Words flow from my inked-up pen

I got up early, Carol and Rob having left for work already, leaving Mum, Dad and me to lock up.

Mum explained, with weary insistence, that the car was so full of Andrew’s college stuff she worried (in her usual way)that  it might break down if we overloaded it, so I had to go back to Easterby on the bus. I left at half-past nine . . . . Another red-hot day, uncomfortable already at this early hour.

In Dearnelow I bought a Pere Ubu record for £1.99 in a sale and caught the bus back home. I got into Egley about noon, & then did nothing but slip into a boredom too familiar to describe. I lounged distractedly before the TV and then in the back room writing this.

The DHSS sent my SS application back because I’d missed something out, so I walked through the stifling heat to repost it, suitably amended. It’s been too hot to do anything.
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I’ve got a letter from Shelley. She wrote it last Thursday, and she's had a good time at home and has been to a friend’s farm: she penned a long description of an idyllic walk to a quiet lake, writing “I still haven’t come down to earth”; so typical of her! I remember how hyper-sensitive she was last term when struggling with some momentous Wordsworth essay; she kept telling me how tender and unworldly the whole experience had left her feeling, and how vulnerable she was to the stinging ‘materialist’ attacks of Barry and Stu, how close to tears they brought her. She signed off with an airy “cheerio” and enclosed a spent match, a bit of a fag packet and a piece of patchwork wrapped in paper.

After three years, why do I keep at this journal? The initial reasons are no longer so clear-cut and easy to define. If I honestly believe ‘everything is pointless,’ that nothing has any meaning and existence is futile, then why do I carry on writing with such monotonous regularity? If all this is pointless, where’s the point?

I can’t honestly say why I’m doing what I’m doing. To what end? Doubtless none of this is of any historical importance given our age’s excess of mundane records and sources. I suppose it relieves what would otherwise be an utterly structureless existence that seems to drift on and on without rhyme or reason. Perhaps writing this offers the tiniest of constant, unifying threads. I’m writing now just for the sheer hell.

Words flow from my inked-up pen.

A dewdrop, a bubble, a dream

Robert strikes me as being consistently sad and down at heart. Maybe this melancholic streak (which he’s inherited from Dad) accords with Buddhism’s acknowledgement of mortality and destiny in death. I have it too but it’s often overridden by the everyday joys of youth. It’ll emerge in time I suppose, abiding and permanent.

I’m scared of getting old. My life now is full of zap (no matter be it bad zap, still zap all the same) and I don’t want to lose the great sweeping tides of feeling and end up middle-aged in mind and outlook. As Carol and I listened to Roxy Music’s first album today, she told me that inside she feels just the same as she did in 1972 when she was 18. Dad too has often said that inside he feels just like he did when he was my age. I can’t believe I’m almost nineteen. It doesn’t seem so long ago since I was the kid who regarded nineteen-year olds as adults.

Now I'm part of that world too.

I planned on going back to Egley, but just as I was shoveling down  food so I could catch the last bus, Mum and Dad showed up, fresh from Badon. They had a good time and visited Avebury, Silbury Hill, Castle Coombe etc. Andrew got a 2.1 degree, much higher than the 3 he’d expected.

It was a fine evening, so Mum, Dad and I walked down through Saxton village. The sky was clear, the green peaceful tree-topped hills were bathed in warm light, a scene marred only by the raw scars that mark the new bypass that has cut straight across the little path that used to lead up past the farm and into the grass and woodland beyond. We paused at the pub for a pint, overshadowed by cool green trees, before continuing on past the village and out along the road towards the roundabout.

Mum picked wild daisies and I ribbed her by telling her that she was committing a crime. This semi-jocular banter continued all evening.

Really here in name only

A thoroughly lazy day. I spent it either listening to records, watching television, or looking at books. McEnroe pasted Lewis 6-2, 6-2, 6-2 in the Wimbledon final and then I saw John Lloyd become the first Brit since 1936 to win a Wimbledon title when he won in the mixed doubles.

Rob played a few of his hundred of records, most of which date from the early- to mid-‘70s, and he waxed nostalgic about the era he was my age (1973). A new brand of cynicism is abroad now and those laid-back easy days seem to have gone forever, but still live on in Rob’s records, on songs that sound woefully out of sync with the mood at large, especially among young people.

Some of his records make me nostalgic, and remind me of his student days at Valley Shore College and my visits there. One image in particular imprints itself on my memory: a figure sitting at a desk in a room that Rob wanted to show me because he said it was haunted; as we opened the door the light streamed in white and dazzling behind the person at the desk. I also remember sitting in the audience at a play or something, and in the seats in front of me was a man with a huge ugly football-like growth on the back of his neck, which showed through the strands of white hair draped over his collar.

