EPISODE 59: GETTING OUT AT THE BOTTOM

Welcome to my blog which, like last week's, concerns a short story competition that I will enter at the end of the month. This is the first unread draft of a story I have written over the last two days. It'll take another week until I can make myself read it and make the alterations that will inevitably suggest themselves. This story is just over 4,000 words long.

GETTING OUT AT THE BOTTOM

 It’s a shock, I suppose. With hindsight you can say, yep, I guess I should have seen it coming, and you tell people the story but you don’t begin it there, you begin when it first went wrong. Was it yesterday, or last week, a month ago perhaps, or even way back when you first felt it slip? Did you say anything at the time? Some do, some don’t. I don’t. I notice the change, the first time a lover looks cross or deceitful, the first time someone fails to keep an appointment or breaks their word, and I hold my noticing inside of me in a mental log so when it happens again I can think, ah, is that a pattern forming, is this person not to be trusted after all, and the log turns into a ledger. But I don’t say anything, don’t want to rock the boat, don’t want to think I’m going to have to lose you.

And it’s no big deal. Literally.

…

1967 is a very long time ago. 17 then, 62 now. A lifetime.

I met him in a squat in North London. I smoked a joint with him. My first. South African grass. He told me he was going to the Roundhouse in Camden to watch Pink Floyd. On the way there we dropped some acid. LSD was his thing. I loved the colours, the music and the sex but I feared for my sanity. Barmi had no such reservations and he revelled in discordance and darkness. I remember one early morning in the park as sun rose. We’d been tripping all night and I was high and safe. Never had the trees, the municipal fountain and the birds, looked so sensuous and beautiful. It is a moment of life that has always been with me as the knowledge of perfection. Maybe it was then, when I was at total peace, that I first opened my log on Barmi because it was at that moment that he broke my reverie by loudly disclaiming an Egyptian spell he had picked up from Crowley invoking some dark force that I had no interest in.

For three years Barmi and I lived in the squat, received grants to go to the LSE and London University respectively, dealt pot, talked revolution and slept with an extraordinary number of beautiful young women. What unified us more than anything was love of cannabis in all its forms. A dope fetish that neither of us grew out of. Red leb, gold leb, afghani, roccy, nepalese, thai grass. The names on their own turned us on. We’d sit on sofas in our sittingrooom, with its decaying walls beautified by wall-hangings from the east, like two potentates in calico, dishing out drugs and wisdom in equal measure. Setting was everything. Our aim was to get our friends high and if you got high you became our friend. Always there would be some free smoke on the table. Try it before you buy it. Some incense burning, some music playing, relax into it man, feel what you feel, let the mind drift, see the sparkling colours, let the past go. We’d sit in a circle, ten, fifteen people at a time sharing the same joint, the same chillum, the same dream of freedom. Revolution with a smile.

The squat was demolished on decimalization day in February 1971. By then, the scent of flower power had already faded. For true believers, like Barmi and me, the die was cast.  Turn on, tune in, drop-out. This was all we wrote on our final exam papers. No marks, no degrees, no interest in the rewards that society had to offer. What to do? We met Tabitha the topless tarot reader when we were on mescaline at the Reading festival that summer. Ireland for you Barmi, she said, and India for Tim.

On the 30^th January 1972 I was initiated by the guru swami maharaj in a small ashram in a village in north India. Mesmerised, I was there for four years.

On the same date, although I was not to know this for thirty years, Barmi was on a peace march in Derry when the British army opened fire and killed 13 people. Barmi wasn’t hurt but he came home soaked in another man’s splattered blood.

***

We were fifty-two years old when we next met. In many ways I felt that my life had come and gone. And this was okay with me except that I was stuck on what to do with myself. Of course I had become disenchanted with my illuminator but the world is a dream vedantic philosophy remained my cornerstone and saw me through the vicissitudes and joys of family life, divorce, periods of moderate financial security and, most latterly, bankruptcy. Pursued by creditors and an unnecessarily vengeful ex-wife, mostly genially ignored by my then adult children and unable to find employment or pay rent in London, I had out of desperation accepted the offer of a small one roomed flat in Totnes, Devon, a small apparently sleepy town that I thought would provide rural tranquillity. I’d been there less than a week when to my astonishment there he was, striding down the High Street for all the world as if he owned the place.

Same scruffy shoulder-length now grey hair, same chest-tickling long white gandolfian beard encrusted in yesterday’s dinner, same gleam in his small piggy eyes. His face, born old, had grown in to itself, mature enough now to last him until his eighties. As he made his strutting way down the street he was stopped or hailed every few yards by a variety of people. Short conversations would take place, maybe a hug. When he sat down outside a café, I joined him. I knew he wouldn’t recognise the bald lined man sitting opposite him.

 You okay Barmi, I asked. He looked at me, studied me, couldn’t place me. Wondered if you had any acid, I said. Or mescaline. Tabitha liked that.

He didn’t get it. Sorry man, he said. Who are you?

A waitress brought coffee. Before I could answer two young lads started whispering in Barmi’s ear. He put his left hand in is decaying sports jacket pocket and then took it out and shook the hand of one of the lads. Off they went.

I see you haven’t lost your touch, I said. Just your memory.

