Oh well, whenever: a poem

Oh well, whenever.

Your single-worded message,

the frown in sympathy,

even a kiss within a dream

elicits a breath unbidden, sharply caught.

A reaction more erotic

than anything thought.

PM

Block: a poem

Because when the music isn't coming, words are all there is... 


Block.

The passion, dissipated,

contemplates indolence.

The doleful absence,

a sense of hiatus

and high dudgeon

and does no good. 

PM

Gazelle Twin CD review.

Please find my review of Gazelle Twin's CD The Entire City here.

http://spitalfieldsmusic.wordpress.com/2013/06/17/gazelle-twin-the-entire-city-review/

PM

The politics of indifference. Part two: when everything matters.

Many things make me angry, but you already know that. In my defence, I think the world is getting angrier. It’s certainly feeling a little crazier out there in the bigger picture than ever before — and in fact as I was preparing to post this article I heard the terrible news of bomb blasts at the Boston Marathon, an event whose details are unfolding even as I write and will require calm analysis another time. 

Take a look at the last six months or so: if you told me back then that Britain would lose its long-standing AAA Credit Rating I’d have found you a boring conversationist, sure, but distinctly credible. Undeniably though, is how it's an ignominious and highly public shame on this country. You can talk up the culture, the heritage, the noteworthy historical figures, but you can’t argue with the numbers. We’ve screwed up royally here.

Tell me six months ago that ‘anything up to 100%’ horse meat would be discovered in mainstream supermarket brand foods purporting to be 100% beef — possibly for a considerable time previously — and I would express amusement, mild dismay, but really, no shock. I reckon I’ve bought meat from a supermarket fewer than a dozen times in the last two years: in the past I’ve wondered enough about how loosely supermarket-supply butchers are monitored when their output is so much greater and more relentless than an independently run family shop. To maintain supply levels and frequency, corners are inevitably cut, along with the beef, it would seem. I must say I love the bullshit of whomever it was who stated ‘anything up to 100%’ in the recent reports — it’s like being diagnosed with an illness that could cause symptoms ranging ‘anywhere up to death.’ How can anyone say 100% of one thing be another thing? Ah well. If there’s some good to emerge from this, it’s that maybe the supermarkets will play harder, we’ll all learn to be more accountable for what goes in our mouths (food-wise, at least) and cultivate closer relationships with small, independent butchers (food-wise at least), who are clearly more strictly regulated, especially as they have more to lose from unscrupulous practice (er, food-wise at least. I’ll stop now). Besides, you simply find a better range of cuts, more negotiable prices, fresher produce and a bit of honest eye-contact with a small operation. Think about it. 

Tell me six months ago that Jimmy Savile was a paedophile and I may have wanted to believe you, but would need proof. I always thought he was oddly asexual if anything — living alone with no noticeable partner, and that slightly weird, but fairly textbook Freudian worship of his mother — not factors which could be conflated into the 400-plus accusations of insidious molestation and emotional (to say nothing of financial) blackmail. It seems the bigger the facade, the easier it is to hide in plain view. 

As for the Pope, resigning — weeeeell, not without precedent, but as every elderly Pope has died on the job since at least the 15th Century certainly made it unforeseen in the modern age. It has given my mother, whose conversation is somewhat circular in her old age, something new to talk about at the very least. I must say it has given me as much pause for thought as if I heard the Chief Cashier of the Bank Of England had changed — something I only found out the other day had happened six months ago. Gripping. 

Best of all, tell me only six months ago that Oscar Pistorius would murder his girlfriend with a pistol…after claiming to mistake her for a burglar…on Valentine’s Day…geddouttahere! What? Oscar, the medal-winning Paralympian who made history by becoming the first Paralympian to qualify in the Olympics slightly over 180 days earlier? A man clearly unused to the idea of disability and failure, reduced to a pathetic, hot-headed, control-freak killer? Tch’oh!

Incredible, really. As Neil Innes said in a splendid Rutles tune: “It’s a strange world we live in, but surely we’re forgiven if we don’t know where to turn.” 

