Script for a 21st Century Opera

Or maybe for a 20th Century one? Whatever, this is poetry that rhymes, tells a story (quite a wacky one, it’s true) and does a lot of other unfashionable things. I’m still quite proud of some of the rhyming, though its not in the ‘scatter metal/ Mount Popacatapetl’ class that Donald Swan occupied, possibly by himself. I like to think he might have cast a wry smile over this, as I hope you do, in time.

He had a pain where he didn’t oughta
So they by-passed his aorta
Gave him the lungs of a serial killer
He took a holiday in Manila

He’d been a numbers man back in Penge
Now, when he breathed, he breathed Stonehenge
Blood and sacrifice, ancient religions.
Lunch for him was a few live pigeons.

He went back to the job and he was spitting lead
Revenge was sweet and they were dead.
He spared one person – a girl called Melissa –
On one condition; that he could kiss her.

She knew life owed her something
And tenderly she stroked his gun-thing.
It was hard, and he got fonder.
Then she took him off on her Honda.

They holed up in a Surbiton squat
With a cabin crew, ex-Aeroflot.
But then one day after too much vodka
The Russians Kalashnikoved a squad car.

Things got sticky. Things got worse
The comrades all went home in a hearse.
And out of the rubble, bound and gagged
Stepped Melissa and friend, white-flagged.

The tabloids said that they were heroes.
Gave them a cheque with lots of zeroes.
While Melissa and him got penicillin,
The reds took the rap for all the killing.

As for our hero, he was barely alive,
Memory wiped, like an old hard-drive.
His testosterone slipped back to human.
And Melissa went off with a new man.

The moral of this story isn’t hard to find
And I don’t think it’s just that love is blind.
Remember this when you meet someone new, kid,
Love is blind, and it’s also stupid.

In Defence of the Unsubtle – Revisiting Kidnapped and Kim

I’d like to propose the reinstatement of a couple of works of imagination that hardly seem to feature (except perhaps as symptoms of the age) in the critical canon. I’m thinking of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim.

Both are rites of passage novels. The hero comes to knowledge of himself and his world through dangerous exploits in unhospitable circumstances.

David Balfour, the 17 year old hero of Kidnapped, has delusions of grandeur. On his father’s death, he goes out (with much the same attitude perhaps as Laurie Lee, walking off to Spain on that summer morning) to reclaim his inheritance. His dead father’s brother, a psychotic miser of breathtaking proportions, tries to kill him – by beguiling David into going up a staircase of a ruined tower in the dark to bring back documents; only a bolt of lightning prevents David from stepping off the staircase into a fatal void.

That one scene, so dramatically rendered it seemed to me then, in the BBC’s Sunday Serial production, had me trembling for most of the week.

But even this somehow gets smoothed over, and David is once more taken in, allowing his Uncle to have him kidnapped by the sea captain, Hoseason, to be taken to the Carolinas in servitude. Enter then, by the most improbable deus ex machina circumstance (Hoseason’s brig runs down a boat in the fog and one man leaps aboard), Alan Breck Stewart, a Highland rebel, fiercely loyal to the deposed Stewart dynasty.

Stewart is yesterday, as much as the book is (the plot is set in the 1750’s). He is small, determined, vainglorious (‘Am I not a bonny wee fighter?’ he exclaims in a testosterone filled rush after bloodily defending himself against Hoseason’s hapless crew.) Yet he proves to have a shabby nobility and a gritty resilience that David (and we) can only admire. Their journey to Edinburgh, where David finally establishes his inheritance, is a trial of David’s manhood, in which he has his eyes opened in terms of values, loyalty, love, endurance and many other qualities, before the novel’s abrupt ending – with Alan Breck Stewart standing out awkwardly from his natural environment – outside Edinburgh’s British Linen Bank (signalling perhaps that we have witnessed the last guttering flames of heroism in these islands).

Kim, the eponymous subject of Kipling’s novel, is the orphan son of Irish parents in India in the 1890’s, somewhere amongst the Afghan wars of that era. He becomes the chela or disciple of an Indian holy man, but also is inveigled into ‘the Great Game’, spying for the English rulers, principally against the Russian agents who are attempting to destabilise the situation.
Kim’s journey along the Great Trunk Road opens his eyes to many things, against a Technicolor background of all that is India in Victorian times.

“All castes and kinds of men move here. Look! Brahmins and chumars, bankers and tinkers, barbers and bunnias, pilgrims and potters—all the world going and coming.”

