TV eyes

An anticlimax after the excesses of yesterday; we wandered about in a very subdued, tired, and unenthusiastic haze. I didn’t get my things organised and packed until the evening, and by the time I'd ‘phoned the taxi and had two thirds of my stuff delivered to Westdorgan Road, it was going on for half-past nine.

Barry and Stu were the only ones in when I arrived, and they helped me carry my things into Gareth’s now empty room. Almost immediately I began to feel I’d made the wrong decision, Barry whining round for money to go down to the Frigate to meet Kamran. The atmosphere felt wrong, somehow.

My room is quite small compared to the roomy quarters I’ve considered ‘normal’ since March, and it lacks character. It also costs £18 a week (I paid Gareth £36 yesterday which puts me temporarily in the red). I worry my presence here will create tensions and constant niggling aggravations. Perhaps I’m wrong—I hope so, but I feel an intuitive premonition that things might go sour, and I'm quite down hearted.

I didn’t get much sorted out before, to my chagrin and irritation, Barry, Stu and Lindsey came back from the pub and were in my room watching TV. I have to move it out of here, and I’ll probably come in for criticism for this, but move it out I must.

The end of every fork

A morning and early afternoon spent fulfilling necessary obligations on campus. The last day of term meant handing in Conflict and Consensus extended essay titles (on the Beat Generation), putting in travel claims and seeing my personal tutor to collect my report.

This was quite poor—a 4 from Pugh and Gilbert, and a 3/4 from Colin Pasmore (“he has not fulfilled his promise,” etc.). Don Carwardine expressed doubts about my unorthodox style of accommodation, and said he fears the inherent instability of most squats is likely to disrupt my final year, but I placated him by promising to get rented single accommodation after the summer.

After getting back from campus, Pete and Lee and I took the LSD in the toilets of the Art College. It was Lee’s first ‘trip’ so I was curious to see how he’d receive it. We had a prematch meal of bacon, eggs, and sausage at a café at the bottom of Hatfield Street, a buzz of expectation within us as we ate. I went for a shit in the College (anxious not to crap out the drug) while Lee and Pete waited for me beneath a tree. . . .

We walked to the seafront and wandered aimlessly along the beach, watching seagulls wheel and turn in the sun which streamed in ghostly shards through the gaps in the bright yellow and grey cloud, dappling the sea. We could feel the first, tentative effects of the drug in our nervous systems, a slight alteration of observed reality, the beginnings of hallucinated awareness. I think we all felt the same way, anxious lest the trip failed to produce.

We met Lindsey on the now chilly and wind-bitten pebbles outside the Admiral. She was on her way to work behind the bar there and she railed at us about her “shitty job” and “exploitation” and we were sheepish, aware of the first fluttering sensations of drug-awkwardness and wooden paranoia. I could sense Lee fighting it, unwilling to admit that anything was happening; later, almost overwhelmed, he admitted he simply “had to compromise” himself to the inescapable acid distortion of time-space. We ventured briefly into the amusement arcades on the promenade where Lee was overcome with yawns, watering eyes and excessive salivation.

He was literally foaming at the mouth.

Then TV at the Grey House, a pop programme hosted by Mike Read, a Queen video—monstrous faces distorting rapidly—and "Uptown Girl” with Billy Joel, an ugly strutting circus dwarf, the girl in the video tempting us almost beyond endurance, melting inside, transfixed before the screen. Lee’s room appeared enormous, the doorway a vast distance from where I sat in the opposite corner, Lee and Pete perched gingerly on the bed as though there were on beams of wood high in the air.

We clambered up through the loft and onto the roof, Pete and I having a momentary dread in case Lee hurled himself to his death. What is it that happens? Blotches, marks, smudges on walls, floors and skin, are all joined in a delicate softly shifting tracery of patterns, the carpet a two-dimensional mechanical pattern, vibrating gently, my own face in the mirror blemished asnd red, overlaid by shimmering networks of lines and swirls.

We walked through the grounds of the Cathedral, the summer crowds thick around us. Lee and I had the simultaneous impression that we were being propelled forward, as though we were high up on a scaffold which was being pushed along on wheels, the crowd at our backs awaiting a public crucifixion. We couldn’t help ourselves for laughing.

In the Pembroke we tried to play chess, which was an impossible task, as if the entire dead-weight machinery of the universe blocked every move. The pieces were like lead, the infinite permutations and juxtapositions of possible moves an impossible-to-unravel complexity and mystery. We stared hard and our brains beat themselves uselessly against the brick walls of illogic. Upstairs in the toilets the flowery-pattern wallpaper swirled and blossomed and Lee saw a black-gloved hand tearing away the wallpaper as he took a piss.

Back downstairs, more fun with spatial distortions, and we perched miles high at the bar, the trough of the booths far below. Everything was either vast, or small, or a puzzling, fascinating mixture of both. Landlord Joe watched us with a bewildered and wry look as we gulped fizzy lemonade. A couple behind Lee’s shoulder took on the guise of insects, crustaceous, furtive, crawly as they talked, the man trying to pick up the woman, his high speed bug-eyed, square-jawed insistence striking me as particularly insect-like. Joe became a sphinx and we crouched in our seats as he looked down on us with sly elongate Arab-eyes.

