SEVEN MILES HIGH
Flying back from Vegas, crossing the Rockies at dusk, the crests of the mesas bathed all peachy pink. Christine McVie singing Songbird in my headphones. The girl in the next seat laughing out loud at an old episode of Only Fools and Horses.
It’s minus 54 degrees Fahrenheit outside.
Eight timezones to cross on a fourteen hour flight, clock faces a blur as their hands race to keep pace. I’m taking a trip halfway into tomorrow, before yesterday’s had chance to say goodnight.
Five hours, 54 minutes – and 2502 miles from home.
Seven miles below, the North Atlantic ocean, laid out like a crumpled, stone-washed, denim-blue dust sheet, waiting to catch all those lost hours and minutes as they tumble, irredeemably, from our lives.
THE UNINVITED
That was the time we heard them chattering late into the night. The carefree chatter that goes with being a freeloader. Squatting in someone else’s house. Eating their food and enjoying their heating, without ever having to put your hand in your pocket to pay your fair share.
That was the time we decided... they had to die.
Clutching my Chinese-made pistol (actually a Chinese-made air-pistol) I slide back the hatch leading up into their lair. Armed with the gun, a stash of poison and a piece of lead piping – in case it should ever come to face-to-face combat a-mano-a-mano – I am transformed.
I am Clint Eastwood – preparing to take on the Mexican bandits in A Fist Full of Dollars. I am Arnold Schwarzenegger – stalking The Predator in the steaming jungles of Central America. I am...
I am Inspector Clouseau on the trail of The Pink Panther, come to deal with a couple of scrawny rats that have moved into our attic space to shelter from the winter cold.
Although now, half way into my mission, with my knees already creaking from slowly crawling along the narrow joists, I’m beginning to wonder whether the dust, thrown up by the loft insulation, just might claim me as the first casualty in this confrontation.
THE ONE-EYED KITCHEN GOD
It’s been sitting on the kitchen worktop for as long as we’ve lived in this house. Its chromium skin, now encrusted with limescale stains and steam heated smears. Its element, as furred-up as my own arteries, taking longer and longer to boil the water.
I’d like to get rid of it. Perhaps replace it with enamelled one, in a colour that tones in nicely with the toaster.
But then the toaster dies, so I’m glad I didn’t.
“Never mind,” says my wife, “if I fill it with a half-and-half mixture of vinegar and water, then leave it to soak overnight, that will descale the element and have the kettle working as good as new by morning.”
Although,” she adds, looking me up and down, “I don’t think the same could be said about you.”
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
When we are out on the lanes walking the dogs, I’ll frequently pick a blackberry off a bramble bush and pop it in my mouth. I don’t wash it. I don’t cook it. I don’t waste any time getting to know it. I just eat it. It’s like being on a long and winding pick-your-own fruit farm.
However, on this particular occasion, something – let’s call it intuition, sixth sense or even a survival instinct left over from our primaeval past – prompts me to pause and look at the berry I’ve just picked.
There, clasping the far side of the fruit, is a big, fat, green, speckled, iridescent bug – looking for all the world like an alien creature, riding a burned out asteroid through the icy wastes of the Solar System.
Of course it isn’t an extraterrestrial but, as I flick the blackberry and its passenger back into the hedgerow, the insect does, for one brief moment, experience the frisson of tumbling in free fall across the uncharted tracts of space.
AT CHEZ GERARD
In the restaurant, the waitress – with the piercing blue eyes – smiles at me when she brings me my espresso. Distracted by something inconsequential I do not see this gesture, only the looks – on the faces of my companions – reveal what I have missed.
I USED TO HAVE A BEATLE CAP – JUST LIKE THE ONE JOHN LENNON WORE
They say the brain uses the time we are asleep to catch up on its filing. Storing away the day’s experiences for cataloging and cross referencing against other memories.
That’s fine by me – I’m more than happy for all the little neuron clerks that dwell within my cerebral cortex to get on with this job. Providing they do it quietly.
Now normally my conscious brain shuts down around eleven PM and barely entertains another lucid thought until at least two cups of tea into the breakfast news. But, on this particular night, my little grey cells decided to take me on a multimedia jaunt down memory lane.