Again Barmi consulted his pocket, this time withdrawing a small lump of black hash. Tim, he said, I insist that you try this. Let’s go to my place and have a couple of chillums.

****

The first year in Totnes was difficult for me as I struggled both financially and socially to put myself on an even keel. I soon realized that Barmi, who had been living in the town for nearly twenty years, had established himself in the mind of many as some sort of maverick anarchist magus. He didn’t have followers as such but he did have an extremely large client base for his dope business and no-one could score from him without a some point being battered by his views which he could only seem to express negatively, that is by haranguing others for their weaknesses of spirit or thought. As he was mostly good natured and retained the charisma from our youth, his customers would buy into the idea that he personified and represented the purity of the hippy traditions of love, peace, equality and illegal dope smoking.

From what he told me, I gathered Barmi’s lifestyle hadn’t changed much over the years. I’ve never done a proper job and never paid a penny rent, he told me proudly when we first went back to his flat which, I subsequently realized, belonged to his latest girlfriend. It seemed to me that throughout his life this pattern had been repeated. He’d meet a woman, charm her, then move into her home and squat there like a giant cuckoo, until either the female found the strength to eject him or, more likely, having squashed his hostess into numbness he moves on to find something or someone more exciting. Like me he had four children, unlike me he had no idea what ages they were, where they lived or what their qualities were.

For all his fecklessness in relationship, Barmi remained loyal to the goddess that was marijuana and to the male friends whose intelligence he thought might be equal or superior to his own. Many of his friends, men and women, were stimulating people to get to know and I was grateful for this. Through his dope dealing, Barmi also knew countless other people and for many of these he was the only person that would deal with them for they were the homeless, the broke, the disadvantaged, the smackies; the riff-raff that no-one wants to see. This was Barmi’s social work and he excelled at it. You try laying a £10 bag of grass on a smackhead or a k-freak and then have the patience to wait for your money to come back. Barmi’s only competition on the street was a local gang of hoodlum crackheads called the Fosters who recuperated their debts with knives and boots.

 Of course, even the most medicated had to accept his sermon and occasionally be dragged off to wherever Barmi was living to become educated into the arcane mysteries of the goddess Shakti in the form of a plant. I must admit I was in sympathy with him on this. The newspapers go on about skunk and schizophrenia but it’s mostly bollocks. I get riled about this so I’ll have to try and skip over the arguments. Give these kids a decent setting to smoke in, let them know you’ll be there for them if they panic, play them some cosmic music, show them how to breathe, allow them to float away. Job done.

Oh yeah, get them to lay off the alcohol.

It was Barmi who suggested that I bought a kilo of weed. Having found my skills as a sub-editor as redundant as I had in London, I was further handicapped by the occult decision of a government department to deprive me of any benefit. After six months of no income, I was temporarily saved by a £4000 inheritance delivered by the death of an aunt.

That’s the price of a kilo, said Barmi. Buy it then sell it to me at 140 an ounce; you’ll make a grand.

After much hesitation and consideration, I agreed. What he hadn’t told me was that he needed me to lay the weed on him because despite the fact that he had been dealing his entire life and had no expenses to speak of, he hadn’t a penny to his name. What I had to do, therefore, was give him five at a time, sometimes more, sometimes less, and then wait for him to sell it before receiving the money. This could take a day or three weeks. Often when he wanted more, he hadn’t actually paid for the previous lot so then debt would swell up to maybe a thousand pounds. Initially I’d worry but after a while I saw that whenever the debt was getting too high Barmi would bring it right down to a reasonable amount.

Ten years went by in this way. Barmi wasn’t to be my only customer because I had to make a living and because the weed I was selling was so delicious and so strong that it was the connoisseur’s delight. I don’t know what your opinions about drug dealing are but believe me for a petty pot seller in Devon the pickings were moderate and far less than the average wage. Nor were they tax free for as much as a detest the state, I render under Caesar twenty per cent of the earnings from my ‘gardening’ business.

Barmi and I continued to meet somewhere in the middle of a philosophic continuum which had him emphasising social action and me advocating general detachment from the whole whirligig of individuality and blame. We still shared our hippy values and our love of the stoned state. The beautiful hash of the old days has gone but now there are the new Moroccans and the endless varieties of skunk to lyricize over and I’ve still never smoked a joint or eaten some hash cake and not felt the better for it.

About six months ago, we had a weed draught. None to be found – except in my tin for I always keep my personal ready for the longest shortage. Once upon a time, Barmi and I kind of liked a fallow period in which both to lie low and to anticipate the next shipment of goodies. Not once had our purpose of selling pot being to make money; it was simply about spreading the message and the joy and then buying more hash to drool over. An ounce of grass forty years ago may have cost £3, now it is near on £200 or £280 if you buy from Barmi.  I make £15 to £20 an ounce; he makes five or six times that. For both of us rapid turnover is essential so by the seventh unproductive week we were in trouble. For the first month your phone rings all the time. When it goes quiet you know your customers have found another source.

