Enfiewd

Of course, you wonder who named this place. You wonder why they left the old place. And you wonder why you can't quite feel the same as a friend who said: 'I cannot find a scrap of pride in Enfield in any corner of my soul, or recall ever having felt any. Despairing fondness for this or that bit of it: all the more poignant, and even tender, for being mixed with the familiar disappointment and shame. But never pride.'

Faith

Imagine the people who knew they could fly. Imagine the people who chose to fight the Atlantic and make a new life. Imagine the people who already lived here. Imagine the people who vanished from the colony. Imagine a town called Duck.

Eunice

Tryon, NC. The sun was shining. The air was sharp and still. The house was sad, shaming, uplifting, bent and rusted and nailed-up with need and pride and lies and truths, its foundations new and so, so old. The boys on the porch of the place next door were listening to Kanye, laughing, drinking beer.

I'd wanted to go to see where she was born. I'd wanted to walk the walk she took to her piano teacher's, maybe ask the teacher's ghost what it was like for her being English here, what it was like trying to get Eunice to do her homework. I'd wanted to see the hall where they tried to make her parents watch her play from the back row. In my soft, self-centred way I'd wanted to feel connections between black and white, man and woman, between my country and hers, between her unbelonging and mine. I'd wanted to find signs we - my people - have learned from her life, that we have no desire to go back to the days when she and her parents and her seven brothers and sisters lived here. I'd wanted to find signs the flags being waved right now are just flapping sheets of pointless rage, that our hearts and blood and memories have too much in common to let us reverse back down the hill into hell.

We drove home and my daughter played me 'Four Women' and I wanted to cry for the hurt she shares with the woman who lived in this house. And for the hurt she can never share with her.

For England.

My dear,

There's something I must tell you.

There was a raven. It would come, often, roof-surfing on the lid of a jar in the snow-covered parts of me, lurking black like a prophesy, twirling my heart around like the witch's hat in the rec.

How tiring it must be, I would think, to find yourself a symbol, yet still sit proud. How tiring it must be to find yourself pretending to be dead, just to scare the tourists at the Tower.

Anyway. In that grief-quiet, sea-bound childhood the thing with feathers would come and tell me this was a dream and that everything would be ok. It would come and I would squeeze my eyes together, my fists together, and I would wake up. And the moon outside the window would blaze, brief. And daylight would always come again.

Ha! Pardonne-moi ce caprice d'enfant! You know Dickens had a raven called Grip? And Poe and he found themselves together in Philadelphia? And - perhaps - you know the rest of that fiction? Well. We mourn the loss of our familiars, our bonds. We grasp at the abstract no better than birds. And they too mourn.

Yes. I found myself in a dreamed Philly last night and my parents were gone. A chambermaid opened the door and you were asleep, naked, smiling, on top of the bed. My dying friend was angry: I owed him five pounds. I squeezed and squeezed but the bird never came.

Ravens pretend to be crows, entice them to come and share food. But they have no time for seagulls, which they chase away. I wish I was a crow, not a seagull. I wish I could surf on snow-covered roofs. Perhaps one day. Perhaps one day we'll do it together?

Yes. Anyway. Again.

It's time to go.

A kiss from your history: X

Still Red.

When you grew old, when the glory faded

and the hope dissolved,

she’d come round once a year

and wrap us back together,

painting stories of petalled blood

that fluttered from the sky, settled on mud,

gentling like your son's first smile,

cooling pain with a kiss, easing you into sleep.

And you, the cocky kid who lied about his age,

so proud and hopeful and bold,

you lied to me too, years before,

told me I was wrong about Spurs,

then shied away, man-wary always

of her dark fears, and of your shame

when they'd tried to make her their own,

when they'd tried to take her from us.

I didn't mind, not really: her wry, wise warmth

watched over us each time we met

on Sundays of scarlet, quiet and mist

and, after you'd gone, she’d reappear

and I’d ask her to sit, tell me

about death and your friends,

tell me about the stench of Greek sand

and the French rain and the trenches.

