The first fucking James Bond film

It’s a couple of weeks back now but I went to see the new James Bond, Skyfall, on a wet Wednesday afternoon on half-term in Penzance. It was packed.

Before I get on to Bond, though, let me wander off for a bit with something about the cinema, the Savoy. It’s the oldest in Britain, I think. Last time I was there, when they showed the bit before the film about how taping movies etc is an act of piracy, a member of the audience stood up and, in the deepest, roundest Cornish accent ‘Aaarr, that it be.’ (I’ve told that story before but in person. I’ve no idea if it worked in print.)

And so to James ‘fucking’ Bond. Well, actually, Judi ‘fucking’ Dench. Have you seen the film yet? Did you catch it? Mrs/Ms/Miss M, at a dark moment, says: ‘I fucked up, didn’t I?’ She doesn’t say it clearly, she mumbles it.

And my point is? That no review — not that I’ve seen anyway — has commented on it. Why did they put it in the film then? My guess is for two reasons. One, I can tell everyone about but the other — which is the real one, I reckon — is something that can only be revealed to people who’ve actually seen the film.

Reason one. It was a straightforward way of emphasising the gravity of the moment. Nothing else would have achieved the same impact. Which shows that, however publicly acceptable ‘fuck’ has become, it still does retain power.

Reason two. Because it is a Rubicon of a moment. A river has been crossed. A moment has happened. It’s an indication that things will never be the same again. It’s an emotional harbinger of something that happens later in the film. Something tough and irrevocable. But I can’t tell you what it is. (If you’ve seen the movie, I don’t think you’ll have too many problems figuring it out.) It has nothing to do with sex, though, just with the more usual modern meaning of ‘fucked’.

Next The next Greatest Song In The World Ever . . . Today. This one doesn’t even have words.

My second Olympic memory . . .

I happened to be in Penzance when Britain (I can't help it, I find it too hard to type Team GB) won its first gold medal. 

A local girl had won it. I had myself photographed in front of the gold post box but I don't have that picture to hand. What I do have, though, is a picture of that gold winner's parental business. It's an ice cream shop in Newlyn. 

Here is the shop.

And here is the celebratory notice put up by her parents. It's a crop from the previous photograph. I would have got closer but that would have involved standing in the middle of a busy and narrow road. Also, there was so much sun falling on my camera that I couldn't see what I was photographing. It was just point, pause, click, hope.

One Yes, it is a piece of cardboard with Gold written on it, not very well.

Two Yes, it is me in the reflection.

Three No, I can't make up my mind either about what I feel about the display. 

These are the possibilities, I guess . . .

a) What kind of parents (whose daughter has just won an Olympic gold medal) can't be bothered to do more than reuse an old scrap of ice cream material packaging?

b) Is it perhaps a moving antidote to the hi-octanity of other celebrations just about everywhere else?

c) Do I like its modesty and amateurism in an embarrassingly pomo manner?

PS Truth be told, I don't like the ice cream much. It only comes in one flavour — vanilla, they call it, but white would be a better description. It's made with milk rather than cream. The only person I know who likes it — or claims to like it — is a Famous Five-ist.

A place of memory and desire, part five

Those further memories . . .

Last Saturday having been Bloomsday, I got to thinking about Dublin and me and how that might relate to the matter at hand, Sound City Beat, a new album by the Radiators from Space, a Dublin punk band.

(As I write this, I’m listening to another memory of Dublin, a live performance by Glen Hansard — who has just, of course, had his own fairytale of New York, winning Tonys for Once.)

Now, faced with forms requesting my religion and/or nationality, I do one of two things. If it’s in person, I have a teasing habit of putting myself down as a transgendering black woman and seeing how the official reacts. If they demur, I’ll say something like: well, inside, I’ve always felt like Aretha Franklin and isn’t this meant to be about self-description? Plus aren’t you looking to boost your minorities quota? Put me down in the loopy-loo column, too, if it’s any help.

