If you're one of those people of a certain age who began learning to play the guitar as a young teenager back in the early eighties, and relied on listening to records (yes, the vinyl kind) and very bad, unintelligible (and highly expensive) musical notation books, the emergence of sites like: http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/ were the Stairway to Heaven and the Highway to Hell for apprentice and advanced Riffmeisters young and old.
(Sorry, couldn't resist the pun and the melodrama. God bless you Tommy Vance, may you rock in peace - RIP).
But to be a trifle more serious for a minute, I remember that I would have killed for a free tab transcription of Schools out by Alice Cooper, the opening bluesy riff to You Shook me all night long, the fiddly folky bits in Led Zep, those strange minor 7th chords that inhabit the more psychadelic ramblings of Pink Floyd and the Beatles.
Yeah, sure, you can work them out yourself, if you've got loads of time and something called a musical ear, unfortunately I didn't. My 'transcriptions' sounded similiar but there was always something missing: a little note, bridging chord, a hammer-on, an open string not left ringing...concentration, talent, intelligence...
I used to spend vast amounts of money on The Beatles Complete, The Rolling Stones Anthology, and end up with telephone book thick doorstoppers full of chord box ridden spreadsheets where, even when I followed the instruction exactly, I realised the transposers were as bad as me - imagine Julian loyd-Webber 'interpreting' Voodoo Chile?
Now I can get 30 plus transcriptions of one song, specialized transcriptions of the opening riff, the solo, acoustic interpretations, and all will be rated for accuracy and interest - and its all for free!
Its a beautiful example of sharing your creativity and passion for an instrument and giving it to others for free: putting it out there in the world and saying, "Here you are, see what you can do with this?"
I'm still working on the fiddly bits in this one though:
Thursday, 29 July 2010
Tuesday, 27 July 2010
Nomadic minds, nomadic bodies
I often watch films and documentaries on ‘alternative lifestyles’; they always pick me up and generate the sensation of a tight skin or coat of armour being dissolved from my body, a feeling of lightness like a balloon that has been untethered.
I’m under no illusions that this way of life can be difficult – is difficult – but when I read, hear and see these stories, its like someone opening a window somewhere in my soul and I can taste a fresh breeze and get an immediate sense of space, another way of being on the most primitive level.
I guess in a sense it makes me feel like a kid again.
Being ‘off the grid’ so to speak, not having my psyche and physical body organized by an architect, not being yoked like cattle to the mainstream governmental/consumer infrastructure, is incredibly liberating on an imaginative and sensory level, but I wonder if I’d have the bottle and the determination to sustain that lifestyle through all the xenophobia, bad weather and lack of rooted-ness. But then again, I’ve never felt particularly rooted to anywhere.
There’s still that little kid inside of me who used to roam so freely around my grandparents Caravan site when I was kid back in Shropshire. There used to be a large hill nearby which seemed like a huge mountain to my miniaturized senses, it was called the ‘The Pimple’ – a name coined by the adults, to which the irony was lost on us young ‘un’s of course.
Saying that, because the caravan site stood on a rise in the landscape – a natural plateau – The Pimple had a bit of leg up from Mother Nature, an apprentice mountain.
It was an odd geographical anomaly of scrub, rabbit holes, mole-hills and red sandstone. When I think of it, I can immediately feel the dry grainy soil running through my fingers, the sense of power and detachment as I gaze out on the sprawling landscape from my eyrie; all the caravans strung out like pearls around the hill, the ribbon of tarmac disappearing into the black pine wood, and the big heart stopping skies.
My Grandfather told me there was a crashed Lancaster bomber buried in the top of The Pimple: this of course explained the large Bronze age barrow-like structure that snuggled at one end of the summit…still, seemed a bit small to me at the time, but it fuelled my imagination again, encouraged me to dream.
Funny, when I talk of the nomad/gypsy/traveller lifestyle I cartwheel away into my childhood like a frail kite suddenly gripped by a strong breeze.
