Autunno
The sadness breaks tonight it breaks at seven
it cheats all tender efforts to get even
it remembers what I did not we were Autumn
and the way it falls away and gives to auburn
where the slackening of trees felt our knot tauten
and it bunts me with the harvest of old caution
and it dances its rapt pupils to abandon -
because it knows the days weigh more now as they shorten. (more...)
...He stayed
The whole time he was at the Bodies till
They moved him. (Philip Larkin, ‘Mr Bleaney’)
Lodger. It sounds a sad thing. Still, whenever talk turns to houses and someone happens to ask if I own, it seems best to own up. I am a lodger. Not a tenant or lease-holder or anything else, but a lodger, renting a room with no contract in someone else’s house. It’s a peaceful, affordable room at the top of a handsome house, with a garden in summer and cats all year round. I’m treated very kindly and I do call this home, but after perks and excuses it is lodging all the same. Meanwhile friends, in their wisdom, are depositing and mortgaging and getting floors done.
Of course, I’ve no more right to carp about property than I have to property itself. Home-owning is a complex and uncomfortable aspiration, one which strains the frayed ligature between what I want and what’s expected of me. Particulars, surveyors, gazumping and deeds are things that happened to my parents and, like cufflinks and car-keys, always seemed part of the regalia of growing up. And this means that now that I am 30, I am a lodger with small anxieties about property – and whether adult life will ever coincide with what it looked like from childhood. And so what?
One way to look at these anxieties is to muffle their psychological noise. For might they be not merely fixtures in the head of a lodger, but also somehow characterise the cultural disquiet this marginal figure cannot help but embody? The literary historian Sharon Marcus points out that as early as the 1840s – as the Victorian domestic ideal firmed up in the wake of a widespread separation between home and the work-place, and its attendant boom in speculative house-building – lodgers took on an unsavoury, even menacing aspect. In part, this was because the shabby, urban lodging-house, which blurred people and spaces and who-did-what-where, provided a seemingly anti-domestic model of dwelling against which the middle-class household could be evaluated. But it was also because a version of the lodger might encroach on the life of that household itself. The term, after all, encompasses all manner of solitaries of both sexes – from the destitute to the dandy.
For no sooner did the ideal take hold of home as an individuated space, demarcated by four walls and with a discrete entrance from the street, than the fudging began. Home-owners, tenants, and even sub-letters strove to uphold what that space ought to house, and sustain the imagined connection between property and propriety: the hierarchy of types of occupancy seemed to advertise the impermanence of many domestic situations, while meagre opportunities for freehold led the nation, wrote Ruskin, to ‘look upon our houses as mere temporary lodgings’. The privacy of home sometimes needed to be subsidised to prevent its economic subsidence, and one solution was to bring in lodgers or paying guests. The price of private life could also be its tarnishing.
People take lodgers for reasons other than purely economic – for company or from kindness, or because they have space – and recent politicking about spare bedrooms suggests that attitudes towards property are themselves in transition. But so far as his historical status is connected to the cost of domestic ideals, the lodger has inevitably been represented as a dislodger, undermining the stability of what rent ought to fortify. The word and its cognates are fidgety and disruptive: a lodger might just as well be the person housing as housed, since the verb transitively allows someone to lodge somebody, but intransitively forces someone to lodge somewhere. It’s as if the word knows it describes something that makes dwelling vulnerable – as the compromises made by temporary residents seem to transfer to their hosts.
Put another way, while a lodger’s routine may be subject to any number of rules and restrictions, allowing a stranger to share home and its facilities is liable to limit one’s own privacy and domestic behaviour. After all, strictures also determine the habits of those who enforce them – like the gaoler in clinking duet with his prisoners’ timetable – as well as exaggerating the visibility of those things they can never fully control, such as bodily functions with their smells and accidents.
