I had not previously been a cat person. Not at all.

Pye’s previous owner, our friend Jean, asked Jols whether we would take him on. She unexpectedly had to move from a biggish house to a small flat, and she didn’t think it would be fair to confine him to that space. Our small house in the country would be much better, Jean reckoned.

Jols said yes.

“But neither of us knows what to do with a cat,” I said.

“I know.”

“And you’re rampantly allergic.”

“I know.”

Seriously, why would you say ‘yes’ to a thing like that?

And so Pye, or Tsukeskyann Pyewacket to give him his full pedigree name – son of Joymichael Sunset Boy and Tsukeskyann Cassonade, grandson of Adhuilo Romany King, Pajandrum Poppadom, Menyang Mitsouko and Menyang Hitomi Mimi (I could go on) – arrived at our house. We liked to call him Π. He didn’t seem to mind; he still responded to it. Over the years that became ‘piggy’, which became ‘liten pojke’, Swedish for ‘little boy’.

What? Anyone who’s owned a cat will know about name-creep.

And the consequence of Jols saying ‘yes’ was— well, for the first time in our lives, neither Jols nor I sneezed, or wheezed, or sported a single puffed-up tear duct. We were not allergic to Pye.

It was meant to be.

I am not a spiritual or superstitious person. But Pye’s arrival seemed to act as a counterbalance to the awful things that were going on for us back then. He arrived in October 2007, as we were in the midst of a frightening, expensive and acrimonious wrangle over our house, and just as we’d received some awful news about Jols’s mum.

As we were buffeted through our annus horribilis of 2008, I would glance suspiciously over at Pye and think, “have you been sent to tide us over through all this?”

Jean is a very spiritual person. Maybe she’d foreseen all of that.

Whatever the admin, Pye’s presence was truly the only thing that was nice about coming home for a good year. We could focus all of our anxieties onto him. He didn’t seem to mind. He liked tuna. Initially reserved, he grew to appreciate –nay, enjoy– being stroked, without ever really demanding it.

His temperament was exactly the same as mine. Jols observed that he was my ideal pet. We both tended towards quietness, both gravitated towards the warm part of a room, and both disliked the sound of hairdryers and vacuum cleaners. We also both had a tendency to spontaneously vomit at the slightest sign of stress or change. We were inseparable friends.

“But you’re going to die.”

When we learned last week that Pye wasn’t well, and wasn’t going to get better, Jols and I were super-aware of the difficulty in breaking this news to the people we know. Those who had pets would understand, those who hadn’t could be forgiven for not feeling it. I am most fond of the sympathetic response of my non-pet-owning sister. She said: “I cried when the time came to part-exchange my Citroën Saxo”.

Pye was put to sleep, and then pushed beyond sleep, by the tactful, sensitive and friendly Alexa and Laura at Bridgnorth Veterinary Practice. We brought him home and buried him in his favourite spot in the garden.

So it goes.

And what have we learned? After all this heartbreak, does that mean we’ve become cat people? You know the type of people I mean.

It’s not for me to say, perhaps. But we are definitely Pye people.

As Jols pointed out last summer, while fondly stroking the top of Pye’s soft little head, this is what happens when you say ‘yes’ to things.

Tsukeskyann Pyewacket (Pye). 8 May 1999 — 24 Jan 2012. More than just a cat.

Okay, so on this occasion I paid for the invitation, rather than being paid for my work, but it doesn’t diminish that gentle sense, Dick Whittington-like, of ‘having arrived’.

But before I get ahead of myself: In order to ‘have arrived’, one has to actually arrive.

Professional arrival is a fine art, I think it’s widely acknowledged. I’ve been through enough job interviews to realise that the optimum arrival time is T-minus seven minutes.

At T-minus ten, the person who is set to receive you will look at the clock and think, god, what am I going to do with this total stranger for ten minutes? I hate them!

T-minus five looks a bit calculated, a bit neat, and you also run the risk of having to rush in the event of any out-of-order lifts or missing staircases or whatever. No, no. T-minus seven. With all unexpected obstacles negotiated, you can stroll in and commence ‘having arrived’.

So the real art, then, with such a target decided, is arriving at the arrival; how do you make sure you’re seven minutes early?

Here’s the route I was required to take yesterday (travelling from west to east):

That is, 0.08 miles (459 feet) of prime British pavement, taking in Eros, flashing lights, shows, pizzazz, everything that great old town has to offer. Here’s the route I took to ensure arrival at T-minus seven:

An entire mile of British pavement, some prime, some sub-prime.

To be honest, the opening gambit was necessitated by that most obstructive of obstacles: Piccadilly Circus. It’s a confusing place to navigate at the best of times, even without taking into account my policy of refusing to look up like a tourist — which is a bit awkward, as that’s where all the road signs are. When I emerged from the tube station, I took a gamble, and lost: I turned the wrong way.

This wrong eventually righted, I zeroed in on the building I was supposed to be doing my ‘arriving’ at, and identified its discreet double doors. Right. I situated myself at a Pret across the street from those doors, and commenced eating a sandwich and drinking a smoothie, peering suspiciously for any tell-tale signs of anything.

Upon sandwich completion, I departed the Pret and proceeded to a nearby Spar to buy some Polos. Then I walked round the block, stopping off only to check out the back door of the building I was supposed to be doing my ‘arriving’ at. Brief panic that this was in fact the correct entrance, as there was a group of people hanging around outside looking expectant. No, no. Wrong street. Onwards.

I passed the front doors again, but I was still at T-minus twelve, so I continued past them and walked for 2.5 minutes, before turning and walking back for 2.5 minutes. I pushed the doors and walked in, with all possible calm and poise, precisely seven minutes early.

I think it’s fine to conclude from this a general rule: what happens at T-minus eight out is nobody’s business but your own.

j

Jols and I both went to the University of Wales, Aberystwyth – indeed, we took a couple of the same courses – but we rarely crossed paths. We have since chastised one another about this: me she for not going to a single one of our Film lectures; she me for never going to see any of the plays she was performing in.

One of the plays I didn’t go and see her in was the drama department’s production of Macbeth in 1996. Jols was cast in the prestigious role of First Witch – the one who gets to say ‘When shall we three meet again’ and ‘Double, double toil and trouble’.

About two-thirds of the way through the play, the First Witch has a speech to deliver to her wyrd systers, after which the stage directions tell us that some wyrd music plays, during which the hags ‘dance and then vanish’.

The music and dancing, by all accounts, went well. The witches whirled and cackled and were generally wyrd and portentous. Pyrotechnics flashed and fizzled exactly according to plan, adding to the theatrical melée.

The mystical powers of vanishing, though, eluded one of the witches.

There was nothing fancy about the plan: a simple dart for the exit under the cover of a full blackout. However, the whirliness of the dance coupled with the pyrotechnics served to disorientate the First Witch. Rather than disappearing professionally through the exit, she was witchily alarmed to find herself trapped flat against the back wall of the set. Her cackle evaporated into the pitch black as she desperately ran her warty hands across the unyieldng surface to regain her bearings and gather some sense of where the exit had got to.

The scene was still, sadly, in progress. It was only a matter of time before the lights came back up to allow Macbeth to deliver his next line.

When they did, the audience was met with a ‘bonus’ hyperventilating and resolutely unvanished witch, gingerly shuffling towards the rediscovered exit.

Macbeth’s next line, as written by the Bard, was perfect in every way:

Where are they? Gone?

‘The rest of the cast were sitting in the green room,’ Jols recalls of this unfortunate incident. ‘They were watching the performance on a TV screen, and they were just all hooting with laughter. I could hear them through the wall…’

Something about this incident gives me a very strong sense that I was right not to go to any of those plays.

All hail the First Witch.

He said it because I’d mentioned that I was about to go on a breadmaking course, to learn how to make sourdough bread. I hate all other forms of cooking, by the way, because I’m rubbish at it. I just wanted to at least bake something I thought was enjoyable.

Driving home that evening, I finally landed on the perfect response: ‘No, Andrew, I just don’t like to be the same.’

Oh well, yet another killer comeback, lost to the ages.

It’s a shame, though, isn’t it? To have something you are enthused about to be dismissed as being merely ‘different’? It’s a real joy-killer. So, with this in mind, I’ve been wanting to preempt such an exchange by working up a cheery and constructive response about my latest enthusiasm: I’m learning Swedish.

I’ll admit it’s a hard sell, because even I start to think ‘Typical me…’.

Why? Why Swedish? Varför svenska?

Andrew’s reasoning would doubtless be the blandly utilitarian, ‘Why learn Swedish? Are you going to Sweden? You should learn Chinese or something – they’re the ones who are going to take over the world.’

NO. I will not have my enthusiasm dampened on the basis of its usefulness. I don’t want to, if you’ll forgive me, die with the knowledge of how to conduct business in Mandarin. I want to die at some ripe old age with advanced knowledge of how to speak and listen to a language packed full of dancing vowels, bouncing energy, long, longgg consonants, and precise sibilants that can turn on a sixpence and reverse and send you off in unexpected directions.

So far I’ve come up with this opener: ‘I’m learning Swedish for several reasons, none of which are any good.’ Ho ho. That gives anyone an ‘out’ if they want to take it.

If they’re interested or bored enough to get as far as the second reason, I say: ‘Because I watch a lot of Swedish films’. This is shorthand. I watch the films of Ingmar Bergman, and I haven’t watched many other Swedish films. But people generally don’t know who Ingmar Bergman is, so I say ‘Swedish films’.