So what am I saying here? It strikes me that if I have got angrier over the years, then maybe many more people are buying into the collective madness than ever before — or rather we’re made more aware of them nowadays. The internet community, such as it is, has been in place for the best part of two decades, but the accessibility and ease of dissemination that social networking affords is probably the single most significant change in communication of the last ten years. I’m typing this intending to post it up on Blogger (thanks Blogger) and then inform my friends and colleagues on Facebook and Twitter that I have done so — thus, an instant transmission of ideology is attained to a considerable number of people who can disseminate it in turn should they so wish; this we know. 

You also know as well as I do that what this technology affords most people is the ability to post up deliriously cute pictures of cats, what they’ve had for dinner, or sanctimonious (albeit humorous) proclamations on the correct usage of grammar and punctuation. I’ve perpetrated these harmless conceits as much as anyone, and more power to them, frankly, but I’m sure we’ve all considered from time to time — if not these cheerful, happily unnecessary distractions, then what else is social networking for? 

Well, what I am seeing worries me. 

How often am I confronted on Facebook with a status update or posting shared by someone that states “99% of people won’t have the GUTS to repost this” preceded by some raving cryptofascist bollocks? You’ve all seen something like it. Here’s one I found at random: 

Doesn’t make much sense, does it? Homeless go without eating. Elderly go without needed medicines. Mentally ill go without treatment. Troops go without proper equipment. Veterans go without benefits that were promised. Yet we donate billions to other countries BEFORE helping our own first. 1% will repost and 99% won’t. Have the guts to repost this.

It’d be patronising in the extreme to go into statistical specifics to illustrate just how misguided these sort of statements can be. Let’s just highlight the essential cluelessness of assuming, as the paragraph would like us to infer, that the parlous state of financing for medical facilities, care for the elderly and so on, could have such a direct, simplistic correlation with the money supposedly being ‘drained’ in the name of foreign charities; that somehow the act of donating to charity ever boils down to a cruel choice for anyone who is kind enough to donate to anything, whether domestic or overseas (“Let me see now: blankets for Syrian refugees — or Timmy’s dialysis? Hmm...”). 

The worst part of this is that people really do let this kind of woollen rhetoric rule their reason — and I’m talking specifically about when they’re online here. I don’t see enough people using their brains — I see too many people just passing on half-baked ideas to other people who will only half-understand them, but believe that much wholeheartedly. Do we really want to be represented by someone else's words quite so often? This is not communication, nor education. It’s not even being politically active. When was the last time that one of these statements (as opposed to links to actual valid online petitions) truly fomented any form of productive soi-disant revolution? The riots that spread across the UK in 2011 were partly co-ordinated — if that’s the right word — by social networking media, you might argue. Well, QED, I say. 

If you’ve ever thought this way, then, it’s time for me to patronise you: please, go away and think. Use your fucking brain. Think a little harder and further than your first thought and consider where this train of logic will take you. Consider the true meaning of that most-abused of expressions: ‘charity begins at home.’  It’s not about where you live in the world. It’s how you live in your head.

PM

The politics of indifference. Part one: why nothing matters.

Once upon a time, not long before school, when I was still tiny enough for my father to carry me to bed, I’d nod off on the sofa in the evening while he’d watch endless news and current affairs programmes. I remember thinking that all those people in suits on television seemed preoccupied with something I thought for years was called ‘polytex.’ It sounds like something you use to paper over the cracks. Well, insert your own shrewd social observation here. 

Politics never fascinated me as a career choice, an active profession. The Seventies were dominated by overweight middle-aged men in ill-fitting suits and wayward hairstyles — seriously, no exaggeration, do a Google search — or Mrs Thatcher and Shirley Williams. These people were never going to be lifestyle icons to the switched-on supercool hipcat I thought I was, evidently, and I suspected the conversation would be limited and dull. It all came over as so grown-up, so earnest. 

