In the dark

Out of bed and shivering at two-thirty this afternoon: I’ve got another essay to write for Mr. Carwardine and Frankenstein and The Ancient Mariner to read too.

There was a letter waiting for me from Dad. He spent half-a-dozen pages telling me of Mum’s Sunday morning discovery in the outhouse of the bundle of blood-stained clothing Lee wore for his trussed-up corpse imitation back in September. This turned Mum quite ashen-faced and they’ve been on “tenterhooks” ever since, waiting for a fateful knock on the door—the stabbing at Harvey's last winter, plus the bundle of bloodied rags, seemed too much of a coincidence for Dad: "Your uncommunicative attitude, during parts of the summer, can be possibly seen with a damning clarity now, if I’m right. If I’m wrong, then the peculiarity of the situation becomes even more sinister . . ."

As I reread the letter, I couldn’t quite believe the implications of what Dad was saying—it gives me an odd feeling to think this—but on reflection too it’s quite amusing, knowing of the real story behind those ripped and bloody trousers and shirt. Dad said he’d leave the next move to me in case a hasty action “brings down a hornet’s nest about our ears; and by ‘our,’ I mean you and I and your Mum and Rob and Andrew . . .”

He obviously expects some kind of confession from me. I rang them and told them the truth. Dad sounded grim and I can’t help thinking he didn’t quite believe my garbled explanation, so next time I write I’ll enclose some of Lee’s photos as proof.

A cheque for £70 was in the envelope too, which will relieve my financial crisis a little. ‘Crisis’ is the only word to use; I got a note from Midland Bank today saying “we would not expect to see any increase to your overdraft” (of £178.10)—actually nearer £220 as I write this. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I can’t complain as it is purely self-inflicted

It’s dusk once more – daylight goes so quickly – I’m sick of the dark.

We’ve got to get out of here.

Psychic sacrifice

I tried to stay up and work last night but succumbed to sleep at 4 a.m. The day taken up with tutorials and spending money. I went round to Maynard Gardens to meet Lee but he was out, so I wandered around the record shops, bought Thee Psychick Sacrifice by Throbbing Gristle and went to a housing agency with Guy. When I called back at Maynard Gardens Lee was there; he showed me a four-minute film he’s made with his Yashica 8-E of the Moulin Rouge on TV and footage of the wobbling handlebars and pedals shot while riding his bike.

In the evening he and I met Juliet and Guy and had a drink with them and Barry in the Red Deer. Lindsey turned up later, and I must admit I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I wonder what Del told her?

I came back to Jervis Terrace and the damp air and cold chaos of the flat almost makes me regret it. John and Del have gone, the former to London, D. to Milton Keynes.

Grey triangle

A brief resumé of my movements to date; I haven’t slept in my bed for two nights and I’m still at Lee’s. I spend the nights on his floor which is a little hard but not too bad. This is how much 44A Jervis Terrace has affected me. . . .

Yesterday, at about seven, Lee and I went to Mo’s birthday party at Livingstone’s. We didn’t feel like going at all but turned up for Mo’s sake. John and Del were in an exuberant, amusing mood, John even more so as he said he’d scored the previous evening with Liddy, which surprised me as I didn’t think her susceptible to the Turney blitzkrieg tactics. “I’m a man, you’re a woman; let’s go to bed” was how he won her over, or at least that’s what he told me.

Del tried it on with Lindsey but got nowhere and told me that they’d instead spent two hours talking about me. “I did a good job for you. . . .” Of John and Liddy, Lindsey said, “her side of the story is not the same as his,” but I was drunk by this time and can’t remember what else we talked about, though it wasn’t for long. I didn’t say much all evening and spent the longest time talking with Inga’s friend Ebbe about her impressions of England and the English.

Ian was there, and Mick too, but we didn’t talk much. Ian exudes a superficial air of mystery and the bizarre that’s dispelled the more you get to know him. He said that when Barry, Lee and I interrupted he and Mick the other night they were on their way to set fires in the crypt, dressing this act of destruction in ritualistic talk.

The latter half of the evening turned into a fragmented whirl of half-remembered impressions; trying to stand and having the world spin crazily around me, retching among the bins and rubbish outside a club, Del and Lee pouring cold water over my head to sober me up . . . With drunkenness came silence, and I was quiet for the cab journey back to Lee’s Residence Halls.

I slept until three today, so ate breakfast as the sun was setting, although only the pink tinge of the clouds betrayed this fact. Lee has gone out on his bike for some more food. It’s nearly midnight; a German film plays to itself on the TV, the sound turned down so the images flicker silently across the grey screen.

Lee and I have come up with a symbol for our film project, a grey triangle, the mark given by the Nazis to ‘anti-social’ elements who were interned at Dachau—tramps, vagrants and the like. Lee even intends sewing the grey triangle on all his clothes to reinforce his stance of ‘new Puritanism’ that he plans on unleashing in all its ascetic glory at the new year . . . A thread of continuity uniting so many (possible) things, a banner under which to rally and to leave people guessing.

I’ll be tolerably pleased if I even manage to commit one idea to celluloid, for I’m very lazy and let myself down so often . . . It’s important I get a really fine place to live.

I am Here and it is Now

Our plan to hand in our notice and move out has been met with a demand from Colin, Crown Racing’s minion, that we can leave only on the condition that we find someone else to move in. “You signed a contract until June 30th” etc., etc. I've put a few notices up around campus advertising our hell-hole, but if that fails then we’ll simply leave and, if Crown Racing’s boys complain, we’ll get in the Health and Rent Assessment people.

The icing on the cake, which we first noticed the other day, is the steady plip-plip of water dripping through the hallway ceiling on to the carpet. They must know that in the flat’s present state, they’ll have a hell of a job getting 3 other mugs to accept such squalour and deprivation. I can’t understand the apathy and stagnation that’s let us stay there for as long as we have, with scarcely a word of complaint.

Lee and I’s latest scheme is to buy another cine camera, splicer, reel-to-reel tape machine etc, and make films. But like so many of my intentions, this one will probably never reach full fruition. Like a caterpillar with genetic defects, it will emerge as a butterfly without wings, a thing of potential worth disfigured by an inherent disease. Another year will no doubt find me sadly (and with real regret) adding this plan to the growing list of ‘might have beens.’