If you’re English, you’ve probably spotted the problem. An Englishman’s response to ‘I watch a lot of Swedish films’ is always: ‘Ohhh yeahhh?’ — by which he means ‘All the pornos?’.

I haven’t figured out what the connection between Swedish films and pornography is. Maybe there’s a concrete historical fact that a lot of skin flicks emerged from Sweden back in more innocent times. I don’t know. My suspicion is that it’s some vague mashing of ‘foreign’ films with Swedish liberalism, massage, saunas, and a general sense of Nordic phwoar.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter: I have a killer comeback prepared for exactly this situation: ‘Yes, but I’ve pretty much learnt all the vocabulary needed for those films: “Ja, ja, ja…”.’

So, moving on. The really serious people will graduate onto a whole nother level of the conversational telescope. The real reasons. The reasons, I maintain, that aren’t very good. But they’re good enough for me. I think really it boils down to two or three things:

I really like the sound of the language. It has the passion, expressiveness and lightness of Cymraeg, with the precision and cleanliness of Deutsch, and also enough of the English structure for it to be less intimidating than some languages. The fact that it is not in the Premier League of trading languages makes it all the more appealing to me: I can approach it somehow as a pure language without any of the baggage of past learning failures. Does this make sense? No?

One other major reason is: I never thought I would learn another language. If you know me, I will have told you at some point that, despite it being compulsory to take at least one language at my school, I was permitted not to take any, because I was so bad at them. Truly, truly disinterested.

Even to this day, I am fundamentally disinterested in learning how languages function. It’s just too much like hard work. Verbs and nouns and adjectives and— oh all that.

I will go out of my way to not learn what an adverb is (just as I go out of my way to not learn what the chords are on a guitar) because I find that whole direction of approach to learning so— tiring. It’s unnatural. Like writing wrong-handed. Frankly, I’ve got more fun things to do.

A lot of people don’t understand this attitude. Maybe they’re right.

But, after ‘Bergman’ and ‘liking the language’ had got me to enrol in the first place, my Swedish tutor was able to confide something marvellous: ‘I was like that too!’ There are, she explained, people who are good at learning language, and people who are good at using language – and the two can be quite separate.

I already know, in my cart-before-horse sort of way, the subtle but absolute difference between English verbs like walk (walked) and seal (sealed) —i.e. voiced and unvoiced endings. The thing is, I just didn’t know that I knew it. I was enchanted. Delighted. Enriched. And it didn’t hurt a bit.

So, I suppose this presents my main answer to the question ‘varför svenska?’ And it’s quite a good one, I think. In my Swedish class I can learn about myself, and discover what I didn’t know I knew. The subject tells me all sorts of things about myself that I hadn’t realised, and it sheds new light on things that I already know about.

Take the title of this letter: ‘Varför svenska?’ Swedish for ‘why’ is ‘varför’. This is, you are doubtless already thinking, much like ‘wherefore’.

Therefore: ‘wherefore’ was once English for ‘why’.

Therefore, pausing briefly to blow the dust off my degree in English Literature, ‘Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?’ means ‘Romeo, why are you Romeo?’. It’s more in the spirit of ‘Romeo, why are you from the family I am supposed to hate?’

Another brick for the wall of pedantry I’m building between myself and the rest of humanity.

So my killer comeback to ‘You just want to be different’ should in fact have been: ‘No, I just am different. And look at all these lovely people who are equally different to me.’

Ah, that feels so much better.

And it’s less a question of varför svenska? and more one of varför inte svenska?

Why not?

And screw you, Andrew!

Hej då

j

Teachers, much like parents, are in the firing line for everything. Any tiny inflection or misplaced comment might stay with a child, and fester away for a lifetime to come.

In 1990, my Maths teacher read out the results of the latest test – all of the scores averaging about 13 out of 16. He came to my name. “James,” he said, pausing just for half a beat, “1.” The whole class fell silent. To this day I consider myself terrible at maths, but in reality I’m probably only average. Or mean or mode or whatever.

Two years later, my English teacher read out the results of our mock ‘A’ Levels – all Bs and Cs. “James,” he said, “well, ‘Elephant’ begins with it”. The whole class fell silent.

Some of you braniacs may conclude from this that I am a stupid person. I’m afraid I’m too stupid to come up with a counter-argument, but I will concede that these are merely teachers reading the results of my labours, rather than authoring anything ‘influential’ as such.

One ‘A’ Level history class in particular was responsible for adjusting my brain so much so that I could actually physically feel the world expanding around me. I can’t do it justice here, but, in short, the teacher explained that: The Big Bang, evolution, and the known history of the universe will be seen as little more than superstition, fable and quackery – it’s just what we assume based on what we know. The more you know, in short, the more you know you don’t know, and ever will it be the way. To grasp that with my stupid head was quite the revelation.

If it’s stupidity you suspect, get a load of this.

In the early 1980s, I was part of a conversation with a group of lads – we were all about seven years old. We were asking each other how much we could count up to. One lad bragged about having counted up to a thousand, but I considered that just bravado. Another lad called the bragger’s bluff: “No way. That’s so stupid. Do you know how long it can take you to count up to a hundred thousand? Sixty years.”

I had no reason to question this claim, and it goes down as one of the most influential statements of my entire life. To this very day my sense of perspective about how long a given task is going to take has been affected. It manifests itself as a crippling lack of ambition. I’ll look at a book, and see it is 400 pages long, and just think, now way will I ever finish that. So I won’t bother starting.

A quick bit of calculator-aided maths tells me that counting to 100,000, at a pace of 1 number per second (which I think would take into account time spent sleeping and not counting), would take… Um… wait a sec:

• 100,000 seconds divided by…60 (seconds in a minute) is 1,667 minutes.
• 1,667 minutes divided by 60 (minutes in an hour) is 28 hours.
• 28 hours divided by 24 (hours in a day) is 1.17

So that’s 1.17 days. Not 60 years.

It is in fact 0.005 per cent of 60 years (including leap years). So my whole life has been calibrated to an accuracy of 0.005 per cent.

What strikes me about all this conversational plankton is that —truly— no one’s ever going to have remembered saying any of these things. It’s just as horrifying how influential some throwaway or overheard comment might have been as it is how little effect the most carefully considered, adjusted and performed piece of advice might have had.

j

I was at a book launch – the sort of event where the attendees don’t know each other, but they know that everyone is united by the same enthusiasm.

All was going well – I’d found some friendly people to chat and assess the canapés with – and I’d at last allowed myself to finish the single glass of wine the law permits drivers. I took the opportunity while putting my glass back on the bar to slip out to the gents – quite a daring move given that this was a strange place, and locating the gents is one of the great anxieties of the average evening out-of-the-house. On this occasion I had had the great good fortune of clocking them on my way in to the event. The only uncertainty was that, as I strode confidently towards them, the door might be locked – so my confident push of the door was made with a physical caveat: an elbow crooked and ready for the fact that the door might not give.

It gave.

Naturally, then, my spirits were high on returning to the party, and this must have given an airy confidence to my walk as, while I looked around the room to seek out the little knot of people I’d been speaking with, a fashionably-dressed man came up to me and said, “You look like a man who’s just returned from the bathroom! Where is it?”

Imagine. You live your life going to parties and (a) not finding out where the bathroom is ahead of time; (b) approaching total strangers to ask where they are; while © taking the extra added risk of proposing that the total stranger has actually just been to the toilet.

This man must be of a different species altogether. What if I hadn’t been to the toilet? I mean – the fallout just doesn’t even bear thinking about, does it?

The result of his approach, however, was interesting. I found myself very well disposed towards this man. I animatedly described to him where the bathroom was and how easily he would locate it, and only by a force of will did I manage to stop myself enthusing about how comprehensive and sanitary the facilities were.

So it is that these small encounters change a person. I resolve now before the year is out to have that same conversation, casting myself as the questioner. The only trouble is, I’m going to have to determinedly not find out where the gents are when I visit a place – and I’m just not sure I can do that. And then of course I’m going to have to be sure that the ‘returning’ man has indeed just, well, returned.

Anyway, I’ve gone on at greater length than I’d anticipated about that. I’ll have to save it for a future letter to talk about what I had wanted to talk about: the inspiring minutiae that have propelled me to where I am.

à bientôt.

j

But these women, long on responsibility, long on practicality, long on care, can be short on patience. The whole department is littered with the signs of their not wanting to repeat the same old stuff over and over again to the poor punters who stump up the corridor. The signs are there in the sheer number of signs.

Sitting on my own, awaiting my appointment, I noticed that the regulation NHS blue and white plastic sign on the door of the staff toilet (reading “Staff Toilet”) was embellished with a notice typed out in 72pt Comic Sans on a piece of A4 paper: “This is NOT a public toilet”. The word “NOT” was further enhanced with fluorescent marker (now faded).

Behind me, another factual notice (“X-ray results will not be given today, but will be delivered to your GP”) was similarly backed up with the more emotional (and laminated) printout: “Take responsibility for collecting your X-ray’s from your GP”.

Feeling a little chastised, I was struck by the matronising tone. For the love of God just take some responsibility! And evidently I was not alone in being struck by this. In a feeble attempt at defiance, some past patient had taken the time to circle the greengrocer’s apostrophe on “X-ray’s”, the blue biro inadequately marking the laminate.