If I am filling in the form at home, though, I tend to write something like: Jewish-ish* Catholic atheist north Londoner**. If I’m feeling frisky/facetious, I’ll add the old (but accurate) Nik Cohn line: and typical of the sort.

The fact is, though, I’m as much Irish by descent as anything else. Yet I didn’t actually visit the place till I was at university. I arrived in Dublin on the Liverpool night ferry with a head full of two versions of the city.

One was from my reading — Joyce, Beckett, Flann O’Brien etc etc. I didn’t expect to actually meet them but I did expect to encounter memory traces of them. So I was disappointed there.

The other Dublin in my head was my grandmother’s. She’d left there before the first world war — when the English were still in power. Though she’d been back since, she still saw the city through the eyes of a poverty-blighted young girl just up from the boglands. To her, Dublin was a city of lights. So I was disappointed there, too.

Still, I know that at some level I had a fantasy of what it would be like to have grown up Irish in Ireland. As a Dubliner in Dublin perhaps, rather than an East End overspiller in the Home Counties, with ties to north London Irishness. In dreams begin possibilities . . .

* By marriage and, therefore, parenthood.

** Serious moment. In all the discussion of Scottish independence and English identity, I think a big point is missed. There are no English in England. Rather there are a variety of sometimes overlapping regional/local identities. Yorkshireman/woman. Cornish. Scouse. Sarf Landahner. Etc etc. I think that’s why it’s so hard to pin down an English identity. It’s simply not there to pin. The Milibands are not just neighbours of mine. They come from a similar cultural and social and historical place/space. And that’s identity. Class comes into it, of course. But that’s another bucket of memories and desires.

Next (and last of this series) My other lives.

A place of memory and desire, part one . . .

One of pop’s small but consistent pleasures is the way intellectual/academic concepts have been grist for its self-regard mill.

The Rolling Stones recasting Bulgakov’s Master & Margarita. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark flipping David Watkin’s 1977 book Morality & Architecture for the title of their second album. Just about anything Green did for/with Scritti Politti — starting with nicking the band name from the collected writings of the Italian neo-Marxist Gramsci.

Or the NME right through the 1980s when it was a rare article that didn’t quote some French structuralist thinker or other. Honestly, there was often as much about Derrida or Kristeva as there was about, say, the Smiths. Now I am far from being an expert on such philosophising but on the few occasions when I did know of what they were writing about, they generally got it somewhat — to drop into technical language, for a moment — arse about face.

Some, therefore, might call these intellectual references as specious or pretentious even. I wouldn’t, though. To me, they were as much a part of the pop game as, say, gold lamé jackets. Not dissimilar, either, in a way. It was a showing-off thing, a peacock display. And all the more wonderful for it. Pop without dumb display would be . . . well, it wouldn’t be pop.

The fact that it was almost invariably done by young men who hadn’t actually done any formal or thorough study of these matters only added to the piquancy of their appropriations. Building songs on a fine-grained appreciation of, say, Lacan’s mirror stage would, frankly, have a limited audience. However, saying that’s what you were doing but — because you’ve never actually really, like, you know, read more than a page or two of Lacan — then just writing a song about your ex-girlfriend and how she liked to look in the mirror, well, that makes sense.

Fine artists get away with that kind of stuff all the time. Read their notes on their shows. It’s like they’ve eaten an intellectual text then regurgitated and put the upthrowings down on paper. Again, I wholeheartedly approve. Just because a joke is on its cracker doesn’t mean it’s not genuinely funny.

Which is all by way of saying that I miss these intellectual sprayings on pop’s simple self. And also by way of justifying the heading for this posting.

I know it’s a misappropriation of something said by Bion — British psychoanalyst who first learned his trade as a WW1 tank officer and went a little Kalifornia kookie in the 1960s. I also know he got it from TS Eliot: ‘April is the cruellest month, breeding. Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing. Memory and desire, stirring . . .’