The next moment Lee said he couldn’t move and so he sat there in a dread paralysis, telling us where to move his chess pieces. He said that his left arm felt as if it no longer belonged to him and he could feel his own arm moving inside the mechanical outer skin. Then, as we packed the chess set away, his arms completely lost their connection with the rest of his body and for a moment we all three saw them as belonging to someone else. I held my own hand up before my face and realised it was possible to coolly and cleanly slice away each successive layer of matter with my eyes, cutting through outer dermis, muscle, tendon, the sub-skin muscle pulsing with life, until at last I reached the stark, out-splayed skeletal fingers.

We decided to go to the Bat and Ball, a dim idea in our minds to meet Stu, Gareth and Barry; we seemed to walk for a long time and cover no distance at all, but if we glanced away and glanced back, the scenery directly in front of us had leaped yards closer. It was a strange, strange sensation walking each one of us alone together past people with hawk faces and spindly spider legs. Each person we passed presented a physique and facial appearance more laughable and pitifully deformed than the last, and we laughed so loudly and immediately that I feared we were about to get beaten up.

Finally, after what seemed an interminable length of time and an endless cavalcade of freaks and grotesqueries, we reached the vast road junctions next to the Bat and Ball, great deserts of tarmac which we ran across feeling conspicuous and anxious. I went into a ‘phone box to ring Barry and Stu, but almost suffocated on the thick piss smell. They weren’t answering.

We went in the pub’ briefly but couldn’t bear the hostile cartoon faces and so walked out to the grass, walking through green rubber trees with cauliflower leaves into a great amphitheatre. A pregnant woman walked towards us, her blue dress stretched tight over her protuberant belly, and we were disgusted when we saw the domed head and the line of spine of the curled up foetus inside her. Lee said everything looked like a cheap ‘60s ciné film. He seemed uncomprehending and confused but eventually came to terms with the things he saw. As we sat on the grass I chewed a root but had to spit it out when it turned into a worm.

We wandered back to the seafront, our movements now fluid, now mechanical, our bodies not our own. We ate burgers and drank lemonade and dropped in at the Admiral to see Lindsey behind the bar being leered at by disgusting old alchies. At a loss now. Pete looked bored, so we ended up back home at Maynard Gardens watching TV. We could see through it all, plumb the blatant advertising come-ons and the cheap pretences with a weary ease.

Lee and I rounded things off by going to an all-night café for a plateful of semi-cold leftovers and a look at the freaks, funsters and derelicts, which at this time and in our state was a terrible place.

Next to Lee a bleary-eyed drunk slumped over a plate of congealed baked beans, his cigarette burning down in the ashtray as he tried to pick up an unresponsive and cold faced girl who sneered and smile-snarled at his pathetic stories and chat-up routines, humouring him, just passing the time of night—with a flash of recognition, we could see what is “on the end of every fork,” cleave through these poses, acts, charades, masks and fancy costumes and reveal the chittering human organism beneath, squirming naked in its unlovely insect gore, see humanity and all of human life as it really is—harsh foul-mouthed laughter, black fingernails, feeble dirty hands, grubby sweat-bright faces, the smear of cheap lipstick amid the greasy plates, all the contemptible vanities of fashion and hairstyles transfixed by the eye of understanding.

We left feeling tarnished and unclean, the town alive with racing police cars.

A slow wearying comedown . . . bed soon . . . it’s almost three.

Possibilities

Very frustrating.

Today was the day we’d planned our mass-ingestion of LSD but I wasn’t able to get in touch with anyone at Westdorgan Road. I rang them numerous times throughout the afternoon and early evening but no one answered the ‘phone, and Lee, Pete and I began to consider the bitter possibility that they’d all taken it without us. This was not the case, we found later; the telephone wasn’t working properly.

So the day progressed to a disappointing, frustrating conclusion, the only highlight being the games of chess we played at the Pembroke.

No. 1

I got three letters; one from Dad, another from Mum, and the third from Andrew.

Mum’s letter disturbed me; it was uncharacteristically drawn out and struck me as emotional. She ended it with, “Thank you for being our son,” a phrase which puzzled me a great deal. She’d picked up on comments I’d made in my last letter home about my the moving house business and she feels her intuitions have been proven right and I’ve now been left “high and dry,” with nowhere to go. She mentioned Andrew and I having similar interests: “you could do all kinds of things together.”

The final paragraph declares that, “Dad once told you to look out for yourself first and I think he’s been proved right. If you don’t look after no. 1, no one else will.” As I said, the letter disturbed me but also touched me and made me laugh with its almost childlike innocent questioning phraseology. “It’s quite uncanny how you all think like us. Should we be proud or sad, do you think?”

She also mentioned Nanna P. and her messiness and that Nanna B. is bitter about our Calverdale holiday, saying, “Who wants to go on holiday to look at a lot of bloody cows!” Says Mum, “I feel sorry for her and her sort, don’t you?”

I know she doesn’t like writing letters and the fact that she penned such a lengthy one shows how worried she must be. So tonight I rung her up and reassured her, although she sounded doubtful. She also mentioned that Nanna P. has had her X-rays and is nervous about the results, and recently had £90 stolen by a conman who bluffed his way in to her flat by claiming to be a council workman. He asked her to put her finger on the kitchen tap to check for drips and left her standing there while he raided her purse.

I rang Andrew tonight too. In his letter he offered to buy me a ticket to Bracknell Jazz Festival as a birthday present. I wonder if this was partly inspired by Mum’s anxious ‘phone discussions with him about me? He told me he’s buying a 550cc Suzuki and will have it in time for the Festival.

