Fur coats and bow ties

Yesterday fairly routine, just as I’d expected, and later Stu and I trekked out to the Indian takeaway on Wickbourne Road. We went to the Westdorgan at nine, and I was in bed by 1 a.m. . . .

Went to University at one, a tutorial, and so it begins again, this weekly bind of self-recrimination, baulking at the boredom entailed in reading Faulkner—so dull. Then into town and Lee’s for a cup of tea.

P. Monmouth told me he was “going to be an artist” in the commercial sense of the word, making big money selling artworks to the gallery fraternity, the fur coats and bow ties who queue nightly at places like the Barbican. Lee has hopes of doing the same with his 360-degree pinhole photography. I will make my fortune writing hardcore porno novels.

Later Lee and I partook of £2.50-worth of sulphate and the buzz we felt walking along the seafront gave way to leaden-limbed torpor and an overwhelming fatigue by the time we got back to Westdorgan Road.

Familiar stones

A continuation of yesterday’s inactivity—reading, records and food.

I played Robert at Scrabble before he, Carol and I set off for Easterby and the football. We stopped for a curry at the Bahawal and I tried to communicate to them both my love for Easterby and the familiar stones of my hometown. We dropped Carol off at Egley and went to the match with Dad in his car.

A biggish crowd saw Athletic subdued by a slick Riverside Excelsior side who went on to win 2-1. Highmore scored a superb goal to pull one back, running on to a cross from new boy Frisby (one of Athletic’s best players). The ball must have left Highmore’s head at a tremendous speed and was in the net before the ‘keeper had a chance to move.

Despite the defeat I was in good spirits throughout the match, Dad and I finding cause for great amusement in the dour monotony of an aged fan behind us, his hair greased back over his thin skull, circa 1925. What an array of human types assembled in this one spot, people the like of which you see nowhere else. There were the usual herds of blank-eyed soul boys stumbling to and fro in response to the taunts of the Excelsior fans; they sang “We’ll break your fucking neck, McArdle, McArdle” (Excelsior's best player and goal scorer), to the tune of “We’ll take more care of you,” the British Airways ad.

I got a postcard from Claire this morning. She’s been on holiday with three of her friends in Austria, and she phoned me at teatime to ask if I was doing anything next week when she’s got an evening off.

I still in my heart of hearts weave fantastic conclusions to these occasional meetings.

Misanthropy

I finally bought my coach ticket and I return to the South on Tuesday.

I can’t say I’ll be sorry to go. A fortnight is just long enough here. Mum and Dad went to Rob and Carol’s in the morning to fix up a shelf but I stayed bed-ridden until the very minute of their return, throwing clothes on in a frantic shame (it being 1.30 p.m.), and as a result, I didn’t get out of the house until three. I was quite looking forward to the evening; I planned to meet Deborah, Jeremy and Steven Bates in Farnshaw, but as it was only Jeremy and Steve turned up.

Peter Wood, plus a large group of his friends and other Egley Grammar School types, occupied one corner of the Red Grouse. My entry into the pub’ was greeted with jeers of ribald laughter, so I stared back unsmilingly. Steve has confessed to Jeremy that he finds me arrogant, so things began a little awkwardly but alcohol soon loosened us up; we met Richard Houlding in another pub and went with him to the Builder’s Arms and from there to a curry house.

The macho men were out in force, their aggression fueled by alcohol, and one particularly foul example of humanity called Glen threw his weight around, threatening to “deck” the stony-faced waiters who clustered around him. As we left, a separate group of soul boys scrapped it out on the pavement and I cursed them and all of humanity out loud.

 I think my enthusiasm for this narrative is lacking somewhere, because deep down perhaps I know I’ve reached the end of the line with this. I must not lose all voice while I struggle to resolve my ‘problem,’ which to outside eyes appears as no big deal, but because I keep thinking how I want to go beyond the simple day-to-day reportage level of usual diaries and desperately want my writing to yield something other than half hearted characterisations of the typical days events.

In short I want to become a writer—this is the crux of my dissatisfaction. Because of these things and more I must discard the present format. . . . Four years and no progression, no evolution onto better things.