By the time I was a teenager, politics for me had social currency, but really only by way of being the main target of derision of so many ‘alternative’ acts in that most fecund of decades for stand-up comedy. It may seem hard to believe that Ben Elton was funny in those days, given his poor showings on more recent TV, but he was, yes indeed, ladies and gentlemen. Funny, quick-witted, impassioned and if he seemed a bit preachy from time to time… well, maybe I needed a little of that too. Margaret Thatcher in Elton’s hands became ‘Mrs Thatch’, indivisible from her coruscatingly insane, bouffanted and vulture-faced Spitting Image puppet, surrounded by hopeless eunuchs or equally insane wannabes. Like practically everyone my age, I got behind all the alternative comedians and their largely left-wing invective because it was cool, it was happening and it seemed to annoy the older generation, not least the stand-up variety acts — or at least those who lacked the courage to accept that things had moved on, socially speaking, and moreover felt their livelihoods were threatened. Comedy had indeed become the new rock’n’roll. Yet, still I was skirting around discussing any real politics, actual matters of Parliamentary policy. I didn’t know much about politics, but I knew for certain what I didn’t like. 

This vague, contrary conviction hardened up a little by the end of my time at school, when a number of my chums joined their local Young Conservatives Club. My grasp of Tory party policy was tenuous, but considering I’d spent the best part of the decade laughing at the contemptible Conservatives and their monstrous leader, I found this determination in my colleagues to vote for the designated bad guys (once they were of legal age, remember) baffling at least. It’s entirely possible that they were encouraged to join a social club that met with parental approval, the better to meet girls and be out of the house for a few hours — but all that besides, they really were, in my eyes, the most pathetic specimens in the Sixth Form: one of their number had the nickname ‘Square’ in recognition of his achievements in the dullest aspects of mathematics and the other, it was well-known, had embarked on a weird insect torturing-and-killing spree after being dumped by a girlfriend of four days. Not exactly ideal poster boys for the Blue team I’m sure you’ll agree — but interestingly, none of this made me want to vote Labour by way of contrast, either. I had a sneaking suspicion their shindigs would be populated by Red Flaggers just as inept, awkward and boring. 

The situation became more intriguing at college where I witnessed firsthand the active abuse of politics by individuals for personal ends. I’m talking about sex of course — it seemed so blatant to me that shaking a tin to raise money for a campaign to stop atrocities in Bosnia (this should date my time at University for you all) was done less out of sympathy for the people of the former Yugoslavia and mostly to get that redheaded Student Secretary for Social Justice into the sack. I have alluded to this before (here) and should point out instantly that I was as much a party to this hypocrisy as anyone. Believe me, my desire to attend a ‘die-in’ at Trafalgar Square in the mid-Nineties was motivated more by a shapely pair of pins and long blonde hair (neither my own, I hasten to add) than any previously apparent (or indeed subsequent) outrage at French Pacific Nuclear Testing. Apparently Greenpeace is 80% female membership, you know. However, as surely as I recognise this hypocrisy in myself, I’ve always been doubtful, in my dealings with people, of the motives in making their political affiliations overt.

Having said ALL of this, I find as I get older that my genial fence-sitting of old to be frankly rather spineless and increasingly feel the need to make a decision. After all, no-one’s truly apolitical, are they? It’s all just a question of whether an issue affects you, and/or if you allow it to do so. So, I’ll leave you with the promise that I have a countering essay lined up to argue this drivel. 

In the meantime, allow me to tell you a brief story of political terrorism that I perpetrated during my time at College. 

The end of the Spring Term of my first year at College coincided with the election of a new President for the Student Union and several ancillary positions on the Student Council. This was relatively exciting as I happened to know several of the candidates who went up for these posts. There was a tall, handsome, long-haired and cheerful chap called Wayne and his ever-present mate, Matty, who contrasted pleasingly enough by being shorter, fatter and bald, if no less jovial. There was another skinny, blandly earnest chap and a rather enthusiastic girl taking the number of Presidential Candidates up to four. Memory fails me on their names, but let’s call them, er, Phil and Clare. 

We had the hustings one lunchtime, where the four candidates stood up and stated their suitability. Phil came across as the crushingly mediocre kind of chap to run the Union like a business. He’s probably doing something tedious but well-paid in the City these days, in his forties like me. Clare sadly hadn’t really thought out her strategy but had been clearly put up for the job by being harmless, approachable and energetic. We won’t hear any more from her. But Matty and Wayne had the proceedings sewn up. Wayne outlined his plans to get bigger indie acts to play at the end-of-term College Ball — the rock’n’roll President card. Matty promised better funding for outdoor events, Extreme Sports Societies and other healthy fun. Both came off to the kind of applause a headline act normally gets at a gig. They were gonna give the people what they wanted

That evening I realised that Matty and Wayne had played their parts in the hustings almost as a double act. My feelings on who actually got voted in was secondary to my feeling that something didn’t seem right. I got out a pad of post-it notes and wrote on one of them, using block capital letters and writing upside-down, the better to hide my left-handedness further:

A VOTE FOR MATTY IS A VOTE FOR WAYNE.