Deflation

The day has slid by, fulfilling its glaring summery promise. No surprises.

Stu and I bought more LSD from Kevin Yettram in Gaunt’s Hill View, two tabs each for ourselves and three tabs for Pete and Lee between them. We met Gareth in the Three Tuns and walked into town for a few late games of pool at the Bat and Ball on Wickbourne Road.

Gareth goes home on Saturday. I couldn’t evade the tedious, deflating end of term feel about everything, noticing it in his bored slouching in his chair and lack of interest in the promise of our mass-‘trip’ at the end of the week.

Lindsey and Susie both got jobs working behind the bar at the Admiral on the seafront. . . .

Verbal masturbation

My Conflict and Consensus tutorial was the usual forlorn tedium.

On The Road and Howl were this week’s topics for for dissection and verbal masturbation, JK especially getting slagged off as pretentious, shallow and sexist. Fair point, but I still think Kerouac an inspiration. For all the ‘intellectual clarity,’ no one began to penetrate the inner heart of the writing, and I left feeling slightly irritated.

I went and got drunk at the newly refurbished Pembroke with Gareth and Stu, the former sun burnt from his weekend at the Glastonbury CND festival. We then went back to their place and we've whiled away the night smoking dope with Jason and Barry and Lindsey. For all my supposed indifference and liberal laissez-faire declarations, I was acutely aware of Jason and Lindsey.

I fully expected them to slink off to bed together. But they didn’t, and L. climbed the stairs alone.

Gareth has gone to bed fairly early too as he’s tired from his eleven-hour journey. I’m sleeping on Stu’s floor.

Stop and see

First the Harley-Davidson-riding Hell’s Angels, yesterday the mods and skinheads, and now the cyclists; today Watermouth's full of them, streaming towards the sea front along Maynard Gardens in their hundreds.

This is a popular place in the summer; holiday makers crowding the grass outside the Cathedral, packing the antique shops in North Street and the seafront, and I regard them with the cynical eye of the year-round inhabitant. I can’t now see this place objectively, or see why everyone comes here, excitedly taking photos. It’s the same with the Dales.

My bathroom-cum-bedroom overlooks Barnum Avenue and the all-night clatter of the fruit and vegetable market, and the comings and goings of lorries and forklift trucks often disturbs my sleep at night. If I stand on my bed to open the sash window I can see across the street into the bright lit interior of the Rajneesh centre opposite, which is situated inconspicuously—almost furtively—beside the market. I can see the devotees—if that be the word—moving to and fro inside, clad all in red, and they’re a familiar sight these days around this particular area of Maynard Gardens.

One of their number, bearded and with black hair and beads around his neck, occasionally serves on behind the bar in the Pembroke, reading the Rajneesh Times when he’s unoccupied.

What difference does it make?

I went to a party on Holtspur Road with Lee and Pete. Lee and I stayed perhaps five minutes in total. It was a one room, red-lit affair, The Smiths blaring above the din of party chat and laughter. Pat Duncan and his shaven-headed friends loomed around the doorway, PD looking drugged and/or drunk, blinking and staring around at the walls and ceiling and people as though he’d forgotten glasses or was wearing new contact lenses. . . .

It was the worst party I’ve been to for quite a while. As such moments I vow to myself never to go to another party again, for I’ve yet to go to one that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed. L. and I walked back, leaving Pete to be sociable . . .

Wessex Road was alive with ambulances and police motorcycle escorts racing past with wailing sirens and flashing lights. There were quite a few skinheads about. I overheard two in the Pembroke earlier saying they were down from Broadbourne to “fuck modettes” . . ..

I am Dylan Thomas

I copied up my essay—nine-and-a-bit sides—and at four I caught the bus onto campus with Pete to hand it in. It was a lot cooler today, overcast, windy, and more bearable. We were given a lift back by Jeff Fowler.

In the evening I dropped in at the Frigate briefly with Lee and found Barry, Guy, and John Turney downstairs. Barry said that everyone has “fucked off”—Stu and Penny have gone home, Gareth has gone to see Siouxsie and The Banshees and Lindsey was working at the Admiral. Turney made some comment about my ears, which I laughed about at the time but on reflection I should have defended myself. He’s so tiresome.

Gav is in London. Alex and Sarah are at Stonehenge. Gav’s friend Ray Edgehill sleeps in G’s room while G. is away as he’s been kicked out of his current place. He and Hawaiian-shirted Scottish friend arrived at quarter past eleven, both very drunk. RE was wearing an “I am Dylan Thomas” T-shirt.

I feel particularly unable to endure such company so I’ve retreated upstairs to my bathroom.

→ FORWARD →

Four years on from June 8th 1980 → FORWARD →

Pete and I called in at Westdorgan Road last night and were both struck by the atmosphere of boredom, ill-temper and cynicism. We were glad to leave and I began to rue my decision to move in at the end of the month. I put my foot in it yet again when Ade uncharacteristically refused the oil as it was passed to him. I bluntly commented “perhaps you should try reading a book,” and he left shortly after scarcely saying another word.