But then again, somewhere, buried deep down in my neural network is a geological sediment of associations, archaic biological semaphore which is signaling: Caravan’s/nomadism/nature = security (in a strange way), space, freedom, unlimited possibilities and horizons (both physically and imaginatively), and a kind of Ray Mears meets Huckleberry Finn romantic idealism.
I’m proud to call myself a dreamer though…and I’m not the only one…(apologies for the Lennon sample).
I suppose we’re all prisoners of our childhood though – both good and bad – and being an adult is sifting through the chaff to find the wheat, stuff we can be nourished by and binning the crap that makes us juvenile rather than merely childish. Children just see things as they are, it’s the grownups that are often the most juvenile in their unresolved war with the hidden aspects of themselves; all that education and culture - the so called civilizing process.
The older I get, and the more people I have seen die – often horribly in some fetid and impersonal hospital ward, or snatched away by a sudden heart attack or accident – personal freedom, escaping from the machine, being ‘off grid’ appears the most sensible and authentic way of living.
Its not irresponsible or absurd, but a rational individual response to an irrational society.
These films illustrate some of the highs and lows of being off the grid:
I’m under no illusions that this way of life can be difficult – is difficult – but when I read, hear and see these stories, its like someone opening a window somewhere in my soul and I can taste a fresh breeze and get an immediate sense of space, another way of being on the most primitive level.
I guess in a sense it makes me feel like a kid again.
Being ‘off the grid’ so to speak, not having my psyche and physical body organized by an architect, not being yoked like cattle to the mainstream governmental/consumer infrastructure, is incredibly liberating on an imaginative and sensory level, but I wonder if I’d have the bottle and the determination to sustain that lifestyle through all the xenophobia, bad weather and lack of rooted-ness. But then again, I’ve never felt particularly rooted to anywhere.
There’s still that little kid inside of me who used to roam so freely around my grandparents Caravan site when I was kid back in Shropshire. There used to be a large hill nearby which seemed like a huge mountain to my miniaturized senses, it was called the ‘The Pimple’ – a name coined by the adults, to which the irony was lost on us young ‘un’s of course.
Saying that, because the caravan site stood on a rise in the landscape – a natural plateau – The Pimple had a bit of leg up from Mother Nature, an apprentice mountain.
It was an odd geographical anomaly of scrub, rabbit holes, mole-hills and red sandstone. When I think of it, I can immediately feel the dry grainy soil running through my fingers, the sense of power and detachment as I gaze out on the sprawling landscape from my eyrie; all the caravans strung out like pearls around the hill, the ribbon of tarmac disappearing into the black pine wood, and the big heart stopping skies.
My Grandfather told me there was a crashed Lancaster bomber buried in the top of The Pimple: this of course explained the large Bronze age barrow-like structure that snuggled at one end of the summit…still, seemed a bit small to me at the time, but it fuelled my imagination again, encouraged me to dream.
Funny, when I talk of the nomad/gypsy/traveller lifestyle I cartwheel away into my childhood like a frail kite suddenly gripped by a strong breeze.
But then again, somewhere, buried deep down in my neural network is a geological sediment of associations, archaic biological semaphore which is signaling: Caravan’s/nomadism/nature = security (in a strange way), space, freedom, unlimited possibilities and horizons (both physically and imaginatively), and a kind of Ray Mears meets Huckleberry Finn romantic idealism.
I’m proud to call myself a dreamer though…and I’m not the only one…(apologies for the Lennon sample).
I suppose we’re all prisoners of our childhood though – both good and bad – and being an adult is sifting through the chaff to find the wheat, stuff we can be nourished by and binning the crap that makes us juvenile rather than merely childish. Children just see things as they are, it’s the grownups that are often the most juvenile in their unresolved war with the hidden aspects of themselves; all that education and culture - the so called civilizing process.
The older I get, and the more people I have seen die – often horribly in some fetid and impersonal hospital ward, or snatched away by a sudden heart attack or accident – personal freedom, escaping from the machine, being ‘off grid’ appears the most sensible and authentic way of living.
Its not irresponsible or absurd, but a rational individual response to an irrational society.