I myself had been sitting and considering how to guerilla-edit “This is NOT a public toilet”, by deleting all the words and replacing them with the much more useful “Nearest public toilet down the corridor, second left”. A small tonal adjustment, with a judicious sprinkling of fact, to prevent the patients from feeling bad for just wanting to answer nature’s call.

The frustration inherent in these little notices was reduced to its most perfect form on the inside of the heavy lead door of the X-ray room itself. Called in, and waiting for the attendant to verify my X-ray, I saw a small grubby sticker at eye-height, declaring in Times New Roman: PULL.

Imagine the synaptical adjustment that goes on in a person’s head when they’ve just pushed a pull door. Now multiply that by the number of people that must troop through that doorway every day. Imagine the resentment that must build up in you if you’re the poor X-ray attendant who has to not only see but anticipate every single patient on your list doing the same thing – they’re going to push it, I just know they’re going to push it! …Gah!

Indulge me a moment: All of this brings to mind the time back in 2000, when Jols and I registered at a new surgery in Wolverhampton. Here’s what happened: we registered, then within an hour we realised there was a closer surgery, so we went back to retrieve our medical cards. All well and good. But between the surgery and the public highway was a single set of double doors. As is often the case, only one of the doors was unlocked. We passed through those doors on four occasions (in, out, in, out), and – I could blame myself for this – Jols led the way through the doors on all four journeys. The sequence I endured was as follows:

1. In: Push the locked one; pull the locked one; push the unlocked one; pull the unlocked one and through.
2. Out: Pull the locked one; push the locked one; pull the unlocked one; push the unlocked one and through.
3. In: Push the locked one; pull the locked one; push the unlocked one; pull the unlocked one and through.
4. Out: Pull the locked one; push the locked one; pull the unlocked one…

It was at this moment that I snapped, and history records that I shouted: “LOOK AND ASSESS!”

It turns out that one of the things I unconsciously do as I approach a set of double doors is to look at the shape of the joinery and where the doorstops are situated, and conclude which door is likely to be unlocked, and which way it might go. I almost always pass through unchecked. This is not something Jols does. She hasn’t the time for that kind of thing. So I understand the frustration, I really do.

It was the tone of these notices that left me feeling prejudged. The world, these women have clearly concluded, is full of idiots.

Maybe the thing to do is what the X-ray attendant actually did, She said: “You’re free to go now; the results will be available from your GP in about 10 days.” That’s right, she accepted that sometimes you have to take the responsibility of speaking.

“Yes,” I said, appreciatively, “I understand that. I’ll be sure to make an appointment.” I had read and absorbed the sign outside. Tick.

I picked up my bag and coat, and pushed the door.

I pulled the door.

We became friends and bandmates in about 1997/8, and he was the frontman of the band that played at my wedding in 2006. Well, he died on the evening of 6th January 2010, aged 35, in the company of his close family.

All my friends who met him; my wife; both of my brothers; my mum; my nephew; even my nan – they all liked Duncan. He had this authentic public schoolish charm, undermined deliciously by his capacity for outrageous naughtiness, topped off with a grin and a twinkle.

I first got to know him when I went with my friend (his girlfriend and later wife) Catrina, to see him in a gig at a hostile Racehorse pub in Northampton. It was just Duncan – and a drummer who couldn’t count – desperately fighting to engage the Sunday night drinkers with his songs. It goes down as one of the most inspired and energetic performances I’ve seen; his acoustic guitar was spattered with blood by the end of the night.

I straightaway offered my services as a bassist until he could find a more permanent solution. Our first rehearsal together was up in his flat, where he taught me the bassline to his song ‘Something Covered’. We sat on the floor because his only chair had a sheet of cellophane taped over the seat to produce a ‘snare’ drum for the purposes of recording.

We began a weekly 50-mile pilgrimage to St Neots, where we would meet up with his old schoolmate (and new drummer) Trussy. There, for a couple of hours, the three of us would patiently work up ideas from the most obscure corners of Duncan’s mind into crackling punkish songs.

A solid core of about ten or fifteen of us in Northampton had musical ambitions, but you don’t have to don your rose-tinted spectacles to see that Duncan was head and shoulders above all of us. His artistic aesthetic, his standards, were far and away the highest, most developed and most original. More than that, he could actually sing! He had presence! He had the energy, the volatility, the charisma, the fearlessness, the unselfconsciousness to front a band. It was effortless.

Everyone could see it.

Most unusually, however, he was a man who genuinely cared for everyone else’s ideas. If you had an idea, he would leap on it and nurture it, and get everything he could out of it. He’s the only person I’ve known who’s ever really done that: he knew that the idea was king.

Two years on, and shortly before my temporary position in the band was permanently filled by good friend Dave, we marched into the Lodge Studios in Northampton to make a record of where we’d got to. Rather than the standard four tracks, we managed to record and mix a full thirteen in a single day. That session goes down as being among the most fondly remembered days of my life.

My favourite of Dunc’s songs from this time is On This Day I am The Flyer.

It’s not at all representative of the band’s restless, high-energy, melodic eccentricity, and I highly recommend you have a listen to them here.

These couple of years weren’t easy lifewise, but they were hugely creative. You can pack a lot of talking into 50 miles of driving every week, and we would enthuse about Dunc’s hopes for Orwell Music, and memories of his former bands Rudder and Strange New Creation, and about my hopes for my writing. Those years also form the basis of a large slice of who I am now, my creative thinking, my musical tastes: the Dirty Three, Mark Kozelek, Tindersticks, the Breeders, the Amps, Ride, PJ Harvey, Pixies – artists from the core of my tastes, many introduced to me by Dunc, and all of whom keep his influence alive and thriving.

I built the wedding band around the hope that the ten or fifteen of us from Northampton would play, and that Duncan would front it. I always felt it was a big ask for someone like Duncan – a man of particular tastes – but he showed nothing but warmth and enthusiasm for the whole enterprise. This is the main memory of Duncan that will stay with me, although I could just as well bask in the glory of the volatile, snarling, laughing frontman of Orwell Music.

These memories also provide the overriding feeling of the moment: here we are, all of us family or friends or bandmates – and we’ve lost our frontman.

Macmillan Cancer Support

Catrina’s blog

• ‘I have won a Princess Nova caravan’, 17 Sep 2009, in which the news breaks.
• ‘Meet the Princess Nova’, 21 Sep 2009, in which the caravan is described.
• ‘What will I do with the Princess Nova?’, 22 Sep 2009, in which I realise I have no idea about caravans.
• ‘The song that won a million hearts’, 25 Sep 2009, in which I give the lowdown on how the song came about.
• ‘The Princess and the answers to unasked questions’, 25 Sep 2009, an update on practical preparations for the caravan.
• ‘Fit for a Princess’, 4 Oct 2009, totally impractical preparations for the caravan handover and photoshoot.
• ‘Rolling out the red carpet’, 13 October 2009, I get a towbar.
• ‘She’s our princess now…’, 19 October 2009, in which we are given the caravan.
• ‘Be a man: tow a caravan’, 21 October 2009, in which I am thrown in at the caravanular deep end.
• ‘The Princess photo shoot’, 23 October 2009, in which I tell the tale of the promotional photo shoot.
• ‘Judgement day revelations’, 26 October 2009, in which I crow at the people who didn’t win.

We are both wiser.

I shall not elaborate.

After setting off, funny engine noises led me to stop and check the oil.

No oil.
Put in oil.
All well.

Trip to Barmouth, including driving up a mountain, which could be completed only in first gear.

Arrival and set-up in torrential rain.
Torrentially leaking window.
Discovery, purchase and application of bizarre vaseline-covered tape.
Unwashable vaseline hands for Jols.

I discovered I needed to rewire a non-standard plug to gain electricity.
Needed to purchase tools.
Needed explanation of how to rewire.
I was still unable to get the electricity working.
No heating.
No fridge.
Ruining of bacon and milk.

We drove off to a local eatery, which served the crappest microwave meal I could have imagined.
We decamped to another eatery for dessert, which was fractionally better.

We summoned up the courage to return to the cold caravan.
A leaking skylight had directed rain into the binbag containing our duvet.

It was at this point > < that I snapped, and Jols and I fell out over her ever more futile attempts to keep a cheery outlook, and my reference to a ‘ludicrous situation’ and a ‘piece of shit caravan’.

We went for a walk in abject silence, and entirely failed to find a path through to the sea, so had to turn on our heels and walk back.

Shortly before departure the owner of the site came over and explained how to connect the electricity, which required the pretence of cheeriness and gratitude.

We had to leave at 10am to get back to the caravan storage place, which closed at 1.

We had had no breakfast, and had no time to stop for anything.

Part-way home the right indicator stopped working on the back of the van.

We arrived at the caravan depot five minutes before 1, to find it shut.

We bumped into the owner, who opened it for us to quickly drop off the caravan.

Upon returning home, wearily unpacking the uneaten bacon, and undrunk pink champagne, I discovered the already warm milk had leaked on to the back seat of my car.

Agreement has been reached that a second outing will take place only after certain conditions have been met.

The judging of the limerick/song/rap competition to win the Princess was, apparently, very involving. White Stuff’s Georgie and one colleague trawled through all 3,500 entries one by one.

They divided the entries up into ‘Yes’, ‘No’ and ‘Maybe’ piles. Then they realised that the ‘Maybe’ pile might as well be the ‘No’ pile too, if there were any ‘Yes’s.