I’m the singer without a voice.

I’ve been reading a section in From Blake to Byron on the Romantic diarists and ‘men-of-letters’ that makes me reflect on the pedestrian banality of everything I write here . . . ‘I am here and it is Now’; this “must be central to any worthwhile diary, and it is not an effect achieved by accident, but by an unerring choice of the right words and a rigorous exclusion of unessentials.”

I note this down to remind myself of everything this writing isn’t; there’s too much of “I was” and not enough of “I am.” My trouble is one of perspective: I fail to realise the larger whole because of an obsessive concentration on the unnecessary—and, in future years, boring—minutiae of who met whom, where and when, etc. Pepys wrote out rough drafts of his diary entries, but I’ve never done this because I approach writing this diary with a sloppy frame of mind, and as a result this ‘epic’ struggle is neither one thing nor another; it’s too poorly written and overrun with weary, hackneyed expressions to be anything other than a daily record of my daily movements and immaturities of mind, and it’s too formally composed and constrained by the page and an idea to be truly Spontaneous or the kind of experiential notebook I want it to be.

Sometimes I think I have reached a certain spontaneity (last Easter’s “Outsider” kick, my ‘salad days’ of Kerouackian word-flow crap, etc.), but I think I need to sort out in my mind where I aim to go (if anywhere) with this idea of keeping a diary. The first tiny but necessary step will be to opt for writing on unlined paper; this will help ‘loosen up’ the way I write and think too. I do this not to try craft this into some great Art-work (I won’t ever be great in this sense), but simply to advance into the habit of recording sights, sounds, smells, sensations and the merest flickers of thought that mark out one day from the next, perhaps with a view (god knows how) to using these at some future date. Is this too much to expect?

‘I am here and it is Now.’ It’s approaching eleven o’clock on a dry but bleak and cloudy autumn morning. I’ve set out all my books before me and I have to get a second and final essay for Mr. Carwardine over & done with by evening (on Keats’ Hyperion and Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound). Lee snoozes quietly on his bed, although he’s supposed to be writing an essay on the Victorians and death. We’ve talked about a trip to Highgate already, but we’ve yet to put pen to paper.

“Who alive can say,
'Thou art no Poet may'st not tell thy dreams?'
Since every man whose soul is not a clod
Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved
And been well nurtured in his mother tongue.”

Penthouse plasticity

I finished the required work at about midnight last night; the essay mostly bullshit and empty hyperbole, but it didn’t turn out as poorly as I’d feared.

The heavens opened all day. Barry and I met Lee in Watermouth and we bought Mo a birthday present, a wicker shopping basket on pram wheels. We delivered it to her new address, 42A Castle Mount Court, a fourth floor flat in a new block ascending darkly into the mist, all lit with the glow from balconied windows. The flat that had inspired Barry to such enthusiastic praise disappointed me; although it’s undoubtedly comfortable and warm, it seems to lack the kind of personality that Ian’s place has—penthouse plasticity—although the view is impressive.

Pete has stayed with Mo since she moved in . . . Barry is full of noisy enthusiasm for the idea of moving into the three bedroom flat which is on the floor below Mo’s.

We left to go deliver invites for Mo’s party to Ian and co., and encountered them striding purposefully along Stoneways Road carrying firewood, candles and a cassette player, destined for the catacombs in Smith Square. They hardly gave us a second glance, a disinterested aside to Lee as they swept past with a remote air. So while Ian and Mick descended into the bowels of the earth, we partook of the pleasures of the living across the road.

Despondency, weary talk. I can’t face the cold, dirty misery of our prison, so I’m sleeping on Lee’s floor again.

Transmission

John, Del and Pete went with Mo last night to help her move her stuff into her new place, and when the time came for them to leave, Pete was upset because Mo wasn’t coming home with him and their spell of living together had ended . . . so he stayed at her place last night . . . I didn’t stay up last night and I struggle now with the beginnings of an essay on Wordsworth, which I must hand in today.

A power failure at twelve and we were in darkness and silence for twenty minutes. Apparently a substation in New Lycroft had blown up and plunged the entire area as far as Brighton into a murky twilight.

The Fall were on The Tube tonight. It was so funny watching the audience of pseuds lost as to a reaction, some of them trying to dance and succeeding only in making total fools of themselves, others just standing about bored, trying to look interested.

Their new album should be out soon.

Tangled web

I got up at nine-fifteen and finished off my reading of Keats’ “Odes,” hitching in to Uni in the drizzle and cold. My tutorial went quite well and I said quite a lot, but now I have two essays to write for next Thursday for Mr. Carwardine and one for Black Americans. I must hand in one essay for Mr. Carwardine tomorrow, and so I have to stay up most of the night to get it written.

I met Colin Pasmore again after the tutorial. I announced that I’d come to “deliver the death-blow to my year abroad” and I told him about Mum & Dad’s letter and my finances. He seemed quite concerned. I tried to explain my dilemma and the guilt I’d feel committing Mum and Dad to extra money. Pasmore argued that it would be worth it, saying everyone who’d come back from the year abroad had had a good time. “It’s an opportunity not to be missed” says he, and ”you’ll never get the chance again to experience that environment and you’re only young.”

I found myself slipping into a position of total uncertainty and indecision, even though I’d felt fairly certain of my options over the last few days. It’s so very hard to intellectualise about this whole situation, as apart from the financial aspect, my ambivalent feelings don’t stem from any rational part of my being.

Mo moved out today, into a flat that has a waste disposal system, free newspaper delivery every morning, large rooms and a balcony with a view of the sea . . . I’m so pissed off with this dump, with John’s constant presence, with the tangled web which seems to haunt my every move.

I called Mum. Janet has had her baby two months premature, and after a few weeks in hospital, she has at last been allowed to take him home.

Youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies

I couldn’t face a night in the Jervis Terrace shit-hole so Ade gave Lee and I a lift to Lee's residence halls where I spent last night. I’m sick of the squalour of my living conditions, the peeling wall-paper, the damp, the dirty walls and floors, the eternally filthy kitchen . . . I’m moving into a hotel next term if I can’t get anywhere else to live.