Since Monday the weather has been consistently hot, not a cloud in the sky. This morning at ten the thermometer in my east-facing bathroom registered nearly 80°F. I’m finding it impossible to work and apply myself to the task in hand. I struggled all morning with the writing of an extended essay on Burroughs for Colin Pasmore, an essay that should have been written and handed in on Wednesday, but by mid-afternoon I’d failed even to make a start and so missed another tutorial (on Alice Walker), which is my second for this course this term. I can hardly look forward to a very encouraging report. I managed two-and-a-half sides and then spent four hours looking at books on photography and film, Rodchenko’s 1924 portraits of Mayakovsky, etc.

I finally managed to write eight sides in rough, and copied up 2½ sides, and at ten-thirty, Pete and I went to the Lancaster to see Jeff Fowler and Miles Beattie’s band That Whole Panic! The music was fast funk, Jeff’s girlfriend Laura on keyboards, M. Beattie all arms and legs, pouting, on vocals (“Trees and sky, no reason why . . .”), JF an excellent bassist. Lindsey, Barry, Stu and Susie were there too, Lindsey and Barry in particular quite drunk.

Our LSD extravaganza is set for the end of next week and the number of participants is now some half-a-dozen. I sat there watching the sparse crowd and wishing I had the wherewithal to perform ‘live.’

19 years, 348 days

I spent the day on campus, not in the library as intended, but lazing in the sun on the grass outside with Pete. We lingered there until eight thirty, the evening cool and clear, the heat of the afternoon having subsided, blown away on the soft refreshing winds of approaching night.

We talked about America and Pete seems enthusiastic about his year abroad. He plans on reveling in the superiority of being English in America. Occasionally, I get the merest twinges of disappointment and regret. I say the merest twinges, because I ruthlessly crush them before I have time to feel I’ve made a mistake.

Travel seems to be the favourite post-finals option among the few people I’ve spoken to. I talked about this with Mum as we walked back from Forefield when I was in Calverdale, and she said she’s altered her position on traveling rather than settling down. When I used to mention this to her before A-levels she blew her top and made me feel ungrateful for saying I wasn’t going to University just to get a job. Yet now she says if she was in my position she’d travel.

“Robert has always wanted to travel but Carol isn’t keen . . ..” This is all quite a weight off my mind and the more I think about the years after I leave University the more optimistic I am—opening doors, etc. I am only nineteen years, 348 days old, and the thought of this makes me glad . . ..

Hallucinated viewpoint

Round at Westdorgan Road in the afternoon with Gareth, Stu, Ade and Barry, smoking oil that Stu had pestered Ade to buy. Stu seems bad-tempered and cynical these days. Gareth made himself sick with a combination of sulphate, alcohol and oil: his room is used as the communal space by everyone else and it’s where TV is watched, drugs taken (orally, nasally), food eaten and plates left . . ..

When I move in I’m moving the TV into the kitchen.

Lindsey, Susie and I went up to the Westdorgan and fell to drunken enthusiasms on the subject of LSD. We’re having a mass ‘trip’ next week, maybe Tuesday or Wednesday, which will include me, Gareth, Stu, and Pete for definite, and perhaps Lindsey, Barry, Susie and Lee. LSD and sulphate are the two drugs I feel least opposed to/uneasy about, the latter for its constructive application, the former for the sheer hedonistic novelty of the hallucinated viewpoint and the resultant humour and chaos.

Invisible man

The sun beats down unremittingly from a heavy, stagnant sky. It’s the beginning of summer.

A tutorial again this morning on Ellison’s Invisible Man. I sat for two hours saying all of a dozen words, staring out of the window at the green of the trees, totally bored. It was only the third tutorial I’ve attended for that course, and I must have missed four or five already this term. I’ve written one essay and I intend writing my extended essay on the Beats.

Gareth, Lee and I have been talking about taking a trip to America in September, hitching from LA to Plotinus to stay with Pete and Guy. We reckon we could do it all for about £500, but now that I’ve agreed to move in to Gareth’s room over the summer I have that rent to pay on top of my other expenses.

It seems I hardly speak properly with Pete or Lee nowadays; they are quite often off together, big friends of late.

Reverberations

I didn’t wake up until two o’clock this afternoon.

Went to a party last night at, 44A, our old place. Stu, Gareth, Penny, Lindsey, Susie and Ade came along too. Stu and I left soon after arriving to try buy some more acid from Kevin Yettram but no one was in. Back at the party, Gareth drunkenly chatted up Anita, one of Susie’s friends, crushing himself close. Jason, Barry and Stu and I went back to Ade’s: we chased a couple of dragons (man) and I got back to the Grey House for three a.m.

I’m closeted in my bathroom hunched over this script. The house is quiet. Instead of spending the time writing about what I’ve done, I should write about what I’ve thought or wondered. I must apply myself to a couple of hours writing each day to become practiced at the art. My essay on Burroughs remains unstarted. I have to hand it in next Wednesday.

I haven’t been too well the last three or four days and I’ve got a bad cold, catarrh, pains in the head. It’s so hard to apply myself to anything constructive living like this. I spoke to Dad on the ‘phone, wished him a happy Father’s Day, and things fell into a sort of order as the breath of stability blew through me.

I’m strangely unaffected by the news about Lindsey and Jason, and instead I'm curiously but pleasingly free of all mental tremors and reverberations.

Circus

I woke up as the train set off back to London, hurtling through the darkness unlit and unannounced. I had hours to wait for the nightbus to Waterloo and wandered wearily around the busy station, very hungry and very tired. Got back to Watermouth at seven or so in the morning and went straight to bed.