I am often asked whether my mealtimes are fixed, if I have to keep hours, and even, once or twice, how I stomach the celibacy (in some people’s minds, the idea of lodging conjures a version of bachelordom or spinsterhood that is decades too late). This type of dwelling implies a circumscribed domesticity, in my case happily based on lenient and unspoken courtesies, but in other situations no doubt set down and policed. For Gordon Comstock, the dingy lodger hero of George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), the foremost infringements are brewing and screwing: ‘This tea-making was the major household offence, next to bringing a woman in’. (The lodger’s nocturnal misdemeanours have their own brassy genealogy: ‘Roger the Lodger’, an old music-hall turn, descends from Nicholas, Chaucer’s priapic lodger-clerk in The Miller's Tale).
Orwell’s novel is very good on how sharing space with strangers inverts how we live: the hallways and landings of Mrs Wisbeach’s lodging-house are not places to pause but to hurry through; the noises off, heard through doors or thin walls, are not comfortingly familiar but remorselessly alien; mealtimes fail to bring reprieve. Other grubby novels of the period, chief among them Patrick Hamilton’s, are equally wise to how the noises, smells and sights that a house usually keeps hidden become public – that is, shared but never communal – in the presence of lodgers, in an amplification of the embarrassments of home.
Slaves of Solitude (1946), for instance, unravels in the Rosamund Tea Rooms, a generic boarding-house outside London where inhabitants take rooms to see out the war; they cannot help but live in earshot of other people’s petty indiscretions and, as it eventually turns out, the real noise of life. It is impossible for Miss Roach, Hamilton’s protagonist, to scuttle past fellow boarders’ ordeals:
She climbed the stairs, and the groaning met her as she rose. ‘Oh!… Oh!… Oh!…’
Mr Thwaites’ door was closed, and she listened outside.
‘Oh!… Oh!… Oh!…’ she heard, and, beneath this noise, the sound of two strange men talking in quiet and level tones. Only doctors, and frightened doctors at that, would be talking in just that quiet and level way.
In other contexts, ‘Oh!… Oh!… Oh!…’ might titillate or kindle comic misunderstandings. Indeed, elsewhere the spilt sounds of lodging do provide grounds for mystery or comedy. In The Ladykillers (1955), the crooks take for granted the meddlesome credulity of the little old landlady; knowing she’ll swoon at his door, ‘Professor’ Marcus, her lodger, sticks a minuet on the gramophone, while his bogus string quintet plan and bungle a heist. Or take Hitchcock’s title, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), in which the sound made by a lodger – the sound made by ‘lodger’ – acoustically breeds the nebulous city he stalks through. (The film, like so many of the best silent movies, truly enjoys the noise it can’t make; there is a memorable shot of a ceiling that dissolves to glass to render the sound of the furtive lodger as he paces overhead).
To urban writers, in particular, fixated so often on achieving rooms of their own, the figure of the lodger clearly resonates with professional anxieties about the durability of writing and the shortfalls of the spaces in which it takes place. Lodging is a reminder not only of the transience of what is supposed to endure, but also that what is temporary can inadvertently become permanent – as lodgers become lodged, like pieces of shrapnel.
‘He stayed / The whole time he was at the Bodies till / They moved him’: I used to read Larkin’s lines as a euphemistic description of Mr Bleaney’s death, as if he had been carted from his rented box-room in a box still more compact. But looking again, he might just as well have been assigned to shift-work elsewhere, so that what I took for an ending was just transition elsewhere. ‘Sometimes I feel I’ve got to move on, so I pack a bag’, sings David Bowie in ‘Move On’, the third track on Lodger (1979). The album’s gatefold sleeve shows him splayed on the ground, with his broken-nose bandaged – a repeat jumper from a rented window. You never know with the lodger, quite where he is going.