I didn’t get to sleep until four, but woke up today early and in a bright mood to match the day. The clatter and noise of engineers, industrial designers and mathematicians subsided at about nine-fifteen and we emerged to empty staircases and deserted kitchens; Lee tells me that this routine is followed by the residents each week with scarcely a variation in the pattern. Up at eight-thirty every weekday, work at the Poly until five, watch TV, go up to the local pub and in bed by eleven-thirty. Saturdays are for getting pissed and wandering about being loud and obnoxious, Sundays for cooking large meals and nursing sore heads. Their lives seem preordained.

I went into University at twelve-thirty, and at about twenty past four I met Susie and Lindsey in the library coffee bar. Susie was in another one of her flutters of indecision, playing with her hair absent-mindedly and teasing great strands out with her fingers. I again felt myself dry up in front of Lindsey. I bought a book—Volume five of the New Penguin Encyclopedia of English Literature: From Blake to Byron. Lee turned up around seven and he and I hitched home.

It was bitterly cold by the time it got dark, the earth crusty and white from frost, my hands and ears in agony. I’m looking forward to hitching back to Easterby at Xmas; it will be a good laugh.

The long-overdue letter from Mum and Dad awaited when I got back; the first part from Mum, in her large rounded hand: “This is a difficult letter to write. I know you must be very anxious about everything . . I don’t see how we can fund you to the tune of £800 on top of your grant. We can manage £100-£200 extra, but not any more as we have to think about one of us falling ill. We don’t get any younger.”

She also says that if I tried for a post-grad course in Journalism they would finance me if I sought exemption from the year abroad. Dad picks up on this theme, saying he thinks I could “walk it” going by the evidence he’s seeing in The Echo. I will think about it carefully as he asks, but I expect I’m going to disappoint them both severely. This isn’t my idea of how I want to spend the next five years. What is my vision of the next few years?

I’d like to travel, but no doubt I shall end up in the UK: I love this country too much to desert its shores forever.

I need to do something drastic to change the recent state of my entries in this diary. I’m sick of my limp, colourless writing, hackneyed expressions, and inexpert, careless structures that don’t read well and abound with errors. The lines on the page enforce a rigid 200-220 words per page; this seems to have something to do with it. I want this to be less a series of chronological events, more an ideas book . . . Lee says that Ian wants to take his girlfriend down into the crypt to fuck her on top of one of the sarcophagi.

“Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.”

-Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale."

No sound is dissonant

Today is the twentieth anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination. Dad was on a police scooter this day in 1963 when a man came out of a house to shout the news. . . .

We didn’t rise from our beds until two and the stark shadows were already beginning to lengthen outside. Del had stayed up all night on speed, borrowed Wordsworth, Plath and Eliot from me and driven off into Watermouth. He said he was feeling very emotional and later told us he sat all morning at a table in Green’s, a bundle of nervous energy . . . He was out when we got up but eventually turned up mid-afternoon, looking none the worse for wear.

Lee, Barry and I walked down to Wickbourne Road and spent a couple of hours looking for a sturdy torch, wandering to and fro to the numerous second-hand and electrical shops that line the street. We got back at four. It was dark when we all piled into Del’s Hillman Imp and set off for Smith Square. We parked the car outside Ian’s flat in Blenheim Place; the doors were open but no one was in, so we left a message in the typewriter standing on the table and walked to Smith Square, John and Del in a very frivolous mood, jokes and repartee flying left, right and centre.

The entrance to the crypt was in the middle of a wasteland of rubble and broken bricks, a simple metal cover beneath which steps descended into impenetrable blackness. One by one we vanished into the earth; the blackness and silence was total. We bunched together and spoke in hoarse whispers, John and Del nervously joking and laughing as materialists are apt to do in the face of unnecessary mystery.

At the bottom of the steps was a passageway off which ran small side chambers, each with a compliment of brick boxes piled in twos and threes nearly to the ceiling. There were several similar rooms on either side of the passageway, each filled with identical brick boxes capped with stone lids, although some rooms were empty. Although each room had originally been blocked off with breeze blocks, these had recently been broken through, leaving the ends of each sarcophagus visible from the passageway. On these were carved the names of the occupant of each box and his or her date of death and age.

We climbed through the hole in the breeze block wall of the first room on the left; here lay the sarcophagus of Emily Newburgh, who was born in 1770 and died 15th April 1806. The heavy stone lid was split into three sections and the coffin had rotted away and lay in pieces. Lee shone the torch down on the fragments . . . the hair . . . it was the only human thing there, coiled in a plenteous brown river among the spars of broken wood and what was left of the rest of the body, a last pathetic reminder of this woman’s life and her brief flirtation in this world of vanities. In parts, the thick matted strands had come apart to release individual hairs, long and wispy, glittering in the torch-beam with the sheen of life. Poor Emily Newburgh, lying dead and scattered to the world, now in the thoughts of the living for perhaps the first time in decades; I wonder who she was, what she liked and disliked, what little personal eccentricities she had?

The other sarcophagi all dated back to the late 1700s/early 1800s and seemed to be those of fairly wealthy people and their children; I presumed this was why they had been interred in the bowels of this crypt, not left in the (now-vanished) graveyard outside, at the mercy of future development. “No sound is dissonant / which tells of Life” (Coleridge).

After a half-an-hour or so we emerged thankful back into the cold night air. We went for a drink at a pub across the road and we all, everyone one of us, felt affected by what had gone before; Lee was silent and unresponsive and none of us felt very disposed to laughter or light hearted talk. Del offered John £20 if he’d go back down the crypt alone and without a torch—he almost did, but he bottled out at the last minute. I don’t blame him.

Ian and co. were still out so we drove home. It was Mo’s birthday and she and Pete were drunk, Pete whining because he didn’t want us in his room watching TV. Comments and slammed doors . . . Ade had come round too after spending a couple of nights alone in front of the TV in his new place; we’ve heard of a house for five which should be available around Christmastime.

Everest model 90

At around midnight last night, two half-expected visitors, John Turney and Derek Caraway, descended on us whirlwind-like, the former fresh from a few days in Amsterdam, the latter just escaped from stagnation in Milton Keynes.

