermanent. “We look after the body but forget about the Mind,” says Robert. We fail to accept the fleeting nature of our existence on earth and we turn money and possessions into gods that smother everything, including the Mind.

The last year has changed Robert’s life. . . . How much longer can he continue in the confines of his job and marriage? It seems as though as he grows his material world becomes narrower and narrower until finally he’ll have to make a decision.

Perhaps Carol will grow with him too?

The weather was blustery and showery. Croft Perseverance were Athletic’s opponents. The ball just wouldn’t run for Athletic, and a couple of certain goals were denied by agonising off-the-line clearances by Croft defenders. Athletic had more chances in the first half and should’ve scored.

The Shed was crowded because of the rain and a half-time brass band complimented the clichéd Northern backdrop of terraced houses and industrial wasteland up beyond Three Locks Road. Noticing this, a big contingent of Athletic supporters broke into a stentorian and ironic rendition of Dvorak’s “Going Home.”

Although Athletic outplayed Croft in the second half, they beat us by three soft goals in the last ten minutes, which brought typically fickle reactions from the fans—“You fuckin’ bastards!” etc., etc., this aimed at the Athletic bench. This annoyed Robert, and Athletic’s bad luck also angered a bewildered Dad who went on about it as though it were something which could be argued with. There is a smell of relegation in the air, and it will be a struggle to stay up.

Tonight Shelley rang from Watermouth; she, Stu and Shawn were at her flat and are on speed as I write this. She phoned through want of better things to do; she broke into occasional giggles and sounded as breathless and as full of beans as ever. I spoke briefly and awkwardly to Shawn who sounds to have had as empty and pointless a summer as I have. He hasn’t got a job and has alternated his time between home and Watermouth. He and Stu are down to look for flats for next term.

I put down the phone with mixed feelings, leaving them (no doubt) to pace the floor of Shelley’s flat all night. That world is so near, so ready to take my to its heart with open arms. Meanwhile I sit up here in Northern isolation and make plans to live and be in a way which is far removed from the hurly burly of the hard reality in Watermouth. Shelley’s call gave a premonition of how truly vain and fatuous are my hopes for a different way to the one of old.

This repetitious petty crap needed to come out. The feeling that I can’t continue in the habits of the past is coming home to me and it manifests itself in dissatisfaction with my University course. The last day or so I’ve been seriously contemplating a change to something like Art History. I don’t know how seriously my tutors’d take me.

But in truth this would be a superficial remedy and I get sick of saying ‘something more is needed.’. . .  But something more is needed. Another two years of what I’ve already had isn’t enough!

Brains of the living

The thermometer on the landing is down below 70°F for probably the first time in ages. I got up at twelve to grey clouds and wet, windy weather: the rain streamed down from a flat colourless sky, a dull roar as it beat steadily against the roof. But gradually it slowed and stopped, the clouds broke, and the sun shone down on a glistening garden.

Minutes after I’d got downstairs, Mum and Dad got back from a walk up in Burndale: they told me that Robert has bought two bronze Buddhas for £50. I got up to find a postcard from Pete and a dole cheque waiting. . . .

Nanna B. is back in hospital for a sprained tendon, but Mum, Dad, the doctors and everyone else seem to think she shouldn’t be there. She lies red-faced and robust in a ward full of grey geriatrics at death’s door. Mum silently suffers her fears for the future, seeing only a vision of she and Dad burdened with the care of their crippled mothers: “It’s going to be hell,” says she with a long face.

Andrew rang at teatime to say he’s got an interview for a job next Thursday at twelve and he’s “nervously optimistic.” He sounded fairly content and I get the impression he’s having a good time in London. Tonight he’s going to see saxophonist Elton Dean at The Empress of Russia pub.

Whenever we watch the evening news a tense, pregnant silence settles on the room; Dad’s face is set in a mask of bitterness and anger, Mum’s in one of lined resignation. Tonight, the outrage and inquests over the downing of the South Korean 747 continue, the Russians admitting that “warning” shots were fired but they are preventing Japanese search parties from entering the crash area. It’s sad that the West’s anger can’t be expressed too strongly for fear of causing undue aggro with the USSR, and anyway the Americans will be after political mileage from this incident, for they’re not far behind the Russians in the murder stakes, after all. . . .

In Israel, Menachem Begin has gone and Shamir looks set to follow as leader. In Beirut, the fighting has died down, while in Chad it has just erupted again after a three-week lull. Just a typical day. . . .

