Rain grey

Mum told me today that Dad is seriously thinking of jacking his job in at Christmas and may stay ‘retired’ permanently. . . .

I spent the day predictably. I did an hour’s work if that—a token gesture brought on by Mum’s arrival home from school and Nanna P.’s arrival at six. The weather has broken and it rained grey all afternoon.

Slopes of Vesuvius

I rendezvoused with Lee as arranged at eleven in Smiths. He turned up looking like something from the Imperial Japanese Army in a small black peaked cap amd dark round specs, checked shirt buttoned at the neck, faded blue Chinese trousers, and dirty white pumps.

He mentioned a couple of good army surplus shops up Whincliffe Road. On the way we bumped into two of his friends from Easterby College, Rick Blevins and his blonde girlfriend; their faces broke into smiles of recognition as they spotted Lee’s tall figure looming out of the crowds. “I told you he was weird,” said Rick to his girlfriend. “Yes, he is, isn’t he?”

It was a long slog up Whincliffe Road. The sun was fierce, and we sweated past the usual string of shabby grocers shops, the fruit out front a temptation to flies, dingy cluttered second hand electrical dealers, junk shops, newsagents. . . . The Salvation Army Hostel is the finest and newest building in the area. We stopped to look in Scallyrags (second hand clothing), where we were watched by a silent Indian in a woolly cap, who never said a word, not even when Lee bought a ghastly tartan waistcoat.

We had fish and chips and I sweated like a pig.

At long last our destination hove into view, just as Whincliffe Road flattens out prior to its descent into Whincliffe, nearly at Monroe barracks. It was an army surplus store befitting of the name, filled with ammunition boxes, jerry cans, military footwear, haversacks, combat jackets, machetes, plus the usual assortment of waterproofs, hiking gear and industrial clothing. I bought a pair of German parachutists boots as used by the Argentinians in the Falklands for £9.99.

I got the bus home. Lee cycled over again later and stayed an hour, maybe more; I'll see him again on Saturday at Jeremy’s barbecue, which sounds a real barrel of laughs. He’s invited Ms. Hirst, Lee’s Mum, Duncan Verity, not to mention an assortment of Beaumont relatives.

Lee and I have cooked up a plan to take photos at about a dozen sites across Easterby. We’re going to tie Lee up with a bag over his head, bind his hands and maybe even his ankles and he’ll play dead, lying in corpse-like awkwardness while we liven things with pig’s blood which he’s scrounging from the abattoir. We’ll get a few shots of him sprawled in subways and in the centre of town; it should be quite interesting.

How will people react to a blood-spattered corpse plus four attendants with cameras and spare pig’s blood? Will we be arrested? ‘Youths Fined for Corpse Chaos.’ And in court we'll quote lines of Nietzsche with Gothic melodrama: “We build our cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send our ships into uncharted seas! . . . We are robbers and ravagers because we cannot be rulers and owners!”

It should be a laugh.

Mum and Dad took Nanna B. and Nanna P. for a run up through Calverdale. They had an enjoyable day, marred it seems only by N.P.’s ceaseless outpourings: every scene found an echo in her immense storehouse of memories and she drifted through her monologue with a monotonous regularity.

She’s mentioned to me that she’s ‘stuck’ with her “memoirs” at page two hundred or so and it seems that she’s lost when it comes to thinking about herself; what she's written is skimpy and lacking in detail, and if she’d write about her own past as thoroughly as she talks about Uncle Kenneth, Shirley, Aunty Dorothy, "ar" Nicola, etc., then she’d be approaching Dad’s two thousand-odd pages by now.

I heard from Barry this morning. He sent me a cheerful and untroubled postcard from Spain where he’s holidaying with Carl Cotton; he jokes he’s training to be a part-time bull-fighter.

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.

Realms

A continuation of the boredom and inaction of the past week. Dad and Andrew watched a vintage car rally in Farnshaw while I slumbered peacefully until nearly afternoon. Later, Dad, Mum and Nanna P. went out for a run in the car up to Oughterdale and I listened to records while Andrew unpacked.

Gripping stuff.

I’m pissed off, needless to say. The decision to come home, so easily taken, seems now to assume the magnitude of a major blunder. I’m so fucking bored up here in this world of narrow horizons and happy family neutrality. A fatherly blast this morning on the subject of hanging gave me a foretaste of the prejudiced angers to come.

Three months of this! I can’t see a way to get enough money to go abroad; the first week of July is gone already, and I feel destined to wallow here in hopelessness until the end of September. Steve called round yesterday to give me a couple of tickets for the Former Students disco on Monday at Harvey’s which at least will be a chance to see everyone. Harvey’s is going to be closed down because some poor bastard was kicked to death there in January. Steve is still as straight as ever. Some things never change (says he).

Thorough dissatisfaction, lack of imagination, total lack of confidence.

Robert rang. He and Carol went to York on a Buddhist course over the weekend and met a Tibetan monk who lives in America. They also went to Neil’s house.