It must have been about 2 in the morning when my mind began to hear music playing. It was an old Beatles number – In My Life off their Rubber Soul album – only this time, it was being sung by Jim Reeves.
Jim Reeves... a man who managed to issue more records after he died, than when he was alive. When I was young, I used to lay in the bath on Sunday evenings listening to the chart show on Radio Luxembourg hoping one of the bands I liked – The Hollies or The Animals or The Who or the Manfreds – would be Number One. But no, it would be another rave from the grave by Jim Reeves. In 1966 one of Reeves’ singles – Distant Drums – sat in the charts for 45 weeks. It even kept The Beatles double-sider Eleanor Rigby and Yellow Submarine off the Number One slot.
I hated him for that, with a visceral loathing. Forty years later, I find myself lying in bed once more brooding over the injustice of it all. I rearrange my pillow, turn over and try to drift back off to sleep – only to be disturbed by another sound.
“Do you remember,” says a voice, coming from deep within my subconscious, “those Cuban-heeled Chelsea boots you used to wear? The way that soft, black leather fitted so snugly around your ankles, when you zipped them up? The shape of the sole,” it adds, “would probably help your fallen arches now.”
“You used to have a really cool chocolate brown and mustard-coloured check shirt, with a button-down collar,” it continues. “You don’t see many of those these days. In fact, the last you saw of that shirt was on the back of Carol McKittrick. She never returned it when the two of you split up. Not that it would fit you now anyway.”
Carol McKittrick? A girlfriend I haven’t seen or had any contact with since... since 1968? Girlfriend? She’d be a mature woman now – with a bus pass and a state pension.
From somewhere else within my mind I heard the click, clack, clacking of an old manual typewriter. That’s all I need. I’ve had the fashion department on to me and now my brain’s creative team is converting this dream into a manuscript.
Go away. I–just–want–to–get–some–sleep. If we have to rake over all this ancient history and pick the scabs off old memories, can’t we save it for a Sunday afternoon, when I’ve nothing better to do than nod off while watching The Antiques Roadshow?”
I make a concerted effort to relax. To clear my mind. To think of something bland and soporific. Think of the incoming tide, gently washing across a shingle shore. Woosh, woosh.
And it works. I feel my brain begin to wind down. One by one, my little grey cells stop whatever it is they are doing and head back to their dormitories. The typewriter stops. The music stops. Elsewhere, I hear the low rumble of filing cabinet drawers being gently slid shut, to avoid that annoying clump when the drawer finally slams home.
“Goodnight,” it’s another voice – an irritatingly chirpy voice, with an equally irritating accent.
“Did you know, that you were the first person in Scarborough to own a copy of John Lennon’s book In His Own Write? You’ve still got it on your shelves – although the last time you opened it was in 1964.
“Oh, and you also had a Beatle cap, just like the one Lennon wears on the front cover. You wouldn’t happen to know where it is now?”
“Get out of here, this is not the time to be asking me this!”
Click. Click. Click.
The lights are going out all across my nocturnal brain.
Click. Click.
And then the alarm clock starts to ring.
NO HATS, NO BAGGIES
At the hotel on the Las Vegas ‘Strip’ there are many places to eat. At the French restaurant, the dress code is NO casual attire. At the Italian restaurant, the dress code is casual. At the Japanese restaurant: casual elegant. At the gala dinner – business casual.
At the nightclub: casual chic – open brackets, no hats, no oversized jeans, no baggies, no athletic wear, close brackets.
At the all-you-can-eat buffet there is no dress code although perhaps there should be some warnings...
Against Hawaiian shirts in patterns so florid they can induce instant migraine attacks.
Against little old ladies, old enough to be my grandmother, who dress like cheap hookers – this is offensive to other diners, as well as to the sensitivities of cheap hookers.
And against fluorescent body hugging lycra being worn by anyone larger than a size 8XL. Not least because anyone larger than a size 8XL really – no, really – should not be dining in an all-you-can-eat buffet.