These films illustrate some of the highs and lows of being off the grid:
Sunday, 25 July 2010
John Burnside: The Dumb House
I finished ‘The Dumb House’ by John Burnside last night. I feel a bit in awe of his writing ability and imagination, but also somewhat spooked by the dark eeriness that Burnside conjures up in this bleak novel about scientific curiosity meets the serial killer.
The central character (the first person narrator) reminds me of Camus’ Meursault: he’s a cold, unemotional cipher of a human being, but unlike the French writer’s classic existentialist ‘Outsider’ he has a mission, or calling – he’s fascinated by the philosophical and social root and development of language acquisition and its relationship to the soul.
After the death of his mother and having the house to himself at last, the narrator finally has the opportunity to repeat an ‘experiment’ he had been fascinated by for most of his life.
It was his mother herself who told him as a child the tale of the dyslexic Mughal emperor who found himself one day arguing with his counsellors that language was learned and the soul was innate, because otherwise why are there so many different languages?
And surely, the soul cannot belong to any one perceptual faculty?
His counsellors cited examples of children who had been raised by animals or survived and often thrived in harsh isolated environments, without any linguistic stimulation, but had, never the less, developed an idiosyncratic language of their own, often totally unintelligible to others.
As emperors tend to do, having unlimited funds and armies of ‘can-doers’ at their disposal, Akbar the Mughal built a lavish room with mute attendants and populated it with a group of new born babies to test his hypothesis in style.
The old tale ends with the children growing up and never uttering a word, lost and isolated in their surreal, soundless world.
The children’s home ever after becomes something of a tourist attraction, a stationary freak show, known as the Gang Mahal, or ‘The Dumb House’.
After Akbar’s example, Burnsides character embarks on a mission to procure a child or children to create a modern Dumb House, to satisfy his clinically scientific cravings, his insatiable (and inhuman) curiosity.
He meets a couple of women, one of whom has a strange autistic child (and is somewhat odd and dissociated herself), the other is a childless, disturbed young mute girl he first spots in the library. Both women are vulnerable and lonely.
As the narrative unfolds, Burnside’s ‘scientist’ betrays a totally cold and dispassionate violence towards anyone or anything that frustrates the purity of his experiment.
The autistic child has his fingers broken when he irritates the ‘emperor’; the boyfriend of the mute girl is slashed, then later kicked to death because he threatens to steal her back.
Finally, the young girl begins sharing the scientist’s bed, and he begins constructing his lab or Gang Mahal in the basement. She becomes pregnant of course, and the narrator has two perfect test subjects. Conveniently, the woman dies soon after from complications from the birth.
As the story unwinds we learn more about the narrators life story, his fascination with animal dissection when still a child, his distant parents, his loneliness and isolation. Burnside gives him all the classic developmental attributes of the classic psychopath.
The central characters search for the soul, for voice and language in his experiment, is also the search to find the soul within himself, the ontology of real being in the world, to make sense of the terrifying nothingness and seemingly disordered nature of his own existence.
Burnside puts us inside the psychopaths head so perfectly by creating a floating poetic stillness to the narrative – the matter-of-factness is chilling in its banality.
The author knows his philosophy of language and perception.
The story touches on Plato’s idea of the Logos: is there some kind of transcendent truth? The purity of the soul emitted by the spoken word over the artifice of writing?
Structuralism: is language transparent, can its grasp the essence of things in themselves? Or is it opaque, a system of crude algebraic shorthand, to help us navigate the ultimate senselessness of the world?
And Burnside himself references and deconstructs the genre of serial killers, existential literature and cinema by creating his own Hitchcockian ‘Psycho’, his own very British and very dark Meursault on a mission.
As his two angelic guinea pigs develop in the lab (male and female, Adam and Eve?) they begin…to sing. A strange unintelligible noise, that the experimenter is unable to decipher: is it communication or just an epiphenomenona - a side effect of their isolation – biological white noise emitted by a confused larynx? Or is it the ghost in the machine attempting speak?
The twins certainly have a bond, and the scientist decides the experiment has been contaminated – he should have had a single test subject – so he decides he can save the study somewhat by giving one twin a laryngotomy - the severing of the vocal chords.