It might as well start with a queue for the Gents: but it starts, when it starts, with a man in a chair. A thick-set man in an armchair, with grey beard and unkempt hair, who’s lowered through a trapdoor before the singing begins. Wry staging, I guess: the House is full for the first opera of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, and, over the coming eight days, many members of tonight’s audience will sink 15 hours or so into the seats they’ve just taken. A man in a chair, sliding into the stage behind three slinky Rhine Maidens in fetching blue merkins: it’s an invitation to an immersion, a Rhine baptism, a cushioned surrender to the music and its world.
But I’ve opted out of this upholstered voyage. My seat’s no seat, it’s a couple of feet in which to stand. I am standing for the Ring. Standing in the gods. Standing while the gods and their sisters screw each other at length. Admittedly, I’m used to listening from up here in the slips, where a ticket costs less than a drink at the bar and I can scope out a seat for after the break. There’s a wooden beam to lean on at about chest height which – when the blood gets heavy, as it does, in the legs – doubles as a sort of barre for creaky demi-pliés and arabesques. The informality is welcome and my fidgeting almost seems licensed. (more...)
As soon as I’m shown into the clinic, the specialist wants to know why I’m there. She’s had a long letter from my GP, she says, about some half-remembered symptoms I first suffered aged six – I don’t mind if the two medical students sit in, do I? – and she can’t understand why, on a wet April day twenty-four years later, I’ve come to discuss them with her. She lists the symptoms and doesn’t invite comment: mouth this, throat that, a bit of bowels. Then she asks me what I want, with the contempt a waiter might have for a customer who lingers over the set menu. Her hair is strapped back with such tight precision that I suspect it’s a ploy to enhance her raised eyebrows.
It seems utterly in keeping with having a food allergy that an allergy specialist should take such disinterest in it. Indeed, the doctor’s brusque, sceptical attitude corresponds to my experience of allergy as something that, however uncertain, has always felt tediously unremarkable. So unexceptional is it that I’ve avoided making this appointment for a decade: I’m only here now because I’ve come up against a GP who won’t revamp my prescription for an EpiPen – the epinephrine autoinjector that’s supposed to give you a chance against anaphylaxis – until he knows what he’s prescribing it for. It might do more damage than it prevents, he says, before reeling off a cautionary tale about some chap, mildly allergic to cinnamon, who lost a thumb when he plunged the syringe upside down.
I agree to be referred to a specialist, and hold back the irresponsible truth. Which is that, for me, the EpiPen sits somewhere between placebo and memento mori: it’s a reminder that I should be taking my allergy seriously and a justification that I am taking it seriously enough. Arranging the prescription, however tardily, makes me feel accountable to the risk I take when I eat. Then the yellow triangular cardboard wedge – the ‘Pen is packaged like a Toblerone bar for people who’d die if they ate one – gathers dust in a sock drawer, or mould in a wash-bag, until the time comes to sort out another. It’s to deceive myself sufficiently, Doctor!, I want to wink and whisper, I store the last resort where it will always be too late!
It’s a complacent attitude, of course. It’s little excuse to protest that I avoid more hazardous cuisines, whatever they might be, in favour of the food I think I know; besides, the allergy is far more handy as a social pretext to dodge restaurants where I’d rather not eat in favour of the food I know I like. And yet my allergy is no illness, nor even so much as a condition, so protesting anything would be to protest too much. It’s more like a chore, remembered and forgotten so many times each day and, as with so many chores, it tends to seem wholly petty when most maddeningly vital.
I habitually neglect to tell waiters what I can’t eat – then scuttle after them, as if flapping at a departing bus, before they can punch in my order. I am allergic to nuts. I have a nut allergy. I am allergic: the allergy possesses my body, inherent, unflinching. I have an allergy: where I profess ownership, the familiar sham of control. Either way, the kitchen’s answer – and how well that spatial metonymy shrugs the prospect of blame – never fails to catch the charade-like nature of the entire inquiry. There are no nuts in the ingredients… the kitchen can’t guarantee…
Nuts to nuts! My body’s dull, dormant antipathy to a vaguely defined group of foodstuffs – frutta secca, dry fruit, in Italian, is so imprecise as to band withered apples and apricots with the pecans and pistachios – merits my wishful scorn, no more. The boredom of allergy is exacerbated by the niceties it provokes: that slew of hoop-jumping questions that we ask to feign interest in someone else’s digestion. Is it all kinds of nuts or just some nuts? What would happen if I gave you a nut right now? If you ate a cashew would you swell up and die?