FETCHING IN THE LINES
After discussing the metaphorical symbolism of Adam and Eve’s nakedness, or some other tale from my Children's Illustrated Bible, we’d have a supper of soup, accompanied by large hunks of bread. It always annoyed my mother that Margaret would hack the loaf into wedges, rendering the leftovers impossible to toast the following morning.
My Aunt Margaret was a fisherman’s wife who spent most of her life working in the warehouses on the Scarborough Fish Pier. When I was young, she was my baby-sitter and evenings would be spent listening to her holding forth on her two favourite topics: The Old Testament, with a strictly fundamentalist, Elim pentecostal interpretation – and the Soviet penal system. She admired the fact Joseph Stalin, like the Lord Jehovah, was quick to smite down anyone who opposed him.
I now realise the long years spent in the raw cold, mucking the salt-slaked long lines clean of debris, then skaning the mussels from their shells, had turned the knuckles of Margaret’s hands into arthritic claws, incapable of wielding a more subtle knife cut.
ANGEL OF THE MORNING
Later that morning she brought me satsumas and a mug of sweet green tea that smelled of toasted rice. The slogan on her mug reads I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered while the one on mine says I am not a number, I am a free man. She asks me when we’d meet again and I reply “soon”. At the time I say it, I mean it. But we never did make that second date. I am a free man and I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered.
THE PERFECT MATCHING PAIR
I’ve seen and handled a few in my time. All shapes and all sizes – and I can tell you this: No matter how good the underwiring, large naturals have a tendency to droop. They also have lives of their own, bouncing up, bouncing down, swinging right, swinging left, independently of each other. And, they are rarely a matching pair.
These were different, in that they were not different. They were the same. They were identical. They were the perfect matching pair. Round. Rigid. Pert. Jutting out at a steady 90 degrees to the body – like two heat seeking missiles selecting their next target.
From time-to-time, their proud owner would glance down at them, like a mother might gaze upon the heads of her new born twins. Admiring the handiwork of their creator – not god but a surgeon. And all the while smiling a smile that said: “That was money well spent. These will keep me in the style to which I wish to become accustomed. These will help me stay warm in my old age.”
ICED TEA WITH ELVIS
Last night I dreamed I met with Elvis. We were sitting in one of the departure lounges at Memphis International Airport. Drinking iced tea. Killing time. Waiting for a delayed flight.
Here’s the thing: I’ve sat in one of the departure lounges at Memphis International Airport. Drinking iced tea. Killing time. Waiting for a delayed flight. But Elvis had left the building. All that remained of the King were the souvenirs on display in the terminal’s shopping arcade.
On a wall, above the gents urinals in an adjoining restroom, there was a sign. It said the terminal was also an officially designated tornado shelter.
As my delayed flight finally bucketed away into the night sky and a stewardess warned us to remain seated, because of the risk of turbulence caused by – and these were her very words – tornadic activity, the thought crossed my mind that I could be drinking iced tea with Elvis sooner than I had anticipated.
THE MORNING AFTER
Still wearing yesterday’s clothes, walking in to work from an unfamiliar direction. The subtle ache of unexpected physical exertion. The taste on your skin of a stranger’s sweat. The irrepressible smile that lights up your face, each time you rewind and replay the events of the previous 12 hours.
Who got lucky last night?
Are you going to see them again?
Will they call you today?
A HIGHER STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Far up on a building site a brickie takes a break. Shirt off, bare chested, he sits cross-legged on a window-ledge, basking in the mid-morning heat, clutching a mug of tea and smoking a roll-up. Like Buddha on a high rise.
THE DOG DOESN’T DO SARCASM
The dog is doing his little dance. The little dance he always does whenever he wants more biscuits. He has a limited repertoire. He’s never been to dog training and we were too poor to send him to stage school.
As if, I say, I’m giving you any more biscuits when you’ve just turned up your nose at your dinner. A dinner of well-balanced tasty morsels that a team of canine nutritionists spent the best years of their lives perfecting. You, the same picky pooch who, given half a chance will happily snarf down six-month old roadkill.
Then I realise I’m being sarcastic – to a dog. My dog doesn’t understand English. Even if he could, he’s old and deaf now.