Barmi, who unlike me had run out of smoke, paced the streets day after day until he found someone who knew someone who had mentioned someone who was looking to sell a healthy amount of weed.  The price we were quoted was unusually low which was both attractive and worrying. As collecting the stuff would involve a 400 mile round journey with Barmi and two people I didn’t know to visit more people I didn’t know, I wasn’t keen. On the other hand, I needed the money.

For Barmi, the whole trip was a buzz. I was driving. The guys in the back seemed cool and we chatted and smoked amiably. When we got to the other end I was told I couldn’t go in and meet the sellers. Barmi would go in with my money and one of the guys. Of course I wasn’t happy. Five and a half grand for a kilo. You don’t want your money disappearing and you don’t want to buy shit.

Trust me, said Barmi.

I hate it when people say that to me.

On the way home, I was uneasy. The car stank of skunk. This was both extremely unprofessional and stupid. Barmi should have checked it was packed decently. He assured me the weed was good, and dry, but until I saw it I couldn’t be sure. When you’re carrying, the motorway seems full of police. I kept thinking, fuck, I’m sixty years old, what am I doing?

In fact the weed was a trifle damp which meant by time it was properly dry it was 6% lighter. Otherwise it was fine. A kilo is just over 35 ounces. As a favour and a thank you, I allowed Barmi four at cost price. Because of the draught I knew other customers would buy enthusiastically. Three days later, it had all gone.

Barmi, I slowly realized, was furious when I told him there was none left. But I got it for you, he said plaintively. I found it for you.

I’m sorry, I said. I sold it cheap because it was damp. Went quicker than I thought. Look, here’s half an ounce of my personal. There’s some Northern Lights coming at the end of the week.

Thinking he was pacified, I left in good spirits but afterwards had a tinge of guilt so I went home and took back three ounces I had promised to someone else. It then took me the best part of three hours to find Barmi again. When I did so, he was standing by the recycling point behind a supermarket. As I parked up beside him I saw the rage on his face. It was then that I should have known, should have read the signs.

I felt bad, I told him. Got some weed back for you.

The rage disappeared from Barmi’s face. I found it for you, he said. I’ve been so angry that I told everyone I was giving up dealing.

In truth he was pissing me off. He hadn’t done it for me but for himself and the £500 he had already made from the arrangement which was as much as I would make. Not to worry, I said with a smile, I’ve sorted it now.

For Barmi and me the 2011 Occupy movement and the activities of Anonymous hacking group came as a welcome surprise. Barmi was ecstatic. He took offence when I described it as the last hurrah of the hippies but I wasn’t mocking. Even cosmic nihilists want their children and grandchildren to live in a kinder world. For the first time in years, Barmi went to London where he camped on the streets, preached to the revolutionaries at St Pauls and rediscovered his radical activist heart. When back in Totnes he was up all night, reading and concocting theories about the collapse of capitalism. Initially I was pleased for him because I felt he needed a change in his life, needed a real challenge. For a while I had seen he was stuck in himself, repeating the same day every day, saying the same things to the same people. Atrophied.

Go to London, I urged him, stay there.

Too late. Occupy were moved on. Barmi stayed in Totnes and eased his frustration by shouting at people eating meat at cafes and donning his Anonymous mask at night to cause petty damage to whatever he considered to be the property of the one per cent. Personally I considered this petty, pointless and demeaning, and I found it hard to congratulate. When he told me he wanted to be arrested so he could explain the Occupy movement to the local police, I began to realise he was losing all sense of reality and that I should withdraw my money from him as quickly as possible. Unfortunately this is easier said than done because you don’t supply these debtors with weed they can’t earn you the money you owe you.

Then we hit another break in supply. You’ll have to go up North again, decided Barmi. I told him I wasn’t bothered and felt I should hang on to my cash for a deal that was already arranged for later in the week. Straightaway Barmi became agitated. I’ll sell it all before your man turns up, he promised. Again I demurred, partly because I didn’t fancy the drive, partly because I wasn’t sure about the weed and partly because I knew damn well that Barmi wouldn’t be able to shift that much so quickly. This time he positively flared up. Well I’ll get someone else to do it, he threatened. Cheap good weed, I don’t see your problem.

It’s damp, I told him.

Mine wasn’t, he said.

Later that day, another customer put in a large order so Barmi once more got his way although a fortnight later he’d only bought two ounces off me.

There’s no settled periods in the dope business. Suppliers and customers alike are random in their appearances. Up to about a year ago we had a regular supply of the best hash in the world. Then overnight it stopped. Since then there has been nothing of note, nothing that I could sell without shame, so when Barmi came round to show me what he called an  amazing bit of Nepalese hash for half the price it should be, I was quite excited. The blim he showed me was so tiny there was no way I could evaluate it. We can make a killing on this, said Barmi. There’s a kilo waiting for us.

Because I have never known Barmi to get his hash wrong, I consented to his buying a couple of ounces for me. When it arrived, I judged it to be crap. As did my friends. Barmi acted unconvincingly bemused. Seemed alright to me, he said.

How many signs did I need?