It’s wearying to be asked these questions repeatedly. In the right mood though, they hit on the type of latent comedy that banal repetition can foster. After all it is funny, if not exhaustingly so, to be allergic to a playground synonym for testicles: I’ve had food slammed in front of me for ‘Mr No Nuts’ before. Made in a factory that handles nuts: some ball-scratching work-house for Waitrose? Perhaps the structure of allergy is itself comic, if that is the word, for ultimately what else is the body that mutinies against itself? Allergy is one of those unruly surprises that snooze in our physiological make-up. Estragon: what about hanging ourselves? Vladimir: it’d give us an erection!
Eating, when it’s done well, should naturally cousin comedy – which is why Petruchio’s depriving of Kate makes for no more than cold laughter. But eating, for me, is a nervous comedy that could at any mouthful swivel into tragedy. At the allergy clinic, I’m relieved when the specialist doesn’t ask me to retrace my body’s fierce reaction to rogue traces – to the smear of pistachio ice-cream on another scoop, to contaminated buffets, to peanut dust on the rim of a pint glass. Unlike other anecdotes, these stories have no capacity to take flight; they are coarse and flat and grounded. And they are merely illustrative, not diagnostic.
Since I’m now here, I can have some tests. But the specialist thrusts a truism at me: if the tests are positive then I’m no less at risk, and if some tests show negative, I risk thinking I’m no longer at risk. And the only other test, she admits, is to play a kind of nut-loaf roulette. Remember your body is a unity is her adamant, baffling conclusion.
The tests take place in the Respiratory Function Unit. When I enter the room, there’s a woman strapped to a mask, and later a man gets strapped in by her side later – at which point the first strap-on starts to fuss for the toilet. Here too are another clutch of medical students and a chubby young woman with a blotchy red forearm. As soon as I’m seated, the test invigilator, Leonelle, starts to scribble on me in black biro, laddering small words and abbreviations in two columns down my inner arm: DOG, HOM, GRASS, ALT, BIRC, TREE, ASP, CAT, EGGW, EGGY in one, MILK, COD, SOY, WHE, PEA, BRAZ, HAZ, WAL, CAS, ALM in another. A lot of pipetting follows and then, with what looks like a pencil-sharpener’s blade, she punctures my skin to let the fluids seep in.
I soon feel a deep itch at CAT. The sensation’s like the aftermath of a mosquito’s bite – the small poisoning before the flesh starts to puff in new contours. Leonelle is now measuring the woman’s blotches with a school ruler, but every so often peeks at my arm, as if sizing up presents before they’re due to be opened. CAS, cashew, is rising quickly, a big thickened welt the size of a penny-piece. It soon takes on the shape of a heart, colonising the geometry of what it threatens to stop. I am allergic to cashew nuts – as I was aged six.
Before long, HOM, GRASS, ALT, BIRC and TREE come up like a regiment of little pink buttons, trooping my intolerances. And PEA and BRAZ, and HAZ and ALM as their auxiliaries. The medical students have stopped what they’re doing to enjoy my arm, and Leonelle seems genuinely excited. I am allergic to nuts. I am allergic to the outdoors – to birch, tree, grass, and a long-named fungus. I am allergic to the indoors – to dust-mites and domestic animals. And to WHE, which has fissured, doubled, a chain reaction that rises to look like a question mark: am I allergic to wheat?
The specialist sends me away with some photocopies. Which give advice on Oral Allergy Syndrome, since I’ve mentioned that some fruit makes me tingle. Before eating an apple, I’m to rub it on my lips, wait ten minutes, take and spit a bite, wait, bite and swallow and wait: I will need to groom my mouth for almost half an hour if I want a Granny Smith or Pink Lady. An apple a day is about all I’ll have time for.