“First thing he did when he got to Holland,” says Del of John, “was go with a prostitute.” Replies a grinning John, “I wanted a woman with a bit of experience . . .” Their live-wire energy/parody/piss-taking routines threaten the easy torpour we’ve existed in since they were here last. I hope they find a place soon; I can’t stand the constant hints, nudges, innuendo and references to sex and my lack of it. With playful malice, Trevor said I was conning he and Del about the date of Mo’s upcoming birthday party “because he doesn’t want us to talk to Her” (emphasis on this last word). He just doesn’t care. But how I do.

Stu went ‘home’ at midnight and at two-thirty a.m, he and Gareth turned up with bagfuls of work and we stayed up all night. I finished Corregidora at six; it’s a hard, uncomfortable book to read. I slept until eight-thirty while Gareth and Stu worked and when they left shortly after nine, Del gave me a lift into the University.

I met Shawn Bennett and we had a couple of drinks up at The Town & Gown until I had to leave to go to my tutorial at 2.45. On the way I bumped into Lindsey & arranged to meet her and Susie in the cafeteria of the library after my tutorial ended.

In the library coffee bar Susie and I talked about the gradual but inexorable rift that develops between one-time friends who don’t spend time together anymore. Shelley is becoming a part of my past now, a figure from my history, and so it is with Penny, Rowan and Shawn too to a certain extent, Alex Margolis most of all, . . .

As we waited in the Cellar for our food to be served, I looked across at Lindsey and for one brief instant, all the feeling and emotion I used to have for her came welling back to the surface. I could’ve kissed her, held her right there; I loved everything about her . . . but I can’t allow myself to be drawn back into another hopeless, helpless situation. I have to remember the past and how I behaved. I just want to be as good a friend to her as I can be.

Talking to her was like banging my head against a brick-wall so I left her and Susie drinking, went to the library, met up with Pete and Mo (Pete drained and pale from speed), and came home.

Lee came round mid-evening with a £5 typewriter (Everest Model 90 – "Made in Italy”) that he’d picked up from a charity shop and repaired. It’s a real bargain, and types perfectly. I typed a letter to my bank manager. I received a firm but polite letter today about my overdraft. Lee told me that he, Michael and Ian had gone back to the crypt of the demolished church in Smith Square and found an opened coffin.

He stayed the night.

Gayl

Later yesterday evening Mark went to Capone’s with Guy, so Lee, Michael and I went back into town and broke into a derelict house which stands in a three-storey block of buildings opposite the Art College.

We climbed in through a partially boarded window in the basement (this a very conspicuous entrance) reached down steps choked with dead leaves, next to a busy bus stop and main road. Earlier we’d filched two flashing road works hazard lamps and these were the only lights we had; each time the yellow lamps blinked on we could barely glimpse the floor of the darkened interior, a chaos of rubble, planks and discarded newspapers, tantalising shapes that were lost moments later as the lights switched off.

Our progress was slow and ludicrous, clutching our yellow flashing lamps and whispering loudly. Upstairs there was more light from the street outside, but all we found were a few forlorn reminders that some people have been dossing down here recently—empty cider bottles, old broken shoes etc. We had a close shave on climbing out as the pavement above was full of noisy laughing drunks waiting for a bus, who scuffled and fooled inches from our hiding place.

“I thrive on the excitement,” says Lee.

Michael and Lee stayed the night and we jammed two mattresses into my room.

I got up at twelve thirty today—a grey dismal Sunday in November. Lee washed up and cleaned the kitchen, but it got very messy again when Mo cooked Pete a meal. I slammed out of the house in a real mood, leaving everyone else watching TV, and hitched in to University. I didn’t even tell them I was going.

I went to the library and in a few hours my inexplicable anger had spent itself in the restful silence. It seems Pete and I are nearly constantly at odds these days over some trifling matter or other.

Bill moved into his new flat yesterday, taking the TV aerial with him, so we had to shift the TV back into Pete’s room. I haven’t seen Shelley, Gareth and Lindsey for days. Susie says Shelley is “settling down to a cosy domestic routine with her menagerie of doting males.”

I stayed at the library until seven and hitched back. It began to rain as I walked down the library steps. I have Corregidora by Gayl Jones to read for 2.45 p.m. tomorrow. Stu has just come round, and he and Pete have bought a gramme of speed between them. I have a lot of work to clear up in the next week, two essays to write by this time next Sunday, one for each course. The term is drawing in to a close already; in just three weeks I’ll be going home again.

It seems so long since I was there last.

CND, RCP, SWSO

The day has gone by innocuously enough; Lee atoned for the last night by rolling up at one and we went into Watermouth with Barry. An unpleasant Saturday afternoon near Christmas, the town awash with people. Around the Attlee Square clock tower a large group of students had gathered in the road and were singing in aid of peace. Crowds of people thronged around them—contempt and amusement from some—the traffic tailing back in several directions. All the University SWSO crowd were there: ‘dog-faced’ Mickey with the mohican, Martin Hegarty, Guy’s friend Felicity . . .

Lee and Barry and I were full of scorn for them—as if ANYONE will listen; it’s like preaching peace and morality to a psychopath with a machine gun. Sitting in the street is useless. When Heseltine had his face splashed with red paint on a recent visit to Manchester University, the CND bureaucracy predictably condemned the act as “intolerant.” CND will go on singing and linking hands until the fateful Day itself, all their undoubted commitment and sincerity smashed to pieces against the brick wall of the State. And I suppose on this point, I agree with the RCP.

I was spending money “like a man with no arms” as the saying goes, and somehow I’ve got through a little under £40 in two days. I’m now £150 overdrawn. I wrote to Mum and Dad about the year abroad, and in my letter I hope I made my position clear. I also wrote a typical sort of letter to Claire.

Michael P. had stayed at Lee’s halls watching a Jimmy Cagney film and was summoned by a telephone call. We met him in an amusement arcade near the seafront. I’ve only met him once before, a brief moment at Easterby Art College when I paid a visit with Grant last Easter. He had long hair down to his shoulders back then, but now wears it slicked back with a parting down the middle, ‘twenties fashion. He’s thin and small and looked quaint in a black tuxedo jacket, grey waistcoat and white shirt and bowtie. He doesn’t speak much, but when he does it’s with a heavy Easterby accent that’s music to my ears.