The days glide innocuously past and present no real challenges or remarkable events. All the better, because my romantic notions of home demand that things here remain perpetually the same. It’s a pity but true. I’ve noticed even at this early stage (my past not being too far removed from my present), that Easterby is changing.

Old familiar landmarks are being demolished, roads are altered, junctions widened, and to my horror I find myself adopting a reactionary attitude, which is one aspect of my mental outlook I particularly want to change. Just for a moment the full impact of Dad’s influence on me emerges. I doubt it’s something I shall ever be free of.

Minions of the state

Robert drove over from Dearnelow and he, Dad and I went to see Athletic play Hatherseats. The kick off was delayed fifteen minutes to allow the crowds to get into the ground. Hatherseats were easily the better team in the first half and outplayed Easterby completely: Ben Tester scored from a deflected long-range shot three minutes before half-time.

The seats in the Three Locks Road side were filled with Hatherseats fans and when Tester scored they erupted into cheers and clapping; as they did, the half-dozen Athletic thugs in front of us snarled with rage and swore and shouted at them, pointing at selected victims with clenched fists, telling them that they were “dead” afterwards. They spent the remainder of the game infiltrating the stand and drawing closer and closer to one unfortunate, their faces black with anger, their eyes blazing with murderous intent.

I felt separate from them.

It seemed certain that Easterby were going to lose, but after halftime they came out and took Hatherseats apart. Four goals in the last twenty minutes silenced the massed ranks of red on the Kop and I was glad.

Grant rang later and said he had just got back that teatime, so I arranged to meet him in the Woodhead Hotel at Lockley. He spent a lot of time telling me about a play he took part in last term at Gloucester in which he played the role of Moors Murderer Ian Brady. It involved a lot of direct interplay between audience and cast, and he said the former were transfixed in their seats, not daring to move. I should think he made a good Ian Brady.

We walked up to the Magpie and I felt oddly weary amd unable to pursue lines of conversation with any thoroughness. I couldn’t reach across the gulf between us with my words. I told him everything was the same since this time last year and I didn’t know what path to pursue, and he admits to being in a similar position to me. We talked about political violence as an escape from the numb passivity of life, the IRA . . . He said they are after power: “In a role reversal they’d act just like minions of the State. They all desire Power.”

I sensed the gulf between us once more.

We left the pub, bought a curry, then I caught the bus home, my head full of all the old things.

Trying too hard

I spent Christmas Eve with Lee, Jeremy, Gillian Wade, Tommy, and Richard Houlding. The latter is working in the tax office and hasn’t changed much except for a new, up-market soul-boy look. Tommy still walks the streets in dainty white shoes and baggy black trousers. He’s moved to Brynmor.

Gillian seemed to feel the need to come out with ‘funny’ stories and the silly voices to go with them and she got a little over-bearing at times. She was, she herself admitted, “trying too hard.” Lee left us after we’d trailed round a few pubs, mingling with the joyous throng and feeling particularly un-festive. Going through the motions.

I curbed the impulse to set off to Easterby for a night of depressing frivolity and we rounded the evening off with a curry in Farnshaw, which was crap.

Perfect at least as animals

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

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

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

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

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

Human, all too human

Paul Reé: “Having arrived at the insight that the world was ‘meaningless,’ his mind seems to have been paralysed by the idea: it was the end as well as the beginning, of his philosophy. For Reé, the senselessness of existence was a source of despair – for Nietszche it became the ground of freedom.”

The manic scrawl of Friday reveals that I don't have the courage of my convictions, or rather I don't fully appreciate them enough to class them as ‘convictions,’ because I don't live and act in a manner which corresponds with what I say. I “contrive to think and act as if nothing has changed.” But what else can I do? I don't act as though I accept the things I write; these ideas are so many intellectual abstractions.

Nanna B. and Nanna P. are here together today. The latter excels herself, monologuing endlessly to N.B., who staggered into the back room saying breathlessly, “By, can’t she talk!” And talk she did, in a loud strenuous voice that echoed out across the garden and the privets making Mum flinch with embarrassment.

She put Dad in a fix by innocently telling Nanna B. about a trip to Saxton that Nanna P. had made: Dad hadn't told Nanna B. this, afraid as he was that she would spread tales about the untidiness and uncleanliness of Rob and Carol’s house to others. I don’t know why he’s bothered; the fact that he is bothered seems more of an insult to Rob and Carol than anything else. Why should he care what our fuck-up of a family thinks? He's scared stiff of trouble.