Yeah, it’s not a tale for the squeamish.
I won’t tell you the ending, its pretty bleak as you can imagine.
Overall, what comes out of the book is how the narrator, the ‘psychotic-scientist’ has been inhabiting his own psychic Dumb House, a lonely alienated existence, without any real meaningful communication or love.
He can only have ‘relationships’ with women who are as emotionally crippled and as disorientated by the seemingly weird ordering of reality as he is.
In the end it seems that the twins themselves are secretly mocking him, they at least have each other, and he is once again excluded, an outsider.
I found the book in a second-hand shop, and knew that Burnside was a poet, so thought I’d give it a go, not realising he’d written other novels which I am going to procure as soon as possible.
A very disturbing, but rewarding philosophical and poetic read.
The central character (the first person narrator) reminds me of Camus’ Meursault: he’s a cold, unemotional cipher of a human being, but unlike the French writer’s classic existentialist ‘Outsider’ he has a mission, or calling – he’s fascinated by the philosophical and social root and development of language acquisition and its relationship to the soul.
After the death of his mother and having the house to himself at last, the narrator finally has the opportunity to repeat an ‘experiment’ he had been fascinated by for most of his life.
It was his mother herself who told him as a child the tale of the dyslexic Mughal emperor who found himself one day arguing with his counsellors that language was learned and the soul was innate, because otherwise why are there so many different languages?
And surely, the soul cannot belong to any one perceptual faculty?
His counsellors cited examples of children who had been raised by animals or survived and often thrived in harsh isolated environments, without any linguistic stimulation, but had, never the less, developed an idiosyncratic language of their own, often totally unintelligible to others.
As emperors tend to do, having unlimited funds and armies of ‘can-doers’ at their disposal, Akbar the Mughal built a lavish room with mute attendants and populated it with a group of new born babies to test his hypothesis in style.
The old tale ends with the children growing up and never uttering a word, lost and isolated in their surreal, soundless world.
The children’s home ever after becomes something of a tourist attraction, a stationary freak show, known as the Gang Mahal, or ‘The Dumb House’.
After Akbar’s example, Burnsides character embarks on a mission to procure a child or children to create a modern Dumb House, to satisfy his clinically scientific cravings, his insatiable (and inhuman) curiosity.
He meets a couple of women, one of whom has a strange autistic child (and is somewhat odd and dissociated herself), the other is a childless, disturbed young mute girl he first spots in the library. Both women are vulnerable and lonely.
As the narrative unfolds, Burnside’s ‘scientist’ betrays a totally cold and dispassionate violence towards anyone or anything that frustrates the purity of his experiment.
The autistic child has his fingers broken when he irritates the ‘emperor’; the boyfriend of the mute girl is slashed, then later kicked to death because he threatens to steal her back.
Finally, the young girl begins sharing the scientist’s bed, and he begins constructing his lab or Gang Mahal in the basement. She becomes pregnant of course, and the narrator has two perfect test subjects. Conveniently, the woman dies soon after from complications from the birth.
As the story unwinds we learn more about the narrators life story, his fascination with animal dissection when still a child, his distant parents, his loneliness and isolation. Burnside gives him all the classic developmental attributes of the classic psychopath.
The central characters search for the soul, for voice and language in his experiment, is also the search to find the soul within himself, the ontology of real being in the world, to make sense of the terrifying nothingness and seemingly disordered nature of his own existence.
Burnside puts us inside the psychopaths head so perfectly by creating a floating poetic stillness to the narrative – the matter-of-factness is chilling in its banality.
The author knows his philosophy of language and perception.
The story touches on Plato’s idea of the Logos: is there some kind of transcendent truth? The purity of the soul emitted by the spoken word over the artifice of writing?
Structuralism: is language transparent, can its grasp the essence of things in themselves? Or is it opaque, a system of crude algebraic shorthand, to help us navigate the ultimate senselessness of the world?
And Burnside himself references and deconstructs the genre of serial killers, existential literature and cinema by creating his own Hitchcockian ‘Psycho’, his own very British and very dark Meursault on a mission.