In the midst of this melting pot, Kim is recognised by the Chaplain of his father’s old regiment by a document that he keeps around his neck. He is then sent away to be educated among the English colonists, with his holy man’s agreement. After three years, he rejoins the lama and travels with him, passing information covertly to the authorities as the lama seeks enlightenment.
Finally, the lama finds the River of the Arrow he is searching for and achieves his spiritual fulfilment. Will Kim follow him, or continue in the service of the English, or try to combine the two? On that subject Kim can only say, “I am not a sahib. I am thy chela.”

These books have obviously similar themes – the journey from ignorance to knowledge, the awakening into manhood, with all its complexity, and the realisation of the difficulties of making moral judgements, particularly when those judgements are of individuals, rather than generalised toward races or nations. David Balfour is no kind of rebel, but he comes to appreciate the values that impel impoverished Highland crofters to pay their dues abroad, to the absentee pretender as well as to the British state.

Each also has a spiritual dimension: questions are posed, not just about behaviour and what it is to be an adult, but about how to live, how to balance a respect for spiritual concerns with those of the real world and one’s own circumstances. What of course they don’t have is the suggestion of a quasi-sexual relationship between the hero and his companion. While Melville knowingly describes to us the process known as the squeezing of the sperm (in the chapter of Moby Dick called ‘A Squeeze of the Hand’), hints of sexual awakening in these two British novels, such as they are, are resolutely heterosexual. (Encounters with the daughter of the ferryman in Kidnapped and the Kulu woman in Kim are pointers to a sexual future for both).

Both journeys are remarkable for their surroundings – David Balfour’s across the wilds of Scotland (before arriving at ‘civilisation’ in Edinburgh), Kim’s across India, and into the hills, before his lama finds his enlightenment on the plains. Both are set amongst violence and potential disorder, where misjudgements in terms of behaviour will (and often nearly do) have catastrophic effects.

When it comes to critical judgement, Stevenson is often ignored (a children’s writer, famous for Long John Silver, the black spot and the treasure) while Kipling is summarily dispatched (mainly because of his poetic legacy) as ‘misogynistic, racist, and a glorifier of war’. But in these two novels if nowhere else, it seems to me, both rise above those verdicts. And, just to try to make these two unfashionable novels a little more respectable, I can say that Seamus Heaney was fond of quoting Kidnapped as one of his most important influences and Henry James wrote in praise of both.

Perhaps the Victorian era, a time like no other, was one where it was easy to confuse quantity (isn’t there simply too much Scott, Tennyson and Trollope?) with poetry and fiction that requires a little more discrimination, and I would have to admit that certainly there are a number of other works in the Stevenson and Kipling canon a good deal less worthy of respect. Here, it seems to me, these writers achieve something beyond their ‘normal’ selves.

The most powerful aspect of both of these books is the fact that their endings are beginnings – having learnt lessons, the panorama of possibility opens up to these, now knowledgeable, heroes. Stevenson, finally and unwisely succumbed to the impulse to create a sequel (in the not-very successful Catriona). Kipling had the wisdom to see that pursuing Kim further might only provide a terrible anti-climax.

Whether David Balfour in later life did more than become a good upstanding citizen and whether Kim might later have changed the destiny of history are questions that may well impel the careful reader to re-examine these two novels that seem, to me at least, to stretch the adventure genre beyond its normal limits.

The mathematics of chocolate

This is a small speculative story about reputation and how that might grow. It was written before the advent of social media, which makes it somehow more relevant.

His lectures on the mathematics of chocolate bars went down a storm with his students. They had, they told him, shone a light into areas of differential calculus that they would otherwise have ignored, and that, as he knew, would have made it difficult for them to make progress in the numerical world that they would have to confront at some time or other.

The lectures became a recognised part of his repertoire. At 27, they made him an assistant professor, and then one of the red-top newspapers found out about them. They made fun of the idea of course. He became to them, ‘Professor Curly-Wurly’, but after a while, after their questions were answered very straightforwardly by him, they began to ignore him.

“Sometimes, it helps to illustrate complex problems by applying them to everyday items,” he said. “It helps to make the complexity understandable.” He was no fun. Comments like these reflected badly on the papers’ position in society.

A more respectable paper gave him a Saturday column. He was a guest on a radio programme where the public asked politicians and others about issues of the moment. He was asked about the likelihood of dying from bird flu.

“Life is a dangerous business,” he told them. “Here we are on a mysterious, ball-shaped contraption, hurtling through space, with no control and very little understanding. Yet we take to the air in heavy machines. We cross roads where lumps of metal whizz by. We overdose ourselves with drugs from bottles labelled ‘wine’ or ‘beer’. In that context, to worry about a mathematically improbable cause of our demise seems strange.”