In the afternoon, Mum, Dad and the two N.’s went out for a run, getting back about four. Grant rang in the evening and invited me over: I got a lift on to Lodgehill from Uncle Harold who had arrived to ferry Nanna B. home.

Grant was in a better mood. It still hasn’t really sunk in that at long last he’s actually getting away from Easterby. We went for a drink up at the Albion in Ashburn but were driven away by the deadly clientele, so we walked on to Lockley.

The streets were packed with children running, shouting, and riding bicycles, and the doors of the houses were open, people out enjoying the night air, repairing cars, talking . . . No doubting that human beings lived here, the sights and sounds of joyful activities everywhere, unlike the great grey dead cemetery back at Egley. Somehow the sight of all this life made my spirits soar and I felt that something was actually happening.

We reached West Lane and turned down towards the main road, stopping for a drink at the Woodhead Hotel at the top of Gardner Place. We enjoyed sitting outside at the back on a terrace overlooking a small garden and optimistically discussed Grant’s hopeful plans for Gloucester and all the possibilities that might unfold.

He’s not happy with the way his band Eat People is going and the “tameness” he's mentioned before still irritates him. He’s at odds with the bass player (“he wants everything to sound like a cross between Killing Joke and The Birthday Party”) and the “thick” drummer. Grant says he wants to be plunging into other, more diverse things, “real lunatic stuff.” I told him of the cynicism afoot at Watermouth. Art Colleges may be pretentious, but I think I’d prefer that to the stagnant cynicism of Uni. At least things would get done.

We sat gazing out at the now dark garden and trees and I felt wrapped in good spirits & optimism.

We rounded the evening off at the Nirmal curry house up West Lane before wandering back the way we’d come, voices and movement still punctuating the darkness. We passed a church with a towering steeple, a grim crouching chapel and the mirror-flat reservoir above Woodhead Park.

A sickly yellow moon rose behind us.

Red hands

Andrew and I went for a curry at the Bahawal and then took the train to go see the new Imax theatre in Whincliffe; we watched To Fly! on the giant 45 x 60 ft screen.

The first scenes of a balloon ascent were deceptively filmed on a standard sized cinema frame and Andrew and I both looked at each other, as if to say ‘pathetic,’ but at that moment the balloon soared up and the entire screen exploded into colour and sharp, vivid detail. The clarity and the immensity took my breath away. It really was as if we were perched there on the lip of an enormous window.

I went to HMV, took my Joy Division album back and bought Paris au Printemps by P.I.L. and Dread Beat an’ Blood by Linton Kwesi Johnson.

The hanging debate was in full swing on Radio 4 when I got home and everyone was rooted to the radio until well into the evening. Dad occasionally erupted bitterly, condemning the IRA as “evil psychopaths” and fixing me with an intense glare when ever I dared to counter him. But he’s wrong, and history will prove him so.

The IRA are not psychopaths. They're just soldiers who consider the ‘troubles’ a war; four UDR men were blown up yesterday in a land mine explosion. “Murder!” screamed Dad. “Those bastards should hang!” His eyes gleamed with murderous fire.

I felt like reminding him of Bloody Sunday, reminding him that the Loyalists in Northern Ireland go out with the sole intention of killing Catholic civilians, that the sectarian violence often comes from the side that stands proud beneath the Union Jack and the red-hand of Ulster. But I kept my mouth shut and allowed him to carry the day, but I felt a knot of anger at the hypocrisy Mum, Dad and Andrew were all coming out with.

I wonder if my exposure to the RCP makes me feel this way? But I bridle at RCP politics. Their Preparing for Power conference begins on Saturday and I honestly can’t afford to go, even though I have a ticket. But in a way I’d like to, especially to attend the Irish talks.

The vote on five amendments and then the vote on the general motion of hanging for murderers itself finally came at ten o’clock. I heard the first two amendments convincingly defeated. In one sort of perverse way I half-wanted to see hanging for ‘terrorism’ come back, because it would be the biggest mistake the British State could make in Ireland, and it would be the easiest way for the IRA to win support among the mass of Irish people under the hand of the British. But this was a perverse twist to my general abhorrence at the barbarity of hanging, and the barbarity of shooting and killing in general.