The ‘Yes’ pile was then whittled down into a Top 10, which was wrapped up and delivered with a reverential hush to the CEO of White Stuff.

A winner and a runner-up were duly chosen.

And get this: this decision was reached on words alone. Only after they had decided on the winner did they listen to my masterly recording of the rap. This revelation was catnip to Christine, whose work most of the words were.

What I find most brilliant about the whole process is that, when the winner was announced on the White Stuff website, they received complaints.

Apparently, people wrote in to White Stuff saying that, had they known that it was not just limericks, but poems, songs or raps that were allowed, they would have tried harder. The beauty of this to me is that, it was made perfectly clear all the way along.

But that sadsacky brand of huffy shoulda-woulda-coulda is just so brilliant when you’re on the winning team.

This is one in the eye for all those customers who came up to me when I was working at MVC and told me it was “against the law” to advertise a sale as being “From” £4.99.

But fear not, losers. I shall not crow. After all, Jols and I spent hours and hours coming up with a winning phrase to score something inane from Fentimans soft drinks company a few years back. Our best effort? “Fentimans? Fermentimans!”

I still think we should have won that. You wouldn’t belieeeve the one that did.

Well, that’s about all.

jx

This was the amount of psychological commitment I invested in the ‘Princess and the P-Reg’ project.

I was not prepared to find myself sitting in front of a chintzy pimped caravan in  the middle of a rain-swept Worcester High Street at school home-time, sipping champagne and mugging for the camera. But if I have learned anything in the last decade or so, it’s to mask a lack of preparedness with gusto.

As mentioned previously, the White Stuff people had generously towed the caravan to Worcester and decked us out in free clothes in order to get a bit of PR out of the whole thing. Who were we to object?

I haven’t seen the photos – they are apparently going to be touted round the high-circulation caravan magazines, of which there are many – but I imagine my amazing ‘trap’ double-chin will put in a solid cameo, and my ‘stress eye’ (an unknown characteristic prior to our wedding photos being developed) will do its very best Captain Darling impression.

During the shoot, the good folk of Worcester trudged by more or less without comment, but one or two schoolkids milled around and pronounced our new acquisition “well good”. I managed to blank everything that was going on around me, and just act as stupidly as possible, which I’m sure to the White Stuff crowd just looked like I was acting like a normal human being.

The only bit of control I managed to retain over the proceedings was the growing of a couple of mil’s worth of beard, which should have the effect of making me look tired and/or homeless. Certainly it led people at work to give me a wide berth, assuming I’d got divorced or lost a relative or something.

Luck was on my side for one aspect of the event. The White Stuff contingent let slip that one of my work colleagues had found a moment in his busy schedule to contact the White Stuff press office and ask for the photos. After mulling this point for a while, I vetoed the suggestion (ever the fun suck hole), and we came up with the compromise of taking a ‘special’ photo to send him.

As ever,

jx

PS. I withdraw my scorn at Catherine for letting the Birmingham Mail photographer snap her in a happy-go-lucky ‘elbow on pile of books’ pose – a shot which has yet to surface.

PPS. Oh, look:

Decked out in brand new clobber (for the attendant photo shoot), I listened as the ever-industrious Mick, who had been towing the Princess from Cornwall to Scotland and back all summer, gave me the skinny on how to tow a caravan.

“Have you ever towed a caravan before?“
“Urr, no.“
“Have you ever towed anything before?“
“Umm…”

He smiled, picked the thinnest roll-up in the world from between his lips, and exhaled smoke.

“It’s a piece of cake,” he said.

Turns out it’s a fairly large piece of sherry trifle cheesecake with whipped cream and a cherry on top.

When your speed limit’s 70, go at 60; when it’s 60, go at 50. If you’re on the motorway and the van starts to veer, then speed up, don’t slow down, or it’ll jack-knife and you’ll all be dead (or something).

To connect it to the back of the car, reverse the car close, manhandle the caravan into place, lift that and crank that, then when it’s married, drop that. Then hoist that, and clip the emergency braking wire in place. Your caravan’s on. Then you can connect your two plug things, black-to-black and grey-to-grey — don’t get it wrong or you’ll blow the lot — and check your car lights are working through the caravan.

I nodded throughout this explanation, employing what I like to describe as my bullshit nod, which has seen me through university and many jobs besides. I arched my eyebrow through how to connect the wheel clamp and the hitchlock, and I hmmed and ahhed about how the gas bottle is connected.

Pulling away after the media circus (of which more anon) I was relieved and alarmed to find the Princess dutifully following. It was pissing it down, so I drove pretty slowly, and pulled some wiiiide turns. Jols and I winced and groaned as the satellite navigation dragged us over every speed hump in Kidderminster, and it was really only after this trial that we started to engage with the fact that we had nowhere to go.

The place where we had arranged to stow the Princess had long since shut for the day, and so Jols had made some enquiries at local caravan parks as to whether we could keep the Princess there for a night. One such park had “plenty of space”, but after we’d answered a few questions (“we don’t know exactly how long the caravan is”, “we won’t be staying in it overnight”), they suddenly found that they “didn’t have any space”.

Not only are caravan owners lepers to society, it seems that clueless competition-winning caravan owners are lepers-with-swine-flu to the lepers.

The day was saved (and not for the first time) by deeply generous and tolerant pals Lou and Mike, who lent us their driveway for the night, and kept a cheery outlook even after seeing the Princess.

Arrival at Lou and Mike’s driveway brought roll-up-touting-Mick’s final bit of advice back to me:

“The only real problem is reversing.”

As a queue of traffic began to form beside me, I struggled to recall:

“See, if you want it to go left, you turn right as you reverse. But not too hard, or it’ll jack-knife. You have to turn right, and then turn left to follow it on the arc. You’ll get the hang of it.”

That, my old son, is pressure parking.

jx

On Thursday Jols and I headed off to White Stuff’s new Worcester branch, where we were met by the very accommodating Georgie and co (up from London!), who were responsible for the whole ‘caravan’ promo. Georgie has, she told us with what you might classify an edgy laugh, carted the Princess from festival to festival, from Cornwall to the Isle of Wight, to Edinburgh and everywhere in between throughout the summer.

Life, she admitted, will be odd without the Princess. But Georgie’s made of strong stuff. After all, the White Stuff winter collection’s in, and she’s all about garden gnomes now. And it doesn’t stop there; apparently the campaign for summer 2010 is well under development, but no amount of prodding and pouting from Jols and me could tease a hint out of her as to what it’s all about – or what competitions they might be running.

What an odd job.

For all our don’t-know-what-to-do-with-a-caravan-ness, the White Stuff people have been very good to us; the Princess has been decked out inside and out by the woman who designs the stores, and so the wallpapered exterior has been matched by a wallpapered interior, a wallpapered picnic table, gilt-edged shelving and chintzy lampshades. Cushions have been specially made, a picnic hamper provided, but the pièce de résistance is an astroturfed step.

Quite against their Ts and Cs they carted the caravan from London to Worcester, and decked us out in White Stuff clobber so we would look the part for a few photos.

I shall do my best over the next few days to pen you a note about how all of this went.

The result of all this oddness is: the Princess is ours, and she now resides in a Secret Location in Deepest Shropshire.

Your pal

j

I sook out a place where I could get a towbar, and the lovely people at Copthorne Services carried out the following minor surgery on Lenny:

Quite natty, no?

And who knew it was so easy to get a number plate? A tenner to the local garage, a flutter of paperwork, and they’d got it within a couple of hours…

Now all we need is a pair of those crazy wing mirror extensions, and just a tiny idea of how on earth to drive while towing a caravan – and, more importantly, reverse – and we’ll be set.

Roll on thursday!

jx

While working out the finer points, Georgie from White Stuff mentioned: “Of course, we’ll want you dressed head-to-toe in White Stuff clothes. Head off to the nearest store and get some ideas about what you’d like to wear…”

It will come as no surprise to you that it takes a situation of the gravest seriousness for me to hazard even a foot towards the changing rooms. I found myself in the Shrewsbury store, loaded up with a full five items to try on. Jols, for her part, flung herself into the task, and staggered up after me practically buckling under half a hundred-weight of White Stuff’s autumn collection.

“Oh my god,” the assistant actually muttered.

One quick explanation later, and by now ensconced in a packed-to-capacity changing room, Jols was subsequently referred to in hushed, reverential tones as “the caravan lady”.

It didn’t take me long to decide on my choice (by which I mean: I’m a man; we’re all the same shape; we’ll wear anything), and I settled into a nearby chair while Jols busied herself behind the curtain conjuring up some White Stuff magic.

We felt a bit bad departing the store having bought nothing, and leaving the staff to put the place back together – but the real work is yet to come: my wedding photos remind me it’ll take more than magic to wedge a comfortable smile into my face.

“Cheeeeeese…”

j

There’s a car park down the hill — but the annual rent for a parking space is around £100, and, erm, the caravan is covered in chintzy yellow wallpaper. Given past experiences, the amount of grumbles-cum-complaints-cum-lawsuits we would have to endure in the first week make this completely unfeasible.

So, perhaps we could fall back on some kind friends to help us out.

Whichever way you carve this, we’re asking for someone to semi-permanently set aside 10 sq m of real-estate for a garish and quickly mildewing caravan that (history indicates) we’ll quickly forget all about. What we need here is some landed, generous friends who we don’t mind falling out with.