He did not receive the customary round of applause, which was usually given to special guests. Instead, the audience looked thoughtful.

But soon, there were those who approached him in steadily increasing numbers, looking for insights, looking for certainty. “I have none to give you,” he said, “Though perhaps we should think more about the consequences of our actions.”

He told them stories to illustrate how our lives should be more simple if we wished to avoid problems like global warming and food shortages, about how economic differences helped to contribute to wars and terror, about how our basic desire was for fairness in a world which was randomly heartless, about how each of us could help to make a difference and make life livable, at least for some of the more fortunate.

In response to their money, which they sent without his asking, he founded a charity to promote education in mathematics.

His personal life was a mess. Sometimes he was seen in public with an African woman, from the Congo, who had survived a gang rape in her own country, who had been educated at the University where he taught and was now prominent among those seeking to unravel the damage wrought in her country. On other occasions, he was accompanied by an actress, rather older than him, who was noted only for her vacuousness and a liking for cosmetic surgery. At his insistence, she toured Africa, and her career reinvigorated itself. He was photographed accompanying a prostitute. He admitted a liking for pornography.

All the while, his stock was rising.

An American president sought a brief meeting with him and recounted how his son who had previously found math a difficult subject, had been enraptured by the chocolate analogy.

He was invited to join a parliamentary enquiry into educational standards. He published a rather odd book – part psychology and part popular mathematics – which surprisingly sold in millions.

But as his celebrity increased, so his life became more reclusive. He was, so they said, afraid to leave his house in daylight. He had his telephone disconnected. He communicated by email and text message.

His death was shrouded in mystery. Unusually, he had ventured out in his car, apparently to meet a celebrity media owner, who had wanted to offer him a contract for a television series. On his way home, a tourist coach hit his car and tipped it down a steep incline near a well-known beauty spot. He had been driving erratically. Whether he had been drunk or drugged was never revealed.

After he died, a few prominent people who had known him talked of strange happenings when he had been alive.

They claimed to have seen him walking across a swollen river near his home. (He was, possibly, simply walking on the bank where the water had washed over.) They said that they had seen him impossibly revive a dead man. (He had actually given the kiss of life to a student who had jumped into the river from a bridge when drunk).

Most curiously of all, one past friend claimed to have met him, walking up the path to the friend’s house, after he had died. (For that, there was no explanation, though the past friend had been moved by the death and was known to use recreational drugs.)

Academics wrote about his economic doctrine, which, simply put, instructed those who had more money, to think about what they could do for those less fortunate, and which argued also that ways of limiting the size of human populations should be sought.

For a while, his memory was the subject of a personality cult. Its members claimed that he had not died at all. They shared chocolate bars, which they said, mysteriously, were his body.

A Very Late Christmas Story

White Christmas

It began with shouting from somewhere above the small bedsit where Jeff Blake lived.

Not the floor above certainly, where the ancient Misses Clayton sang hymns on Sunday afternoons to the accompaniment of their brother Michael’s squeeze box, but from some greater altitude, most likely the flat under the eaves which was always a trouble for the landlord to let, because of the endemic damp, according to those residents who concerned themselves with these things.

The arrival and departure of several tenants over recent months left Jeff at a loss to identify the present occupant. Probably the thin man in the shabby dark coat who had passed him on the stairs recently, a man only seen that once, his “Wotcha cock” as he hurried by being the only words the two had shared.

Whoever was involved, the noise, principally raised voices, was getting louder. There was finally a scream, then a crash.

The house was not often the scene of domestic wrangling, if that was indeed the problem, but this disturbance seemed more serious, so much worse in fact that Jeff felt moved to open the door to the dark stairway and look up.

Another crash, and this time accompanied by a gasp of pain from someone, left Jeff in a quandary.

He heard locks and bolts being screwed home by the Misses Clayton, but just as he somewhat timidly put an exploratory foot on the staircase, the door of the attic banged to, and amidst some shouting, the man he had seen in the dark coat ran down, pausing only for a moment as he passed to thrust something at Jeff.

The man, bereft of his coat now though instantly recognisable from his greased hair, winked quickly at Jeff, said something like, “I’ll be back,” and sprinted down the stairs, taking them two and three at a time. He was followed closely by two other men, both hindered by large boots, young enough to have been policemen, shouting at him to stop. The greased hair man showed no inclination to do anything of the sort and the door to the street banged shut, only for it to open and bang shut again as his pursuers followed.