Dad doesn’t ‘approve’ of my association with Lee and feels he’s “skating on thin ice” with his plundering of old buildings. He sees him as a bad influence on me, which rankles. A great tide of dissatisfaction with my lot wells up within me as a reaction against the stagnation of home and family.

Opportunities slip by.

The luxury gap

I was up early. Dad dropped me off at Moxthorpe so I could get my hair cut. This done, I walked home and we set off for Nanna B’s.

The weather was again very hot and muggy, too warm for comfort. Nanna B. was unchanged and  quite entertaining, but I sat there feeling uncommunicative, apart, and totally removed from this circle. She fell to reminiscing, reciting school rhymes word perfect from sixty one years previously with all the rush and enthusiasm of a little girl.

She also revealed more tantalising fragments of family history: William John Martindale, my Dad's grandad, committed suicide in Loney’s Dam early one Sunday morning in 1906 following the death of his wife Emily, leaving their three children orphans. Eldest son Ernest grew up to die in WW1, Harold became my granddad and Esther, battered by her husband, died one day in 1926: the incident was hushed up and passed off as meningitis.

N.B. gave me £2 for my birthday and with the empty fussings ringing all around, we left. Dad dropped me in Easterby. It was too warm to move.

Later on in the evening, Dad and I went down to the station to pick up Andrew but his bus was late, leaving Dad and I to wander through the station to the incongruous strains of military music over the PA. Eventually there was that familiar self-conscious half-smile, sliding in aboard the coach. He looked tanned and we settled back into our well-worn ways immediately.

Dad dropped me off at Jeremy’s ½ an hour later than I’d arranged.

We went up for a drink at a noisy crowded Kerforth pub, The Adelphi, which was filled to overflowing with beery affable groups of loud people. Jeremy and I sat inconspicuously on a bench to one side while the crowd swore and laughed and talked and screeched, the girls fashion conscious in the pastel shades of their smart ‘going out’ clothes, the blokes all in jeans, tight T-shirts, white socks and low slung shoes. A handful of Hell’s Angels hung about in the obligatory denim waistcoats, their girls in tow.

Jeremy and I reminisced and bemoaned our lack of a social circle here. He seemed to have limitless resources compared to me and quite happily bought me drinks and kept my glass filled.

By closing time I was in a sloppy mood and as we walked down Whincliffe Road we were intercepted by two flat-capped drunken occupants of a red open-topped Triumph Herald. Jeremy knew one of them. Terry and Kevin were both pissed and, as they said they’d give me a lift home, we clambered into the back of the car and roared off doing eighty at least while I shivered in my thin shirt. Jeremy laughed unbelievingly as we screeched through Farnshaw, a Heaven 17 cassette at full volume, the two in front jeering drunkenly whenever we encountered a lone figure wending his or her way home.

We stopped at the petrol station near Moxthorpe roundabout, and curses were directed at the pale-faced petrol attendant in his glass cubicle. I was persuaded to stay in the car and go down to Jasper’s, an ominous sounding nightspot in Easterby. As we hurtled along the main road I was amazed no one stopped us, for Terry drove like a madman, overtaking on the inside, screeching to a halt at junctions, cursing and laughing as the traffic lights changed on us.

Just beyond Lodgehill he screeched to a halt and threw up over the side of the car. A hundred yards or so further on it happened again, but he drove off right as rain, laughing, spitting and wiping his mouth on the imitation leopard skin steering wheel cover. Somehow we made it to our destination in one piece and Jeremy paid for me to get in.

Jasper’s a typical Easterby night club, the mating game in full swing inside, couples snogging and dancing. We stood about drinking (me on Jeremy’s money) and left after about an hour for a curry up by the poly, where our hosts entertained us with beery bombast.

Kevin enthusiastically described for us in graphic detail his day spent in the shower with his girlfriend Alison. “It were real!” he said, with a raucous laugh. I had a chicken curry and ½ a prawn curry too, and we watched an Indian film on the TV along with the intent, white-coated staff.

At two a.m. we raced back to Egley and I am writing this. . . .