As his two angelic guinea pigs develop in the lab (male and female, Adam and Eve?) they begin…to sing. A strange unintelligible noise, that the experimenter is unable to decipher: is it communication or just an epiphenomenona - a side effect of their isolation – biological white noise emitted by a confused larynx? Or is it the ghost in the machine attempting speak?
The twins certainly have a bond, and the scientist decides the experiment has been contaminated – he should have had a single test subject – so he decides he can save the study somewhat by giving one twin a laryngotomy - the severing of the vocal chords.
Yeah, it’s not a tale for the squeamish.
I won’t tell you the ending, its pretty bleak as you can imagine.
Overall, what comes out of the book is how the narrator, the ‘psychotic-scientist’ has been inhabiting his own psychic Dumb House, a lonely alienated existence, without any real meaningful communication or love.
He can only have ‘relationships’ with women who are as emotionally crippled and as disorientated by the seemingly weird ordering of reality as he is.
In the end it seems that the twins themselves are secretly mocking him, they at least have each other, and he is once again excluded, an outsider.
I found the book in a second-hand shop, and knew that Burnside was a poet, so thought I’d give it a go, not realising he’d written other novels which I am going to procure as soon as possible.
A very disturbing, but rewarding philosophical and poetic read.
Sunday, 18 July 2010
Cafe Culture
Found these fascinating vids today.
The first one is a potted history of the cafe culture in London from its humble beginnings in the 50's - the birth of rock 'n roll and Beatnik culture - through to the the 60's student/hippy/arts scene.
The second film, is a lament on how the smoking ban in France is affecting the traditional Parisian cafe clientele.
As I wrote in the 'Smoking for beginners' post, I am partial to a pinch of tobacco in moderation but can understand the irritation it causes to others.
I can still have a fag with my Espresso outside a Cafe Nero though...not really the same though is it really.
I like to play 'spot the cigarette' when watching old movies, documentaries and TV - so funny, Richard Burton sparking up and chaining it on 'Parkinson', as natural as breathing at one time.
The first one is a potted history of the cafe culture in London from its humble beginnings in the 50's - the birth of rock 'n roll and Beatnik culture - through to the the 60's student/hippy/arts scene.
The second film, is a lament on how the smoking ban in France is affecting the traditional Parisian cafe clientele.
As I wrote in the 'Smoking for beginners' post, I am partial to a pinch of tobacco in moderation but can understand the irritation it causes to others.
I can still have a fag with my Espresso outside a Cafe Nero though...not really the same though is it really.
I like to play 'spot the cigarette' when watching old movies, documentaries and TV - so funny, Richard Burton sparking up and chaining it on 'Parkinson', as natural as breathing at one time.
Saturday, 17 July 2010
The Three Wayfarers
“This stark surprise, these vivid figures among the rocks,
seemed to be there for his benefit alone. It was as if they were
actors striking up a tableau whose meaning he was supposed to guess,
as if they were not quite serious, only pretending to know he was watching.”
So feels the musician character in Ian McEwan’s ‘Amsterdam’ novel as he covertly witnesses a couple arguing in the isolated beauty of the Lake District.
I read that part last night lying in bed, and it made me tingle in recognition of a similar experience I had about three weeks previously in ‘the wilds’ of the local countryside.
It was a sweltering hot day and I embarked on one of my usual nature rambles along the Staffordshire Way – it was just after lunchtime on a Thursday and I was prepared as usual with the essentials for outdoor survival: spicy Nik Naks, Tuna sandwich, bottle of squash and a notepad and pen. Strangely I forgot my camera this time.
After about a mile from my village, as you exit the long bridal path, there’s a lane which takes you onto the main road to the adjacent village, and just before that, the stile to reconnect with the rest of the public footpath.
Instead of automatically swivelling to the right on this day, I stood and pondered for a while, just listening and letting the countryside envelope my senses.
It was so quiet, no cars, cyclists, aeroplanes, other walkers – just a few bird tweets springing up every now and then. It was beautiful but a bit unnerving.
At times like this I often like to imagine I’m in some Sci-Fi movie, maybe Charlton Heston’s version of the Omega Man.