Two weeks ago, Barmy and his girlfriend Blossom went to a small festival in Dorset. I must admit that as at that point he owed me £750, and another friend close on a grand, I was a bit peeved they were indulging themselves on our money. On the fourth night of the festival, Barmi returned to Totnes and asked me to take some weed. When I arrived at his flat he had someone with him I hadn’t met before. This is John, said Barmi. I’m hoping that you will start selling weed to him. By saying this, Barmi broke all the conventions of the trade for he must not identify my role without my permission. Because I was anxious to get some cash off him and because it was late at night, I hid my fury, ignored his attempts to get me to be friendly to John and left as quickly as I could after selling him an ounce and failing to reduce the debt.

Three days after that I met him again in a café in Totnes. He was clearly wired. I haven’t slept for ten days, he told me, and I’m in a state of gnosis. To me he looked dreadful and sounded worse. Although the sun was shining in the café garden I was shivering as Barmi rambled on about his plan to pay his debts by introducing other customers to me and then taking a commission from them. Nothing he said made sense to me so I just sipped my tea, blanked him out and waited for him to buy some weed. Finally he said it. I want two ounces. Openly he counted out thirteen twenty pound notes and out them on the table between us. You’re a hundred short, I said. I can’t let the money go up. Without saying anything, Barmi went into the café, returning a few minutes later with a further hundred pounds. Only later did I find out he’d taken it from the till.

Yesterday, Barmi called me up again. For twelve years the conversation has been the same. He calls, I fix a time. Yesterday this wouldn’t do. Now, he demanded.

His new friend John was there. As was Blossom, who looked distraught. I felt nervous and short of breath. No tea was offered.  It’s time to implement the plan, said Barmi portentously. From now on I want you to lay weed on John and Blossom. Charge them £20 more than you charge me until the debt is paid off. We talked about it in the café.

No, Barmi, we didn’t, I replied, trying to be calm but hearing the tremble in my voice. You talked about it. I’m not interested. I don’t want to deal with anyone else and I don’t want to lay weed on anyone else. You’re my friend, you owe me the debt, you settle it.

For all the signs and adumbration, I did not expect the weight of abuse, threat, condescension and intolerance that I then received. It mystified me. Not only was it entirely contrary to any hippy value system that we talked about but it simply didn’t make sense. You make £100 an ounce, I said. Sell seven ounces and we’re clear; what’s the big deal. And don’t you dare ever threaten me again.

I didn’t threaten you, he said. I was just saying what would happen if you didn’t do it the way I told you.

Turning to Blossom, I asked, did Barmi threaten me. She nodded. John wouldn’t look at me. Now, Barmi, do you want some weed or don’t you.

Taking a wad of cash out of his pocket, Barmi said, I want three.

Okay, I said. That’s five hundred and forty pounds.

There’s four hundred here, he said.

I took out two ounces from my bag.

Three, said Barmi.

No, I said.

Jumping to his feet, Barmi kicked out at the coffee table and began to roar abuse at me. My temper finally snapped and I yelled back at him, accusing him of shitting on fifty years of hippiedom and near on twenty years of friendship. During the ensuing row John escaped and Blossom burst into tears. When Barmi had had enough of shouting at me, he went off to find John and I tried first to comfort Blossom and then to try and elicit from her some explanation for what was going on. Her explanation astounded me. He thinks the Frazer gang are going to beat him up, she said. He owes them two grand. He told them he’d get you and Phil to buy a kilo of hash from them without knowing it was them. But neither of you were interested.

But why would he work with them, I asked. He hates them.

And then suddenly the answer was obvious. All the signs had been there, the boasted staying awakeness, the self-absorption, the greed, the megalomania, the rambling garrulousness, the stupidity, the destruction…

It’s mountain climbing, isn’t it, I said.

Blossom nodded.

He was going to sell his friends for cocaine, I asked. Really?

And me, said Blossom, sadly. He’s leaving town, he says, running away. Afraid of getting his legs broken. Down to me to pay the bills and pick up the pieces.

As Blossom sobbed, I made myself a cup of tea, rolled a spliff and contemplated the sudden and inglorious end both to a friendship and to a business that I clearly couldn’t continue under the gaze of the noxious Frazers. Later, my own girlfriend, who had been a friend to Barmi briefly contacted him on his mobile to see if he would give her an honest explanation for his behaviour. It’s Tim’s fault for trusting me, he said.

Getting out at the bottom, maybe it is better than not getting out at all.

EPISODE 58: IN WHICH THE AUTHOR THINKS ABOUT WRITING.

Welcome to my blog, even if you are that strange Russian search machine that visits me twice a week to disappoint its readers while boosting my hits to an inexplicable average of ten a week. As nothing of note happened in the last week in my world, apart from being irritated by the noxious jubilee and failing to make any progress on my projects, I have briefly turned my attention to the actual raison d’etre of this journal, my non-career as a writer.

Last year, presumably at this same time, I received an email about the VS Pritchett short-story competition. There were two weeks or so until entry time. I gave it a go. Here we are again. Shall I bother? Have I the time? I suppose the question is already answered because I’ve spent the last two hours playing with ideas and not making much progress. As usual I have made two or three starts to different pieces and then stopped because although I can feel a story unfolding I’m already wondering if it is important enough, or unique enough or metaphysical enough or contemporary enough or funny enough or sad enough to engage someone’s attention. It might work for Murakami but for the rest of us have to use our fifteen minutes of fame to at least make sense. The prize is for stories between 2,000 and 5,000 words. Which ones will do the trick?