I wrote on a second note: 

A VOTE FOR WAYNE IS A VOTE FOR MATTY.

My dormitory was part of the same building as the College refectory (it was a Catholic Convent, fascinatingly enough). An easy enough task to sneak downstairs in the wee small hours in stockinged feet, in near-darkness, and place the post-its respectively on Matty and Wayne’s candidacy posters on prominent display in the refectory lobby. I snuck back to my room and even destroyed the underlying post-it notes on the pad I’d written. Then went to sleep. The refectory opened at 8am the following morning. 

I padded downstairs at about 9am to considerable hubbub. It was hardly V For Vendetta, but I felt a thrill nonetheless as I queued for my breakfast to have one of my friends remark despairingly to me, “…but it’s sabotage!” and I nodded sagely. Oh, how I nodded sagely. Feigned ignorance. And felt mildly, deliciously naughty.  

Do you know, I think Wayne got voted in on a landslide majority. But I had expressed my pointless point of view.

I have never told anyone I did this until now. So feel honoured! 

PM

Now listening:

Radio 3 as standard. And lots of Maria Callas. 

Now watching: 

Monty Python And The Holy Grail (Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, 1975) 

Monty Python's Life Of Brian (Terry Jones, 1979)

Doctor Who: The Ark In Space (BBC, 1975) — Top-form Tom Baker. Indomitable. 

Ashes To Ashes: series two and three (BBC 2009, 2010): after some wobbles in the first series the characters hit their marks and the plots are more engaging in the last two series, with a genuinely elegaic ending to round things off. Splendid and satisfying. 

Rant-wank for 2013.

It has to be said upfront, if the title of this essay didn’t convince, that your generally gentle and hopefully genial correspondent is not enjoying his 2013 so far. This time last year I wrote an article that expressed my fears for the future of HMV. It was hardly the most adroit piece of prophecy, but the news of past weeks still arrived with a degree of shock and suddenness; finally, this most eminent and estimable of music retail institutions is going into administration, its outcome uncertain. My main fear, voiced last year as now, is that without worthy shopping establishments and the opportunities they afford people to venture out into the Big Wide World and Deal With Other People (Possibly Strangers), we will find instead that the West End — the very heart of London for many — will become a deader place to inhabit. Sure, they could always open another restaurant on the site, but that’s all it will be — another restaurant.  

I’m reminded of a sketch Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie performed on their supreme Nineties TV show A Bit Of Fry & Laurie which involved a discussion about the then-burgeoning broadcast deregulation legislation that inaugurated the Satellite television era: the fear expressed was that while the acquisition of dozens more channels would offer more choice, and a break from the perceived ‘tyranny’ of the UK’s terrestrial televisual tetralogy (BBCs 1&2, ITV and Channel 4. We only had four channels on telly in those days. Yep, four. All terrestrial) we would be getting less quality overall as the new channels would be full of shit, to put it… er, much as it turned out. The corollary, as Fry & Laurie imagined, would be analogous to asking a waiter in a posh restaurant to exchange a single, dirty, solid silver spoon for a bin filled to the brim with thin plastic coffee stirrers. They may be all crap, so the punchline went, but at least you’ve got choice, haven’t you?

Sigh.

If truth be told, I wasn’t enjoying 2013 even before it had arrived. It’s strictly personal, not stuff I’m prepared to discuss, I’m afraid, as much as I suspect it would unburden me to do so. Please take my assurance that I have resolved, beside my New Year Resolutions, not to wallow in past problems and try to take this year as I find it.