I also know that it has a history of popular appropriation. Stephen Duffy — once known as Tin Tin, now resident of Falmouth — called his (kind of) greatest hits collection Memory and Desire: Thirty Years in the Wilderness. (Duffy’s band, Lilac Time, didn’t, it seems take their name from that Eliot fragment but from a phrase in Nick Drake’s River Man — though it’s also possible that Drake was himself referencing Eliot.)

Which is . . . pretty much the introduction to my introduction. That’s what happens when I don’t post too often. It’s all too easy to write too much.

Next (and soon) The actual introduction to this posting, followed by the posting itself. And what’s that about? A new record by the Radiators. Come back tomorrow.

A mindbending evening

If you’ve ever wondered what they get up to in Penzance of a Friday night . . .

Not exactly a pressing question, I’d guess. But still . . .

There, by myself, I saw in the local paper that the Mindbenders were playing in a local pub, the Dock Inn. The Mindbenders, I thought, that can’t really be the same ones I vaguely remember from the 1960s, can it?

Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, I seem to remember they were called. What a great name: a collision of aspirant 1960s working class first name, a record label title for a surname and a hint of drugginess in the backing band’s name. I also seem to recall their hit was A Groovy Kind of Love and that the band later split from Mr Fontana.

So I went. And this is what I saw, in all its are bure boke reality.

It’s an archetypal West Cornwall scene. Older women, often divorced, looking out for themselves. Many of them found their way there in search of a new life. New agey stuff, often. They completely outnumber the men of their age and income group. And they remember their younger selves, it seems, by dancing to a group from that period.

What was the Mindbenders’ performance like? As you might expect, there were now just two of them — a pair of old geezers. Bass and guitar, plus drum machine. 

 

I didn’t stay for much more than half an hour but they didn’t play a song I didn’t know — though none of them were Mindbenders songs. One of them, the bassist, I think, introduced each song with the name of its original performer/writer and a little story about it. There, I thought, is someone who long ago grasped the import of a PRS statement. I quite liked their attempt at Robert Parker’s Barefootin’ — though nothing, of course, could ever match the fizz of the original.

Having written all that, I googled and wikied. I now know these things:

* Mr Fontana was born Glyn Geoffrey Ellis.

* Even though he and his band were on the Fontana label, he actually got his surname from Elvis Presley’s drummer, DJ Fontana. 

* Fontana is a town in California. Beyond that, I can’t find out what it means or why Philips picked it for one of their record labels.

* Mr Fontana now seems to have mental health issues — court appearances in weird costumes, setting fire to his own car.

* The two hits he had that I do remember from the list are Um etc, a cover of a Major Lance tune, and Game of Love.

* The Mindbenders’ name had nothing to do with drugs. It came from a Dirk Bogarde movie The Mind  

Benders.

* I was right about A Groovy Kind of Love. Written by Toni Wine and Carole Bayer Sager (Burt Bacharach’s ex-wife among other things), it’s apparently based on a piece of classical music — the Rondo of Clementi’s Sonatina in G. Not that I’ve actually heard it.

* It was originally done by Diane and Annita. I actually have that version on a wonderful Ace compilation, You Heard It Here First! The originals of I Feel Good, My Boy Lollipop and Wild Things are also gorgeous surprises.

* Later Mindbenders included Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman, future members of 10CC. I don’t think they were the ones in the Dock Inn, Penzance version. Graham Gouldman did, however, write this song, for the Yardbirds.

Also . . .


Another Cornish scene.

A little something about the significance of pop.

On the twelfth day of christmas . . .

Family. I'll be untypically emotive. Years ago now, I remember reading someone who, when asked which was more important, health or wealth, said: neither, it's family, because when you're sick or broke at least there is support around you. 

I'd add friends but, basically, it's true, isn't it. Few of us prosper without family and friends. In a meaningful sense, that is – which does include financially. Unhappiness is not just a product of not making your way in the world, it's also a reason. Unfair, I know, but . . .