Here are what I now see to be 5 starts.

1. Day One

Right now, I feel very lonely. I’m sitting on the bed in the motel room. I asked the guy at the desk if I could smoke and he said yes, if I gave him £5 he’d take the battery out the smoke alarm. I was about to give him the money but he laughed and waved it away. You think we can afford alarms, he asked. Man, we want this place to burn down.

I’ve been here four hours now.

Only one hundred hours to go. And then I’ll know.

There is nothing to see out of the window except a brick wall. It’s not an omen but it feels like one.

I’m scared too. All my fears are speaking in my head. What if my luck runs out here? What if Tim’s blown his part? What if the police come? What if the gang know about it?

Always the same questions.

I will cope. I always have coped.

It’s been close sometimes.

I’m not a brave person, not a risk taker at all.

2. It is very difficult to tell people that you have died, especially when they can see you and touch you and tell you that you haven’t, so nowadays I rarely bother. Marie knows about it of course, so does John, but neither really believes me. They think it’s a stance I’m taking. Sometimes when we’re in bed, Marie takes hold of my penis and says, ‘Doesn’t look dead to me.’ I smile because she loves me, the one we thought I was, and I love her, as I love everyone now. At the beginning, when I thought there was some point, I did try to explain that the body is alive but I am not but I soon learned it was a waste of words.

3. Tomorrow I retire. I’ll put down the tools of my trade and start a new life. I’m so excited that I’ve not slept for a week. This whole year I’ve been putting everything in place. 

4. The little ginger kid sat apart from the others with a scowl on her face and with her skinny arms clutching her desk as she struggled to bottle her fury. The teacher and the whole class watched in fascination and wondered what may happen this time. “Please,” said Ms Jones, not even beginning to sound calm, “Please. Remember last time.”

5. It was always the money for me. Sure, I smoked the stuff but I wasn’t like him, like them, the oldies, always comparing one weed to another and rambling on about the drugs they’d consumed fifty years ago.  Dave wasn’t the worst but he fucking loved his marijuana. So he only had the best and, because he was a believer, at the best prices.

Good business for me.

In fact 1, 3, and 5, are probably the same story which was/is to be about a retiring drugs dealer setting-up his last deal. Number 2 is just a dalliance with the impossible, the putting into words of the wordless. Whenever I run out of books to read in the bath at night, I begin again to ponder Nisarga Datta’s masterpiece, ‘I am That.’ I’ve been studying this on and off for 36 years, rarely being able to feel that I’ve understood what I’m reading but with a sense that some truth  was close to being revealed to me. The essence of his teaching is this:

‘…the sense of being, of ‘I am’ is the first to emerge. Ask yourself whence it comes or just watch it quietly. When the mind stays in the ‘I am’ without moving, you enter a state which cannot be verbalized but can be experienced. After all the sense ‘I am’ is always with you, only you have attached all kinds of things to it; body, feelings, thoughts, ideas, possessions inner and outer etc. All these self-identifications are misleading. Because of them you take yourself to be what you are not.’

The thorn in Nisargadatta is his refusal to countenance the person, who is never real, never worth bothering about. What is strange is that for all the studying of this book I have done, when I do think I understand what he is on about it always seem like it is for the first time.  What I have never been able to do, never really attempted to do, is to remain in that sense of ‘I am’ that he talks about. The Avatar exercises have shown me, once again, how compulsive is thinking. It is both an addiction and a defence against emptiness. Feeling is the key.

As these thoughts preoccupy my soul, I find I want to write about them in my stories. Stories, however, are about persons, drama, activity. A good novel fills you with life and relies on your identification with the characters. I’ve written frequently about the aesthetics of Abhinavagupta in which emotion is used to transcend emotion. Nisargadatta would be most unimpressed. He’d stand up in the stalls and shout out, ‘Hey, it is just a play, a story your grandmother told you. Take your attention away and the whole thing dissolves.’

There is one thing Maharaj says that I have used as a plot driver. It comes in a dialogue with a visitor who keeps trying to make sense of his world. Over and over again Nisargadatta tells him that the world he is talking of is imaginary then finally he says:

Within the prison of your world appears a man who tells you that the world of painful contradictions which you have created is neither continuous nor permanent and is based on misapprehension. He pleads with you to get out of it by the same way you got into it. You got into it by forgetting what you are and you will get out of it by knowing yourself as you are.

EPISODE 57: THOUGHTS ON A PUB AND A SHORT STORY.

Welcome to my blog which finds me with paint covered hands and a paint spotted jumper which will never be my best again. This morning I went to Bristol to show my face at my eldest son's new pub. By new, I mean new to him. In every way.  

The building itself, which I saw for the first time today, seemed in more than a little disrepair and the idea that they would open tomorrow ambitious to my untrained eye. In fact, I don't doubt there are many people less acquainted with pubs than me. I don't suppose my parental abhorrence of alcohol is directly responsible for all my children being drinkers and this one now with his own pub, but it could be, Even when I was a drinker, I didn't like it and imbibed it simply to get out of my head. Once I found better ways of doing that, I was done with alcohol which seems to turn an awful lot of people into total morons. 