I begin to feel guilty, like maybe I’ve hurt his feelings. So I give him some more biscuits and explain that... I wasn’t laughing at him but with him.
My dog doesn’t do sarcasm but he appreciates irony.
Published in Not Expecting Fish (Gatehouse Press) 2007
AT LULWORTH COVE
As they pose for their photograph to be taken, the two women self-consciously rearrange their ample bosoms with all the determination of hotel chambermaids fluffing up eiderdown pillows – but with all the pointlessness of a cook ladling a blancmange back into its mold. Their companion, with the camera, braces himself to take the shot, resting his naked paunch on a conveniently located tourist information board. The board explains how the cove has evolved over millions and millions of years. Nice to see all that geological research was not in vain.
POST-OP
One, the shape and consistency of an egg – lightly boiled. The other, the size of a Big Mac – strictly no fries. Two hours of my life lost in an anaesthetic haze. The next 48, a mental maze, as a cocktail of drugs drains from my brain. But at last I can reopen my diary and start to fill out all those empty days. I’ve also noticed my body has acquired some interesting new scars – which is cool. Or at least would be, if I were 40 years younger.
THE WRONG SORT OF PEOPLE
It’s morning and I’m heading into London on an early train. Somewhere around Chelmsford – just as dawn is breaking – I look out of the carriage window and see a close of dinky executive homes, on a dinky executive housing estate. They all have the same small, neat, eminently sensible gardens – are surrounded by a network of good roads – and are just minutes away from plenty of shops, places to eat and entertainments. For a moment I am tempted. I ask myself: why do I live in a remote house in the middle nowhere?
Miles from shops or any of the other facilities that help make life comfortable. Where the simplest of tasks – like visiting the local post office – can involve taking a 4-wheel-drive down long, flooded, mudded tracks. Where I can’t get a decent broadband connection. Even if I could, every time the wind blows the wrong way, the power fails and the lights go out. Where I don’t have mains drainage. Where the house is cold and drafty – so cold that keeping it warm in winter consumes almost as much electricity as a small Third World country uses in a year. And where gardening is a constant struggle against briar, bramble and bindweed, as nature reverts to the wildwood on the margins of my plot.
Then I snap out of it and remember: That those shiny new houses are built of nothing more substantial than sticky-back plastic. That the neighbours would start a petition every time I hit a power chord on my Telecaster. That I’d receive threatening letters from the council whenever I had the temerity to light a bonfire. And I‘d live in fear that if the ‘wrong sort of people’ moved in next door, it would reduce the value of my house.
And then I realise: I am one of those wrong sort of people.
Not for me the crumpled, Hugo Boss suit wearing, Ford Mondeo-driving but BMW aspiring, deferential golf playing, bad PowerPoint presenting, clingfilm shrouded sandwiches in the centre of the table slowly curling in the heat of a windowless meeting room in a budget hotel on the edge of a trading estate, executive lifestyle.
I don’t want to be a respectable, responsible member of society polishing the hood of my car every Sunday morning, while discussing the merits of Waitrose Pinot Grigio versus Tesco Chardonnay with my neighbours until the day I’m screwed into a polished pine box and carted off to become mulch beneath a green-fly infested rosebush in a municipal crematorium’s garden of remembrance. I want to be me.
On second thoughts perhaps I’m better off living in the middle of nowhere – much less unpleasantless all round.
IN THE LECTURE THEATRE
Halfway through the seminar, the girl with the henna-red hair and big copper earrings stretches, her upraised hands gripping the seatback as she arches her body to find a more comfortable position. This movement plumps up her already ample bosom to create a decolletage of such spectacular proportions that her breasts seem on the verge of making an escape bid. Simultaneously, the hem of her short black dress rides up, like a theatre curtain on opening night, across smooth lycra-clad legs to expose the rolling contours of her upper thighs. Time stands still. Then she relaxes and – as her clothing regains its decorum – returns to her notes. The image is gone, nothing remains – except a memory, seared into the retina of my mind’s eye.