Which brings me to: family.

When Jols excitedly rang her dad to tell him the wonderful news, he said, ‘Oh, love, that’s great news! You’re not putting it on my driveway’.

I toyed with the idea of loading it with my childhood detritus and parking it across the road from my mum’s house, or maybe asking my dad to host it in the vast tracts of Ireland that currently surround him, but manners preclude.

So the answer to this question is still running wild. We’ll catch it in the end. Or it’ll catch us in the end.

Meanwhile, there are some other questions. For example, How make fit caravan on brum brum?

We’re going to have to get a towbar, and then — what — brakelights and all that? And a numberplate? Well, I’ve booked my poor car in to get a towbar fitted this coming Monday. The man at Copthorne Services was very understanding.

‘Do you want a single or a twin supply?‘
’Urrr…‘
’A single’s for if you want the battery charging and the fridge running while you’re driving.‘
(Has it got a battery? Or a fridge?)
’Urrr…‘
‘Do you want a bag on your head?‘
’Urrr…‘
’We’ll see you on Monday’ [click]

Jols received an answer to another question we hadn’t yet asked: an insurance man phoned up and told her we’ve a year’s free insurance on the caravan. Who knew you had to get these things insured? Makes sense, I suppose. However, his friendly, uncomprehensive investigations turned up a few truths.

He: ‘So, where will the caravan be kept?‘
She: ‘Urrr…‘
He: ‘Ahh.’

The good thing about his phonecall is that he wants to borrow the Princess off us for a few days for the upcoming Camping & Caravanning Show at the NEC in Birmingham.

It’s like: sure thing! Give us a chance to find out what on earth we’re supposed to do with it…

Laters

jx

After spending a leisurely Saturday morning with Jols seeking out all the theme tunes to kids’ TV shows from the 1970s and 80s on YouTube, I set about creating an electro pop opera in Garageband. I’d been listening to how Tim De Laughter of the Polyphonic Spree put his operatic pop together, and so I used that as a fulcrum to create The Adventures of Snoffler and the Wobbledog: a popera lasting about six minutes.

Jols locked this piece of information away in her little stove of ideas.

When White Stuff launched a competition to win a caravan by writing a limerick (‘or a rap or something’), Jols leapt on the opportunity. She spent the next several weeks reminding me that we ‘needed’ to get right on down to rewriting the lyrics of ‘Are You The Wobbledog’ – a Tribe Called Quest–tinged rap from my popera.

I kept forgetting, for some reason.

So, cutting to the chase, we spent two sessions of several hours each writing new lyrics. Unlike myself, Jols is a stickler for standards – she really is excellent at this. I, faced with an intense period of work, will apply myself doggedly to doing absolutely anything else.

It was at this stage that I got my novel rewrites done.

So anyway, I sped the existing music up; cut it down to around a minute or so; and we rewrote and rewrote and rewrote the lyrics until Jols deemed every word a winner. I can’t remember who wrote what, but ‘ladythrone’ and ‘sassy little chassis’ are definite Jollisms, whereas ‘big end’ and ‘vehicular’ and general rhythmic choices tended to be mine.

Then I spent an hour or so recording the vocals, with old George Martin burying her head in a pillow for every take to stop herself giggling at my mockney accent.

Take after take after take was required to make the ‘car’ character ‘sound grateful enough’ at the end of the song. But we got there in the end, and popped an email off to White Stuff.

The rest, as they say, is a mystery.

your pal

jx

PS: I’ve also just made a video for the song. This wasn’t used to try and twist White Stuff’s arm, but if I’d known I could have submitted this, I would have done! Click here.

Dickon, ever the editor, thought I should try to get some capital out of it by doing something PR-able, or asking the high-circulation caravanning magazines if they wanted to feature it in any way. Then he suggested I try selling it to BBC’s Top Gear, as an excellent candidate for destruction. “You’d get some money for it, and White Stuff would get another round of publicity, so they’d be happy.”

Jols would never go for that.

Jon suggested I drive it slowly through London. It would be sure to get pilfered, piece by piece. It’d be gone by the time I got to the M1.

The one thing Jols and I have concluded between us is that we need to have a party. Matt suggested taking it to some caravan park and inviting loads of people over to camp.

Sounds like a plan.

You up for it?

jx

Called ‘Princess Nova’ the caravan was extensively renovated before being decorated with vintage wallpaper and yellow paint for the panelling. A mini bar has been added alongside upgraded cooking facilities and a double bed.

White Stuff toured the caravan throughout the summer, starting at Henley Regatta, and taking in Cornbury Festival, Chagstock, the Limetree Festival and the Edinburgh Fringe before a grand finish at the Isle of Wight’s Bestival.

A well travelled princess indeed – I’m growing intimidated…

j

I know what you’re thinking: ‘But you hate caravans’.

Mm.

So what this leaves is a series of questions to which I don’t know the answer. I’m now going to try to answer those questions, for my own sake.

1) Where are you going to put it? You haven’t even got a driveway or a guaranteed parking space. Yeah… I suppose if Jols and I really thought about this, we wouldn’t have entered the competition. Perhaps it’s best we didn’t, eh?

2) Why did you enter the competition? The whole point of entering the competition was to create something really good that was going to make the people at White Stuff laugh. So literally: for a laugh. But we did want to win (without ever really entertaining the idea that we actually would).

3) Won’t the wallpaper come off in the rain? I have absolutely no idea if they’ve accounted for this at all. We’ll find out when we see it…

4) Are you going to keep the caravan? Now, I thought Jols and I had agreed between ourselves that if we won it we’d sell it. But winning seemed so unlikely we didn’t really have to firm that agreement up. When we did win, it became apparent we had agreed no such thing.

Believe it or not, I do actually enjoy (read: have grown accustomed to) being plunged into such things. Like, say, finding out I’m suddenly and unexpectedly a cat owner. That was a great opportunity to tackle my chronic cat allergy. This is merely the opportunity to figure out what it is that makes caravan lovers… well… love caravans.

After all, what else am I going to do with my time? Watch DVD box-sets? Become a high-class alcoholic?

On 29 September we’re due to go to Worcester to pick up the caravan. We’re going to meet the White Stuff people who organised the competition, who seem very nice, and very fond of the Princess, and we’re going to be photographed.

I know what you’re thinking.

‘But you hate going to places you’ve never been to, meeting people you’ve never met and, more than anything, having your photograph taken in an official capacity.’

Mm.

It’s an existential quandary, all right. Better meet it head-on or I might disappear all together. The only constructive thing I can think to do is grow a beard. For the photoshoot, like.

Watch this space.

jx

Well, my sister got tickets and whomever she was going with dropped out. So I thought, well, why not? I didn’t get to see them back in 1978–81.

You will, of course, point to the obvious reason ‘why not’: keyboardist Jerry Dammers is not a part of the reunion line-up, and acrimoniously so.

An early review of this tour concluded that no one really minded who had been playing keyboards. This is clearly and entirely missing the point: here is a case where it really does matter. Jerry Dammers was the founder of the band, it was his sound, he wrote most of the songs, he created the record label, he provided the band’s iconic look – whether because of his signature dentistry or because he created all of the iconic black and white chequered artwork. Certainly, and most importantly, his political outlook provided the foundations for the music.

The Specials were a deeply important band – more political and vital than scene-mates Madness (though less accomplished and adaptable). They lashed together a punk singer, a rasta-ish MC-type, a reggae guitarist, a roackabilly guitarist, a lounge keyboardist, and more besides. Alluringly, they were here and then they were gone, a sparkling, spitting match that flared up in the oxygen of the time, lit the cultural wick and then burned out, leaving an enduring flame behind to light up the ensuing years.

So probably the thing to wonder about is this: why would they reunite? Aside from conjuring teary-eyed nostalgia from a lot of overweight skinheads, what could they actually generate afresh on the night? Well.

What they created for me was the first crowd I think I have ever been in where the mix of black and white faces was significant. No ethnic group owns The Specials. The whole crowd enjoys the same music for the same reason, and that is that The Specials weren’t just white kids performing black music, like so many R&B or rap artists. They were black and white kids performing a unified music. No one dominated or imitated anyone, it was a strength in unity: a new sound (1978).

The Two-Tone name and design is no mistake: it’s not grey, “it’s black and white (don’t try to hide it)”, to quote Madness’s own pre-lucrative-phoenix-from-the-ashes swansong.

So that was new to me: a realisation that something so positive and realistic could have existed at such a time of flux in the UK.

The Leeds gig I went to made headlines because fans started throwing coins at lead singer Terry Hall, after he crowed about Manchester United’s European Champions’ League final spot. This was the cause of another realisation to me. Here was a man, faced with thousands of people, and he was prepared to face them down. “One more coin,” he said, “and I’m leaving this stage – I’m not joking” – instantly followed by “and I’ll be right behind him” from Lynval Golding. Another show of strength and unity in front of a 21st century crowd more used to abusing the star turn. It felt good to hear this – and it worked.

Of course, these things are not quite new creations. Well, they are new to the kids who didn’t know the Specials the first time around — the Leeds teenagers who were dressed up in the kind of immaculate two-tone retro clobber that never existed at the time. To the rest of us they are reminders. Reminders of the grey, dilute message we have grown accustomed to, and reminders of the punch packed by someone on stage with a microphone, an attitude and something worth saying.