So it was probably only just that today I spent  few hours painting walls in honour of my son.

Once upon a time I earned my living as a painter and decorator. I was very bad at it. I can be careful for a while but sooner or later a mistake is made or an inch is missed and neither blemish put right. Luckily today a woman appeared who liked doing all the finickety bits but didn't like standings on ladders or doing the broad empty spaces with the roller. Together we made an excellent team.

Well, I thought so anyway.

At one point I found myself being observed by a plump rastafarian who was complaining at the skow pace of the work, 'Should be open by now,' he said more than once. 'Need to get some business done.' Annoyed at the scrutiny, I downed tool and went off to make a cup of tea. Turned out that this guy is a local drug dealer who is feeling displaced by the change of ownership. He appears everyday with one of his henchmen to hurry them along. My son and his partner treat him like an enthusiastic regular and they permit his presence there. I suspect this is a mistake because he is a massive threat to their security and their future.

****

The following is a short story I wrote yesterday because I was fed-up of writing myself ever-lengthening to do lists. I was intending to do it as a structured creative exercise based on my Robert Fritz method. What actually happened was that I wrote the first line and took it from there.

CHOICE.

I’m going for a walk, said Phil. Don’t know how long I’ll be. Maybe she heard him, maybe she didn’t. He went anyway.

After about twenty minutes he began to calm down. Shouldn’t have got so angry in the first place. It wasn’t her fault that he’d chosen this day, the first of their holiday, to quit smoking. Luckily he’d stomped out with enough money to buy a packet of cigarettes. He lit one up then texted his wife, sorry.

Three cigarettes and a couple of miles later, he began to hear the sounds of music drifting from the side of a hill. Following a muddy path he found three people, two young men with long hair sitting on makeshift stools playing guitars and an equally young woman sitting crossed leg on the ground tending a blanket displaying homemade jewellery.

The woman, dressed in a torn sleeveless t-shirt and a short blue skirt, nothing else, smiled up at him. Are you one of the brethren, she asked.

Yes, he replied as he crouched down to finger the jewellery and to enjoy her beauty.

I thought so. Didn’t I boys? You’re so late! You may be the last, she admonished earnestly. Don’t worry though, I’ll take you.

Jumping to her feet, she took Phil’s hand. I’m Joanna, she said. I work in the Temple.

Phil felt his phone vibrate. A text from his wife. Come home. We’ll make up. Love you.

Joanna’s hand pulled at Phil’s and he allowed her to lead him further around the hill and into a small wood which ended at the entrance of a small cave from which came the sounds of rushing water. 

Letting go of his hand, Joanna spoke as if an awe. The entrance to the Otherworld, she whispered. 

Seeing nothing as he peered into the darkness, Phil hesitated to follow when Joanna disappeared into the unknown but just as he began to turn away the lighting of candles revealed to him two large pools of water in which naked men and women were bathing and singing songs that he couldn’t recognize and yet seemed familiar. When Joanna came back into view, she too was naked. Isn’t it wonderful, she said.

When Phil immersed himself into the water, he understood what she meant. Never had he felt so relaxed. He felt he could truly sink into an ocean of peace.

Got you, said Joanna gleefully. Every time, I get you.

Phil looked around uncertainly. It seemed that he was nowhere at all. Have I died, he asked.

Yep.

Because I followed you to the pool?

Yep.

Did you drown me?

Yep.

Why?

Because that’s what I do.

Kill people?

Not people. Just you. Over and over. Every lifetime I come along and flash my tits at you and then this happens. I’m probably as fed up with it as you to be honest. It’s not as if you ever anything special. Sometimes I’m quite enjoying my life until you turn up. It’d be alright if you didn’t do that bit when you suddenly gain superhuman strength and pull me down under the water with you.

Owing to being dead, Phil was unable to comprehend much of what Joanna revealed to him and when he was reborn some years later (and, for the fifth consecutive time, christened Philip) he certainly had no memory of his encounters with her but always, somewhere in the core of his being, lay the suspicion that at any moment, out of the bluest of blues, he would be called upon to make a crucial choice and that the choice he made would be the wrong one.

EPISODE 56: A WEEKEND AWAY

Welcome to my blog which, for the first time, is a little late this week partly because I had an unusually busy weekend and partly because I’ve run out of things to say. Quite how I’m going to capture your interest, or even my own, I’m not sure.

This last week has been summer. It may be the only summer we have or it may herald the stonking best summer since 1976. Yesterday I woke up in Manchester. This wasn’t a surprise to me because I had driven up the day before; two hundred motorway miles at a steady 80mph, restraining myself as much as possible because I was caught speeding a few months ago and already have to do a speed awareness course. (In fact I’m always aware of my speed; my problem is in knowing what speed the speed camera wants me to be going at.) My three speed convictions in fifteen years have all come at the same place, a camera by a set of traffic lights in Bristol. I looked again yesterday and I’m sure there’s no sign on that stretch of road to say what the limit is. (Presumably it is there but deliberately hidden.) I don’t quibble too much with the overall justice of my being caught because I always speed.