A week later, I’m copied into a letter to my GP about EpiPens. Thank you very much for asking us to see this 29 year old writer, it opens, before listing some symptoms I never had: there’s a widespread rash that’s sprung from nowhere in my past. The letter runs through my positive results but is inadvertently kind, I like to think, in omitting my brand-new wheat allergy. He clinically fulfils the diagnostic criteria for anaphylaxis. This is likely to be related to nuts… I have now discharged him back to your care.
Axel had been a gendarme for thirty years, including a stint during the late ’80s when he’d been seconded as a bodyguard to François Mitterrand. He was a short, golden-skinned Breton in his early sixties, with closely-cropped ash-grey hair. He tweaked the tachograph one morning on the road from Lille to Arromanches – where we had an early, inflexible museum slot – slipping a clean disc into the machine when we stopped around dawn in a deserted car-park on the fast road into Normandy. It was cold, and he stood me one of his stubby, filterless Gitanes, giggling as I crouched behind his double-decker coach and coughed away at it. (more...)
At school I was bullied for being Jewish. Sure, I didn’t have to put up with the animal noises that my father had to stomach at a minor boarding school in Hertfordshire in the 1960s. But ‘Jew’ or ‘Jew boy’, shied unimaginatively from close range, were part of the miserable package of taunts and torments which was assigned to me in my first term at public school and made my initial two years there into a lingering daily misery. It didn’t seem right to complain, except in roundabout ways: I remember, after a mild bout of conjunctivitis had cleared up, rubbing soil from a pot of hyacinths into my eyes before breakfast to guarantee an extension to my sick note.
As my summer tan began to sallow that autumn, one of my classmates idly drew attention to the pigmentation of my skin: it was yellow. And so, from that moment, ‘little yellow boy’ became as inescapably part of the timetable as the weekly swimming lessons I so dreaded. The tireless abuse was all verbal, though it sometimes made use of props: my most enduring memory from that time is of being confronted with a sniggering yellow wall when I stood to contribute to a class debate, as the entire class brandished jaundiced exercise books or foolscap folders in front of their faces. A boy who sat next to me in many lessons (since his name was alphabetically adjacent to mine) doodled ‘yellow boy’ or ‘Tom Marks is a little yellow boy’ or perhaps ‘Tom Marks is a little fucking yellow boy’ (the details fail me) in columns that burgeoned over any yellow stationery he could muster.
It never occurred to me to associate the intermittent anti-Semitic gibes with the insistent stigmatisation of the tone of my skin. I don’t suppose any of my classmates made a conscious connection either; a sizeable minority of those who declared my tint a taint were themselves Jewish. But thinking back, it’s hard not to detect a resonance, at best ironic and at worst institutional, between the abuse historically meted out through that colour and those ersatz yellow signs and basic caricatures that classmates drew of me on their sulphur-coloured file-dividers. No-one would have pinned a yellow star on my blazer, for sure. But it’s discomforting to infer that those boys, for the most part sons of successful professionals in London, were able to activate the chromatic memory of historical persecution without them or their target seeming to notice.
There was a shadow-history of prejudice at the school that belied the diversity of its intake and the ecumenical bluster of its assemblies. Isaiah Berlin, one of its most celebrated alumni, had severed links with the old boys’ society when a quota of Jewish pupils was allegedly introduced by the governors in the late 1950s. An old story circulated that a couple of decades previously, a boy – a Jewish boy – had been seriously injured after tumbling, for whatever reason, from a classroom window. In the late ’90s, when I was a pupil there, casual intolerance swamped the lower years (I know that I once blundered through what I deemed a joke about Persian carpets in a shamefully misguided ploy to put a debating opponent in his place). Many of the boys who, like me, were small and toadying and on the slow train to puberty, became the butt for any manner of bigotry. Boys could be boys, it seemed, so long as they kept the school bobbing proudly at the top of the academic league tables.