As to the matter of those pesky Resolutions, I confess I did not make it easy for myself this year. Two this time around: no messing, no philosophy, both tangible and publicly achievable ventures. The first was simple in its unambiguity: Drink No Alcohol Throughout January. You may appreciate that the weeks leading up to and including Christmas involved a prodigious amount of jovial cavorting and carousing, to the extent that I presume my liver never caught so much as a whiff of a day of unqualified cleanness and sobriety throughout. All this Bacchic revelry ended, not with a bang but with a bit of a pop, on the evening of January 1st 2013, with the last of the inaugural bubbles and a valedictory cup of mead.

But now — it’s February and I have completed my task. Only on one day over the whole of the previous month did I imbibe, and since this was due to a friend’s birthday celebration — a day I had predetermined I would allow before I even embarked on this crazy venture — I can consider myself clean and sober for just over five weeks. Boy, were they long weeks. During the first fortnight on the wagon I would have told you that out of all my attempts at a health drive, this one was a right fucker and no mistake. Richard Harris once memorably referred in interview to the ‘fourteen boring years’ he spent on the Temperance Train and in some small way, I received an insight into how that felt. That sinking feeling that descended each and every time I realised that a particularly bad day at work could not be mitigated with a pint at lunchtime or several afterwards. The prospect of a sociable lubricant on a congenial Friday or Saturday night with friends — gone. I found myself spending more evenings in at home in January than I probably spent in the previous three months put together — and with that, a comcomitant insularity. Fortunately, I had Mrs M as my guardo camino, my co-traveller on the road to purity. I have to say that she seemed to operate as evenly and as sweetly-natured as ever she did, with none of my fuss and mithering — for which I was not only grateful, but quietly impressed. She is evidently a tougher cookie than I am, and a better person for all that too.

As for any physiological effects, well, I admit I did look forward with a morbid — albeit undeniably excited — trepidation to the prospect that I may wake shaking in tremulous delirium of a morning several days in. This has not happened. There have been two notable changes in my bodily function. First off, I have visibly lost some weight, mainly in my face, hands and about four inches off my waist. My double chin has receded to the point where I appear to have a discernible jawline. This has been a few years in remission, so it was a strange feeling, upon trimming my beard, to notice parts of my face that go in where previously they went out. I have knucklebones instead of dimples on my hands, and my fingers closely resemble those of my octogenarian mother, a detail pointed out to me by Mrs M and one I find delightful and reassuring.

The second change has been in my sleeping pattern. Whereas I used to be a strict 7am riser irrespective of workdays or weekends, I have found that I lie in dozing much as I last did as a teenager, and if left unchecked of a Saturday morning will awake some time after 9am. On more than one occasion I’ve not set foot on bedroom carpet before 10.30am, and frankly this appalls me. There aren’t enough hours in my spare time as it is. However, it has shown me that my main motivation in getting up was mostly dictated by hangover — and that’s not a good reason to spring out of bed prematurely. I do like my sleep, in its place.  

Anyway, while this hasn’t exactly been the most exciting thing in my life at the moment, I thought it would prove to be quite a useful thing to chronicle, given that it’s not been lost on me these past weeks that my announcement to undertake a month off the sauce was greeted in most camps with incredulity and a distinct whiff of scepticism. Before I took this on, I wouldn’t class myself as pathologically addicted to drink. Well, now I know for certain that I am not. It seems I have simply not tried hard enough in my alcoholic efforts. Well, good-oh for that.

Oh, my second New Year Resolution: learn to read and write music. It may come as a surprise to some of you that I have about as much technical aptitude in music as a spoon knows the taste of soup. As a child I remember learning the road signs depicted in The Highway Code. The colours and graphics fascinated me, but clearly not so much as to make me take up driving. Well, it’s time I learned how to navigate the High Cs, if you’ll forgive me. I’ve been crotchety of late, but now I’m positively quavering with anticipation. I used to stop at the pub and now I’m going to rest at the end of a bar. You’re not paying extra for these tortuous musical puns, you know.

Thank you, you’ve been kind. I’ll go now. 

But first, a drink.

PM

Now listening:

Lots of Radio 3. Like, lots of Radio 3.

Khovanshchina by Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881). Exotically orchestrated Russian opera, written by a gifted man frustrated by his day job and consequently driven to drink. Well, aren’t we all?