We walked home.

Phoenix

Barry, Ade and I called round to the Art College to see Lee. We found him in room 312 hunched over a tidy grey and black Remington Rand typewriter newly acquired for £15 second-hand from a nearby shop.

We left B. and A. battling on Phoenix and walked the few hundred yards to the shop where I bought an angle-poise lamp for £3. Lee’s Easterby Art College friend Michael Pugh was coming down at six-thirty, so I arranged to meet them both in The Quayside at 7.30. Much to my annoyance, they didn’t show up and so I sat for an hour alone in the crowded noisy pub listening to two girls arguing about the merits/demerits of some bloke they had both been going out with.

At half-eight I wandered down to The Anchor to meet Pete, Mo, Ade, Barry, Guy and Kamran and we went to two pretty crappy parties, the first one at 29 University Gardens, where we went over the top a bit and had a water fight on the back verandah, bombarding Guy and Barry who cowered down below in a doorway. I nearly crushed a little girl whose drunken tearful mum, for some reason alien to me, had brought her along to what must’ve been a very unpleasant, frightening place, full of loud, stupid people looming up out of the throbbing gloom. As a result, words were exchanged between our lot and a rugby-type who voiced the opinion that he thought we ought to “clear off.”

Party no. 2 was equally crap, a laid-back affair near White Deer Park, the rooms thick with the smell of dope, everything very silly as parties usually are, everyone hugging and laughing and screeching.

Discord

I got up at eleven and had to rush for my 11.30 tutorial. I persuaded Ade to give me a lift in to campus and got there only a few minutes late. I couldn’t be bothered staying up all night to read Hermsprong and succumbed to sleep at three, with ninety pages read. So I let the other tutee, Phil Dickinson, ramble on from an essay he’d written comparing Hermsprong with William Godwin’s Caleb Williams.

At 2 p.m. I had to see the sub-Dean Ned Ammons so that he could give me a little slap of the wrist over missing two tutorials and handing in my vacation essay six weeks late. He was OK about it, and I spent the rest of the day in the library looking for books for next week’s work.

I had beef burger and chips at Dee’s Diner and bought Robert a Christmas present, The Meditator’s Diary: A Western Woman’s Unique Experience in Thailand Monasteries, before coming home. Discord with Pete; in a huff he’d moved the TV from his room into the bleak back sitting room because he was sick of everyone going in there all the time, but there isn’t an aerial for it now. I was annoyed.

I haven’t seen Lee in a few days, and the couple of times I’ve tried to ring him, the ‘phone has either been engaged or he’s been out.

I have a long list of letters to write: to Nanna P., to Duncan Verity, Claire, and Mum & Dad over the delicate matter of this $800. I’m still undecided. Guy is in a doubtful position over the year abroad too, but whenever I raise the subject with Pete he gets almost indignant and says I’m being stupid for even considering the alternatives, although how the fuck he’s going to afford it I don’t know . . .

How hard it is to really know anyone in this life

What have I done today? Very little.

I got up at two and sat about idly, winding Pete up most of the day. . . . I’ve done no reading lately and I’ve quite let work and other things slip. I started off the term well but things have deteriorated.

I’ve got to read the 200-odd pages of Hermsprong for tomorrow at eleven a.m., but it’s nearly half-ten already and I’m only on page 26 and so I may have to stay up all night.

Barry has gone to Masquerades by himself. Earlier today he went round to see the girl he met at the Cellar and she and her friends are going to the club tonight too, so Barry once again sets out with raised hopes. Ade returned today to tell us his “love life is just about going again”; he’s in Barry’s room listening to records.

I keep pretending both to myself and to others that at the end of the year I’m going to shave my head and give up all drugs and drink, but I should realise that this would require more mental resolution and effort than I’m capable of . . . Why would I want to do this?. . .

It’s not important.

I still can’t decide about America—I wish I could make up my mind. I can’t even answer this simple question, so what hope for me? Decisions! Current financial position: £104 overdrawn . . . I look at Grant’s poems and they make me think how hard it is to really know anyone in this life.

This diary says so little. No doubt there are innumerable thoughts and passing shades of mood that have touched me and marked the last two days, but my words have such limited power against the great yawning gulfs of time they strive to combat. One day when I read these words again I’ll curse my lack of skill at fleshing out these transitory moments. What’s clear now won’t be when the surrounding chaff of living and peripheral thoughts have been swallowed up by the years.

This narrative is dull and uninspired because I’m a bit drunk on the whisky Mo brought back from London as her payment towards rent.

The zone

I handed in my essay, written up and altered and discovered that only one person had done the reading for Black Americans anyway. I bought Throbbing Gristle’s Second Annual Report at the mini-market (first side played backwards) and afterwards I met Lindsey and Susie in the library coffee bar.

We met up with Barry and Guy and went to the Cellar for something to eat, and then L., S. and I went into Watermouth; we had to make an effort. Lindsey and I ended up at Dizzy’s, a disco at The Zone—½ price drinks until eleven thirty—and we met Alex who was acting as doorman. Ian and Mick were inside too.

Ian came across to talk to us for a few minutes; he and Lee are holding a performance in the crypt of a demolished church near Blenheim Place a fortnight today. I was supposed to go with aforementioned to said crypt at one, but I didn’t get up until half-past.

After a couple of pretty uninspired hours at the disco L. and I left and I walked the mile or so home.

Never again

Over the past week I’ve let work, letters, everything slip, and as I write this I feel disgusted with myself. I missed my Black Americans seminar today too. I’ve only just this minute finished my ten-½ side essay for Ted Coates; Freddie Hubbard plays softly in my room.

It’s been bitterly cold today. We spent most of it huddled under blankets. Ade made an appearance in the afternoon and quite calmly announced he and his girlfriend have split up. She turned up on our doorstep agitated and tearful in the evening to sort things out but Ade had left, leaving a note saying he never wanted to see her again. She came and sat awhile in Pete’s room with us watching TV, her long dark hair hanging over red, tearful eyes.

I haven’t heard from Mum and Dad or anyone for ages. I’m £80 overdrawn and I spent over seventy pounds this past week.

