The Artist

He reminded me of someone from a different era – like that early ‘70s art scene that permeated my childhood, the one with bearded men and batik throws.   It was as if he had been plucked from that setting and that time and placed in the present without having traversed the interim years.   Wild black hair, second-hand velvet jacket, the huge rubber plant in the flat, chipped stoneware bowls, Leonard Cohen and Frank Zappa on C90s.  Thirty years' worth or more of magazines, mostly already cut-up ready for use, on every available surface. The smell of paint mingling with the smell of mildew and recently baked herring.  And his art everywhere, on every wall and piled up on the floor: works in progress, finished pieces, huge canvasses, boxed constructions from reclaimed household objects, book-like collaged miniatures, pertinent words scrawled in inky black spidery script.  He taught me about the artists he loved and who inspired him - Kurt Schwitters and Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly and Duchamp – well, so much Art.  He always spelled Art with a capital A.  He said it with one too.  I'll be honest - he frustrated me at times, his life was messy, his choices often unwise, but friendship endured.

Well, it would have been his 58^th birthday today.  Sadly he was the second of two of my friends who died last year, and his death was most unexpected, so it still feels a little unreal.

But I don’t want this to be a sad post, there is enough misery in the world and I need to keep myself upbeat. 

Instead I’ll celebrate his birthday by sharing some of his work, now hanging on new walls in different homes.  Isn't this the lovely thing about Art? -  it lives on.

The January greys

I’m not a fan of January; it doesn’t have a lot going for it, does it?   It’s no May.   May is a favourite; a month full of promise and the knowledge that weeks and weeks of longer, warmer days stretch out way ahead.  May reassures me with its carefree message of, “Don’t worry, we’ll do it in the Summer, there’s loads of time yet! Relax!” and its multiple sneak previews of what’s to come – new leaves on trees, new leaves to be turned over.  Yes, loooaaaaads of time yet. 

Nor does January have the sweetness of wistful goodbye kisses like my other favourite month, October. October paints over the faded greens with juicy reds and lurid yellows and delivers surprise presents every now and then: those mild, sunny days when you exclaim, “I can’t believe it’s October!”  I think of it like a lover reluctant to end our Summer fling.  Oh, October, you tease!

January is none of those things, it’s just shades of grey interspersed with, well, other shades of grey.  This year I’m finding it harder than ever too.  To be honest, I'm feeling a wee bit down.  It's impossible to disassociate some things: January is the month in which two of my good friends had their birthdays, and last year it was also the month in which one of them died, the week after Bowie.  The other friend’s unexpected death followed just a few months later (I may write about him again soon too).  They were both only 57.  I miss them hugely and there’s a big part of me which still can’t quite believe they’ve both left - and of course all of me that wishes they hadn’t.

Anyway, in Januarys (Januaries?) past  I would have sent A a customary email on his celebratory date, saying HAPPY BIRTHDAY (nothing if not original), each character in a different colour and font, kind of like rainbow-coloured Never Mind The Bollocks lettering, which he would have completely got.  And he would have replied with a little note of thanks and surprise that I’d remembered.   “Must pop over for a cup of tea soon,” one of us would have said (it was always me going over to his house, he had the bigger kitchen), and in the meantime more messages would bounce across the ether, exchanging snippets and opinions, video clips, what was in the news, our latest wildlife updates, random notes on art, music and books, little bits of gossip about what was going on in the village, sometimes a bit of rockbiz goss too from his own/sibling connections.

In January three years ago the closest we got to rockbiz goss was that someone new was due to be moving into the big (and very expensive) historic house just down the street from us both.  “I’ve been told he’s a ‘punk rock musician’”, A told me.

Well, of course, we went through the list of possibilities.  Who would we like it to be?

“I wish it could be Mark E Smith but I think he’s too attached to the North”, A emailed.

"It has to be someone with some wonga, doesn't it, so that rules out a few I'm sure... but not someone with enough that they'd move to California, so that rules out a few too.  (I've been thinking... maybe Captain Sensible?  He's already fairly local I believe???)  Haha, I can't wait to find out!" I replied. 