After a couple of minutes, I decided to take the left fork for a change, remembering that the local country house - Chillington Hall - was only ten minutes walk down the lane. I used to go past it a lot in my younger cycling days, and for some purely random reason had missed it for a few years by taking other routes.
Maybe all that aristocratic opulence had been a turn-off - lets face it there isn’t anything more blatant in the local countryside that reminds you of the class division in England.
Odd really, or maybe not: Mother Nature and Daddy Big Bucks in a strange symbiotic dance. (Maybe the Big Bucks thing has long gone though eh, thank god for the vulgar but essential tourist trade.)
Anyway, I came to the main entrance gate of the Hall, and sat down on the exquisitely manicured ‘grassy knoll’ to the right. This gave me a great panoramic view of the hall in the June sunshine. I was like a little aristocrat myself: liquid refreshment, finely sliced tuna sarnies and the exotic delight of hand-rolled foreign tobacco…otherwise known as Golden Virginia.
I’d been there for around ten minutes, leaning back and just smelling the breeze and ruminating on the social history of the place – visualizing a black horse-drawn carriage rumbling up to the Hall in ages past – when my reverie was rudely interrupted by a crass reminder of the modern age: a big motorcycle engine, bubbling and whining its way into my little Eden.
‘Twat’ I sighed.
The biker had pulled up at the other gate over the road, behind me. I was thinking, ‘please leave me alone’, ‘let me return to my tranquillity’, ‘don’t talk to me’.
“Takes your breath away doesn’t it!”
Oh God.
I turned to see a small chubby, shaven headed guy (or balding) in his late fifties, dressed in regulation Black Country sun-seeker attire: Ice wash cut off denim shorts, white basketball shoes, white socks and proud beer-belly spilling out of the tight vest.
It was the equivalent of D-Day in the vulgarity stakes.
Then the most hideous thing of all happened…he sat down next to me…and carried on talking.
Joking aside, the guy was really interesting and funny.
He was retired now, and had been in the removals game for many years. He told me his tales of country house clearances, of being a personal acquaintance of Lord Lichfield in years gone by, of the loneliness and boredom of living on his own.
I started to feel a bit uncomfortable, but I could tell he was just a lonely guy, wanting some kind of human contact, just someone to tell his story to, a reminder that he is still alive – has being in the world.
One fascinating anecdote he told me was about a ‘punishment logbook’ he discovered in the stables of a manor house he was clearing out in his youth.
He told me of a particular entry that had caught his eye and stayed with him over the intervening years.
A stable boy had received six strokes of a whip for being seen spitting by the Madam of the house.
I nodded at his ‘Cruel bastards’ estimation.
So I sat and listened, nodded and smiled at the appropriate moments, told a few tales of the countryside myself, and thought of the strangeness of these chance human encounters.
I noticed out of the corner of my eye, behind the bikers shoulder, a patch of white moving up the lane towards us. As it got closer, I became more and more intrigued.
It was another walker, around my age, but so attired that he kind of captured my attention.
White Fedora hat, (and despite the heat) buttoned up long sleeve denim shirt, white Chino’s, Oxford brogues, little goatee beard and specs. I kid you not.
He seemed somehow out of place and time, yet…somehow totally appropriate.
He looked the classic ‘Creative type’: maybe a painter out to capture a few sketches, or an academic, meditating on Kant’s categorical imperative after a morning lecture.
And yes, he walked up to the entrance and sat down on one of the stone bollards opposite us – another talker, another wayfarer at the crossroads.
(Oh yeah, that’s another thing, the track to the Hall continues on the other side of the lane, originally unbroken before it was bisected and scarred by modern tarmac.)
The new guy had a small canvas shoulder bag with him, and on it was printed the name of the local university I’d attended years ago. Okay, the academic guess was probably pretty near the mark. Sure, just a coincidence, but I was getting a little nervous by now.
I stood to leave, making my excuses (I was genuinely hot and sweaty) but also feeling something I couldn’t put my finger on…a feeling of a scene being enacted, like the tableau that McEwan’s character felt in the quote at the beginning.