**
At school I was bullied for being Jewish. I am not Jewish. Or at least I don’t think I’m Jewish. My father is Jewish but my mother is Catholic. My spirit was weaned – unsuccessfully – on the dreary liturgy and those stale communion wafers that you could mulch in the mouth, while feigning prayer, until the starch began to break down into sugar. But my not being Jewish didn’t seem to matter to the bullies: bullying never demands that the prejudice correspond to the prey. It pours its scorn doubly by mistaking identities. A half-Iranian friend, who went to a secondary school in the Midlands, recalls being known as ‘Jonny Jew’ during his time there.
People ask whether I’m Jewish because they anticipate I will be; it’s a question expecting the answer yes and my answer is a shrouded maybe. To those who are looking, I look Jewish: my skin tans easily, my thick curly hair would happily droop, were it long enough, into ringlets, I have no foreskin, and my nose is pronounced, even ornithological. (At a university party, a boy once broke off conversing with my sister to curl his finger down the length of her nose. Something he’d always wanted to try, he said). My name is one of those emigrant noms de guerre, like Rose or Stone, which are as eloquent a marker of Ashkenazi origins as were the Eastern European names they first endeavoured to disguise.
My father is Jewish but my mother is Catholic. This is always the answer, immediately. How false its simplicity is: there’s the brazen fusion of ethnic and religious identities, the muffled allusion to the Judaic lore of the maternal line, the turn to others to define myself, and the weighting of religions like binaries (Catholicism – dogmatic, doctrinal – doesn’t do things by halves; Judaism, I think, participates far more willingly in the Venn diagrams of the self). Most disconcerting is that ‘but’. We often use ‘but’ when we mean a different conjunction; the word’s diminutive scale can easily cover up for lazy or brittle logic. Here though, it jolts me to realise that I’ve been using it defensively, in pre-emptive denial, in the hope that its linguistic nonchalance will satisfy my questioner.
School taught me that a callow, often inadvertent anti-Semitism sometimes tarries where it shouldn’t in this country; it’s usually not taken seriously because it seems like a sort of mutual persiflage that the British Jewry has earned through its assimilation. But I think it informs how I define or defend myself when I’m put on the spot, and not least because my being an in-betweener allows the acidic repartee to take place internally between different parts or versions of myself.
I’m Jewish but my wife is Catholic. This is my father’s answer. I’ve inherited the impulse to make the gentle excuse that must be a legacy from his father, a man who edged away from his orthodox upbringing in East London and into a post-war version of Englishness. My grandfather felt embarrassed in the tasselled wool vest, the tzitzit, he wore each day beneath his uniform to school in Hackney; I suspect war and the navy played the role that the universities would for later generations, giving him space to take hold of his identity. When he married my grandmother, brought up in the more affluent surroundings of Highgate, they didn’t set up for family life in Golders Green or Hampstead but in Northwood, where their social life revolved not around the synagogue but the cricket club. When the time came for my father’s Bar Mitzvah, he didn’t have a Bar Mitzvah; he was confirmed in the Liberal Jewish Synagogue.
I will never be Jewish and I will never not be Jewish. My family’s secularized, apathetic Catholicism – we mark the big fixtures of the Christian calendar but none of us worship on them – leaves room to acknowledge, sometimes comically, how much of another tradition we’ve opted out of. On Christmas Eve, we feast on shellfish and the next day we squabble about the last sausage wrapped in bacon. My father goes to synagogue once a year when his father’s name is called out among the remembered dead. None of us mark Hanukkah or Rosh Hashanah, Passover or Yom Kippur, and I’d struggle to say when they fell were it not that someone will unfailingly offer me New Year greetings in September or early October each year. We overcompensate for not being what we aren’t: when I laid the three tiles of goy once, in a game of Scrabble, my father tried to disallow it.