Now watching:

Doctor Who: The Reign Of Terror (BBC, 1964) — The magical, mercurial William Hartnell as the original Time Lord, in a story set in Revolutionary France and featuring two episodes restored with stylish animation.

Doctor Who: Legacy Boxset (BBC 1979, 1993) — A fascinating odds-and-sods collection of documentaries and all extant footage of the ‘legendary’ unfinished Who story, 1979’s Shada, with the magnificent and unmatchable Tom Baker as the Doctor.

Life On Mars: series one and two (BBC 2006/2007): splendidly pungent and frequently hilarious 1970s procedural cop/time travel drama, with Philip Glenister’s immense portrayal of non-PC DCI Gene Hunt a standout creation.

Ashes To Ashes: series one (BBC 2008): the not-as-good but still-worthy sequel to Life On Mars.

Dirty Harry, Magnum Force, The Enforcer, Sudden Impact and The Dead Pool (1971-1988): Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry canon. Seemed appropriate after all that Gene Hunt.

Ivor Novello’s piano — a slim tale from the Green Room.

In the summer of 1997 I landed a job running the Classical Record department of my local Virgin Megastore. Whisper it quietly, but according to my line manager I was the first person in the history of that now sadly defunct chain to be hired specifically for my Classical music knowledge. Previous incumbents in the Classical Departments of Virgin stores nationwide presumably landed the job as a short straw duty option, or only made their knowledge of Classical music manifest after working in other departments — but I really don’t know. I still find it rather hard to believe, but anyway, that is what I was told.  The following eighteen months saw me increase sales of Classical music in the local area by an alleged 25% but much more importantly, forge some lasting friendships. A full account of our rousing antics is worth an entire blog entry all to itself. But not today, as the late, great Bob Holness would no doubt have said.

All of this is largely irrelevant detail but I include it because when I was eventually sacked from my position in the spring of 1999 (Yes, sacked. Yes, yes, another time, I promise), I spent the following months in abject freefall. I never knew I had a work ethic until the framework upon which to apply one was suddenly taken from me. My parents greeted the news of my sudden ‘career’ halt entirely not as I’d anticipated, meeting it less with anger or argument, but mostly with a sense of puzzlement and denial. Then again, they were both of over pensionable age and had probably not expected their youngest son to be of any more trouble to them. They could have done without my woes.

My girlfriend of six years had left me several months earlier, although as often with these things, the relationship had, retrospectively, wound down to a grind rather than reach a decisive crunch point. At this stage in proceedings I still felt I could keep in touch. I remember her precise words to me, over my friend Rich’s brand-new mobile phone that he’d kindly lent me for the purpose: “You lost your job? What’s that got to do with me?” To be fair to her, she could also have done without my woes for some time, too. 

I can’t quite describe the stomach-dropping and deeply depressing sensation that followed me around like a pestilential storm cloud for the following five months. Depression is a far-too-casually bandied-about word in conversation and I am wary of using the term on myself. During this period, I sought help from my doctor who told me that I wasn’t ‘painting a picture’ of clinical depression. I believed him, but it was of small comfort. Besides, the depth of my despair had started to run to the pathological, as over the course of the coming months, I visibly lost weight; a considerable amount of weight — about four to five stone — which on a chap my height was severely noticeable and a source of concern among my long-term friends who had known me as an amiably rotund person at the best of times. I don’t recall deliberately not eating, as such, but then again, nor do I remember eating all that often either. No, my days were spent skulking sulkily about the family home, smoking the ever-appetite-suppressing cigarettes and the odd joint in my bedroom, only venturing out to draw my dole, buy more ciggies and make occasional forays to the pub, where my friend Rich would buy me scotch and cokes and try to keep me laughing. He was particularly worried for me. One time I borrowed a three-quarter-length jacket from him and I remember the evident shock on his face as I buttoned it up as neatly as he could do on his own, notably slender frame. 

As my waking hours had become miserable, so my sleeping ones, perhaps through a slightly stoned, subconscious instinct for self-preservation, became wondrous. Sleep became my favourite activity — easily achieved, and oddly, of as high a quality and duration as any I’ve ever enjoyed in my life. Indeed, waking every morning brought the grudging realisation that my perceived nightmare was facing reality. I never quite wanted to die — but I remember reasoning to myself, with baleful calmness, that nor did I particularly enjoy being alive. 