 (Yes, I still have the emails...these are verbatim.)

News soon followed that our new 'punk rock musician' neighbour was called Jimmy.

Jimmy Pursey?  we both mused, somewhat incredulously.

Then an update arrived from A that it wasn't a Jimmy after all, but a Tommy.

Tommy...  Tommy....nope, drawing a blank here.

Then another update, "No, scrub that, it's not Tommy, it's Terry!"

Cue further email exchanges about Terry Chimes, who is apparently now a Chiropractor.

But by the time I popped over for a cuppa tea and a real-life chat, it transpired that the new resident was neither Chiropractor nor punk rock musician, instead someone neither of us had heard of and whose connection to the music biz was not to either of our tastes at all…  a session keyboard musician who composes music for TV....  A long way from Mark E Smith, that's for sure.

Life is full of disappointments!

Not my new neighbour

And well, like disappointment, you just have to accept death, don't you?  There's nothing we can do to change things and we're only going to experience more of them because, if it's not our own trip into oblivion, it will be that of others we know and love (sorry).  So I hold onto the memories and the fondness, the hopeful Mays and the sunny Octobers, and the little snatches of chat about non-punk rock musicians, amongst other things.

If A had lived to see this birthday I’m sure we’d have been sharing more similar conversations, both in email and real life, and this January would not be quite so grey.

The Fall:  It's A Curse

For A

The graveyard shift

Something dawned on me recently; it’s probably blindingly obvious to most people but for some reason it hadn’t been to me until that moment.   I was taking a short cut through the churchyard and casually observing the gravestones standing there, like a small crowd of quiet, still people, when it suddenly struck me that that's exactly what they are. 

A small crowd of quiet, still people:  neighbours, friends, strangers;  old, young and in-between; shopkeepers and factory workers; families grouped together  - like a gathering at a village fête.    Although I’m not religious, the significance of headstones suddenly registered in a whole new way, and I found it kind of comforting.  I saw the graveyard in a different light, like a place full of life rather than death.

The local graveyard

Then last month I was down at the City of London Cemetery again and the analogy really hit home.  It’s huge.  The 'population' of headstones is more like a large town than a gathering at a village fête - there are 150,000 graves there.

It’s the biggest of its kind in the UK – set in 200 acres of grounds (I can never picture quite what an acre actually is, but someone told me it’s roughly the size of a football pitch).  It also has 7 miles of roadway intersecting its vast parks and gardens, and 5 chapels.  You might imagine there are quite a few notable characters buried there but a little research didn’t produce many names – although I did find two of Jack the Ripper’s victims and Bobby Moore’s ashes.  The enormous variety of the memorials – the humble, weathered stones alongside some contrastingly new and really quite blingy structures, the assortment  of different traits, cultures, tastes and religions of the people beneath expressed in their monuments – well, they looked just the same to me as the shoppers I’d walked amid earlier on an East London street and the passengers on the platform at Liverpool St. Station.  I suppose it’s obvious when I put it like that.  Anyway, there’s definitely something about this correlation that I find uplifting: the inanimate representations of all those diverse human beings now mingling so peacefully in the cemetery.  If only we could always be so peaceful in life. 

---

I had to take a taxi to the station on the way to help clear my aunt and uncle’s house (both now buried in the above mentioned City of London Cemetery, in a serene, woodland area, unmarked by memorials but represented fittingly by the wildness of nature) and was chatting to the cab driver about the task ahead.  He’d had to do the same thing himself with an aunt’s belongings not long beforehand.  “She’d never married nor lived with anyone and had no other family,” he explained, “but she kept a lot of stuff!”   

It’s strange when you sift through someone’s most personal and intimate possessions, isn’t it?  In some ways you can feel like a voyeur, an imposter.  So Cab Driver and I talked about that, and how a lot is changing now, as so much of what we'll leave behind in the future – photos, music collections, documents, even contact details for friends - may only be accessible via our hard drives and phones… passwords permitting.  There's something to bear in mind!  Anyway, up in the attic amid his aunt’s general paraphernalia, he'd found an old suitcase.  It was closed tight, and for extra security bound crossways with thick string like a parcel.  Attached to it was a hand-written note:

  ‘Please destroy after my death.  Not to be opened’

“Ooh!  I wonder what was in it… did you ever find out?” I asked.  But Cab Driver was an honourable  man and had followed his aunt's instructions without even taking a sneaky peek.