World at war

Barry came back from Tasha and Lucy’s soiree in a gloomy mood of resignation, as his great hope Elisa—the Clare Grogan girl—had (as Barry put it) “got off with some flash spade in a leather jacket” and more or less ignored Barry who’d invited she and her friend to the party in the first place. He felt she was obliged to at least talk to him, and I wondered if she’d been put off by his obvious intent.

“You’ve got to set your stall up to sell your goods,” he says. I’m no good at flogging what ‘wares’ I have to offer; consequently I don’t bother and none get sold!

Today has been a forgettable and uninspired day of lounging about; Lee stayed to watch The World At War at 7.15.

Sleeplessness

I went round to Maynard Gardens to watch Lee make the last part of his video. Guy and Barry were already there.

The three-minute piece is a combination of the footage shot in Crookgreave, clips from The Prisoner and old Heinz Beans adverts, and it ends with a shot of a gravestone coming into gradual focus and an insistent male voice hypnotically repeating "Sleeplessness, sleeplessness, sleeplessness . . ." over and over. It was the most entertaining of the videos I saw.

Afterwards Lee came round to our house and is staying over; most other people have gone to a party organised by Tasha and Lucy.

Soul-boy

We went out to the pub (The Quayside). Barry, Susie, Lindsey and I ended up at a depressing soul-boy disco near The Oasis.

Essay

Pete got back this afternoon and I wrote my essay in the evening while Inga was round again, but I didn’t copy it up.

Perverted by language

Pete and I went to Gloucester yesterday to see The Fall and also to see Grant.

Pete didn’t get up until late afternoon and I was getting very annoyed by the time he did, at about four. We bought a gramme of speed for £14 from Phil (of the grey Renault from last June), and got Alex M. to get us an eighth of dope; he’s off to Peru on Friday supposedly. As it was I regretted buying both and I’m going off drugs altogether. They’re just a waste of time and energy, and rarely make me feel good.

It was growing dark as we got on the train. Got to Gloucester at eight-thirty and both Pete and I felt very excited about the prospect. We rushed from the station, caught a cab to the University and followed the crowds to the Refectory building where The Fall were playing.

This was the fourth time I’d seen them since March 1982. The tickets were £3.00 and the place was packed. I searched the sweaty crush of people for Grant’s dark brooding features, but eventually it was he who spotted me in the plush main bar as I made a bee-line for someone I thought was him. He seemed very surprised and pleased to see me; I explained that since I couldn’t be bothered answering his last letter I thought I’d make a personal appearance instead.

He wore the same brown shabby jacket, and sported the usual unkempt, stringy locks. He smokes like a chimney, and there was scarcely a time when his fingers weren’t clutching some miserable stub of badly rolled cigarette; he has pretty huge nicotine stains on his hands. Nik and a silent blond friend of his were up from Camberwell Art College and I actually said more to him that than I had on the previous few occasions I’d met him. He seems OK.

Pete and I left after this to go for a high-spirited dance in a crowded disco nearby; we’d taken some speed and I felt very good here, very carefree, the future and the present glowing with promise and pleasure. We went back to the main hall which was fairly empty and so only a few people saw the performance of the support band, The Wasp Factory, who Grant said were really good. Pete & I didn’t like them very much, finding cause for amusement and scorn in the lead singer’s pelvic gyrations and passé extravagances.

The Fall came on next, almost taking me unawares. They were up and into “Mere Pseud Mag Ed” before I knew it. They played a fairly good (long) set and it was good to hear “Man Whose Head Expanded,” “Marquis Cha-Cha” etc. Their new LP is called Perverted By Language. Grant, Nik and co. had vanished in the melee up front so Pete and I hung about where there was a bit more space and I leaped about with gay, speed-induced abandon and got very tired and hot. . . . One encore, then the lights came on ad the unwilling crowds were drifting out into the night.

Grant’s quiet and vaguely trendy Gloucester friend Gavin Spencer joined us and we walked back to the residence halls, finding everything quiet, dead and in darkness. We’d had a vague image of what to expect at Gloucester, based naively on Watermouth lines, but we’d been warned and should’ve listened.

No one was about and nothing stirred. The silence seemed oppressive; somewhere an air-conditioning or heating unit hummed quietly. We’d at least hoped for a few people to be up and having some midnight lunacies, but all we got was a friend of Gavin’s who had a girl in his room and hissed at us to go away. Grant kept pleading with us to keep the noise to a minimum as the Warden of the Halls lived on the end of the corridor, in the room next-door to his.

We had a joint – Grant kept reminding us about the noise and warning us not to leave any evidence of our illicit smoke in case he “got in the shit.” Eventually he and the others went to bed, leaving Pete and I to bore Gavin with our facetious comments and our incredulity at Gloucester’s deadness. We retired to the Common Room and Gavin went to bed.

Pete and I just sat there, mumbling to one another until the miserable light of morning filtered through the curtains and we tried half-heartedly to get some sleep. Grant made a tangled, scowl-browed appearance at eight, exhorting us to rise before the cleaners came. Nik and his friend left to hitch back to Camberwell and Grant lapsed into a gloomy and intense frame of mind, rarely raising himself from it sufficiently to laugh or smile.

We wandered around what is laughingly called the ‘campus,’ a loose aggregate of low-rise buildings reminiscent of some shabby council estate. The majority of the student population is apparently into PE and rugby etc. . . . What a faceless, dreary, utterly uninspiring place. Staying there will break Grant; he seems to move in a permanent gloom.

Pete and I began to feel very tired, and sat in the ‘bar’ (ha ha) most of the day. Grant’s mental misery rubbed off on me, and I felt a momentary pang of anger when he muttered “Why did you come here?” To see you, you oaf, why else!? I’ve known him since I was a kid, and yet at times he seemed very remote. The more the day dragged on the greater our collective stagnation and I slipped into a heavy, dull silence. I felt thoroughly drained.

Things livened up slightly in the evening, with smoking of dope and some traipsing about to and fro from various rooms with large groups of cheerful people, but I eventually had to leave at about eight. I took some speed and left Pete listening to records in someone’s room.