In the afternoon Carol, having politely ignored the issue since I arrived, couldn’t help jeering at my accent, which is tinged now with a southern twang. “You sound very middle-class and well-cultured,” she said. Me!? Cultured and middle-class!? That’s horrible!

Just as my northern tones used to reveal themselves on the vowel sound ‘o,’ now these self-same vowel sounds betray a traitorous tongue.

I went to bed early after watching a TV play, Rhino, about a 14 year-old black truant called Angie. The portrayal of the apathy of the school staff and the pointless insistence on doing things which teach fuck-all of practical use in the world at large was all-too accurate and got us fired up and angry. The whole education system is rotten to the core.

Of course it takes a TV programme to spur me into indignation. I wish I could maintain this sense of urgency and anger all the time!

Red dust world

I went round to Uncle Kenneth’s in the morning. Cousin Ian and his friend Adrian were there and Ian spent the next hour showing off to me: he’s a pretty objectionable little kid. Soon after, Kenneth, Shirley, Nanna P., Nicola and Jan arrived and we all ate dinner and I unwillingly had conversations about Uni. etc.

I got wind of a possible job as a labourer on a building site with one of Kenneth’s mates.

Kenneth gave me a lift into town and I caught the five-past one bus to Dearnelow. It was a dragging drive through sunlit Stainwike, Alverhouse etc, and in Dearnelow city centre the breezy pedestrian precinct was swarming with kids and teenagers. I felt even more of the hostility here than I’d sensed in Easterby.

I caught the 468 bus to Saxton and rolled up at Rob and Carol's mid-afternoon. Carol was in the kitchen, Robert cleaning out his fire-bellied toads and green tree frogs in the front room. He seemed very quiet and subdued.

He took his Buddhist precepts last Sunday: this means he's now a fully fledged Buddhist, and he seems deeply committed, often going to Conishead Priory or to Bishophill on retreats: he told me about his monk-friend Neil, who I can tell he admires—even loves—for his simplicity and wisdom.

Rob showed me his altar, which is now upstairs in the small front bedroom above the front door: when he opened the door I was greeted by the sweet heavy smell of incense, and Rob made me take off my shoes before entering. The tall altar is topped with a pale Buddha in the lotus position and draped with exotic-looking, colourful cloth, and in front of the Buddha are small bowls with offerings. Robert’s meditation cushions on the floor in front.

He told me he's convinced of the correctness and crystal clarity of the path he’s taken.

I spent the rest of the day idly, while Robert sewed some red and yellow book covers (one of the conditions he has to fulfill on taking his precepts), or read a Buddhist text. I flopped about in indolence, watching TV or reading.

In the evening I went out and bought some fish and chips before coming to bed.

Gang of one

I got up early-ish and set off to Grant’s, getting there at eleven; he was out so I went into Easterby and signed on along with skinheads and others. I have to go back on Wednesday at 9 a.m.

I bought The Fall’s new single “The Man Whose Head Expanded/Ludd Gang” which was new in the shop today, but it’s disappointing. Marc Riley’s been kicked out and Mark E. said in the Melody Maker recently that he wants to cut the melody out completely and get back to a simpler more noisy format, but this single shows no sign of this, just a restatement (and not as good a restatement at that) of old themes.

Maybe I’ll grow to like it.

I went back to Grant’s house and we passed the afternoon in the dark back room playing records while Grant criticised his brother, forcing him into humbled half-apologies. He was pretty fed up again I think and dislikes his family, describing them as “good liberal middle-class Guardian readers.” He seems to be constantly on edge and in a prickly mood with them which his Mum counters with blind cheerfulness and chuckles.

His sister has grown up a lot since I last saw her and has developed into a typical Egley Grammar Schoolite. His brother flogged me some singles  by New Order, Sex Pistols and Public Image hw wants rid of. At his age I was listening to Santana and jazz-rock, but then I didn’t have Grant for an older brother. But he’s still into Doctor Who, so he’s an odd mix.

At seven we went round to Nik’s house and set off through the woods to the Albion. Grant and Nik seemed quiet and subdued. Tim the guitarist was there and a few others I remembered soon turned up.

I went to cash a cheque at the off-licence nearby, came back and bought Grant and Nik a drink, half-intending on getting pissed but my money soon dwindled. We went to the Brass Cat and then the Hare and Hounds where we met Jackie, but I had to leave to catch the last bus.