Jeff looked at the small parcel in his hands. “Well,” he thought, “it’s none of my business,” and he retreated once more behind his door, tossing the thick envelope onto a shelf. He went to the small window that fronted the street. There indeed was a police car, its doors still wide open as though others within had also joined the chase. But of the man and his pursuers, there was no sign.

As though to close the matter definitively, a van with a loudspeaker on its roof progressed slowly down the street playing Christmas carols at a loud volume to all and sundry, whether they had a will to listen or not. A squad of muffled individuals followed, rattling collecting tins at shoppers and others, ringing doorbells. Jeff closed his curtains. No one responded to the ringing of the doorbells to the flats, not even the Misses Clayton.

Within a few minutes, all was quiet once more and Jeff resumed his seat at his desk, sucking his pen while giving his full attention now to the death of Mr Coyle, the softly-spoken gang boss who had promised he would mete out suitable revenge on Inspector Backton, the hero of Jeff’s unfinished novel, whose lovely, and icily efficient secretary had not returned to her post after lunch.

Jeff typed on, oblivious to the fact that it was Christmas Eve, impervious too to the fact that his own girlfriend, the lovely but not at all icy or efficient Molly, would be arriving on his doorstep not long from now, expecting some sort of seasonal festivity, and would probably be disappointed by that which either Jeff or the local pub were prepared to offer.

“Come off it, Fingers,” Jeff typed, “I know you were in on the warehouse job, even if your brother is prepared to swear you were at the dogs.”

He looked up at the clock. “Cripes,” he said, knowing that, while it was too late to do much about it, the wrath of Molly would soon likely descend about his ears. Somehow, though, the problem of Mrs Pendleton and what she had seen of the jewel heist invaded his mind once more, and it was only after much ripping and scrunching of paper that he came upon the answer. Of course, it wasn’t Mrs Pendleton who had seen the knife that later would be found adjacent to the body of Mr Coyle. No. It was her suddenly created autistic son, as unreliable a witness as could be found and a further complication for Inspector Backton, who loved growing runner beans and the sound of Purcell. He was, in Jeff’s book, to be tested to the limit, and in the flood of words that followed, Jeff once more became oblivious to the passing of time. He was indeed, oblivious to everything until growing darkness and the incessant ringing of his doorbell forced him from the keyboard.

It was Molly, and as he buzzed her in from the street, he thought how selfish he had been to forget everything, to be carried along in the torrent of words that had come streaming from him as he invented the small, intricate and slowly ticking world of crime that he hoped would bring some sort of relief from the financial pressure of being a teaching assistant in a local school.

He opened the door of the flat preparing excuses, most of which he had over-used by now, with Molly at least.

“Molly…” he began, but she was carrying many bags and had a small parcel in her mouth, which she gestured he should take from her as a matter of urgency.

“Thanks. Phew. Found that on the stairs. As you can see, I’ve been shopping.” She pouted at him for a kiss.

Molly was small and lissom, with dark hair and eyes, and bright teeth which showed evenly as she smiled. Jeff who was guiltily remembering that he hadn’t shaved that day, smiled back.

“I thought the good Inspector might have been taking up your day, and I thought we could do with some festive cheer.” The bags she had carried were overflowing onto the threadbare sofa. “Come and see what I’ve bought.” She threw her beret onto the shelf, where, as though by design, it completely obscured the mysterious envelope.

“But where on earth did you get the money?” Jeff asked, staring at the pile of groceries that would almost not have been out of place in the display windows of Messrs Fortnum and Mason.

“I blew the redundancy money – well, some of it,” Molly said, smiling. “Well, most of it actually. Don’t be cross, Jeff.”

Molly had lost her admin assistant job a couple of weeks ago and with Christmas approaching, had so far found it difficult to replace.

“This lot makes the place look a bit like Aladdin’s cave. What have we got here? Marrons glacés? Apricots in Cognac? Preserved lemons? Blimey, Moll, you’ve not held back, have you?” Jeff said, looking a bit concerned that whatever success Inspector Backton had in solving the mysteries that confronted him, the pressure on Jeff to deliver was piling up too.

“I sent a big parcel to Mum, too,“ Molly said proudly.

Molly’s ancient mother, not quite as ancient as the Misses Clayton, though no less Christian in her instincts, languished in a bungalow in a northern seaside town, a town too far distant for Molly and Jeff to visit this Christmas, though they had agreed to make this pilgrimage in the New Year when their fortunes might look up.

Just then, the doorbell rang, not the street door, but the door to the bedsit from the stairs, an unusual occurrence.

Jeff went to answer it. Molly sat in state amongst her purchases, enjoying the luxury of reading some of the labels. Jeff returned with another young man, taller than him and wearing large boots.