So, what could have been in there?  Secret letters from a forbidden lover, perhaps?  That was my first and favourite thought.  Or perhaps documents relating to an illegitimate child?  Or even evidence from an unsolved crime?  Or maybe just a private collection of….. well…  what?!

I'm tempted to do the same myself, just to bring some old-fashioned mystique to the proceedings when the time comes. 

The farewell

My friend's funeral was held on Thursday.  It was actually a rather wonderful and strangely uplifting event, in the way that these things can sometimes be.  So many people... so much love.  The prevailing conviviality helped a great deal to offset some of the sadness.  As everyone gathered in the bright winter sunshine just before the ceremony, two crows flew up into an adjacent tree and cawed loudly.  Knowing his admiration for these birds, that just seemed perfect.

If there's one regret I have, it's that I didn't spend more time with him when he was well.  We take each other so much for granted, don't we, and it seems there's always a tomorrow.  Still, I must console myself with the thought that whilst I can't help but wish there'd been more of them, at least every single minute that I was lucky enough to have in his company was a joy.

Family ties

Sadly, I have a funeral to attend this week, for a lovely elderly relative.  It will be a fairly untraditional and very low key affair; she was from the secular and somewhat eccentric intellectual side of the family - my dad's.

I'd love to think I could be even just a little like her in my final years - still attending educational courses, travelling and embracing new technology into her early 90s and keeping healthy and youthful until very recently.  Funerals are so hard, aren't they, and this will be no exception, especially as I feel desperately sad for the husband she leaves behind -  my dad's brother.  In recent years, I've seen more of him than I have my father.  And this is where it gets weird and is the reason I feel the need to write something here... because my dad may be at the funeral too...

So, I was trying to work out how many times in total I've seen my father since he and my mum divorced around 35 years ago... There can't have been more than about a dozen occasions and the last time was around 2005.   He lives the other side of the country, frequently forgets my birthday (as he did again this year); he's only phoned a handful of times and then only when there's been big news (like when he was getting married!)  Oh and one time to ask if I could record something off the telly for him when he was at a conference in Japan....  that may not sound so odd until you know that it was completely out of the blue - we hadn't been in touch for a couple of years beforehand and I didn't know he was in Japan.  So our relationship seems pretty non-existent.   I know that on paper, or in the eyes of anyone more judgmental, it might seem like he's not a good father, yet I feel the need to explain that he is a good man - he's just, well I don't know, but I think perhaps he has a degree of Asperger's. He's highly intelligent, something of a mathematical genius in fact (god knows where those genes went - down the back of the sofa?) and I know he has a kind heart and a very gentle nature.  He's just 'different' - and I really don't think he knows how to 'be' when it comes to interacting with his two daughters.  I simply think that we are not a part of his world, but - and it's difficult to explain - there is nothing deliberate or harsh about that, it's just the way it is.

Anyway, I'm just airing this now because tonight I'm full of so many mixed emotions at the thought of seeing him, particularly on such a sad occasion, that I'm already steeling myself for it.  I may report back, or I may not -  but I've realised that however bizarre and confusing it might be,  I actually really do want him to be at the funeral, because I don't want the next time I see him to be at his.

For MB

Sorry to be a little downbeat here but sometimes when you’re thinking about silly things like the timer on the oven not working properly or the fact that bread has gone up by 5p a loaf, something pulls you up short and puts a few things in perspective, and that happened today. 

A friend of ours died this morning.  He had leukaemia and had been unwell with it for over a year, but during that time he’d had an admirable and incredible stoicism and positivity about him.  A month or so ago he was upbeat about the news that the NHS had received funding for his third bone marrow transplant.  In spite of being told it only carried a 5% chance of success, it was a hope he wanted to cling to.  However, he never became well enough again to actually have the operation. 