BY TRAIN FROM ELY
Crossing the Fens from March, black smoke belching from the old brink kiln chimneys, fighting for airspace amid the slowly turning blades of the wind turbines. Now passing the McCains frozen chips factory. And in the distance... the squat grey bulk of Peterborough Cathedral contrasts with the viridescent capped domes of the mosque and its muezzin tower. Everything under one big sky, all uniformly slick in the same driving rain.
MISSILES AND McCARTNEY
The guy on the Minneapolis flight tells me he still misses the girl he met and loved in Suffolk, England, 15 years ago, when he was stationed at Bentwaters, near Woodbridge. We talk of Paul McCartney and Eric Clapton. I’d seen them both live, when they were still young – and cool – he only has their early albums.
He says he has Chippewa, Bretton, Scottish and Irish blood in his veins. And that one of his ancestors first came over the empty tundra with the Hudson Bay Company’s trappers. Now he spends his days alone in the radio shack of an isolated airforce base on that same empty tundra, listening for missiles that will never arrive. He says one day he’s going to write his family history – and that he’d like to see that girl again.
GONE TO TEXAS
Late night in the sports bar, reclining on a stool like some latter-day caesar – but in a colour-coordinated Haiwaiian shirt and shorts rather than a toga – the man from Corporate America holds court, surrounded by friends and cronies. Against a background of clinking ice cubes against Jack Daniels, chalk dusted cues against 8-balls and the murmur of venomous gossip, a pianist fights a wave of indifference from drinkers, too distracted by the sight of the waitresses’ honey-coloured, bustier boosted breasts, to heed any of the tunes he plays. It is 2:15 in the morning and outside the temperature is still 76 degrees Fahrenheit.
COMING TO AMERICA
On the back of my visa waiver card it states that the public reporting burden for completing this form is two minutes to learn about the form. Plus four minutes to fill out the form. Making a total of six minutes in all. Someone, somewhere took the trouble to measure, record and report this information. Perhaps all that time, effort – and tax-payers’ money – might have been better spent reviewing and updating the questions?
For example, the form still asks if I ever worked for the German Nazi party between the years of 1933 to 1945. In 1945, I would not be born for another five years. And to have been active in the Nazi party in 1933, I would now be pushing the far side of 90. Of all the bad guys who harbour ill-will towards America, perhaps stormtroopers, too geriatric and arthritic to goosestep one jackbooted pace further, are the least of the US Government’s worries.
The form also asks me if I’ve ever been convicted of a crime involving moral turpitude. For one foolish moment I’m tempted to answer “No – but I do like the sound of that turpitude – where can I get me some?” But then I remember... the officers manning the immigration controls are all at least 8 feet tall, 10 feet wide, pack pistols that could halt a runaway bus and probably know 14 different ways to break my neck armed with nothing more menacing than an HB pencil.
So I fill out the form unambiguously, hand it to the nice man with the big gun – and gain my entry into the land of the free.
CARGO PANTS ARE OUT
I’m on the 5:30 from Liverpool Street. Oblivious to any sense of irony or self-awareness, the overweight guy – sitting opposite me in the carriage – orders a Mars Bar and a large bag of cheese ‘n’ onion potato crisps to go with his Diet Coke. As we pull out of Manningtree, he phones ahead to an Indian restaurant in Ipswich to order a takeaway.
If we are what we eat, then he’s about to become a Prawn Dansak, with side orders of Bombay Potato, Saag Aloo, Bhindi Bhajee, Pilau rice, two Peshwari naan – and a couple of vegetable Samosas thrown in for good measure.
I am reminded of all this the next day... when I pull on a pair of freshly laundered jeans and find they are a little bit tighter than they were the last time I wore them. I’d like to think they’d shrunk in the wash. I’d like to think a lot of things. I’d like to think I still had the body of a 19-year-old. But I know that, short of kidnapping a 19-year-old, the days of slim-cut designer jeans are over and that a future of beige chinos – with elasticated waistbands – stretches out ahead of me.
It's on days like this you wake up and know you’ll never again wear Madrass-check cargo pants, skater boi shorts, snakeskin cowboy boots, biker-style leather jackets, Liberty-print fitted floral shirts, horizontal stripes nor Chuck Taylor Converse All Star sneakers – although in the case of sneakers, this is because they can’t give you the support your fallen arches now need.