It would have been all the more powerful if the unity of The Specials had been total, and they’d been able to practise what they preach. But, hey, you don’t know what goes on behind closed doors, do you? Who knows what intraband politics have gusted through the last 30 years?

The reunion conundrum is: these people shaped a generation, and their creativity was a real force for good. Am I prepared to permit them to earn a pension off the back of that?

Actually, yes.

j

I put it on.

Opening track ‘Burning the Boats’ kicked in. It sounded distantly familiar – memories wafting through from Christmas 1986, when I first put the needle on my new vinyl copy – with a blandish chord progression struck through with a set of wacky saxophone/synthesizer jabs.

Then Suggs’s first lyric came in.

“The government… have announced…”

And that’s it. Songwrong. Three words in.

A songwrong is a phenomenon that occurs in a song that initially sounds good, so your mind is open to the possibility of liking it, but which then wrongs it, snuffing the possibility out, leaving only the charred and smoking remains of your enthusiasm.

The lyric should be, I need hardly tell you, “The government has announced”. Has, HAS announced.

Let the record show that, in deference to my 11-year old self, I continued to listen to the album. It’s still not great, but it does have its moments: ‘Tears You Can’t Hide’ is quite lovely, ‘Yesterday’s Men’ is a fitting swansong of sorts, ‘Uncle Sam’ is maybe Madness-by-numbers, but if it’s Madness playing it, then, well, who’s complaining? Not me. Not even me.

But it got me on to the concept of songwrongs.

The songwrong that works hardest for its money, coming in as the last significant sound, thereby undermining the entire song that precedes it occurs at the end of ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ by Joni Mitchell. Ms Mitchell’s final vocal gymnastics are followed by the most unconvincing fake laugh ever to be committed to acetate. A thoroughbred classic, taken round the back of the stables and shot by a moment of cod-spontaneous studio indulgence.

Madness would be hard to beat for the quickest songwrong – three words in is pretty snappy. The only earlier one I can think of doesn’t really count, because it doesn’t snuff the song totally, but merely imperils the flame before the song takes hold. It is, of course, Morrissey’s much sniggered-over ‘Punctured bicycle’ opening gambit in The Smiths’ breakthrough ‘This Charming Man’. You could say this was, as far as the wider public is concerned, effectively two words into a career, which makes it more resonant. “Have you heard his mispronunciation of ‘plagiarise’ in ‘Cemetry Gates’, not to mention the moronic mis-spelling of ‘cemetery’… Ill-educated buffoon!”

However, as I negotiated the traffic on the M6, filleting The Smiths’ entire back-catalogue for songwrongs, it was Morrissey who had the last laugh. After all, I cannot name another lyricist who might contemplate starting a song – starting an album – with the word ‘belligerent’, as in “Belligerent ghouls run Manchester schools, spineless swines, cemented minds”.

This, then, is education’s end. Belligerent ghouls, spineless swine (to use the correct plural of swine), cemented minds, wronging some of the century’s finest work for a ha’peth of grammatical cloth. This is the kind of rule-straightening that kills artistic spontaneity. [Please note, I used this machine’s spell-checker to spell ‘spontaneity’ right – and again just then.]

I drew into the car park at work to the sound of Morrissey bouncily singing “exetera, exetera”. I got out of my car and approached the building. I was preceded by a woman who has sat at the desk opposite mine for six years. I actually don’t know her name. She didn’t hold the door open for me.

Move along now. There’s nothing to read here.

j

I was struck by John Squire’s medium-hopping attempt to quell the latest rash of stories. The man who has for years tried to distance himself from his musical past and reinvent himself as an artist-not-musician finally faced the question head-on by taking a piece of his art, and scrawling on it a statement apparently about the future (or the lack of it) of the Roses.

I was impressed by the imaginative way that this targeted the central problem. The public (prompted by the press), or the press (patronised by the public) already has its story: the resurrection of The Stone Roses. It’s a done deal. It just hasn’t happened yet. And anything John Squire says is viewed through the prism of “the reunion”. It’s “John Squire’s latest word on the reunion”.

What Squire has achieved is to take this foregone conclusion, over which he has no control, and turn it into a conclusion over which he has some control: a good, steady focus on his art. Simple and effective.

The rub: he hasn’t done himself any favours with the wording of his response. “I have no desire whatsoever,” he wrote, “to desecrate the grave of seminal Manchester pop group The Stone Roses.”

Now, I genuinely hope and believe that he means: “I am never, ever going to take part in a reunion of The Stone Roses”.

But let me interpret what Squire has said: “I would willingly reform The Stone Roses, and bring them back better than ever, and enhance their legacy further”. Or: “don’t worry, I won’t desecrate the grave”. Or: “I don’t want to do this, but that doesn’t mean I won’t”.

Whether it’s a pernickety point or not, it just doesn’t dampen any suspicions that he might be leaving the way open for some future lucrative rift-healing. The speculation won’t stop coming round.

And it leads me to wonder what — if he really wanted to cease the whispers forever ‘n’ ever — John Squire would have to do. Words won’t do the trick. Too many artists — musicians in particular — have gone back on their ‘never again’ for it ever to be an effective response. The Specials, Pixies, Cream, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, just in the last couple of years.

So what else would Squire have to do? Burn his guitars? He could always get more guitars, at the expense of some starry-eyed record company.

No no. The only way I can think of him doing it is to take a meat cleaver to his right hand: “say goodbye to the opposable thumb that clutches the plectrum that plays the opening notes of ‘I Wanna Be Adored’” [/slice/].

It’d be very Van Gogh.

I am not, I feel it polite to clarify, suggesting that John Squire should actually do this. But it is the only gesture I can think of that would convince me that he is fully in control of the non-resurrection of The Stone Roses. It would be a commitment to say, what’s done is done, and I will never have a change of heart. Or if I have a change of heart, I’m prepared to not be able to act on it.

Only now of course do I remember the one-armed drummer from Def Leppard, and realise that even a thumbectomy wouldn’t guarantee a result.

Ah well, back to the drawing board. Maybe they should reform. Maybe that’s the only thing that would quell the desire for a reformation.

This was all brought home to me with the news today that ITV is in financial trouble, and came hand-in-hand with the curiously unsettling feeling of my having successfully predicted something. I don’t have by any means an impressive track record as a futurologist.

A couple of years back, ITV bought the Friends Reunited social networking site. My instant first thought, and doubtless countless other people’s instant first thought, was: “Why?”

What a dim-witted acquisition. It really seemed like the network had missed the boat. Several boats.

Friends Reunited was exciting nearly a decade ago, but it had a once-only function: everyone quickly got in touch with anyone they want to be in touch with, and then ITV bought it. Even writing it here, it seems redundant to discuss: it’s so obviously wrong.

Compare too News International: no sooner had Rupert Murdoch snapped up MySpace than the public appetite evaporated. These days it seems so clunky and inconvenient. [It was eventually sold off at a reported $500m loss]

But why did it seem so obvious that Friends Reunited was the wrong thing for ITV to invest in? Well, it seems to me that people have a fundamental desire not be sold things. Perhaps more accurately, they don’t want to feel like they’re being sold things. It’s self-respect, isn’t it?

And we’ve seen what’s happened with that other News International-related corporation BSkyB. Someone’s come along, half-inched the football, pimped it, and sold it back to us. Now it’s a weird-looking surgically enhanced bimbo swaying around and behaving ever more erratically in an effort to feed its money addiction. Meanwhile its vital organs are rotting away.

It comforts me to imagine that the latest generation of media consumers has got wise to this cynical pimping, and has rejected it.

Twitter is the more convenient Facebook is the more convenient MySpace is the more convenient Friends Reunited.

It’s Calvinball: the general public is relocating to something else, somewhere else, anywhere well away from the corporations. And, until the corporations come up with a new formula, the public is in the lead, Q points to 12.

j

First off, it takes a lot to ask a girl out. Weeks of summoning up the courage, days of shimmying past suspicious friends, hours of trying to find her on her own in just the right situation, just to pop a question that might reduce to ashes the entire foundation of your position in playground society.

This has been documented comprehensively over the generations, and I think it is well understood: it takes a lot.

But that is just the start of it. Where, when the asking-out has finally occurred and consent unexpectedly secured, is ‘out’?

‘Out’ to me, as an adult, is somewhere comfortable to pass time with like-minded people (say, having a chat and a laugh); somewhere to indulge in whatever sensual stimulation is on offer (say, a hearty meal with fine wine).

‘Out’ to me, as a teenager, was somewhere comfortable to pass time with like-minded people (say, kicking a football around and lighting small fires); somewhere to indulge in whatever sensual stimulation was on offer (say, a quarter of rhubarb & custard and a can of cider).

So ‘going out’ — like, with a girl — is the first step on the process of making the subtle switch from one version of ‘out’ to another.

You must find a place you’re not familiar with, to which you can escort your intended (and she’s not familiar with it either, having spent her ‘out’ time round a friend’s house, leafing through magazines and carrying out leftfield cosmetic experiments), and you can get on with the business of, well, being ‘out’.

My mind flits briefly to the evening when I escorted – let’s call her Miss Smith (because that was her name) – across an October-sodden Abington Park in a shortcut to the pub. Her expensively embroidered trousers were quickly reduced to a mud-caked write-off below the knee. What can I say? It was a shortcut. What else were we going to do? Walk round, adding pointless minutes to our journey?

It certainly cut a few minutes off the length of our relationship.