I've been blessed, I guess. I have family and I have friends. Quite a few people occupy both categories. So . . . Xmas and its twelve days?

Well, over the break I read a piece by Ian Jack in the The Guardian in which he pointed out that London over Xmas has now become the kind of family place it used to be. Leaving aside the fact that in my area the exodus to second houses is so notable that you could have a half hour kip in the middle of the road, that is certainly true. Further, he added that the break has become a kind of retreat where families get to spend time with each other, across the generation. Some use the opportunity to fight and relive old wounds, I guess. But not everyone.

In which light, I can report that, over the break, my time-spent included . . .

* family outing to Billy Elliot matinee (young cousin is in the cast)

* Xmas dinner (cooked with my daughter) for a baker's dozen — on Boxing Day, it's a family tradition, leaving Xmas Day itself free for, well, nothing

* dinner with a couple of friends in Cornwall, one of whom I probably won't see for a while as she's heading off east to interior design junks (honestly)

* not one but two football matches with my younger son

* takeaway curry round our table for a dozen family or so

* a formal sit-down meal at a cousin's which I missed because of a bad cold - but got to eat takeaway the next morning

* a nuclear family meal on Xmas Eve

* giving phone cooking advice to a friend when the leg of lamb (an odd Xmas dinner choice, I know, but tradition isn't what it was, clearly) got left in the freezer by mistake and dinner was due in four hours - they say it was the best lamb they ever ate so maybe I stumbled on a new recipe

* brunch with cousins at their house in the far reaches of the known world (Bury St Edmunds)

* a friend's birthday party in his brother's pub

* a New Year's Day party at a friend's

* a completely private New Year's Eve – another family tradition

* picking up my elder son and dropping him at the airport - and, because of Luton's parsimony, having to pay a pound each time for the privilege

* more, probably, that I've forgotten about

And so that's your lot, folks. 

Tomorrow (or perhaps the day after), I'll post the sleevenotes for my Xmas music selection.

On the fourth day of Christmas . . .

A train ride from Exeter to Totnes. It's the most wonderful journey, running down the Exe estuary then along the coast — right next to it, then up the Teign estuary. Less than thirty miles in all, I think. I'm entranced by it every time I take the train to (or from) Cornwall.

You start out in this wonderful calm, flat seaside place, then turn right on to a section where the train runs in and out of short tunnels, bang next to the sea, separating the towns/villages from the briny. In wet, wild weather, the waves break over the train. Finally, you head inland up through the most mild-mannered of riverscapes – a few bobbing boats, a wooded hillside on the far bank.

Everyone goes quiet for most of the journey.

Here is a small film of it. Warning: it's very amateur, far from the best film, with too many shots of the inside of the carriage and not including anything from the Exe estuary. It does, though, describe itself as a record of the second best rail journey in Britain. Which is the best, though, it doesn't say. Maybe St Erth to St Ives.

PS I also did a gorgeous train journey in Israel this year, taking the old, French-built line from Jerusalem down to the coast. The station is in some odd part of Jerusalem, the original station on the east (Palestinian) side of the old city having been closed for years. The first half hour of the journey is a slow meander down a narrow valley, crossing and recrossing the river. I guess it must have been the old historical route into the city. It's certainly not the quickest. On some of the corners, I reckon you could get out, pick some flowers and cut across in time to get back on the train again.

Till tomorrow . . .

Lucian Freud and me, part two

One Yes, I know I spelled Freud’s first name wrong in the previous posting. I realised that before I posted it but decided to leave it in because I always seem to spell it wrong. I don’t really know why.

It’s not that I don’t know I do it. The only possibilities I can think of are that it’s because I have the spelling stuck in my head from the singer John Lucien. Or even Jon Lucien. Or it’s just a — wait for it — Freudian slip.