I felt better after making the effort to move and in fact I quite enjoyed the lone journey back to Watermouth. The speed threw my mind into forward gear and I spent the hours on the train staring glassily ahead of me, my mind awhirl with thoughts and ideas.

I’d got a copy of Grant and Nik’s joint collaboration The Spike, an A4-sized pamphlet featuring Nik’s pen and ink drawings and Grant’s sparse lines of verse, some of which I quite like (for the record – “Lighting Up,” “Hedonist (Socially Mobile),” “Night-Walk”). Most of them concern his usual themes of social isolation, full of images of street-lamps, dark decaying cities and repulsive social/sexual interactions. . . . This inspired me to contrive verse of my own, and elaborate rambling word-structures that I developed into long letters on various themes, but I had no pen or paper and so the creations were lost. Speed is the best drug I’ve had—such glimpses of Potential—but I don’t know whether it’s worth it physically or financially. Perhaps if I took some one morning and allowed a day to run its natural course. . . .

I arrived back in Watermouth eager for paper and pens to convert my speculations into hard actuality, but as usual, I allowed myself to be distracted by Barry, who was crowing triumphantly over some address he’d been given by a girl he had chatted up in the Cellar.

It’s now eleven at night and everyone has gone out to an invites-only party at ‘L.A. thrown by the University trendies. Mo spent ages primping herself up for it, getting her looks in order for the night ahead. I didn’t get invited.

Inga came round wet-eyed just as Mo was leaving, quietly wrought over some bad-feeling in her house. She’s asleep on Pete’s bed now.

Coffee bar

I met Barry, Lindsey and Shelley in the library coffee bar. I hadn’t seen Lindsey since last Wednesday at Masquerades and Shelley for a week. Lindsey and Liddy were selling Next Steps today around the mini-market, and all the old twinges of self-contempt surfaced.

Anyway, Barry and I went to the Cellar and came home where I lay on my bed and wrestled with mixed feelings. I think at this point in time the chance of me not going have become more apparent. Either way, I will have to sort it out soon.

I could miss so much and perhaps forsake a never-to-be-repeated opportunity.

Pasmore

Poor prospects for the year abroad. I went to a meeting at twenty to four with Colin Pasmore, who’s in charge of year abroad arrangements. I was told that that mine, Guy’s and Pete’s first choice of Miskatonic is very highly subscribed and it’s doubtful we’ll all be there together.

Next on the list would be Camden College in Vermont. Students are coming back from America with £800-plus in debt. I was asked about my money situation and I said I felt guilty asking Mum and Dad to fork out this sum on top of the £1000 they contribute towards my grant.

Exemption from the year abroad would be “no problem” says Colin Pasmore: I would just slot straight in with the final years and take my finals in May 1985, a year earlier.

I also met Mr. Carwardine and apologised to him for missing last Thursday’s tutorial, some lie about illness and a note that wasn’t delivered. He was quite OK about it and told me what’s due for next week (Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley).

We have a reading break this week. I got away with it.

All things grow and meet you

I went to see Psychic TV; I caught the 11.27 train to Waterloo and after some panic as the train went unexpectedly to Wickbourne, got into London at one o’clock.

I met Mick and Alex at Platform nine, King’s Cross, at a quarter to two, fifteen minutes before the buses were due. Ian was expected to turn up but didn’t and the coaches were an hour late. The journey up to Manchester was quite unremarkable. Mick, Alex and I sat at the back with a group of Psychic TV fanatics —Psychic cross T-shirts, shaved heads, tattoos galore . . . We smoked dope and I felt like throwing up, so I willed myself to sleep, my face pressed hard against the cold window.

We got to Manchester at 7.45. The Ritz is a shabby looking club down a dingy road facing a railway viaduct. The growing collection of assorted posers and paramilitary pseuds were kept waiting ages outside; meanwhile, we could glimpse the band through the glass doors and hear them crashing away inside. Eventually we were allowed in. The club very plush inside, a downstairs bar with red velvet décor and subdued lights and a central raised dance-floor with a stage and video screen at one end.

We went upstairs to wait, and sat on the balcony eating food from a tiny fast-food counter in one corner. A film was playing on the video screen, a recording made as the members of the People’s Temple in Jonestown, Guyana drank poison and pledged their undying allegiance to Rev. J. Jones in November 1978 . . . “I am prepared to lay down my life for this socialist dream. . . .”

The film was very blurred, the colour balance all wrong, a preponderance of red. “THOSE WHO DO NOT REMEMBER THE PAST. . . . ”

Finally the band came on, four (or was it five) members with shaved heads, the male drummer in leather skirt and tights. Genesis P. Orridge, small and ugly, raved up front and even clambered up the scaffolding surrounding the stage, hanging with one arm while singing. They used a lot of backing tapes—electronic screeches, animal growls and snarls, voices, radio chat cut-ups—and the drums and bass built up into long hypnotic walls of sound. No one danced or moved, and most people just sat or stood and stared. Psychic TV ended their set with “In The Nursery,” which I recognised from the album, and G.P.O. closed it out: “It’s hard work living in this nursery – Thank you, goodnight.”

The coach journey back was equally boring, and everyone slept most of the way. We were deposited outside King’s Cross railway station at around three o’clock in the morning, and Alex, Mick and I immediately went to a nearby Burger Delight place, packed even at this ungodly hour, and blew six pounds on burgers and banana longboats. We were in a good mood.

Alex and Mick were good fun to be with; as soon as the tube was running and we could head for Waterloo they rushed around like children, chasing one another with rolled-up newspapers. I was overcome by weariness on the train back to Watermouth; the grey light of morning seems so tiring to the sleepless. Bid A. and M. goodbye and went home to bed.

Righteous maelstrom

Lee turned up late last night. He’d been to see the wrestling at the Starlight with Ian and Mick and he’d been at Ian’s house earlier while Ian and his friend Gav snorted heroin, got sick, and generally behaved oddly, talking of travelling down staircases in their minds, etc.

Then they’d all watched The Exorcist, the only light coming from the single candle on Ian’s windowsill in the other room. Ian is strange. They offered Lee some H. but he refused, & he says he wants to become “totally puritan” and cut even alcohol out. I see what he’s getting at. I hate the crap that goes with the ‘drugs scene,’ but I suppose looked at in the right perspective they can be useful.