But, shoving my experiences firmly to one side, I was witness to the horrors of someone else’s fledgling relationship last week, as my wife and I investigated our waki udon noodles with chopsticks at Birmingham’s Wagamama.

Wagamama is the kind of restaurant that obliges you to suspend any lingering Englishness, because, first off, it’s ‘pan-Asian’ food (i.e. Asian food you can cook in a pan), and secondly you are sat on a bench opposite your dining companion, and next to a complete stranger. There is no physical divide between you and the stranger whatsoever. I should imagine one of the best things about being a Wagamama waitster is observing the psychological divides people conjure up. I myself never glance outside the –10°/+10° angle of my companion.

Our enjoyment of the noodles and casual conversation were infiltrated about halfway through by a strong scent, as a roughly 18-year-old couple were installed beside us and handed their menus.

Olfactorily speaking, the girl was obviously some way short of being able to judge the precise period of depression of the button on her atomiser. The consequent nasal assault brought right back to me the sheer complexity of the journey those kids were on – the journey that had brought my wife and I to precisely where we were, chatting and having a laugh, enjoying the good food and wine.

Here’s the breakdown of experience of what he had to do after having secured her consent to go ‘out’:

• Think of somewhere to go (“Why don’t you take her out to a restaurant, love? She’ll be very impressed.”)
• Find out what a good restaurant is (McDonalds <—> The Savoy)
• Phone up
• Book a table (or become resigned to the risk of taking her there and finding it full)
• Get dressed up (how dressed up? trip to town? what shops are good shops? TK Maxx <—> Harvey Nichols)
• Find her house; call for her three minutes late
• Wait at the bus stop, while sustaining conversation
• Endure a bus ride, while sustaining conversation
• Find the restaurant, while sustaining conversation
• Know what to do when you get in the door (i.e. queue up to be seated)
• Sit right next to some 30/40 year old couple who obviously know what they’re doing
• Sustain conversation while deciding when to engage with the menu
• Interpret the menu
• Sustain conversation while the food is prepared
• Know how to use chopsticks, and not succumb to picking up the fork that has been placed discreetly to one side by the charitable waitster.

What complete and unutterable misery. How can anybody look appealing in the face of such complexity?

By hook or by crook, our lad negotiated all this. “He was trying really hard,” my wife noted, “but she wasn’t giving him anything to work with.”

The girl was, let it be recorded, eating her noodles with a spoon.

Well, there we are. I managed to attract the waitster’s attention to ask for the bill (oh – add that dark art to the above list), and as I thumbed in my PIN, I heard the lad beside me pitch one last-ditch attempt to stoke up the completely stalled conversation.

“What’s your favourite meat, then?”

I wonder how we survive as a species at all.

As ever,

j

Does the writer write the song, or does the song write the writer? I dunno…

How many musical epiphanies is one person allowed? Thinking about it, I have had very few, because, in all honesty, my musical tastes are narrow. I’ve never really been out looking for new musical experiences. But those that I have experienced have probably dictated the kinds of songs I write. And these trajectories were sometimes set very early.

The Specials: It Doesn’t Make It All Right;
Adam Ant: Here Comes The Grump.
This ephiphany occurred at the age of 7. Maybe 8. There is something very alluring about artists that go against type. These two very upbeat artists produced album tracks that I always stopped dancing to, just to listen. They would give me shivers. It Doesn’t Make It All Right was off The Specials’ The Specials album. It was my first example of a melancholy song, without being sad. These are the most beautiful kinds of songs, and they inform my musical choice up to now, and probably forever. Here Comes The Grump has exactly the same feel about it, under the greasepaint and the yodelling, I felt, was the real man. Later years proved this instinct to be true. Neither of these are great songs, but they certainly shoved me out here.

The Stone Roses: I Am The Resurrection.
There’re probably a lot of people in the world who claim an epiphany to this song, but I’m not embarrassed. One summer our mum and dad wanted shot of us, so we were obliged to take tennis lessons with a Mr Blenco in Northampton. And I definitely put that tennis racket to good use, strumming in a workmanlike fashion though the whole of Pete’s Stone Roses album. I really enjoyed it. The guitar in Resurrection, the final track, dropped out at the apparent end of the song, leaving me plucking away at my racket with some really clean final notes, and I was getting them just right. Sweet. But then the song just started coming back and back, and I was having to use more and more strings. By the end of it I was using the whole racket, up and down and from side to side, just to get all those guitar sounds to come out of it. I was, what, 14? 15? To this day, 15 years later, I can still feel the same about that song. When it hits me right. Though I know now it’s the drums that make it so good.

PJ Harvey: Hair.
In his younger days, Pete would spend months worth of wages on stupid luxury items. One of these was a horrible jacket, long since lost. One of these was a stereo, which he still has. I think it cost that 18 year-old about 700 quid or something. But the bass on that stereo was the most brilliant thing I’d ever heard. And it first came home to me when I was playing (again, Pete’s) PJ Harvey album, Dry. After the brilliant Sheela-na-gig, which is all I’d really aimed to listen to, there came this strange song with a weird off-beat drum shuffle thing going on. Of course, it stopped for the chorus, so I had to wait for it to come back, but then suddenly, at the height of the chorus, these incredible right-in-the-belly doof doof things just boomed out of the speakers. I could not believe that something so amazing might happen. PJ Harvey’s drummer Rob Ellis never again did anything quite like this album, and I imagine a good many fans of PJ long for more of the same. But of course, artists move on, which is sometimes a melancholy thing.

Mark Kozelek: Find Me, Ruben Olivares.
I didn’t initially put this in, but, being the most recent epiphany (a mere five years ago), it was harder to spot. Orwell Music’s Duncan and I were around Dave Kirby’s house in Northampton, mixing a couple of Orwell Music tracks, and Dave happened to put this on. Acoustic music for me up until then was the realm of Richard Digence and Christopher Lillicrap, and I thought The Beatles’s Blackbird the exception to the rule. But when this came on, I thought it among the most perfect things I’d ever heard. It was like being told there was another Blackbird, just as good, and that there was depth in this direction, with the exact blend of gentle acoustics to grit and grime, and none of the folky awfulness about it. The album also contains some of the much-discussed Kozelek AC/DC acoustic covers, which to me are also very near to perfect. It’s unusual to hear lyrics-meant-loud played soft. To add to the wonder, I didn’t remember who the track was by, not having been a Red House Painters fan (or ever having heard of them). It was another three years before I accidentally strayed upon it again — and I feel very lucky I did, because you don’t stray upon Mark Kozelek all that often. And when I strayed on it again, it was exactly as good as I’d remembered it, which I think is the only time that’s ever happened to me.

And you know, I think that’s it for epiphanies. Four.

And these four inform the kinds of sweeping directions I choose when writing songs. Not to sound like them, but to cause the same effect. But then ask yourself: do you always write the kinds of songs you like to hear? That’s for another post, maybe.

What troubles me about this post is the number of songs that can’t be described as epiphanies for me, even though they are absolute perfection as songs. They sit on my conscience. To appease myself, I’ll list these for no reason, as they come to me, just in case anyone reads this who is looking for something: Stone Roses: Fool’s Gold, Shoot You Down, Waterfall, Something’s Burning; dEUS: Theme From Turnpike, Serpentine; PJ Harvey: Sheela-na-gig, Electric Light, Water; Nick Drake: Things Behind The Sun, Black Eyed Dog; Lush: Deluxe; Ride: Vapour Trail; The Beatles: Blackbird; The Soggy Bottom Boys: Man of Constant Sorrow; The Beach Boys: God Only Knows; Belle & Sebastian: If You’re Feeling Sinister, Rollercoaster; The Breeders: Cannonball; The Pixies: Here Comes Your Man, Gigantic, Cactus, Debaser, Where is my Mind; The Smiths: That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore, This Charming Man, Cemetry Gates; Simon & Garfunkel: Sounds of Silence, Mrs Robinson, So Long Frank Lloyd Wright; Pavement: Shady Lane.

I won’t go on. There are too many.

jx

After extensive research, Jols landed upon a stay in the Lake District, in a cottage beside a disused slate mine, near Coniston.

Now, one experience that is common to everyone as we grow independent in life is that of the ‘treacherous last mile’ that must be negotiated before being able to settle into any kind of pleasant weekend away. Any destination worth stopping at is by necessity tucked away off the beaten track, down a labyrinth of narrow lanes.

To be fair to the owner of the cottage (which is something I am very much disinclined to be), the literature did mutter something about ‘arriving in the daylight’ and ‘not having a low-slung sports car’, as the approach to the cottages was a little bit uneven. Fortunately, I didn’t have a low-slung sports car. I had a 1990 Volkswagen Polo. (Was it green? Was it blue? Nobody has ever given me a satisfactory answer. It was this colour.)

So it was that I found myself squinting through a rain-slashed windscreen at a narrow vista of dimly illumined shale tack as the car bounced and lurched up a steep incline at about 9pm.

‘Is this,’ I enquired of Jols, ‘definitely the right way to go?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t see the map.’

It was all academic, really, because there was no way we were going to be able to turn round; a steep bank rose up into the darkness to the right of the track, and to the left, there was just blackness.

I kept the revs up as much as I could, but any real speed meant the car would bounce alarmingly over potholes, and I didn’t want to break the suspension, especially not out here, and especially not in the pitch dark.