Now of course, you must not trouble yourself with thoughts of compassion, or at least not for too long. In truth I was idle and wasteful with the hours to myself I had suddenly acquired and my job-seeking lacked, shall we say, not as much rigor or consistency as my smoking and drinking at the time. Nonetheless, the summer of 1999 saw me sorely vexed, rattled to my very foundations as events in my life thus far had failed to do quite so perniciously. I was unemployed and worse, I felt unemployable. In the weeks to come I started to have panic attacks, episodes of shooting pains across my chest and down my arms, breathlessness — indeed everything, it seemed to me, symptomatic of incipient heart failure. I ended up in hospital after one specially harrowing sensation alone at home. A trip in the ambulance to Casualty, while getting high on pure oxygen, culminated in having my disturbingly scrawny chest wired up to the ECG and subsequently X-rayed. The doctor gave me a gentle smile, a flimsy copy of the image of my immaculate-looking ribcage, a bottle of glycerin tablets and the rather un-medical (I thought) advice to “just calm down.” I was left sat alone on the gurney in the X-ray suite, semi-naked and sobbing profoundly with a mixture of relief, and extreme guilt at all the kind, serious attention I had clearly wanted — and got. I never opened the glycerin bottle. I learned to recognise my (admittedly real-feeling) symptoms as mere panic, nothing more. The hospital could also have done without my woes, that was for sure. 

Fortunately, I had two friends in particular who spent the next several months ‘looking after’ me. I use this term quite precisely as there were times when I was of the distinct impression that I had been placed under some kind of low-level ‘suicide watch,’ and who’s to say my self-destructive behaviour didn’t suggest otherwise, outwardly, even if I really didn’t feel quite so fatal, so final, myself. The redoubtable Rich you already know. The other was my ex-Virgin colleague Sarah, who had been so outraged by my sacking that she sent me a card expressing her sorrow and anger — and offered to buy me some drinks. Sarah wore her hatred for her job like a big, bright badge with a snarling face on it, but outside of work hours or in briefly snatched staff room conversations she was convivial, witty, and of similar outlook. She lived in a house in South London that she shared with several people, nearly all of whom I can’t recall with much clarity, save for Sara (don’t get confused), who was a delightful — and delightfully shapely — Northern lass who dispensed cheerful informalities along with an endless supply of cigarettes from one of those self-rolling devices. Sara was great fun just to talk and drink with: chatty, sympathetic, complimentary, unflappable, with an endless line in salty stories, filthy jokes and encouragement. She was probably about only half-a-dozen or so years older than me, a woman in her mid-thirties but she seemed untouchable and magnificent to me, which is a real shame now, looking back. 

Sara worked in London theatres, although I’m afraid I don’t remember the precise details. I think she was someone in Stage Management, but her work ran all the way from basic admin to dealing with the ‘talent’ and even painting the odd background flat. She knew of plenty of short-term work going, so it was that in the June/July of 1999 I found myself helping out backstage at the Peacock Theatre in Holborn. It was part of the Sadlers Wells group and so I felt I was in the environs of a genuine theatrical institution, even if the Peacock was nowhere near as famous as its parent venue. 

My job involved repainting the dressing room and there seemed to be endless cups of tea on the go at any given moment. So far, so straightforward. Sadly, my previously dormant asthma, coupled with my receding, but still ongoing panic attacks, rendered me useless at the job within an hour or two of arrival. Sara was briskly attentive, spiriting me out of the building and down Holborn way to get me something a little stronger along with a ciggie (yeah, like that’ll soothe the chest pains...) and a sit down. I was subsequently given some other tasks involving handling the lights onstage for the rest of my stint, which also afforded me the opportunity when quiet to stand up front, gaze out at the vast expanse of seating in the auditorium, imagine a full house and ‘have a moment’...

Thanks to Sara, the Peacock Theatre provided me with gainful part-time employment for several weeks, enough to stand a round or two for the pair of us in the pub after work. It was a splendidly sunny and warm summer, the kind worth staying out in, until late. One evening, after several drinks in Theatreland and with the pubs close to chucking-out time, Sara suggested we continue the frolics to a members club she knew. Sounded good to me. 