In the evening Stu and Barry and I went round to Ade and Jason’s. Jason has been to the Stonehenge Festival he had to borrow £40 from Stu & Gareth to do so, and when we got there he was cycling around on Lindsey’s bike looking like a circus act in tails, pirate belt & pinstriped trousers tucked into his Doc Marten boots. We smoked some oil and a tiny bit of scag—my first—although not enough to have any effect.

Ade casually remarked that Lindsey has been sleeping with Jason. He stayed the night after they all went to see the films at the Phoenix last night. This hurt a little at first. Lucky bastard! My singular lack of success in this department has crushed any confidence I ever had in my own abilities and qualities.

Ancient to the future

I caught the three-thirty train to London to see the Art Ensemble of Chicago. I went straight to Camden Town via the tube and spent a couple of hours in Compendium Bookshop and Rhythm Records (formerly Honest Jon’s). I bought the Mottram study of Burroughs for £3.95 and three records: Urban Bushmen (Art Ensemble of Chicago), the soundtrack to Aguirre Wrath of God (Popol Vuh ), and a record by Gilbert and Lewis (of Wire and Dome). I haven't listened to any of them yet.

Got to the Royal Festival Hall about quarter-to-seven and waited, feeling alone, wishing I had someone to talk to. At seven thirty prompt, the doors opened and we were allowed into the vast auditorium. The doorman in evening suit and bowtie made some cryptic remark about my garb.

I sat about fifty yards from and slightly to the right of centre stage. The support band, Barb played lightweight jazz-funk love songs. Everyone was impatient. The glittering mountain of instruments caught my eye, the banner remembered from March 1982 (Great Black Music – Ancient To The  Future), a great array of gongs, saxophones, drums, bells, kettles, flashing lights, a panoply of shapes and sounds.

The machine began, Lester Bowie starting with a throat-hoarse whine on the trumpet. How can I capture (for you, for me!) the precise essence of the things I heard and saw and (as Alex would say) categorically felt? The set seemed less free and unstructured than my memory had led me to expect: long eruptions of rhythm overlaid with wild and repetitive sax solos which had us captivated and enmeshed for hours, one piece where each member built up a thundering, galloping conga and kettle drum rhythm which brought spontaneous applause.

(This formal method of 'capturing experience' is hopelessly inadequate at capturing this particular experience. I'm not skillful or committed enough at this moment to attempt a long and soul-destroying struggle with words and grammar and finite vocabulary in order to achieve a ridiculously inaccurate approximation of the reality of mt experience. I saw and heard and it was good. Let this, for the time being, suffice).

After the concert finished I decided I’d visit Andrew and I had a mad dash across London to Liverpool Street Station to catch the last train to St. Merefin’s. Somehow a return to Watermouth seemed too much an anticlimax. I ended up—an hour later—in Tanburh, the last train back to London having gone, marooned on the station platform in the pouring rain. I should have—but had not been told that I should have—changed at Monkney. So there I was, bitterly disappointed and angry at myself and at British Rail.

The porter let me sleep in the train for a little while.

Limbo

I grabbed a few hours sleep on Gareth’s floor.

These days Barry’s often round at Jason and Ade’s flat on Ewart Place taking drugs. He said Jason gets through £10 worth of heroin a week, smoking it in dragons, although now there’s some talk of ‘jacking it’ for the “better hit.”

Few other events of any significance have punctuated the fabric of my life since I returned from Calverdale. My homelessness dominates all aspects of my thought: in fact it subdues them, because I can’t think clearly or in any settled fashion while I’m in this limbo.

Voices green and purple

I bought two tabs of LSD, large blotters with 'LSD 100' embossed on them, from Stu’s friend Kev Yettram who lives in Gaunt’s Hill View. Stu had work to do, so I took one tab on my own at about nine-thirty and went to the Westdorgan with Gareth, Lindsey and Susie. I took a second tab at midnight as I watched the Uruguay v England match live on TV.

I started to feel the effects mid-way through the second half: it was a subtle change, and I suddenly noticed that the players seemed to be moving oddly and the pitch was no longer a monotone grey but writhed and twisted in green and purple. I was aware I was no longer watching the football, but was now simply staring at the movement of the screen.

In the bathroom  I flushed the toilet, and out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of what appeared to be foam spilling over on to the carpet, but when I looked again I saw that the ‘foam’ was all around me, advancing across the floor at my feet. The carpet writhed and heaved and was overlaid with spectacular coloured geometrical patterns. I stared at my face in the mirror and the longer I gazed at it the less familiar it appeared until, with a slight shock and recoil I saw the face was no longer mine.

In the kitchen I kept losing track of where I was, thinking for an odd moment that I was in Robin Quinn’s kitchen on Briar Avenue, back in Farnshaw. I couldn’t manage a simple task like boiling a kettle of water and making tea. Too easily distracted. I went and sat in Gareth’s room with  Stu and Gareth and Lindsey but I was suddenly overcome with a fit of self-consciousness and awareness of my self, and other people, separate from me.

Barry arrived back quite late on bringing some hash oil with him, which the four of them proceeded to smoke, smearing the oil on silver foil, heating it from beneath with a match and then simultaneously sucking the fumes in through a tube as the oil droplet trickled and vapourized down the foil. Lindsey had never tried ‘chasing the dragon’ before and she found it difficult to manipulate tube, foil and match, and Barry made some derogatory comment. I was intensely aware of her embarrassment and sullen resentment at the male dominance of this ‘drug-culture’ she was experiencing. When she tried it again she sulky and with a prickle of annoyance in her voice said to Barry, “You won’t shout at me this time will you?”