“Molly, this is Detective Constable Morgan. He wants to ask us some questions about this afternoon. Oh, I haven’t even told you yet, there was a bit of a to-do earlier, upstairs, though I’ve no idea what was going on myself yet.”

“Not that strange, greasy-haired bloke from the attic? Tell all, Constable Morgan. I’ll put the kettle on,” Molly said, getting up.

Constable Morgan looked at the sofa. “Looks like you’ve been splashing out Miss.”

“I have. And I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it. It’s not often you get the opportunity.”

“Certainly not Miss, but there’s some money missing from the flat upstairs actually. It’s what I wanted to talk to you and this gentleman about.” He paused, thinking whether he should go further.

Jeff looked at Molly. Molly looked hurt.

“Much as I’d love all this to have come from the proceeds of crime, it was actually what was left of my redundancy money. You can check if you like. A firm called Blinkers. They do PR. I was their office admin until they lost their big perfume account. Look. Why don’t we all have a drink? I bought enough and it is Christmas.”

“Not while I’m on duty thanks.”

“Just like Jeff’s crime novel. I never thought anyone actually said that. Tell you what, I could put some brandy in the coffee, if you like, might make it a bit more acceptable, and no one would know.”

“Go on then. Just a drop. I’m going to be clocking off soon anyway.” The constable sat, and so did Jeff.

Jeff said, “So tell us about the row upstairs earlier? Is the greasy-haired man Mr Big? Was he plotting the theft of the Crown Jewels or something?”

“It was a bit more mundane than that. We suspect… we have reason to believe, in the jargon, that he was buying and selling stolen goods. Nothing too dramatic, some silver, a few bits of jewellery, the odd small antique. We wanted to catch him with the stuff on him as it were. So we went up to his flat this afternoon to confront him. We hadn’t realised how slippery he would be. Made a bit of a fool of us really.”

“It would be all that hair oil,” said Molly, returning with a tray and mugs of coffee on which cream floated luxuriously. “So, what happened? He escaped?”

“Yes. He shoved his way past me and ran off. I believe I saw you on the stairs, Sir, as we ran by?”

“You did. I was just wondering whether to go up to the flat, what with all the noise. The Misses Clayton have probably barricaded themselves in by now by the way. They are the old ladies in the flat above.”

“I’ll slip a note under their door before I go. Tell them there’s nothing to worry about. This is very good, Miss, and as I am now officially off duty, I’ll have another,” he said, smiling like a sheepdog that had just successfully completed a round up.

“But what if he comes back? Is he likely to be dangerous?” Jeff asked.

“We could all be murdered in our beds,” Molly added dramatically, her dark eyes flashing as she poured more coffee and brandy.

“I don’t think he’ll be back. We’re bound to find him sooner or later, in one of his old haunts probably. And then he’d taken goods from a lot of the shadier characters hereabout, and hadn’t, so far as we know, delivered the cash he owed. We only found some of the valuables upstairs. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d be in some danger if he showed his face around here again.”

“But you said there was money missing?”

“We think so. We’re pretty sure he had the money to pay his suppliers. He must have hidden it somewhere.”

Molly said, “Where did you put that package Jeff? The one I had in my mouth when I came through the door?”

Jeff said, “What package? Oh, that envelope?”

“Yes,” Molly said, “It may have been something to do with the commotion.”

Jeff got up and went over to bookcase, where he retrieved the small parcel.

Molly said, handing it to Constable Morgan, “I found this on the stairs. It was tucked in behind the frame of that old print in the hall. I thought it was funny when I saw it.”

“Thank you,” said the Constable, unwrapping whatever it was from layers of clingfilm inside the envelope. Finally, he held it up.

“A key,” he said, “But what to?”

“I think I can help you there,“ Molly said. “Unless I’m mistaken, it’s a key to a locker at the Sports Centre in Blair Street round the corner. I go swimming there sometimes. There are pink tags and green tags to show the bank of lockers they come from. This one is for the pink ones by the door, and here’s the number.”

“Looks like you may have come upon something significant, Miss,” the constable said smiling. “You may just have given me an early Christmas present. And of course, if this does turn out to be significant, there may even be a reward. Don’t get your hopes up though. We’ll check this out now.” He tipped back his coffee. “Blimey. That had a bit of a kick to it. Very festive, and if you should remember anything else, please do get in touch. Here’s the number. Well, Happy Christmas to you both.” He looked significantly at Molly, and then he left.