It’s a coming of age acceptance that you can no longer pretend your straining button-holes are a deliberate fashion statement. Or that you are never going to lose those extra two inches that will make all your clothes fit more comfortably.
It’s a coming of age recognition that some colours now make you look more washed out and washed up than you already feel.
It’s a coming to the age when you have to admit some of those clothes never fitted even when they were brand new and that their purchase was always going to be an act of blind faith.
It’s a coming of age thing, I say, as I finally pass over a bundle of little-worn clothes to the lady in the charity shop.
NAMING THE NAMES
So when I suggest ‘Oi you, Come here’ would make a good name for our new dog – on the totally rational basis that if it ever ran off, “Oi you, Come here” would be the first thing we’d say – my wife asks me if I’ve always been this autistic when it comes to naming things.
It does cross my mind to dispute this remark – but then I remember my teddy bears.
When I was a child, I had a large teddy that I christened ‘Big Teddy’. I had a small teddy I called ‘Little Teddy’. And I had a teddy with pink fur – I think my mother had secretly wanted a girl – that with equally excrutiating logic I called ‘Pink Teddy’.
And then there was the last of my bears.
It was given to me rather late in my primary school career, by which time I was already heavily into playing with toy guns, toy swords, toy soldiers and toy weapons of mass destruction. Had I been familiar with the stories of Evelyn Waugh – as distinct from plain war stories – I might have seen the whole Sebastian Flyte, Brideshead Revisited possibilities of having a teddy bear. But I wasn’t. So I didn’t.
Instead – the bear having arrived just in time for tea – I looked at the contents of my plate for inspiration, and named the bear ‘Egg and Chips’.
And ‘Egg and Chips’ it remained – until fake-fur fabric fatigue took hold and the little fellow succumbed to a terminal loss of kapok stuffing.
With hindsight, I think the bear was lucky.
I could have been eating a Spotted Dick pudding. Or Cock-a-Leekie soup. Or Toad-in-the-Hole. Or Fairy Cake. Or even Stuffed Faggots. And I still think ‘Oi you, Come here’ is a good name for a dog !
AFTER THE GOLDRUSH
When I was a teenager, there was a hippy – we called him Wavey Davey – who lived in our town. We knew he was a hippy because – along with littering his conversation with plenty of “Hey mans”, “Peace” and “Out-a-sights” – he also wore a full length Moroccan-style kaftan. Nothing unusual about that you might think, except this was not the Summer of Love on a warm San Franciscan night – but an out-of-season seaside town on the cold, grey, fog-shrouded North Sea coast of England.
Wavey Davey had two distinguishing features. The first was his artificial leg. He liked to suggest – although always stopping short of giving away any details – that he’d lost his leg in mysterious and dramatic circumstances. We all suspected the explanation was far more mundane – such as an accident at work – and that was why he always kept it hidden beneath the flowing folds of his kaftan.
In fact it turned out the reason why he tried to conceal the leg – although the limp was a bit of a giveaway – was that he earned his living as a drug dealer and kept a stash of heroin in a cavity within the artificial limb.
His second distinguishing feature was the tattoo he had around his throat. It took the form of a series of dots, beneath which were the words “Cut along the dotted line”.
How he and his friends must have laughed when he first had that tattoo done. Unfortunately for Wavey Davey, one of his underworld acquaintances did subsequently follow those instructions – to the letter. The police found him with his leg missing – and his head six feet away from the rest of his body.
After that, I don’t think I gave Wavey Davey another thought for perhaps 40 years.
Then one day I came back from the dentists. I’d had a crown replaced and – because of its size and position – the dentist had recommended gold. When I got home, I pointed out the crown to my wife – and laughed about how much it had cost.
She was preparing a meal as we spoke and had a carving knife in her hand. “Interesting,” she said, absent-mindedly tapping the blade on the kitchen worktop. “If these banks keep failing,” she added, “at least I’ll know where to go if I ever need to raise some cash in a hurry.”
It was then I remembered Wavey Davey.