After midnight I watched Archie Shepp backed by the Paul Hart Quintet on Channel 4’s Jazz programme. He did a version of “Yardbird Suite” which was too laid back and middle-of-the-road for my liking. He’s now more mellow and less frantic than in his angry days of old – I know which version I prefer. I haven’t listened to much jazz at all recently as I’ve been living on a staple diet of The Fall, Public Image and The Pop Group.

Empty roads intersect

It rained overnight leaving the soil damp and black.

Lee stayed over and he went again to the abattoir at 11.30 to get blood, returning in the early afternoon pretty sickened with what he’d seen. Blood, fur and fear everywhere. He’d heard the crying of sheep and the crack of the lead bolt as it was fired through some animal’s skull. As he stood there waiting, a pig that was about to be done in gave him a pathetic look and he had to turn away. He got two pop bottles full of blood for 60p, still hot from the pig’s neck; he’d had to hold the funnel as the blood splashed  over his hands. When he got back the bottles were still warm and topped with a head of red froth.

He cycled home to collect electrical flex, rope and a white pillow-case and came back shortly after Jeremy arrived, and at half-past four we set off to Easterby, Lee wearing his ‘corpse’ clothes—the formless gold trousers which I once wore proudly to school and an old blue collarless shirt.

When we reached ‘his’ house at the corner of Geoffrey Road and Abbot Street, Lee clambered in through the upstairs window to remove the barricades from the door and we climbed the partially collapsed dusty staircase to the second floor into what once had been a front bedroom. It was now a bare cell, with floorboards rotted through and gone in many places and a single glass-less window.

We gingerly crept across the floor, feeling none too safe because we could see the room beneath through the missing sections of floorboards. We tied Lee’s hands behind his back with electrical flex, tied his feet together and finally slipped the pillowcase over his head, tying it round his neck with the flex. When he was ‘in position’ we poured the bottled blood over the floor and him, adding touches here and there to good corpse-like effect. The blood dripped through to the room beneath.

He looked quite convincing lying there, backlit by the window, sprawled amid thick pools of blood and scattered shards of glass. I’d ‘borrowed’ a camera of Andrew's specially for the occasion, and Jeremy and I clicked away, creeping into new positions, reduced to hoarse and frantic whispers at the sound of a car pulling up outside, none of this helped by the floorboards giving way under my heel. I was glad to be out.

Our next location was a long narrow road that sweeps down between warehouses from Crossley Street near the Polytechnic. Bare-footed, bound and hooded, Lee took his place again, in the gutter this time, and we spattered blood onto his clothing which glistened thickly down the kerb. A few people who hurried by smiled at us, thinking “damn art students” no doubt.

The light meter on Andrew's camera packed in mysteriously, so I had to use Jeremy’s meter readings. Lee’s ‘body’ looked a bit ham and staged in this location, so we finished off our films on a piece of spare land up by the Polytechnic in an area I’ve never walked before—acres of weeds, empty warehouses, deserted roads and glass-strewn pavements.

Easterby is surrounded by a belt of warehouse-land: forgotten buildings and sordid corners that offer many fine panoramas of grime-stained walls, slate-roofs, rows and rows of empty dark windows and spidery fire escapes. Empty roads intersect overgrown wastelands where factories once stood.

The yellowing sun was low now and streaked the tangled weeds and broken paving stones with long shadows and light. We bound Lee once more and hid his corpse amid a profusion of purple weeds, his shrouded head nestled in the filth beside the front wheel of a little kid’s pedal cycle, his body awkwardly twisted to one side.

Finally, Lee wrapped himself in a large piece of dirty carpeting that, apart from his legs, completely hid him. We dumped him in a dark hollow against a red brick wall among the nettles and lumps of concrete, his bare feet poking out towards the camera. In this way we used up the rest of the film and the evening degenerated into blood-splashed boredom.

We had to walk back to the bus station and ride back with Lee who was covered in dirt, his ripped shirt stained with dried blood. He didn’t mind a bit, and he and Jeremy stayed until eleven-thirty before they cycled home.

Overnight Soviet fighters shot down a South Korean 747 carrying 269 people over the Sea of Japan. They claim the Boeing didn’t respond to repeated calls to turn back or attempts to “help it to the nearest airfield,” and because it was heading towards a top secret naval base at Vladivostok, it was shot down. One theory is that there has been a total oxygen failure on the 747 which immobilized the crew and explains their refusal to answer. I’m just now listening to Radio Moscow and they say only that the “intruder plane” headed off towards the Sea of Japan after twice violating Soviet airspace. The US government has expressed its “revulsion” and there's going to be a big international wrangle over this in the next few weeks.

My writing is tired and strained and filled with colourless expressions . . . There’s condensation on the dining room windows tonight for the first time in months.