I had quite a good time at this point as conversations blurred into misunderstanding and general hilarity. Gareth eventually fell asleep on his bed at six o’clock and Stu disappeared half-an-hour later.

Languish

Up at midday.

I’ve spent the latter part of today clearing out the top floor bathroom in the Grey House, cleaning the sink and toilet, laying down a carpet and sweeping the floor.

The room is painted a puce pinkish purple with khaki green pipes and fireplace/skirting boards, and although it’s small and cramped it does at least have a degree of comfort (such as running water) that was missing from my room at the Vicarage. My bed is crammed between the toilet and the sink, alongside the bath, and beneath the dirty window. It would get me down if I were stuck here very long, but thankfully it’s only a couple more weeks.

I’ve moved all my things upstairs save for my box of books that still languishes in the basement. Quite a lot of Sarah’s things are down there as well and although she’s been around a couple of times she hasn’t collected them yet.

Anything at all

I went to my Conflict and Consensus tutorial for the first time since 21st May. I was weary and bored.

In the evening, at Westdorgan Road, Stu persuaded me to take a tab of acid. It was the the early hours of the morning by this time, and I eventually fell asleep but woke up a couple of hours later feeling very odd. I couldn’t bear to sit still for above a couple of minutes at a time and my legs tingled and I felt restless. I was filled with a warm sensation.

Both Stu and I were in the same boat, and this led us to believe that one tab wasn’t quite enough to start us tripping. We remained in this half-and-half state for several hours before going to sleep at about seven.

The plastic's all melted

We wandered down to the promenade through clammy sea fret.

On either side of the road  stretching as far as the eye was a congested mass of people and glittering Harley Davidson motorbikes—two thousand of them somebody said—Hell’s Angels with wrap around shades, black helmets and filthy leathers astride elegant monsters in chrome and polished metal, lady-riders in white leathers fringed with tassles, old enthusiasts with kids riding pillion, riders in peaked US police helmets sitting nonchalantly upright on bikes as wide as cars, contingents from Germany, Holland, USA, the usual crowds of hangers-on riding Japanese bikes and mopeds . . . . There were a few wartime models, each painted in drab khaki with a single white star across the petrol tank, a leather rifle holster on the front forks, the riders in US army helmet, khaki one-piece suit and boots.

For most of the day they’ve been roaring around Watermouth in big groups, turning heads. We were in the Pembroke playing pool at dinnertime when the roar and thunder of several hundred thousand c-c’s sent everyone—landlord and all—rushing to the door to watch the seemingly endless stream cruise past, engines snarling, the air full of blue smoke. . ..

Other hotels

The day passed pleasantly enough in the hotel. We enjoyed a big breakfast of bacon, egg, sausage and as much toast as we could eat. The proprietor is a smarmy overbearing man with greying hair and a neatly trimmed greying moustache who minces and fawns around us, laughing loudly at the slightest thing.

I can’t help remembering other hotels in the past, where I stayed with Mum and Dad.

Victims of circumstance

This morning, Lee and I wandered up from the Grey House to find the hallway at the Vicarage filled with Oculus executives and workmen.

There were about a dozen altogether and their leader, grey suited and smiling, reminding me of a character from “The Godfather,” an impression emphasized by the presence of an obscenely fat bearded ‘heavy’ with tattooed arms . . .. We were told we had to get the rest of our things out within the day. We couldn’t believe it, and immediately directed our anger and frustration in Morris’s direction, wondering whether he’d either lied to us or simply got things wrong.

There was no one else about apart from Lee and I and the Citibank people who were now busy putting a different lock on the front door, so we rushed back down to the Art College and made fruitless attempts to ring Morris and Keith at the Housing Association before Pete and Gav appeared on the scene. I spent the next couple of hours lugging my boxes, trunks and suitcases down four flights of stairs and out into the road where I piled them on the pavement while the gangster boss wandered about with slimy benevolence in the front hallway . . ..

Eventually Morris turned up, then Sarah, and then the press were summoned and Pete, Lee, Sarah & I were photographed standing among our piles of belongings. By now we’d improved in spirits and we viewed the whole situation, growing more farcical by the minute, with loud amusement. I was interviewed by a woman reporter from the Herald and I told her that “we are just the victims of circumstance . . . Our only crime is to be homeless,” which made her laugh out loud at my clichéd parody. As her photographer took pictures (he was from Easterby we discovered), we invited an old man into the scene who’d been watching proceedings from across the street.

He wore a red carnation in his buttonhole and we gave him a bottle of pig’s blood to hold that Lee still had from the slaughterhouse, and Pete was photographed with his arm around him while we laughed ourselves hoarse. The oldster then proceeded, in a barely comprehensible voice, to tell us a tale about taking a teapot to a tip. “Can you believe that?” he said, laughing as he reached the end of his incoherent story.

Then two road sweepers stopped by on their way past. Their spokesman was in his late-fifties, scarred and bespectacled, and told us a story about a rich lady (with “nothing better to do with her fuckin’ time than pick on road sweepers”) who’d tripped and “fallen right on her fuckin’ face, the fuckin’ cunt.” He found this highly amusing and asked us if there was anyone we wanted beating up, so Pete jokingly pointed out Morris. We had to drag him back as he was rolling up his sleeves in preparation for the beating.