I’m so glad that the last time I saw him was on a really beautiful day.  Even though summer had long passed and the evenings were getting chilly and darker, that Saturday lunchtime when Mr SDS and I plus some other friends met him at a pub was like a Mediterranean July.  It was so hot that we sat outside soaking up the sun, the ice melting in our drinks, and the back of my neck even got a little burnt.  Our friend was in great spirits and, whilst a little weak physically, you’d be hard pushed to tell at first glance just how ill he really was. 

This pub is in one of the more upmarket, touristy villages round here – ok, if I tell you that it’s owned by Marco Pierre White you’ll get the idea.  There are pictures of MPW inside and apparently if you eat there you can go home with a postcard of him to put on your wall.   Whoop de doo!  We didn’t eat there.  When we saw the drinks bill it was obvious we were paying a premium just to be served by somebody who might have wiped the bar with a cloth that MPW’s PA may once have touched.  I think lunch for the six of us would have cost as much as that bone marrow transplant.

You could be forgiven for thinking that it was the price of the drinks that made our friend a little unsteady on his feet rather than his condition.  In fact, when he ordered them,  his speech was a little slurred too. Ever one for a mischievous comment he explained to the barman, “It’s ok – I’m not drunk!  It’s just the drugs...” 

I’ll remember him as a truly larger-than-life character – charming, funny and spontaneous, with a very real twinkle in his eye.  He’d lived quite a rollercoaster life, full of experiences that most of us can only imagine. 

We’re going to raise a big glass to him tonight - here at home.  We’re not paying those pub prices again.  Our friend would understand.

For MB, who loved Bowie

The final curtain

I’m not sure how I feel about 'The Laughing Policeman’ *  being played at Mr SDS’ funeral but he tells me that’s what he wants.  He’s not dead yet, but you know how these things come up in conversation every so often.  Either that, he says, or ‘The Galaxy Song’ from the end credits of Monty Python’s ‘The Meaning Of Life’.  I think I’d be more comfortable with that choice, although I can’t help wonder mischievously what the reaction might be to the aforementioned cackling copper from those long lost relatives who just came for the after-show egg & cress sarnies. (Incidentally, his third and perhaps most sinister request is the Beatles' ’I’ll Be Back’…)

Don’t you think it’d be a good idea for everybody to keep a note of their preferred funeral playlist which loved ones could then refer to when the time comes?  You’d need to update it as and when your tastes change, of course, not that it will actually matter to you at the time whether your remains are wheeled in or out to ‘Pretty Vacant’ or a throat-singing Tibetan monk’s chants, but it would be one less thing for your bereaved to have to mull over.   My instructions would definitely stipulate, at the very least, that there must be no clichés.  Pleeease, no ‘Angels’ by Robbie Williams, nor Celine Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’.  Yuk.  If I didn’t like it in life then you can be assured that I’m not going to like it in death; even though I’ll be (presumably) in blissful ignorance, please don’t insult my memory.

Then there’s the matter of ego.  If  I got off on the thought that my friends and family might weep inconsolably at my departure, I’d want them to choose something heart-rendingly sad.  The kind of song that makes your eyes water and your throat go dry even when the sun is shining and you’ve just found a tenner down the back of the sofa.   ‘Banks Of The Nile’ by Fotheringay turns on my saltwater taps in an instant, as does Bowie’s version of ‘Wild Is The Wind’ (and here I must also mention his superb rendition of Jacques Brel’s ‘My Death’ which doesn’t so much have me in tears as make my spine tingle rather nicely).  But I wouldn’t want my funeral-goers to have to deal with all that awkwardness of snotty noses, running mascara and where to keep their man-size tissues, uncontrollably triggered by a mere minor key or mournful vocal; I’d rather they could smile.

For me, nobody says it better than Jake Thackray in ‘Last Will and Testament’.  Perhaps that’s the song I’d want?

* Mr SDS is very definitely NOT a policeman.  Far from it.