All this is for my benefit; I’m a little pawn on a giant cosmic chessboard.
I had the compulsion to break the surreal tableau, because I think I felt on a very deep level, that to stay would mean the encounter would escalate into ever more bizarre loops and synchronicities of symbolism.
Looking back, I think I felt I’d lose my identity, or grip on reality in some strange and incomprehensible way.
I walked back the way I had come, retracing the steps of the ‘academic’, not looking back until I got to the twist in the lane.
There they both still were, but standing now in the road…and looking my way.
Maybe they weren’t looking at me, but it made me shudder a bit.
I just felt this weight of signification and meaning, like you get now and again when waking from a particularly vivid dream – the voice in your head saying: ‘remember this, its important!’
One idea struck me quite profoundly when I got home, and has stayed with me ever since.
It was as if those two characters were possible aspects of myself, almost like twin Doppelgangers that I’d projected from the depths of my own psyche.
The life of the mind, creativity, intellectualism - or the lonely older guy, speaking only of the good old days of yore and being on nodding terms with the moneyed classes.
I'm still having fun 'deconstructing' the experience three weeks later.
It felt right that I went my own way in the end, the middle path.
I still don’t believe those two ‘wayfarers’ were real even now.
Here’s a pic of Chillington Hall, this is what I could see, or we could see from our vantage point at the crossroads almost exactly, but it was a bit more green when I was there.
seemed to be there for his benefit alone. It was as if they were
actors striking up a tableau whose meaning he was supposed to guess,
as if they were not quite serious, only pretending to know he was watching.”
So feels the musician character in Ian McEwan’s ‘Amsterdam’ novel as he covertly witnesses a couple arguing in the isolated beauty of the Lake District.
I read that part last night lying in bed, and it made me tingle in recognition of a similar experience I had about three weeks previously in ‘the wilds’ of the local countryside.
It was a sweltering hot day and I embarked on one of my usual nature rambles along the Staffordshire Way – it was just after lunchtime on a Thursday and I was prepared as usual with the essentials for outdoor survival: spicy Nik Naks, Tuna sandwich, bottle of squash and a notepad and pen. Strangely I forgot my camera this time.
After about a mile from my village, as you exit the long bridal path, there’s a lane which takes you onto the main road to the adjacent village, and just before that, the stile to reconnect with the rest of the public footpath.
Instead of automatically swivelling to the right on this day, I stood and pondered for a while, just listening and letting the countryside envelope my senses.
It was so quiet, no cars, cyclists, aeroplanes, other walkers – just a few bird tweets springing up every now and then. It was beautiful but a bit unnerving.
At times like this I often like to imagine I’m in some Sci-Fi movie, maybe Charlton Heston’s version of the Omega Man.
After a couple of minutes, I decided to take the left fork for a change, remembering that the local country house - Chillington Hall - was only ten minutes walk down the lane. I used to go past it a lot in my younger cycling days, and for some purely random reason had missed it for a few years by taking other routes.
Maybe all that aristocratic opulence had been a turn-off - lets face it there isn’t anything more blatant in the local countryside that reminds you of the class division in England.
Odd really, or maybe not: Mother Nature and Daddy Big Bucks in a strange symbiotic dance. (Maybe the Big Bucks thing has long gone though eh, thank god for the vulgar but essential tourist trade.)
Anyway, I came to the main entrance gate of the Hall, and sat down on the exquisitely manicured ‘grassy knoll’ to the right. This gave me a great panoramic view of the hall in the June sunshine. I was like a little aristocrat myself: liquid refreshment, finely sliced tuna sarnies and the exotic delight of hand-rolled foreign tobacco…otherwise known as Golden Virginia.
I’d been there for around ten minutes, leaning back and just smelling the breeze and ruminating on the social history of the place – visualizing a black horse-drawn carriage rumbling up to the Hall in ages past – when my reverie was rudely interrupted by a crass reminder of the modern age: a big motorcycle engine, bubbling and whining its way into my little Eden.
‘Twat’ I sighed.