Lee stayed overnight and I failed to get my essay done; my head was too full of ideas to sit down and focus. I planned on getting up early this morning to make a start, but I slept for eleven hours and didn’t get up until after twelve.

Barry got back at eight a.m. He, Guy, Gareth and Stu went to two parties, the one in New Lycroft and another one at Sutton Road. He found out that Alex Margolin has supposedly blown his grant on a ‘plane ticket to Peru and isn’t coming back. Goodbye Alex. I doubt I’ll ever see him again.

How it goes

The US Marines are withdrawing from Grenada and a provisional government is to be set up and ‘free’ elections to be held. If the people elected another anti-American government, who’s to say that Reagan wouldn’t send his boys back in?

There’s an RCP demo about Grenada in Hyde Park tomorrow but I probably won’t go. Lindsey is travelling up there.

I got a letter from Mum and Dad and I felt so awful about not keeping in more regular contact, so I wrote a letter to them. Dad’s finding his new job easy but tiring, and getting back into the routine seems a bit of a trial: “We will have to see how it goes,” says Mum. Dad needs the company I think. I got a card from Andrew too, and at the moment he’s spending £20 a week commuting from London to his job.

The mist closed in again today, leaving the sun a pale yellow disk glimpsed through banks of scudding fog, the two tower blocks near us rising up into the murk until lost from view. Kids roundabout keep letting off bangers.

Dennis Nilsen was sentenced to twenty five years in prison for the murder of at least a dozen men in London. The jury decided he wasn’t mad and so condemned him to a life behind bars. He may as well be dead. “I have judged myself more harshly than a jury can ever do . . .”

Tonight I read some of the letters of George Jackson from Soledad and San Quentin prisons. Perhaps on reading these, some people might realise why America is as bad as the USSR and as rotten to the core and riddled with racism and prejudice.

Barry and Guy have gone to a party in New Lycroft. Ade has left us again until Nov 19th and Pete and I may get some speed tonight, because I’ve an essay to do before I go away on Sunday.

Some bizarre

A nondescript day; my Psychic TV ticket came, and the venue has been changed from Prestwich mental hospital because the governor fears the inmates (or should it be patients?) may be adversely affected by thee Psychic event.

I rang up to confirm this, and a dry voice at Some Bizarre explained that said governor had got “cold feet” after scores of calls from concerned relatives. So they are playing at The Ritz in Manchester on Sunday (not Friday) instead. “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” announces the ticket. I’d do well to have this tattooed onto my forehead.

Ade went to pay a deposit on a place, but it won’t be ready until November 19th. I went along to take my coat to the cleaner’s and go to the library to get books for a Black Americans essay. I didn’t go to my tutorial.

I had a joint before coming to bed, and I feel ill.

Murmuration

Pete and I finally got around to helping Lee make his video. We didn’t turn up on Monday or Tuesday, so this time he came round to ensure we helped.

Pete and I took the bus into Watermouth with him and collected the video equipment from his studio in 312 at Maynard Gardens. We had £2000 of equipment with us—a camera, VCR, mike, battery pack and leads . . . the VCR itself was worth £600. We struggled back onto the bus and got off at Crookgreave Cemetery.

I was nervous as we walked up the spacious tree-lined front drive, because Ian had told us that one of the Polaroids he’d dropped in the crypt was of me, pulling open the door. But we evaded detection and climbed up to the columbarium where we spent an hour or so filming. The mist closed in and gave everything a serene feel.

We went back to the Art College and watched the video on one of the machines in the library on Barnum Avenue, and I think Lee was surprised at the good quality. He caught me in the film twice; once standing under a tree, and reeling back embarrassedly from a full face shot with white gravestones, swirling mist and trees in the background.

I was supposed to be reading Hermsprong by Robert Bage for tomorrow’s tutorial but I much preferred to push those shadows to the back of my mind and lose myself in the filming. Back in Room 312 we watched the starlings wheeling in great black clouds in the blue twilight, screeching and filling the air with their deafening cries. The trees were thick with them and they reminded me of Easterby on a dark wintry teatime.

Lee came back to Jervis Terrace with me and cut my hair. He, Barry, Inga and her friend Ebbe went to Masquerades at eleven & missed ½ price drinks by three minutes. The club was nearly empty, Barry deep in conversation with a pretty girl who looked like Clare Grogan.

I stayed home to watch "Five Go Mad on Mescalin" which had been hyped up but proved to be crap. Mo and I went to Masquerades later. Gareth and Stu rolled up late and livened things up a little, and I lost myself in ‘dancing’ (ha ha) along with Lindsey, Guy and Lee. . . .

The end

I spent most of the day with Lindsey. I met her in the coffee shop in the library basement, went for a baked potato in the Cellar and ended up round at Gareth and Stu’s.

They live next door to the pub up Treadwell Road, near the cemetery. They both dislike living where they do. Their landlady overpowers them with endless talk, and when we arrived they were sitting watching TV in her tasteless living room. She was out, but her ugly Pekinese Ming slobbered all over us and even tried mating with my arm.

We had a drink at the Wickbourne Road Inn, and Lindsey came back with me to Jervis Terrace. Barry and Pete had rented a colour TV and threw bangers at us as we stood at the door. Ade gave Lindsey a lift home. We got on well I thought, but I’m wiser this time, and I won’t make the same mistake again.

PiL loomed in the evening, but I came to the conclusion that I didn’t really care whether I saw Public Image Ltd. or not, and on reflection I think it was a positive thing that I didn’t want to go. It turned out they only played seven numbers anyway.

What with Lydon’s unashamed exploitation of his audiences (same songs duplicated on each LP) and his recent feeble renditions of “Anarchy in the UK” (quote: “If I ever play a Sex Pistols song again it will be the end”) then I don’t believe I missed out. My recent comments as to his ‘historical importance’ were all just crap. Forget him. He’s lived too long and is an example of what happens to all true punks in the end; they either die or cop out, and it’s Lydon’s misfortune that he didn’t do the former.

So Barry, who’d come to the same decision as me, partly motivated by prospects for female company at the pub, went down in Ade’s car with Pete and Mo’s tickets as well, and got £5 each for them.