I was in Manchester to celebrate the 60^th birthday of the mother of my eldest child. She was at Teacher’s Training College when we met and I was waiting to go to university in Birmingham. Before long we had in the fashion of the times ‘dropped-out’ of our respective fully-funded and granted courses. I suppose we may both have reason to regret that choice, because neither of us subsequently settled in professions or careers. Yes, she now has a doctorate and I have two Masters Degrees but that initial sundering from the system was never really rectified. What would have happened if she had secured her teaching certificate and me my silly degree in ‘Behavioural Sciences’ is of course, an unknown. Maybe she would be a retiring headmistress or me a Professor. I don’t regret the decision I made then but I do think it had consequences to our lives that we couldn’t have foreseen.

As it was, we moved to Bristol. How that came about, I don’t know as neither of us knew the place. There I became a roadsweeper and she worked in a bookshop. Being a roadsweeper wasn’t great but it was mostly easy because once the traffic woke-up the busy roads were too busy to clean and I spent most of my days loitering around Clifton zoo listening to the animals and resweeping the same leaves.

The best thing about the job was that we were allowed to take our overtime when we wanted. I remember two or three of us would take our carts out in the middle of the night, drop acid on the Downs at Clifton, wonder around for a few hours and then return back to base to claim our doubletime. Even in those days I was nervous taking acid but I recall that she (my ex) was always fun to trip with because she was funny and insouciant.

Her sixtieth birthday was hard for her, because she was sixty but more because her lifelong partner (after me) died a few months ago, having fallen ill about this time last year. Of course people told her she doesn’t look sixty but she does. A year of misery shows on her face. We were young and beautiful, now look at us.

No don’t.

***

From Manchester I went to Derby. Actually, I went from South Manchester to North Manchester and then back again, (hard to map read and drive at the same time) and then I headed for Derby to meet my friends. It was as perfect a day as one would wish for when crossing the Pennines. I hadn’t driven that road before and it was a shame that despite having set off 90 minutes early I was soon pressed for time and that I had to concentrate on the driving because the views were stunning with rivers and hills and wild moors.

Having set off after just one piece of bread and one cup of tea, my intention was to breakfast on the way but as time passed I thought it best to make the appointment and nourish myself when I got to the marina café where I was to meet my friend.  As I got out of the car, however, my friend, Steve, was ready for action. “We’ve started the boats,” he said excitedly. “If you’re up for it we could jump right on and then take a break in half an hour when we get to the first lock.”

I needed a pee, needed a coffee (or at least a tea) and I needed to eat. Surely I could wait just half an hour more?

Five hours later, I still needed a pee, a coffee and something to eat.

Steve has had his boat for four years. Essentially our meetings are for business but we’ve become friends and have some interests, for example football, that we share. I usually spend a couple of hours with him in his house and increasingly he has enthused about the idea of my going on a little trip on his boat. For politeness sake, in the hope that we’d be done with it and because the weather was gorgeous, I agreed that this time we’d chug for a couple of hours. I imagined lying on a deck, listening to the birds, smoking a pipe and drinking cups of tea.

Canal boats are noisy. The river is busy on a summer Sunday. There was nowhere to sit and Steve had no teabags. I had no suncream. Steve’s girlfriend at one point said, “I’ll get us a drink.” My hopes soared but she returned with beer – which I don’t drink. Because the river was so busy they couldn’t find a place to moor so we went on. And on. The sun beat down. We’d come to a lock and everything would get even slower. Off the boat, on the boat. Pull a rope, hold a rope, feel the rope burning your hands. Push this lock gate shut. Hold this rope again. Pull the boat back. What fun this is. And everyone is so friendly and while I’m standing there falsely smiling, they ask about the boat and tell me all about theirs. ‘Carried coal, it did. Last worked in 1985.’

Steve and girlfriend so delighted to be showing me their pride and joy. ‘Wonderful,’ I say.

When I finally get back to my car, I’m four hours late for my next appointment which is 200 miles away. My phone is full of messages asking where I am and if I’m alright. Which, once I’ve had a cup of tea and accelerated to a calming 80mph, I am.

EPISODE 55: IN WHICH THE AUTHOR REMEMBERS BEING 14 AND DECIDES HE HASN'T CHANGED MUCH

Welcome to my blog which has purpose if not direction.

Forty-four years ago, almost to the day, I was put on a train in London and despatched to Llandudno junction. I was fifteen and had just been expelled from my grammar school for reasons which I’ve explained before. I don’t remember exactly what I felt that day but generally at that time I was miserable because I was discovering the joys of falling in love with numerous girls while being too shy to be proactive. I do recall the book I was reading, ‘War and Peace’. I was a quick reader and it was a long journey. Russian novels were my staple, primarily because they were the longest books in the library. ‘War and Peace’ became my favourite book of all time, so I when I wrote to Louis Berniers to compare his ‘Bird Without Wings’ to Tolstoy, it was the highest praise I could give it.

My Welsh sojourn lasted maybe 3 months, from May 11^th 1968 to the end of July, by when I’d finished taking my ‘O’ Levels. After countless years of trauma and trouble with the Jesuits and the demands of the catholic religion, ‘Hen Ysgol’ in Talsanau, near Penrhyndeudreath, was an oasis of peace and freedom.