And she stayed near me as I grew,

ghosting over Whitehall and Thiepval

and she's held us all - alone, in millions -

been feted then despised, rendered mute

at Goose Green and Basra and Helmand,

hated and burned and bled

as they lied and used her to play

their games till I, too, wanted her dead.

Today I saw the hateful green banners,

the taunts and threats tightening

as they divided us from each other,

frightening as they took our voice from us

and I stood, as wood-in-vice, transfixed,

wishing you were here,

dreaming you in fields and streets,

needing to know she still loves you.

And I’m with her right now mate,

in a world that’s doing it all again,

and as Autumn chills of loss and change

shadow my tired, strange town

I can hear her voice, her creaking dignity

spanning stone, copse, day, night

and yes, I can touch her pale cheek: sure now -

I think - that what she really wants is peace.

Mojo

Annoying word.

I don't know when I first thought I'd lost mine: June maybe, July? Either 2012 or 2013. Perhaps a century or so earlier...

... and I was in a hard, sun-shot London kitchen yesterday with someone who was enduring the worst pain imaginable. And in the middle of the monstrous, hateful fucking grip of his agony, he said something so funny, so spot on, so absolutely right, we both laughed. And my mojo came back. And I remembered this was the second person in a week to do that for me. And that the other person had been 5,451 miles away. And then I realised we don't either have or not have our mojo, that it's something that springs to electric life in the sudden closing of the gaps between two people. And it makes those two people more than they were before, however briefly. And I realised it's why we live and why we keep on living.

Seahouses

1.

Guillemots and kittiwakes and puffins and a grey starling. The squawks are deafening. Though when you've flown from West Africa to Northumberland, when you're this sharp and beautiful, I reckon you're allowed to make a bloody racket.

The boat rocks. We adjust. They tell us the lighthouse is now solar-powered, which worries me, frankly. I'm just a little in love with Grace Darling.

The sky is fifty shades of black. Islands come and go. Cuthbert may be the least cool name in the world but he sat over there on that spare grey howl of rock and he contemplated all the stuff I would love to contemplate if I dared. His ghost contemplates us as we pass but it decides not to bother waving.

Sometimes everything touches - the Whoo! of the first glimpse of the seals; the mum clinging on to her daughter to stop her falling overboard; the fact that a heroine at twenty-two died of TB at twenty-six. And sometimes nothing touches and there's no difference between life and death, you and me, sad tears and happy tears.

Those seals: they stare benignly. Their lumbering ugliness is beautiful. On land they move like I do on Monday mornings. In the sea they move like I used to on Saturday afternoons.

The boat rocks again. I want to stay here. Everything feels so true and so absolute. The punches of gale and rain and the uncertain strokes of survival are ferocious, kind, thoughtless.

2.

Back on sure. The soft, dark goths - she looks like Siouxsie, he looks like Siouxsie - are playing Krazee Golf. The old man next to me on the bench coughs up a sticky puddle of phlegm. The girl goth yips with glee as she lands a hole in one. The seagulls are, as usual, predatory and disapproving: I ordered fish on its own, no chips this time.

A father playing with his kids is absently carrying a putter and a London Review of Books calendar. The mother is texting. They live - I have no doubt - in North London. My daughters are so far away I know I can't rescue them and it hurts like seagulls pecking at my eyes.

I finish the fish, walk towards the castle, pulled by all the stuff that came before me, stopping on the beach just long enough to get burned.

Leave: A Conversation Overheard On The 210 To Golders Green.

'Who was it who suggested that the opposite of war
Is not so much peace as civilisation?'

      Michael Longley

Stan: ... Fuck you. I'd barely seen you for years, then when you did finally show up you wanted something. Everything. So I play your game, follow your rules. And then you tell me I've disappointed you, tell me I've ruined everything.

Ollie: Well fuck you too and your backward ways. Fuck you too in your hatred of anyone not like you. Your ignorance has cost us all.