Okay, but if it is a slip, what does it reveal? The only think I can think of is that I link his name not with its real, classical Roman forebear — the satirist Lucian, probably — but with that familial derivation of Lucien, from the Latin lucius. Which, suitably for a painter, comes from lux, Latin for light. Which leads to . . .

Two In the aftermath of Freud’s death, my local paper had a reminiscence from an ex-lover. (That’s the kind of gossip you have to put up with in your local paper if you live round my way.) She said that her name for him — others used it, too — was Lux.

Three I had a thought about Freud’s nudes — most of his recent work, after all. What is so unusual (and to my mind original) about Freud’s nudes is their almost complete disconnection from/with sexuality. And whether it’s honest enough to own up to it or not, a lot of nude painting is some kind or other of sexual desire.

Not Freud’s work, though. Which, given the way he carried on, is a bit odd. Worthy of remark even. A renowned real-life skirt-chaser who doesn’t even seem, in his painting, to lust after Kate Moss — who I have seen in person and she really is gorgeous.

So? So there is something plain and ordinary and quotidian about his nudes. They’re not nudes even, really. They’re nakeds. And what I thought is this: there is something about them that reminds me of simple basic photographs of ordinary people, naked — ie not pornography or its ten-bob cousin, erotica.

And I found myself thinking of WW2 camp photographs — the violent intrusions of Nazi pictures of camp inmates etc. How this was another degradation. And I found myself wondering if at some level, conscious or unconscious, the banal demoticness of Freud’s nudes/nakeds is, in part, a way of reclaiming ordinary naked humanity from the grip of Nazi violence.

Which, surely, must have had a place in his memory. He was born in 1922. Hitler came to power in January 1933. Freud saw the Reichstag born — and was ‘excited’ by it The same year, his family moved from Berlin to St John’s Wood. Five years later, in the wake of Kristallnacht (Germany) and the Anschluss (Austria), his grandfather and his family joined them. (He long refused to show his paintings in Berlin and to this day there has never been a show in Vienna.)

Given what then came to pass, he must certainly have seen in those Nazi photographs a future of his own that never came to pass. And by painting the way he did, he kind of stole those horrific images back and reclaimed them — or rather what they showed — for their rightful owners. Their subjects, that is. All of us, by extension, perhaps.

PS After I’d written this but also after I’d put up my first Lucian Freud post, I was contacted by someone I know a little — little enough, in fact, not to know that she’d been painted by Freud. She was pissed off at me for spelling the name wrong. I hope she’s unpissed by my explanation.

Some distraction?

One I was in Cornwall for a bit, caught the riots. See here . . .

Two 'My nose and ass/They're both big/I use hot sauce on my lox and bagels'

What I did at half-term, part two

So . . .

So this was the story the storyteller (at the pagan wedding, on a west Penwith hillside) told about why we ‘toast’ people . . .

Long ago, when giants and monsters roamed the land . . . Actually, he didn’t say that or anything much like it but what he did say did have that kind of Arthurian vibe. What he did say that was that once upon a time . . . Actually, he didn’t say that either, but he did set it in a semi-mythical past.

He did say: people used to put a piece of toast in a glass of wine then hand it around for everyone to drink; and when they had done this, the person being honoured would eat the toast.

When he told this story, everyone (myself included) went: ah-ha, so that’s where the word toast comes from, how come I haven’t wondered about it before, now I’ve got an answer to a question I’d never even posed. A truly shared moment. Honest.
Then, being me and in possession of an online Oxford English Dictionary account, I looked it up.

Ah. This is what I found . . .

A figurative application of toast n.1, the name of a lady being supposed to flavour a bumper like a spiced toast in the drink.

See the Tatler, No. 24, of 2 June, and No. 31, of 18 June, 1709, in both of which toast is explained as a new name, upon the origin of which ‘the Learned differ very much’. No. 24 says that ‘many of the Wits of the last Age will assert’ that the term originated in an incident alleged to have occurred at Bath in the reign of Charles II, 1660–1684. No. 31 is silent as to the incident, and gives the account cited below.