Pete somehow managed to get hold of a van driver who agreed to move all the stuff free of charge but he didn’t turn up until teatime, and by then we’d laughed so much that we felt burned out and deflated. After a short trip down to Maynard Gardens to unload the stuff into the basement, we were on our way to the Pembroke for a game of pool when Morris accosted us from across the road and told us that he’d been in touch with Oculus and they’d admitted that the whole thing had been a big mistake, a case of “crossed-wires” as he put it. So in order to atone for their blunder they’d agreed to put three of us up in a bed and breakfast for the weekend. We could hardly believe our luck, especially after M. told us that there was a chance Oculus would pay both our rates and electricity bills too.

So we followed Morris to Devon Square and a Watermouth Housing Association hostel for alcoholics to finalise plans and then went to the hotel, (Charles House), at Fiveways, to sign for and collect our keys. We rounded off one of the funniest days in a long time in the Frigate getting drunk with everyone else, Pete and I maliciously hooting over a story Oscar had told Pete about a time he went to bed with Kate, one of Liddy's friends, but unfortunately Liddy was within earshot and heard what it was we were laughing about.

Gareth and Stu came back and spent the night at the hotel with us.

Entrance hall

I've been worried about all my things piled up unprotected in my old room at the Vicarage, so quite late on Lee and I returned with his bike lock and a hammer, and climbed in through the basement window (the lock on the front door is now at the Grey House). We found Morris snoring off his hangover in Lee’s old room: Lee had locked him in and so he’d had to piss in the corner.

It was pitch black inside, and as we groped for the stairs we bumped into 'Dylan’ who was wandering about, alone in the darkness. Lee nearly hit him with the hammer.

“I thought I had met an early demise” said Dylan, in his odd, precise way.

Lee and I went upstairs and smashed the glass above the door on the first floor landing leading up to my room, wound the bike lock through the gap, and thus sealed off the top floor. We left our friend (“psychedelic Ken,” according to one of Alex’s friends who seems to know of him) standing bewildered and lost in the dark entrance hall outside Ben’s room, his glasses still hanging precariously from his right ear.

Fragile eggshell mind

Ben had a ‘party’ at the Vicarage to celebrate what I heard was an “indefinite extension” Oculus have agreed to (supposedly arranged in London in negotiations with Desmond Ardingly, MP for Watermouth), on the condition that we agree to leave within twenty four hours of notice being given. That changes things slightly; maybe I should stay on for the last three weeks of term at the Vicarage?

Quite a few people turned up to the party, and when I looked in, everyone was sitting in his room talking and smoking; Morris had collapsed in a drunken heap on the threadbare sofa.

Sarah has already arranged for a few homeless wimmin to move in at the weekend. Morris has decided that he’s going to stay in Gav’s room for a while to supervise the haphazard comings and goings: there’s an escaped nut called Tom who believes he’s Jim Morrison and who’s living in Gav’s old room for a couple of days.

Magic roundabout

I packed some of my things up at the Vicarage.

I found someone asleep on my bed on the top floor. His feet stank. I angrily shook him awake, a thin-faced man in his 20s, maybe even 30, who I’d never seen before, with collar length frazzled hair and a distant unconcerned expression on his face. One of Ben Beresford’s mental patient friends, who he’s presumably met at the hospital . . ..

I told him to get off my bed and he did, his glasses dangling askew from one ear, nowhere near his face, where they remained for the rest of the evening. . . He was quite polite and spoke with a sort of unnecessarily precise and slightly mad emphasis on each individual word. He said he’d felt tired and fell asleep on my bed.

“Are there any other beds in the house?”

I directed him down to Ben’s room where he fell asleep on his back, his head propped against the head-board of the bed, a cigarette in his mouth, his glasses still hanging from one ear.

He reminded me of Dylan from Magic Roundabout.

Transient fruits

I helped Lee and Pete move the rest of their things to the Grey House on a sculpture park trolley, borrowed from the Art College. We had an amusing time steering it down hill as it weighed a ton and was difficult to control.

The Grey House was opened as a squat on May 29th. Alex and Gav slept the first few nights here; the police were told, the owner of the building informed and legal warning notices put up. It was decided not to go through the Watermouth Housing Association as everyone is by now sick of Morris’s unrealistic promises and his mania for publicity and his Squatting Cause.

The owner of the Grey House is a Mrs. Coldman-Hicks, who’s slowly dying in a mental hospital; her son said that we can live here until she finally pegs out and he wants to sell. Lee showed me some of her insane letters, some to “The Col. of the Guards Regiment,” scrawled in a childish, almost illegible hand, that rant on about the people next door and their “machine” that when they switch it on hurts her right eye and right leg, the postman who keeps people prisoner and all the visitors who steal from her. She even had her solicitor send the next door neighbour a letter saying that “our client kindly asks that you refrain from putting your hands through the wall and stealing her money.”

Her son obviously wants shut of the whole business. Gav said he was very decent about everything and put just one condition on their living there, that his fiancée’s daughter be allowed to move in to the basement. But when the daughter turned up she brought along three friends, all of whom seemed to want to move in too.

Mo has moved out of Castle Mount Court as the landlord wouldn’t renew her tenancy so she is now living in Pete’s back room. Apparently I could have had Alex’s room because Alex said he was going to Amsterdam, but now he’s delayed his departure until the summer so that Gav can go with him, but at least he offered me his front room while I clean up the basement. I can hardly complain when it’s free, and Pete’s offered me his room when he goes to America in late August.