Stan: Pot. Kettle. You've always hated me: your contempt's been slicing the skin off me all our lives. I am Your Other. So just eat your quinoa and shut up.

Ollie: I don't get it. They say you're thick, poorly educated. I've defended you. But it's true. Why else would you try to destroy us?

Stan: I could be both or I could be either. Which is it? Thick? Poorly educated? Thick and poorly educated? I think you have to decide. And then you have to take responsibility for your decision. Is it genetics that makes me like this? Free will? Is it economics? Culture? Class? My neurology? Psychology? Environment? Luck? Which of your inventions are you condemning me for being influenced by?

Ollie: You... You surprise me sometimes.

Stan: You never surprise me. You're allergic to surprise. Surprise and uncertainty.

Ollie: Bollocks. We just speak different languages these days. Maybe we always did?

Stan: No.

Ollie: No?

Stan: Yes.

Ollie: Bloody hell. You're all id.

Stan: Aaaaggghhhhh!

Ollie: See?

Stan: You're all superego, if you want to play that one.

Ollie: You've hurt me. All of us.

Stan: And that's a bad thing?

Ollie: I don't know. Yes. Making people feel bad is a bad thing.

Stan: How did the moneylenders feel that day Jesus smashed their stalls up?

Ollie: What?! Bad I suppose.

Stan: And did it do any good?

Ollie: It depends. Did it shame them? Yes. Did it change them? It probably made them more angry, more sour, more willing to rip people off.

Stan: Exactly. They were changed. And they were offered an opportunity. And the temple never quite looked the same.

Ollie: Nothing here will ever be the same again. People are scared.

Stan: That's true every day. Every moment.

Ollie: OK. You win. You win. There's no point to this.

Stan: There's no end, so there are no winners. And there never was a point, just the ones we each wrote into our own stories. 'Your whole life, like a sandglass, will always be reversed and will ever run out again.' Nietzsche. See? I'm thick. But I'm not poorly-educated.

Ollie: At least we have that in common.

Silence

Quinoa?

Stan: No thanks.

To be continued...

Leeds. Or When The Things Before And After The Thing Are Better Than The Thing Itself.

On.

There are moments of peace, ended abruptly each time by the realisation that this is a moment of peace. There are other people's memories: imagine, just for a moment, chasing a dawn milk-float through a fog-choked '79 estate, warnings about the Yorkshire Ripper washing around your brain like sour cream.

There are exquisite triumphs when the older us achieves what the younger us so desperately needed, and we wonder if our autism is just ours, or cultural, or universal.

There are moments of anger dispelled by truth: one of the signs a woman is mad apparently, to be avoided, is that she likes Sylvia Plath's poetry. So we read 'Ariel', fuck-you defiant and smiling.

There are times, of course, London calls too loudly, too insincerely.

And on.

We lie in the bath with The New Yorker and read that 'Las Vegas' means 'The Meadows' and it pleases. We lie in the bath and think Julia Roberts thoughts, then bloody-work-on-Tuesday thoughts, then Julia Roberts thoughts. We lie in the bath and think we must remember to listen to that Super Furry Animals album.

We wish we hadn't, as ever, forgotten the toothpaste. We wish we didn't feel a need to be liked by taxi drivers and ghosts. We wish for love.

From the other side of the canal, the old fisherman wanted so much to tell us about the two great towers, self-conscious reminders of this city's long-gone strength. He shouted and we listened. We took his photograph and find ourselves now sitting in a later train, eased with warmth and thirty-five shared years, wondering if we too had one who got away.

And on.

Carambolages. Paris. No Words.

Carambolages. Grand Palais. Le Dieu tutelaire Samvara et sa paredre Vajravarahi. Tibet. 15th/16th Century. 

Spot The Deliberate Mistake: After Wandering About Wikipedia Too Much At 6 In The Morning On The Bloody Victoria Line. Again.

Facts.

1. When the Ancient Egyptians buried their dead, they would, as you probably know, put beer and bread in the tomb - Boddington's, apparently, and a sliced granary loaf from Budgens in Thebes High Street (unless the dead man was really important, in which case it would be artisan Gruyere focaccia with rosemary and ginseng imported from Crouch End).