“This coffee is nice,” Jeff said, and then he told Molly about Mrs Pendleton, the knife and her newly-created autistic son, but even they were forgotten as he and Molly set about making as lavish a supper as could be managed with the bedsitting room’s Baby Belling, a compact electric cooker with two plates and a tiny oven. They washed down their feast with claret, and finished with fruit from tins and port and more brandy-enhanced coffee.

The mess was terrifying, but they agreed that, for once, they would leave it till the morning.

They slept in the small bed, wrapped around each other like kittens.

It was nearly three in the morning when they heard the clatter and swearing.
Jeff turned on the small bedside light. “What the…” he began but didn’t finish.

It was a man trying to escape from a tangle of plates – they had left them on the floor – and a scarf, Molly’s present to Jeff, knitted with her own hands.

Molly said sleepily, “I suppose that’s Father Christmas unloading his sack. Tell him to leave the reindeer outside.”

“No,” Jeff said. “It’s our neighbourhood Bill Sykes.”

The man with the greasy hair had by now disentangled himself and was cursing as he perched on the sofa.

“Never mind Bill wotsit. I wants me money.”

“What?” Jeff said.

“Me money. That packet I shoved in your face as I went by you on the stairs.”

“Oh that. And if I said we’d handed it over to the police?”

“I think I’d have to press you on that point. Perhaps inflict some pain? Don’t tell me you bloody well spent it on this lot?” He indicated the debris. “That would indeed be unfortunate.” He narrowed his eyes.

He looked quite menacing in the shadows cast upward by the small lamp. Jeff looked at Molly. Molly, clutching the duvet tightly to her, looked at Jeff.

“Don’t ask me. I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Molly said.

“It’s over there on the shelf, under the hat. We haven’t touched it. This lot came from Molly’s redundancy money.”

“Molly being..?” he asked.

Jeff pointed at Molly’s head, just in view below his elbow.

“Very nice to meetcha. Very nice… Well, I’ll just make sure it’s all there if you don’t mind. And then I’ll be off. I don’t suppose you’d know anything about another item. I left it behind that picture downstairs.”

“Police nabbed it,” Jeff said, “Too obvious.”

“Don’t effing obvious me,” the man said ripping open the envelope and looking inside.

“Right, I’m off. And don’t bloody well try and call the police. I have friends who might take that badly. And now Father Christmas is returning to Lapland. I’ll take this for me reindeer.” He took a mince pie from a plate, tucked his envelope away and was off.

They didn’t move until they heard the front door to the street shut, then Jeff and Molly watched him from the window slinking down the street like an old fox.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were concealing the proceeds of crime?” Molly asked. “I’m going to make some tea.”

“I forgot,” Jeff said, “I was worried about why Inspector Backton could have missed the most obvious clue of all. I simply couldn’t think how he could have overlooked it.” Molly looked blank, but then there was the most resounding crash from the street. Cars had collided. With noise that loud, there might well have been injuries.

Jeff shouted to Molly to bring his white shirt from the wardrobe for bandages, and the scissors from the kitchen drawer, and to follow him down to the road. “And bring a phone. We might have to call an ambulance.”

Just down the street, Jeff saw a police car, on its side, crushed between a parked car and a lamppost. What was really weird was that it seemed to have been driven by two snowmen. The car was steaming gently in the orange light from the streetlights. But then, all at once, the strangeness of Jeff’s view was broken. The driver’s door creaked open, and from behind one of the snowmen – an airbag actually – Detective Constable Morgan heaved himself out.

“Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow,” he said pulling at his left arm that didn’t seem to be able to move itself. He straightened himself up with difficulty, then he staggered. Jeff held him up.

“You are a very lucky man. You are a very lucky… That girl, that Molly. She’s…”

But what Detective Constable Morgan thought about Molly was never revealed, as she arrived breathless to the scene. “What’s happened?”

Jeff reeled back from the stricken policeman, though still holding him upright. Constable Morgan was breathing like a steam engine, but exhaling fumes that could have come from a still.

“Carolina Moon keeps shining…” he began in a key much too flat. Jeff put his hand over his mouth.

“Constable Morgan appears to be pissed. Pissed backwards,” Jeff said. “If I get him to the seat at the bus stop, could you run back to the flat and get some brandy?”

“I don’t think he’ll want any more,” Molly said, and then, “Oh, I see. Course,” as she realised that Jeff was trying to save trouble.

“I’m for it now. I’m for it now,” DC Morgan kept repeating, before breaking into Carolina Moon once more and saying something incomprehensible about Molly. Then Molly arrived with the brandy.

“Just take a sip. I’ve called an ambulance.”