I think there were very few of us there; less than twenty I’d say. The only person I remember was a local girl called Rhianna who I met at local café in Penrhyndeudreath that had a jukebox on which I’d repetitively play ‘Child of the Moon’ by the Rolling Stones, ‘Young Girl’ by Gary Puckett and ‘Honey’ by Bobby Goldsborough, (a sickly song about death). After the few tutorials of the day, I’d get on my bike and ride down to the village for cups of tea and a look at the girls. The freedom was extraordinary. On Catholic holidays I was given the whole day off, so I’d cycle to the beaches at Harlech and Portmadog and relax by the sea, safe in the knowing that no-one would ask me if I had actually been to Mass.

For a romantic country-loving boy, the environment was perfect. I loved wondering off in the hills, disclaiming to the sheep and discovering empty spaces inside myself. One day, a friend and I, (I recall he was Lebanese) ‘discovered’ Port Merion, the extraordinary village designed by Clough Williams-Ellis and later used in ‘The Prisoner’. To stumble on such a place unwittingly was a delight and, in the modern parlance, awesome.

I didn’t do particularly well in my exams apart from passing French. This was managed mainly because my French teacher told me all the answers and when we had an oral exam she spoke to me in an English accent so that I could understand what she was saying. After years of abuse from teachers, that act of kindness was of particular note.

At the end of July I went back to Surrey and in September 1968 was accepted back by Wimbledon College who then had me for another term before expelling me for a second time.

***

Last week I read ‘The War of Women’ by Dumas. I read it because I’ve decided it is too long since I addressed the classics. The local library isn’t that strong on books and the classics section is tiny and consists mainly of Dickens, Trollope and Thackery, all of which I have read. (In fact I haven’t read much Dickens. My father used to have the complete works and whenever I looked at them they oozed boredom. I know I’ve actually enjoyed them in the past but the reluctance remains.

The Dumas tale was brilliantly written. Although neither the story nor the characters were in themselves of any great interest to me, it is a rollicking read, full of good dialogue and pace. Most of my reading takes place in the bath at night. This week I’ve been in there for an hour a night, a hundred pages or so and I relearned that one of the reasons these authors’ books are ‘classics’ is because they are so damn well written.

I returned to the library today with the hope of finding ‘War and Peace’ or any of the classic Russian authors but had no luck. A choice of Martin Chuzzlewit, Moby Dick or G.K. Chesterton sent me home empty handed.

By some strange coincidence, the very day I was recalling Tolstoy’s Katya and Natasha, I received an email from a woman in Arkhangelsk in Northern Russia called Mariya. She is 25 and says she is a trainee dentist who is about to be sent to the UK for a month for special training sponsored by a scholarship. So far, so good. She’s contacted me because she likes the look of my profile.

 

What profile?

 I’m not aware of having one. Did she mean my facebook page? She included a rather pretty headshot of herself. I responded with a polite ‘I think you’ve made a mistake’ only to receive back an email with my own photo attached together with six pictures of her and a quite passionate letter asking ‘for your friendship at least’. In the pictures she is depicted either in short skirts or nighties and in the letter she confesses that she works as a stripper but ‘would never sell my body for sex.’  Of course I am assuming that there is some scam going on but so far can’t guess what the point of it is. My ignoring of this letter was followed by a third one from her, repeating much the same story and adding five nude pictures of herself. She signs herself ‘your passionate tigress’ and begs me to meet her when she reaches the UK.

I guess my facebook picture must make me look either stupid or gullible, both of which I am. But not stupid enough to think a golden hearted perfect bodied multilingual Russian stripper and dentist has fallen in love with me.

I’ve just remembered that when I was 13 I began corresponding with teenage girls in Finland. Quite quickly these letters turned into mutual filth and fantasy. One girl in particular seemed to chime with me and our letters were frequently ten or more pages long. Then, to my horror, I discovered she was being allowed to visit London for a week with a couple of older friends. She wanted me to meet her and have sex with her. When the day came to meet her, I set off to school as usual but stayed on the train and went into central London. We’d agreed to rendezvous outside a hotel in Green Park. I arrived early and stood some distance away. I was desperate to have sex and terrified. After an hour I saw the three girls. My god they were stunning; all blond, all beautiful, all in the miniest of mini-skirts newly acquired from Biba in Kensington.

I turned and made my way back to the tube station.

***

My last strained link to Russia and teenaging concerns communism and socialism. My early emotional fervour for the revolution was tempered by a visit to Communist Eastern Europe and Russia in 1967; nevertheless I have never been inclined to accept either the inevitability or the justice of global or social capitalism. In fact at times it seems incredible to me that the 99% allow the 1%, or the 80% allow the 20%, to get away with it. For this reason I have been delighted to read Peter Wilber’s book, ‘Deep Socialism, A New manifesto of Marxist Ethics and Economics’. I hope that with a little time I will be able to digest his ideas and communicate hthem accurately. Everything he writes is fascinating and relevant. Just this morning I was reading his chapter on ‘Currencies, Languages and the National ‘Ethos’ while on the news came the latest panic about the Euro. If only the world leaders would read the fucking book and do what he tells them to do. Mind you, it isn’t down the leaders is it? It’s our job.