No. 31 is a citation from a piece by the man who, more than any other Englishman, invented journalism (and whose name was taken for a pub near my house — till very recently owned by friends of mine), Sir Richard Steele.

1709 R. Steele Tatler No. 31. K8 Then, said he, Why do you call live People Toasts? I answered, That was a new Name found out by the Wits to make a Lady have the same Effect as Burridge in the Glass when a Man is drinking.

There is another citation, in which the more modern meaning is given — the one in which it refers to the act of drinking, rather than a young (or not so young) woman.

1746 H. Fielding True Patriot 21 Jan. 1/2 A Toast, which you know is another Word for drinking the Health of one's Friend or some Person of Public Eminence.

So . . . a toast to the storyteller for his tall story.

What I did at half-term, part one

A first for me: a pagan wedding. It wasn’t actual pagans getting married, of course. It was a couple of artist-craftsman (and woman) friends of mine, in their garden on a sunny day in the hills of west Penwith. Still, I thought you might like to know what you’re letting yourself in for if you get invited along to a pagan marriage bash.

First, there was no sacrifice, either human or animal — even though there was something of a three-legged altar made out of large granite stones. (It usually earns its keep as a garden table.) I can’t pretend I wasn’t disappointed. Where is the spirit of Edward Woodward when you need it?

Second, there wasn’t actually a pagan priest running the thing from behind a hooded cowl, with a staff of correction in her hand. Rather, it was a part-timer whose day job is storyteller. It did help, though, that he looked (and dressed) like Steve Martin in The Jerk — or a more benign version of Brad Dourif’s pentacostal preacher in Flannery O’Connor/John Huston’s Wise Blood.

Three, there was an ancient (well, probably) saying something like ‘What once was, shall ever be’. (Something like that anyway.) It was engraved on a glass goblet, hand-blown by a friend.

Four, a toast was drunk by all from this goblet — which contained white wine and a bit of dry toast (rapidly getting soggy). The story-teller then got us to pass this round and all have a sip. He told us this was an ancient ritual*.

Five, there was no Whitney Houston I Shall Always Love You or anything similar. (Nor was there any Yvonne Fair It Should Have Been Me.)

Six, there was a ‘hand-fasting’ thing where their teenage son (this was a modern marriage) wrapped a strand of three coloured ribbons (white for cloud, green for earth, blue for sky — the pagan bits kept coming). Thus bound, they left the ceremony for a bit — with their best man and maid of honour so I don’t think it was a sex thing, though who knows? Then they came back, said some stuff to each other about how wonderful the other one was and how lucky they were to get married. Then the storyteller (kind of) pronounced them married. (The real legal thing was a couple of days before in a registry office.)

Seven, there was a gorse kissing sprig. (See picture.) It was a reference to a song with a line about kissing only being in fashion when the gorse is in flower. (Gorse is always in flower.)

Eight, we all had our picture taken inside a frame hung from a tree. See picture.
Nine, there was a vicar there. He was a good friend of the bride’s late mother. He began one of his bits with the phrase ‘If there is a god . . .’ Who can not love the Church of England, a religion which, where others have ritual, has jumble sales? For the record and census purposes, I’m a North London Jewish-ish (through marriage) Catholic atheist - and, to steal an old Nik Cohn line, not untypical of the sort.

Ten, it was all excellent.

* Knowingly or unknowingly, he wasn’t telling the truth. In the next posting, I’ll give his version. And the OED’s. You can take your choice.

Wonders of the modern world, number eight . . . The pubs of Penzance


A mid-week mid-morning at the Seven Stars, Parade St, Penzance. Like sign, like boozer. The Penwith take on the gastropub concept. Behind the gate is the covered smoking area — bigger, nautrally than the pub itself.

By the way, Parade St is not a place for a parade. It's barely a street. More an alley with pretensions. Anorexics have to breathe in if they pass in it.