Until then I’ve got several possibilities. I could stay here another two-and a-half weeks until the end of term and move into Gareth’s room at Westdorgan Road as he’s going home for the summer, or I could try find a place on my own straight away. There are advantages and disadvantages to both schemes.

Guy moved out of his flat into a bedsit of his own in Ledwell Street. It’s £25 a week and he said it was very difficult finding a decent place; he hung around newsagents waiting for the first edition of the Herald every morning, trailed round the agencies and made numerous and fruitless ‘phone calls and trips to see dingy pigsties let by sharks and con men before he found his current place.

I know this would get me down, but a single room on my own would be ideal. Moving into Gareth’s room is easier but I can’t help worrying I’d get caught up in the enjoyable but fatal round of going out and staying up into the early hours, or sitting about talking or taking drugs . . . transient fruits, soon rotten. Plus Westdorgan Road is miles from central Watermouth . . ..

I just can’t decide. The rent at Gareth’s is £17.50 a week; the rent for a bedsit is bound to be much higher.

Grey House

I came back on the noon bus which reached Watermouth a little after eight in the evening. It was a boring journey down, with all the customary stops, and when we finally came upon Watermouth the sun was setting in a golden blaze, painting the hills with light.

At the Vicarage I found a message in my room from Lee telling me that they’d found a new squat  at 66 Maynard Gardens and that I had a basement room and should “Come and Join the P-A-R-T-Y.” Most people had already moved their belongings out of the Vicarage. Gav’s room was empty, scattered with paper and litter, and Lee’s room was almost empty too . . ..

So with a little trepidation I walked down Albany Mount to Maynard Gardens. Number 66 is a tall grey house with black window frames and a plain wooden door in a terrace facing the main road. Everyone already refers to it as the “Grey House.”

Lee and Pete were both enthusiastic about the new place and quick to point out that I’d made an error in going home when I did. They noisily showed me round. Below pavement level is a basement that’s very dingy, filled with clutter and thick with cobwebs, and the view from the window is a procession of feet and wheels. There’s a back room down there also, which is equally choked with rubbish and looks out onto an overgrown, mossy and dank high-walled yard. On the ground floor are two main rooms (occupied by Alex), a narrow front hall leading to the stairs and a long narrow kitchen illuminated by a skylight. Beyond the kitchen is a toilet.

Gav lives on the first floor in the best rooms in the house. They’re carpeted, with bookshelves and tidily decorated, and there’s a small balcony overlooking the roar of traffic in Maynard Gardens. On the second floor is Pete’s room, also carpeted, and Lee’s room and a bathroom are on the third floor. There’s also a toilet on the landing between the ground floor and Gav’s room.

All the rooms have sinks with taps that work and the toilets flush. There’s running water in the kitchen, and even hot water!

Happy memories leave a bitter taste

Robert and Carol came today and stayed into the evening, back from a week in Stakedale with kids from school which they said they enjoyed, save for the drunken excesses of the rest of the staff.

As twilight deepened into night, the five of us talked about the tragic nature of time and life, the existential nature of perception, the grasping ego, and how we return to the places we love time after time because in pursuit of an illusion and an anticipated reality that hardly ever conforms to the ‘actual’ reality. Happy memories spur us on, but we never find what we’re looking for. The best we can hope for is that we stumble across some new moments of insight and enjoyment . . ..

We can’t process the moment of harmony, the moment whose essence escapes us the more we stand back and intellectualise it. For one brief moment we realise and we can see.

There were moments in Calverdale when I felt I couldn’t say exactly what it was I wanted in going back there, but at others—such as the time on Half Stile Hill watching the eclipse, the river Calver beneath us bathed in golden green light—the pulse of certainty was strong and I knew: ‘This is it . . .’ Our fixed mental conceptions of a particular place, event or person victimize us and we find time and time again that the reality of now—the present moment—fails to live up our expectations, and we’re surprised and disappointed.

I’m reminded of the story I read somewhere of a man who went back to the house where he’d grown up and where, as a boy, he’d helped his father plant a seedling. In the intervening years, the seedling had grown vividly in his mind into a mighty tree, yet when he returned to the house he found out that the sapling had been cut down not long after his family had moved. What then was the greater reality for that man? The treeless garden of the present, or the sturdy spreading tree of his mental landscape?

Most people would say the former, yet for the man, the mental tree was real for many years. We’re the incurable victims of our preconceptions and fantasies. We can’t be freed, for these tendencies are linked inextricably with our hopes and desires. Where lies freedom from the cycle of conditioned responses and action . . .? We spend lifetimes pursuing our illusions while here and now reality slips through our fingers even as we see it, feel it, hear it . . ..

Robert and Carol left for Dearnelow at ten-thirty. They’ve booked a fortnight in the caravan in Calverdale for August.

Swallowed up in time

Drove back home today instead of tomorrow as planned. Dad was ill with a cold and the weather deteriorated overnight so we cut the holiday short. We came back through Low End, Marpeth Nook, Kit Bank Bottom, over the Stonewath Pass to Ainderdale and got back at two-thirty.

The past six days at Friar Beck have been enjoyable and Calverdale has become one of my favourite places. The things I declared would be, ARE.

My perceptions of the holiday strengthen as its actuality is swallowed up in time.