The biker had pulled up at the other gate over the road, behind me. I was thinking, ‘please leave me alone’, ‘let me return to my tranquillity’, ‘don’t talk to me’.
“Takes your breath away doesn’t it!”
Oh God.
I turned to see a small chubby, shaven headed guy (or balding) in his late fifties, dressed in regulation Black Country sun-seeker attire: Ice wash cut off denim shorts, white basketball shoes, white socks and proud beer-belly spilling out of the tight vest.
It was the equivalent of D-Day in the vulgarity stakes.
Then the most hideous thing of all happened…he sat down next to me…and carried on talking.
Joking aside, the guy was really interesting and funny.
He was retired now, and had been in the removals game for many years. He told me his tales of country house clearances, of being a personal acquaintance of Lord Lichfield in years gone by, of the loneliness and boredom of living on his own.
I started to feel a bit uncomfortable, but I could tell he was just a lonely guy, wanting some kind of human contact, just someone to tell his story to, a reminder that he is still alive – has being in the world.
One fascinating anecdote he told me was about a ‘punishment logbook’ he discovered in the stables of a manor house he was clearing out in his youth.
He told me of a particular entry that had caught his eye and stayed with him over the intervening years.
A stable boy had received six strokes of a whip for being seen spitting by the Madam of the house.
I nodded at his ‘Cruel bastards’ estimation.
So I sat and listened, nodded and smiled at the appropriate moments, told a few tales of the countryside myself, and thought of the strangeness of these chance human encounters.
I noticed out of the corner of my eye, behind the bikers shoulder, a patch of white moving up the lane towards us. As it got closer, I became more and more intrigued.
It was another walker, around my age, but so attired that he kind of captured my attention.
White Fedora hat, (and despite the heat) buttoned up long sleeve denim shirt, white Chino’s, Oxford brogues, little goatee beard and specs. I kid you not.
He seemed somehow out of place and time, yet…somehow totally appropriate.
He looked the classic ‘Creative type’: maybe a painter out to capture a few sketches, or an academic, meditating on Kant’s categorical imperative after a morning lecture.
And yes, he walked up to the entrance and sat down on one of the stone bollards opposite us – another talker, another wayfarer at the crossroads.
(Oh yeah, that’s another thing, the track to the Hall continues on the other side of the lane, originally unbroken before it was bisected and scarred by modern tarmac.)
The new guy had a small canvas shoulder bag with him, and on it was printed the name of the local university I’d attended years ago. Okay, the academic guess was probably pretty near the mark. Sure, just a coincidence, but I was getting a little nervous by now.
I stood to leave, making my excuses (I was genuinely hot and sweaty) but also feeling something I couldn’t put my finger on…a feeling of a scene being enacted, like the tableau that McEwan’s character felt in the quote at the beginning.
All this is for my benefit; I’m a little pawn on a giant cosmic chessboard.
I had the compulsion to break the surreal tableau, because I think I felt on a very deep level, that to stay would mean the encounter would escalate into ever more bizarre loops and synchronicities of symbolism.
Looking back, I think I felt I’d lose my identity, or grip on reality in some strange and incomprehensible way.
I walked back the way I had come, retracing the steps of the ‘academic’, not looking back until I got to the twist in the lane.
There they both still were, but standing now in the road…and looking my way.
Maybe they weren’t looking at me, but it made me shudder a bit.
I just felt this weight of signification and meaning, like you get now and again when waking from a particularly vivid dream – the voice in your head saying: ‘remember this, its important!’
One idea struck me quite profoundly when I got home, and has stayed with me ever since.
It was as if those two characters were possible aspects of myself, almost like twin Doppelgangers that I’d projected from the depths of my own psyche.
The life of the mind, creativity, intellectualism - or the lonely older guy, speaking only of the good old days of yore and being on nodding terms with the moneyed classes.
I'm still having fun 'deconstructing' the experience three weeks later.
It felt right that I went my own way in the end, the middle path.
I still don’t believe those two ‘wayfarers’ were real even now.
Here’s a pic of Chillington Hall, this is what I could see, or we could see from our vantage point at the crossroads almost exactly, but it was a bit more green when I was there.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)