Some fun?

Nick Lowe and his Kippington Lodge were probably the first pop group I saw live — they were the local band. Go here and you'll hear Nick talk about that band — and an evening in a Manhattan broom cupboard with a Keith Richards freshly sprung from pokey. Lowe's anecdotalism has been described — by him, I think — as mile-melters, ie they make long journeys pass in bliss. I listened to this podcast while walking round the park with my dog. If anyone spotted me laughing out loud and gave me a wide berth, they will now know the reason for my public amusement. (PS It's Word podcast 168.)

Through the dark alley-ways and passages of London*



I like an alleyway. Well, you do if you live in a city. Knowing the alleys is one of the ways you distinguish yourself from — okay, can make yourself feel superior — the out-of-towners.

I like the fact that I can walk most of the way from Marble Arch to Tottenham Court Rd station without touching Oxford Street. It makes me feel I know where I am.

Yesterday, I found a new alley. Two, actually.

I’d heard of one of them before but found it quite by accident. It runs from Finchley Road down the side of Finchley Road and Frognal railway station. Despite having lived not far away for a very long time, I’d never walked down it (or up it) before.

It’s called Billy Fury Way, named for the Scouse popster born Ronald William Wycherley — whose Sound of Fury 10-inch album should be in every home, if only for the cover picture.

Why? Again, I’d forgotten but it was the oddest of reasons. Someone — who knows who — realised/decided that there were alleys which didn’t have names. Which meant . . . the police couldn’t record crimes committed there. ‘I’m sorry, sir, I know you’re dead but there’s nothing we can do. You can’t just die nowhere. Therefore you can’t be dead. Evening all.’

So it was decided to name the local alleys. Billy Fury? Because he recorded at the nearby Decca studios — now the base for the ENO, I think. So: West Hampstead, the rockabilly connection.

The alley? Long and dark, with no way out most of the time, but a wonderful short-cut, with trainspottery views on both sides. The whole of the side wall is painted a dramatic black, giving it a distinct threatening air — not unsuitably for an alley, I guess. They’re not meant to be warm, sunny and welcoming. On a fairly busy Sunday afternoon, I had it all to myself. It emerges almost opposite West Hampstead north London line station.

Cross the road, past the Thameslink station — such a small locality, so many stations — and there’s the second alley. This one runs down to the bottom of my friends’ house. I’d walked this one before, several times. But now it has a name, too. Black Path — from, I guess, the black-painted wall motif which continued on from Billy Fury Way. Fantastically prosaic, too.


Which got me thinking of two things . . .

One, daft street names (and signs). In London . . . Crooked Usage (in Hendon) and Amen Corner (near St Pauls). In Truro, Squeeze Guts Alley — there’s one in Whitstable, too, apparently. In St Ives, there’s a Teetotal Street and a Virgin Street — yet it still manages to call itself a holiday resort.

Two, London and songs generally. Here a couple . . .

Ray Davies. I’ve seen it written that the Krays liked this so much they asked — well, you know what I mean — the Kinks if they could manage them. But that can't be true, as it wasn't written till the 1990s.

* A line from the Ray Davies song.

While I’m about it, here’s a picture of the house next to my gran’s. That’s it on the right — it’s not me going in, though. Once uncle and his family lived next door. Another the next house along. A cousin next to that etc etc. The house straight ahead is 97 Evering Rd, Stoke Newington. That’s where the Krays killed Jack The Hat McVitie. (They lived a few streets away, in Cazenove Rd, so it wasn’t much of a journey home for them.)

Caetano Veloso ‘I cross the streets without fear . . .’ What sounds dumb and cliched isn’t. Veloso was in exile here from the Brazilian military dictatorship. ‘A group approaches a policeman. He seems so pleased to please them.’ I moved (back) to London the year this song came out, 1971. To my shame, I never even noticed Caetano Veloso moved in, too.