I could wander much further in scratching this itch. I could wander back home and beyond, to my grandmother, and to the streets of Whitechapel where my grandfather’s ancestors had their homes. I am already a tourist at the Jewish sites of Europe and its fringes: at Shoah memorials, in the cemeteries, temples, ghettoes, museums, and restaurants. The tombs look like magnified herring roe in Fez, like chipped teeth in Prague. I got lost in the forests at Salaspils. In Paris, when the tour groups I lead shuffle into Notre Dame, I find a bench in its Eastern shadows, near the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation. And at the Tempio Maggiore in Rome, where the squared dome makes a unique stand against that city’s many rounded crowns, I once joined a tour myself and pinned the kippa in my hair; it slipped and fell and slipped again, until I held it to my skull to keep it in place.
Packs of men, women, and children are rounding the corner of Albion Street with their hands full of fire. The blazing torches they clutch look like matchsticks made for a giant and their flames burn in unruly shapes. Every so often, when the head of one of these torches detaches and tumbles, someone hoofs a ball of fire along the street for ten metres before it expires. It rolls in slow motion: arsonist’s tumbleweed. Metal troughs rattle past, brimming and spitting with a fire fed by whatever’s been left to smoulder at the side of the road. Their heat is so intense I have to turn away.
This is Lewes on Bonfire Night, when a drowsy East Sussex market town wakes up with its eyes ablaze. Each year, its picturesque streets stage an edgy pantomime which fuses together local celebration and commemoration (of the town’s 16c. Protestant martyrs, primarily, but also of the men it lost in the two wars), anti-popery, and topsy-turvydom left over from Halloween. Above all, it’s a warrant for fervent, gleeful pyromania. (more...)
I have started learning poems by heart again. The first time round, I was six and under orders from Mrs Russell, a primary-school teacher who sometimes said ‘bugger’ loudly in the classroom and whose brisk curly hair later made me conflate her with my mental image of the Queen in middle age. Every other weekend, the class homework was to memorize twenty or perhaps thirty lines of verse. We were allowed to choose a poem ourselves, which meant the whole task was probably a mischievous assignment designed as much to test our parents as their children. I invariably selected something from an illustrated book of comic verse that somebody had given me as a birthday present.
It was a bantam-weight anthology which had ‘How Doth the Little Crocodile?’ and other staples of Victorian nonsense, several extracts from Hilaire Belloc, various poems by Brian Patten and Roger McGough, and a lot of Spike Milligan (which delighted me, since my father would unfailingly run through Milligan’s greatest hits, usually more than once, whenever we took a long car journey). There was something fun about giants scoffing giant jellies, which, more than twenty years later, is the only poem that I’m convinced I learnt: I envied those of my classmates who, when called on to recite after the morning milk-break, managed to elicit laughter from an otherwise unresponsive crowd as they unwrapped fresh little imaginative surprises from what I for one took to be dusty verse-claddings. (more...)
Afterings
The world turned turtle on me.
After the footnotes and the remedies,
After the mental embassies,
The missed alarms and deadline days,
The world turned turtle.
For as long as I have wanted to be a writer, I have been on the verge of giving up writing. In the last five years alone, I have made time not to write: a collaborative prose ramble around London’s Victorian cemeteries, a play about sex, bombs and Dresden, a comic novel about coaxing coachloads of American teenagers around Europe, a slim, elegant study of Cleopatra’s Needle, one short story about a nineteenth-century rubbish dump in Essex and another on gate-crashing West End theatres, an elegiac film about the resurgence of the far-right in Rome, a villanelle on the catacombs of Santa Cecilia on the Via Appia, where I once joined a tour led by an irreverent Filipino friar, a pair of sonnets on Samuel Pepys’s fondness for parmesan, and any number of quasi-metaphysical poems inspired by stuttering relationships (the one about a runaway bicycle, the one about a snowed-in Peugeot, the one about hand-me-down kitchen utensils).
(more...)