Good Lord, The Green Room. I didn’t know it then, but of course I’ve since learned of its preeminent status as one of the most prestigious clubs for anyone in the theatrical profession in London, with a highly illustrious roll-call of members over the decades, both renowned onstage and backstage (for all the right reasons). It has since closed (and reopened) several times in several places since I entered the door of the Georgian town house of its most famous location, on Adam Street, off the Strand and ventured into the basement with Sara. At the time, I merely thought it was somewhere open into the wee small hours and that was fine enough with me.

The small bar room was famously described by Sir Peter Ustinov as a place where giving an after-dinner speech to a capacity crowd was “like addressing sailors in a submarine,” but was empty enough at 1.30am on a weeknight as we found it. Here and there were several expensively dressed individuals, sat at small round tables as if waiting for a cabaret act, clearly soaked to the eyeballs and enjoying the calm tolerant atmosphere in which to be so. Sara knew the barman and as they chatted she introduced me as someone who was musical and could play a bit of the piano. I found this odd as I don’t think Sara had ever seen me address the ivories. I should point out, if I’ve not done so in a previous blog, that my piano playing technique is dubious, more of a fight between me and the keys, and one I only occasionally win. Nonetheless, the barman was a genial and accommodating chap and offered me a free pint of Guinness if I were to give the assembled patrons a tune. I sipped my current, paid-for pint of the Black Stuff and said, “Maybe later!” He added, as if by way of incentive, that the piano belonged to Ivor Novello, the legendary actor, singer and composer — and the invitation was not bandied about willy-nilly. I brightly promised to knock out a ditty for them all before I left, thinking the incident would be forgotten and I’d be able to drink in peace. 

However, after a pint of two more of the Sauce, and with the conversation flowing, I felt magically encouraged and emboldened, until eventually I indicated to our host that I was ready to have a bash. I was hustled over to the piano, which was a marvellously battered old upright on a dais. After a short announcement to the rare few in the room at such a long hour, the bartender let me have it. I announced apologetically that my repertoire was slender and unconventional and that the best thing I had on me was a rather frantic and tricksily percussive piece I had composed myself. This won me some polite, smattered applause. 

I then forget the next three minutes. Entirely. The only part I remember was some slightly more enthusiastic applause at the end and a pint of Guinness appearing magically beside me. I’d done all right. As I returned to the table and Sara, one of the elderly, floridly-sozzled chaps sat adjacently continued to applaud a little longer, but I noticed that his was the sarcastic, slow handclap of derision, of disapproval. He continued until his rheumy eye caught mine. He smiled joylessly. 

“You play like Béla Bartók,” he offered.

A stunning, disproportionate comparison. I suspect I gasped. “Why, thank you, that’s very kind of you to say so!”

“I loathe Bartók.” he concluded with coddled conviction, continuing to smile thinly.

“I’m sorry,” I said, all too delighted, “but that’s a compliment. I’m having that!”

Never was I insulted so fulsomely!

Due to an administrative cock-up at the Peacock, I didn’t get paid for the majority of my employment there for a couple of months afterwards, by which time I had secured a decent full-time job and glad to do so. The money I earned was barely more than my dole, but acquired more agreeably. In the middle of all the craziness I experienced in the summer of 1999, I never expected that I would ever end up in The Green Room, playing Ivor Novello’s piano, for beer — and it was in tune. 

Sara — if you ever happen to read this, thank you ever so much, you were awesome. 

I hope you all had a Merry Christmas and I wish you happiness in the New Year. 

PM

Currently listening:

Lots of medieval and Renaissance Christmas music — too many to mention individually. 

Currently watching:

The eight Harry Potter films. The winsome, racy and charming magic of the early years gives way to something grittier, greyer and possibly taking itself far too seriously. But that’s enough about me, the films are pretty good.

Red Dwarf X (Dave, 2012) resurrected series, back by popular demand and almost back to basics too, with less emphasis on effects-driven high concepts and more of the snippy dialogue and hilariously embarrassing situations that endeared it to millions originally. It’s like they never left. Not the dizziest heights of Dwarf yore, perhaps, but still excellent post-pub viewing.