“I sat in that pub for bloody hours, waiting for him, that greasy haired bloke. I thought I had him, but someone must have been spiking my drinks. Shouldn’t have tried to follow him really. As I’m off duty,” he said, almost proudly. “Oh well.”

The ambulance arrived. Molly said, “We’ve given him some tea with a brandy in it. Just so that you know,” to the paramedic.

“Can’t do too much harm, I suppose,” she replied as they put him on a stretcher.

A police car turned up with a constable and someone else wearing gold braid on his uniform.

“I’m not surprised,” he said. “He was a slippery customer.”

What he was not surprised at could have been the police car, the fact of an accident, DC Morgan’s unfulfilled chase. The question didn’t seem to concern him greatly.

“We should breath test him of course, but…”

“We gave him some brandy to drink,” said Molly desperately.

“It seemed the only thing to do,” Jeff said.

The man with the braid took no notice.

“We caught the villain two streets away. About to be sorted out by some people he owed money to. He was quite pleased to see us really. Said he’d been back to the flats too. In search of that key, I suppose.”

DC Morgan smiled wanly from the stretcher. “This is the lovely lady who found it,” he said as they shuffled him off. “Molly!” It was more of a scream than an introduction.

“Thank you, miss,” the man in the significant uniform said. “There might be a bit of reward money coming your way from that. Chummy said he broke into your place too.”

Jeff said, “He did. Gave us quite a shock.”

“Didn’t take anything though?”

“Well, some damage to the presents and…”

The man with the braid wasn’t really listening.

“Well, there was no end to his remorse when we got him. He said he’d taken money off you to make good his escape, and wanted to make restitution so to speak. I was just on the way to yours now.”

He placed a small roll of fifty pound notes in Molly’s hand. She gasped quietly.
“Keeps it tidy,” he said. “We’ll be round in a couple of days for a statement. No need to mention the money. Happy Christmas.”

It was then that it began to snow. Just small flakes at first, but then bigger ones, floating down magically in the yellow light as though somehow, they had all been blessed, and while everything was certainly not all right, there was some hope of it becoming so.

Jeff’s novel ended with a similar scene. Mrs Pendleton’s autistic son burbling inconsequentially as she held up the head of Mr Coyle, the stricken gang boss, to hear his last penitent words of confession, as his red blood blended with the white of the snow, the red becoming redder in the unblemished snow and the white growing more perfect somehow, moment by moment.

I’m going to be elected

No. Actually I’m not, mainly because I’d be too worried to put my name forward for anything like that. But I do believe in voting, and I do believe in voting FOR something rather than against. The man on the doorstep says, “You do realise that if you vote that way, then you’ll just be letting in the …. (whoever it is they don’t like).” Well, I take your point, but if I don’t vote for what I believe in, then why am I voting at all?

The sad thing is that after all the rearrangement shenanigans of the past few decades (devolution in all its guises), but without anything happening to the House of Lords, and without any boundary revision, the electoral chickens are coming home to roost – in the shape of the SNP probably. The one area of the UK without representation will now be England. Clever stuff, from you professional politicians there.

But my manifesto, (just in case anyone wants to come to my door with a friendly message) would include:

– clearing up litter
– taxing freesheets to pay for it, and packaging, and chewing gum, and banning plastic containers for takeaway food (like they’ve already done in Oxford, I think)
– adding some graduality to stamp duty and local taxation (whatever they call it these days)
– I’d be scrapping Trident (who else has one? and what’s it supposed to be aimed at?) but beef up the defence budget elsewhere
– oh, and I’d make it much easier to install micro generators in rivers and streams
– get on with HS2 and all the other rail infrastructure that we’ve lost over the past years. Crossrail will be genius. That should too
– lumping more tax on smokers, and probably drinkers too, to pay for the NHS
– if you need to save some money elsewhere, chuck out the benefits for the old, except where they are means-tested, and give anything over to the young; they’re the ones who need the help.

Right.That’s the rant over. Have a good day!

A memory

Prompted by a memory, from a long time ago

The wind, or the morning

Sometimes,
Without quite knowing why
My eyes fill with tears
When walking to the station.
It could be the early morning
Or the incisive westerly wind.
But if I had known you would be
Away for the whole summer,
I would have tightened my scarf
And tried to look as though
It was the wind,
Or the morning.

Eccentrics

There is something about eccentricity that makes it endlessly attractive to the English.

Canvas opinion for example, on your favourite Dr Who. It has to be Tom Baker with that scarf.

Favourite actors? Brian Blessed perhaps, or for those of a certain generation, Oliver Reed; maybe even David Niven? Sportsmen? George Best, James Hunt?