Of course, the loud thunk and dragging sound that followed one particularly hefty bounce was a worry. I stopped the car on the steep incline and squeezed out of the driver’s door to see what had happened. From my position, semi-trapped against the steep bank, I could hear a torrent of surging water coming from the blackness beyond. I didn’t have a light, so I used the dim glow of my mobile phone’s face to try to look under the car. Thankfully the light didn’t need a mobile phone signal to work, as there were no signal bars to be coaxed, however wildly I wielded my handset.

The exhaust was lying on the ground at the back, but was still attached at the front, so my suspicions were aroused that there may have been something wrong with the exhaust. Why — I have had three separate occasions to wonder — is your average car exhaust held on essentially by two or three rubber bands? No matter.

After a couple of abortive attempts to string the thing up (without any string), the solution Jols and I arrived at was to attach my jump leads to the exhaust, and for Jols to hold it clear of the ground as I executed the necessary series of tricky hill starts on loose shale.

The upshot of all this was that Jols ended up running along behind the car in the rain and laughing and inhaling exhaust fumes as I kept up enough speed to advance along the potholed track. Several times the exhaust fell away and clunked to the ground, and several times I stopped the car for Jols to retie it before we could start again.

Some people have protested the ungentlmanliness of this solution. I would point to the quality of Jols’s shale-based hill starts at the time, and at how dead I would have been given a role reversal (or, more literally, a roll reversal).

Anyway: in this fashion we limped onwards to our holiday cottage.

Positives: we were on the right road. And I am a member of the AA.

I abandoned the car more or less in the right place, and we retrieved our bags of clothes and boots and milk and teabags and Pringles — all the sundry things you need for a relaxing weekend — and found the front door.

It was, let’s just pause to establish, quite lovely. It had a stone floor, and a fireplace for a real fire. Jols hung up our wet-through coats on the coat hooks in the kitchen — admittedly, hers was rather more wet-through than mine — and we flopped on to the sofa in the front room. After a naive and completely unsuccessful attempt to get the fire going with a copy of Heat magazine, we retired to bed. Enough is enough.

Evening passed and morning came, and a very lovely morning it was too. Looking out of the bedroom window was enough to banish the ghosts of the previous evening. The lovely blue sky and crisp sunlight revealed the expansive mountainous scenery which had previously been shrouded in the dark, and it all even diminished the task of having to get the AA out to this place-with-no-postcode-and-no-phone signal.

And there was the scent, of course. It was tangible. There is something about the scent of an old cottage in winter, the wooden beams, the stonework, the tang of hot soot from freshly burnt coal. Drawing deep of this evocative fragrance I descended the stairs in my pyjamas and went to put the kettle on for a morning cuppa.

It’s amazing, I registered, how much mess — and smell — you can make with a copy of Heat magazine and some matches, without actually creating a sustainable conflagration.

I needn’t have been amazed.

Having filled the kettle with swirling soft Lake District water, I gazed around the kitchen to find where we’d dumped the milk and teabags. I really hoped we’d not left the milk in the shopping bags by the storage heater — that would have been fairly typical, and the ‘country cottage’ smell was suspiciously strong from over there. Thankfully I didn’t find any milk when I hunted in the shopping bags.

I did find that both of our coats had dried remarkably well — the coat hooks were, after all, situated above the storage heater. So well had they dried, in fact, that a large smouldering hole was working its way through the back of my coat, and Jols’s was now a good few inches shorter. It was from the smouldering of 80 per cent wool and 20 per cent polyamide that our ‘country cottage’ scent was sourced.

How best to describe the dimensions and data relating to the hole in my coat? Well, the diameter was just a little bit bigger than the diameter of my backside, and, ironically, the positioning of the hole on my coat was exactly where the coat would normally have been covering my backside.

As an extra added bonus, the heat had been enough to rise through the coat and char my wallet, fusing together all of my bank cards, library card, national insurance card and sundry membership cards into one colourful but useless lump of brittle plastic. You could make out my AA card as a little sliver of characteristically bright and reassuring yellow somewhere in the middle.

Positive: we weren’t dead from noxious fumes.

The upshot of our exploits thus far meant that we would have to walk, without coats, back along the labyrinthine roads, down to the village to find a payphone and the number of the AA in order to phone them to convince them in the absence of my card that I was a member, and that they should come to an off-road destination with no postcode, and roads wide enough only for a hatchback vehicle. We would also, being by now quite grown up and assertive, visit the owner of the holiday cottage and show him our coats, at which point he would surely see the error of situating a coathook above a storage heater, and gladly part with some funds by way of apology and compensation.

It would be better of course to get this out of the way before we could start our holiday. By the time we had dressed and gathered ourselves, the blue skies had turned as grey as the slate mountainsides, and the rain had started to fall. Winter getaways: you’ve got to accept it. Only, there was the whole ‘coats’ situation. There was really only one decision. We would wear what was left of them down to the village. That would keep the rain off our shoulders at least.

So, having laughed all the way up the shale track as she bore the exhaust pipe on the way to the cottage, Jols now got her revenge by laughing all the way back as my coat gave a charred frame to my revolving buttocks as I stumped back down the shale track. She laughed all the more heartily as I insisted she get close behind me whenever a car approached us. Note that there were several of these, and none of them stopped to offer us a lift.

We got to the village, and I found a phonebox and phoned the AA.

‘What’s your membership number?’

‘I don’t know’

‘It’s the long number across the middle of your card.’

‘Yeah… um…’

We landed on some alternative details, and that seemed to suffice.

‘And where is the car?’

‘It’s in a slate mine.’

‘Right. What’s the name of the road?’

‘Um, it’s a shale track.’

‘Do you have a postcode?’

‘No…’

I finally managed to give them the intersection of two roads where I would meet their mechanic. He would be with us in an hour or so.

While we waited, we popped over to see the owner of the cottage. An initially bright welcome quickly grew frosty (“Well, I can’t do anything about your coats, what do you want me to do?”), and then downright hostile (“Well, sue me then. See how far you get.”) I’ll leave you to make up your own mind whether putting a coat hook over a storage heater and then blaming us for hanging our coats on it is a reasonable conclusion. We didn’t sue him.

The AA man was much more pleasant, and he — like most of the many AA mechanics I have encountered — was very helpful, and found the whole situation very funny. He vanned us back to our car, skilfully negotiating the tight squeezes, and then spent a good half an hour fixing the exhaust back to the underside of the car with wire. He warned me to get it fixed properly (i.e. with rubber bands) at my earliest opportunity — a warning I entirely ignored, leading the exhaust to fall off in a car park in Stevenage some three months later. Deserved.

So now we were able to enjoy our holiday, taking very little care of any of the host’s furniture or belongings, and having a lovely big raging (intentional) fire, which we started with his Christmas tree. We headed off to Preston on the Monday morning, and settled in the much more comfortable surroundings of Jols’s mum and dad’s house, and watched the telly.

The one news story that struck us that Christmas time was of a discovery ‘off the beaten track’, near a disused slate mine near Coniston. The TV news reporter stood in front of the very same cottage situated just by the edge of that very same mine.

Positives: Our experience on this holiday could, let’s conclude, have been worse.

Her chosen course of action was to light all the candles before I came into the house after work, at which point she would then step forward with a rousing rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’.

Only, I got waylaid on my way from the car to the front door, and all the lit candles starting giving off quite a heat (I’m getting old, you know). Minutes passed, and Jols, standing there, bearing the cake on a platter, began to sweat (literally) over whether this was all going to work.

By the time I finally got into the house, the candles were merrily ablaze.

She stepped forward with the cake and proceeded to sing:

“Haaa—” —at which point she stumbled a little, and slopped molten wax onto the lovingly chopped almonds and the cake beneath.

“Ho no—” —at which point she blew out the candles.

—at which point she burst into tears.

I’m a bit nervous about next year, because it’s supposed to be the year of nuclear war.

I went to big school today, and I went on a lorry that my dad drove. He doesn’t normally drive a lorry. My teacher is called Mrs Carbass, which sounds like ‘car bus’ when you say it, and I tried to tell her that I’d come in on a lorry, but she was too busy talking to somebody else, and didn’t hear me when I called her.

That’s all

j

My mum recalls the events as follows: ‘It was Mother’s Day. You were two years old. [My brothers were five and seven] I woke up, and I didn’t have a card; your dad hadn’t got a card for me from you boys. Anyway, I took you all off to church [dad always stayed at home], and they handed out daffodils like they always did on Mothering Sunday, and I remember getting home and preparing the dinner, and I was thinking, ooh, maybe I’ll get a nice surprise at dinner or something, but dinner came and went, and no, nothing. So I was washing up and wiping the table down in the kitchen. We had a white table with flowers painted on it. And I was wiping it down, and I was crying. And you happened to come in at that exact moment, and you said, “mummy, why are you pretending to cry? So I was, you know, “I’m not pretending to cry, lovey, I’ve just got something in my eye. It’ll soon be better, run along now…” you know?’

What I remember about this is a vague image, which may or may not be a false recollection, but most particularly the fuss that was made over the fact that I had thought adults didn’t cry. The mental chemistry that will have been created is what I remember: perhaps people were laughing at me, perhaps they were sympathising, or perhaps they were being just generally loud. But the strength of the memory is in the fact that there was a reaction based solely on something I had said, and I will have reacted to that. Maybe I felt stupid, or maybe I just clocked it and moved on.

Yes, I clocked it and moved on, certainly.

best

j