And finally, thinking of songs and London and alleys, some Sondheim . . .

‘There's a whole in the world like a great black pit
and the vermin of the world inhabit it
and its morals aren't worth what a pin can spit
and it goes by the name of London.’

(Just asking, Mr Sondheim, but where can you buy a spitting pin?)

Next up Back to the Origin of the World

What other people did on their holidays . . .






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Meanwhile . . . Shakin' all over New Zealand

Barrie Briscoe
May 31, 1936 to August 23, 2010

To a funeral on a Cornish hillside in late summer sun with the smell of the sea, the rustle of leaf-heavy trees and the distant roar of the A30. It was for Barrie Briscoe, a nature-loving atheist who'd outrun his three score and ten and who'd lived at least four lives - roustabout, academic, architect, painter.

I didn't know him well. He was the head of the architectural practice which worked on a project with me. I don't know if he even liked the end result of the project. But I enjoyed his company the few times we met. And I think he felt the same. I like to think he did anyway.

I knew he’d been ill, very ill, of cancer. The last time I’d seen him he was in a bad way and that was last year. Then, I know, things had got worse. Yet his death still came as a shock. It always does, it seems.

I learned by email. I was away from home so I'd taken my laptop to the pub for its free and fast wi-fi. There, in my googlemail, was a message with his name in the subject field. It was from his wife, Petra - who I knew far better, through the project. 'I am sorry to tell you that Barrie died,' it began. Direct, clear and forthright. A language of friendship.

The funeral was in a vast, private garden just to the west of the Penzance that’s opened to the public now and again. I guess its owner was a friend of Barrie’s. The invitation was a flyer, with a picture of him at the top. Glass in left hand, held by the stem, right hand in a semi-fist, the point-making gesture of a lifelong teacher. He’s smiling. His eyes are twinkling. Usually that’s a lazy cliché but Barrie’s eyes really did twinkle.

‘No religious rite or cleric,’ said the invite. The ceremony was led by a friend, Richard Vanhinsbergh — I didn’t know Richard but his close personal knowledge of Barrie gave the affair a gut-felt pungency.

Bernie — who I do know, he was the builder on our project — was there, too. He dug the grave. I’ve carried, a coffin — my aunt’s, across rainy, muddy, flat, wintry Catholic ground north of Liverpool. That felt, well, primeval. What Bernie did, that felt even older.

The funeral crowd — a big one, a hundred or so — gathered on the top of a hill. There was fizzy wine to drink and fishy snacks to eat. A gathering of Penwith's great and, well not good perhaps, but good-intentioned at least — in the early evening, anyway.

The coffin was then taken down to the burial ground. We followed behind and stood round the grave, a gouge in the grass sentried by a rectangle of small olive trees. There were words said — warm and knowledgable of the man we were interring. Many of them drifted on the air, blurred by the sound of the wind-bothered leaves. Their half-absence, half-presence seemed right, somehow.

There was a harp playing. The coffin was let slip into the grave, by a half-dozen friends. There was a bit of crying, not a lot. People there knew enough about death not to indulge or fall into half-imaginary emotions. When it was over, Bernie hung back — he and his men had a friend's grave to fill in.



Then there was a party, at a gallery in town, by the sea. There were a few of his architectural models — simple, inspired, made of cardboard — and pictures of him on the wall. Over the years, this part of the country has attracted a lot of people whose lives elsewhere, well, didn’t work out. Many of them were artists or at least arty. They were pretty much all there to say goodbye to Barrie. They sat outside, in the late afternoon sun, drank beer and smoked roll-ups. A lot of them seemed to be called Bernie.

There was a lot of food, mostly provided by another friend, Freddy (a woman). So much food, in fact, that, wonderful as it was, there were doggy bags as you left. And that, too, had a sacramental aspect. Somehow, it felt like you were taking a bit of Barrie home with you. I had mine, a pasta dish, for lunch the following day. It tasted really good.