Say what you will, it can’t be any coincidence that all of these have been touched by a little of the slightly off-centre. (Even David Niven, outwardly sporting the stiffest of upper lips, had a house called ‘Cirrhosis on the River’)

We all love an eccentric, don’t we?

 

The masters at the school I was educated at (an old-fashioned Grammar School) were eccentric almost to a man – at least it seemed like it at the time. And I have to say that it seemed an essential component of getting the best results from the motley group of which I was one. A little vulnerability, a demonstration of a side of themselves that was not only outside the framework of ‘rules’ was essential. It created a new and gloriously unpredictable reality – one without fear and if not totally without drudgery, was at least mitigated by something more sublime than ‘results’.

The master who taught me history was one. He never knew anyone’s name and never cared. Pupils were to him ‘large boy’ or ‘small boy’ and on one magnificent occasion in my presence, ‘medium-sized boy.’ His fascination with history led him to appreciate particularly (an appreciation I now share) the delights of ‘CV Wedgwood’ (as she always signed herself). It was racy in the extreme for her to be referred to as ‘Cecilia Veronica’ as my man was known to do.

(CV Wedgwood’s books, The King’s Peace, The King’s War and The Trial of Charles I, are still the most readable and approachable books on the period, Her introduction to Cardinal Richelieu and the French Monarchy is masterful).

But back to the classroom and our history master. He used to play games with us. Not on the sports field, but in class, where he would leave letters from his fiance (rumoured to be a nurse in some distant town) tantalisingly close to the point where they could be read by those in the foremost desks. Of course, they would be snatched away as the occupants of those desks leant forward.

He also had charge of what was known as the ‘General Sixth’ a class generally accepted to be immune to both punishment and learning, condemned to take a set of ‘easy’ O Levels to augment whatever qualifications they had already scraped together.

On one occasion when our eccentric entered their form room, there was no one there. The General Sixth were hiding in the cupboards. This might have caused a showdown with any other master, but our hero showed a perfect understanding of the situation and how it might be mitigated.

Gathering quickly from the rustlings and giggles from the cupboards what was actually happening, the history man said very loudly: “Good heavens. The General Sixth appear to have vanished. I think I shall retrace my steps to the library and then return here in two minutes. I am convinced that then they will all be in their places, and thus escape any punishment, which otherwise would be severe.”

And do you know? that’s exactly what happened.

So, what to read if you at least have some question mark over the case I have set out here? There is only one book for you, English Eccentrics, by Edith Sitwell (the author herself had her moments), will introduce you to travellers, sportsmen, heroes of the hunt, of the table, the stage and the pulpit, who perhaps are not quite of the run of the mill. Curricle Coates, Old Tom Parr, Jemmy Hirst and my favourite, Jack Mytton, the hunting squire who relieved himself of so much money and often led his horse into a nearby cottage to lie in front of the fire after a cold day of the chase.

David Niven’s memories of Hollywood are published in Bring on the Empty Horses, The Moon’s a Balloon and others.

The King’s Peace, The King’s War and The Trial of King Charles I, by CV Wedgwood, are published by Penguin.

English Eccentrics, by Edith Sitwell, is published by Pallas Athene.

Aquascrotum

Shaving in front of the mirror this morning prompts a memory of schooldays and the continual skirmishing between those in authority and us, who wanted perhaps a slightly more avant garde style of hair than might conveniently be tolerated. Part of this involved rules about sideburns. The headmaster gravely intoned in assembly one morning that we were to be allowed to grow them, but only as far as something called the ‘grotis’. Someone behind me asked my pal Phil what he had just said, having misheard because engaged in negotiation regarding the loan of a Rolling Stones LP. Phil, who was contemplating his incomplete geography homework, said, without looking up, “You can grow your sideburns down to your scrotum, mate.” Phil was often an impromptu genius with words, labelling a certain rugby team ‘Featherlite Rovers’ and a gentlemen’s outfitters, “Aquascrotum.” One can quite easily discern the rails on which our minds ran at that time.

It’s #LoveTheatre day

I’d rather go to an average play than a great film, and so much good live performance in London. Really makes the capital come alive.

For National Poetry Day

From 1997, an imaginary incident At Heaven’s Gate…

At Heaven’s Gate

Grappelli fiddled.
Bremner snorted.
‘So who did you play for then?’
Back came the reply.
‘Hot club de France.’
At which, without hesitation,
Bremner took his legs from under him.
In memoriam
Billy Bremner and Stephane Grappelli – died December 1997