2. When Inuit kill seals, they pour snow into the creatures' mouths so their souls aren't thirsty in the afterlife. Which is considerate of them. And only became a problem recently when vengeful seals started clubbing Inuit to death and pouring their own over-priced craft beer (sourced from a pop-up in Dalston) down their throats.

3. In parts of China, Tibet, North Yorkshire and Mongolia, people are given a 'sky burial', their bodies cut into small pieces and left on a mountainside to await recycling by vultures. Or, if they're unlucky, psychopathic yaks. Or short-sighted lamas. Or short-sighted llamas.

4. Victorians were often buried with bells (or an iPad) to raise the alarm, just in case their relatives had been a bit too eager to get rid of them. Or were displaying that famous Victorian love of sophisticated practical jokes.

5. When I go, I'd quite like a vinyl copy of Bob Marley and the Wailers' 'Live' album buried with me. And a turntable, some decent speakers, an amp and maybe a spare stylus. Oh, and some cheese. And a DVD of any of Ben Elton's West End musical triumphs.

Uber

They say to me:

• If we're going to smile at the sun, we should also smile at the rain.
• You let too many refugees in here. They are criminals. Look at those two over there, they don't work, these people, they just sell drugs and fight. This is why we must learn street-fighting. The war will come and we must be ready.
• I am Bulgarian but I'm also Turkish. Sometimes one, sometimes the other. They are both my home but neither is my home. England is my home. In England they don't care if you are Bulgarian or if you are Turkish. Let me tell you about the history of the Balkans.
• I don't go on holiday any more. There is nowhere safe.
• I don't care if my son grows up and hates football. But he must never support Fenerbahce.
• What do you think? Livingstone was not anti-Semitic. Do you think he was anti-Semitic? Do you? You don't want to answer me do you?
• Where I'm from, we have twelve weeks of sun. Then twelve weeks of rain. Here you have twelve minutes of sun. Then twelve minutes of rain.
• I miss Kurdistan. But I love Thurrock.
• I've just left my son at the hospital. He has to be on this machine twice a day. Every day. He has thalassaemia. Thalassa means 'sea'. Sea Of Blood.

I say to them:

• Thank you.

And then I give them a score out of five.

The Man Who Fell To Earth

The world is divided, he once told me, into two. There are those who - when it comes to their plane plummeting from the sky - will put their own mask on before trying to help their child. And there are those who will, instead, rush headlong to help the child, risking both their lives. In that battle, he told me, the end will come. 

It's possible, he also told me, to influence the outcome of a Spurs match simply by choosing to arrive at two forty-five rather than two fifty. Arrive earlier and the entire stadium is different. Arrive earlier and you encounter a different thousand people. Arrive earlier and, as you squeeze past the young bloke wearing a 'Kane 10' shirt leaving the toilet, the young bloke you wouldn't have seen if you'd arrived later, his train of thought may be shifted from The One Who Got Away to what his mate Darren said earlier and when, in the opening minutes, Danny Rose dribbles down the wing near where he's standing and chooses the wrong pass, this young bloke may scream at him and Rose may start to doubt himself.

Yes. The world is divided, he once told me, between those who hear the call of the Carolina Wren in the woods and find it enough, and those who are determined to identify the bird and make poetry from its song.

And there are five meanings of Dao, none of them exact, he once told me, but this morning I can only remember one: 'the ultimate metaphysical entity that was responsible for the way the world is and is responsible for the way it ought to be'.

Escape

In the good old days you could catch the train at the very last minute and find yourself in a carriage with no exit except a door that - if you shoved down the window and leaned out to turn the handle - opened straight into the flying countryside. 

I sat. Six seats, one other passenger: after five minutes, he put down his Telegraph and came over to sit next to me, asked me, without preamble, if I had a girlfriend. We were passing Pluckley then, an hour to go before Charing Cross, so I told him 'No'. He wrote his name and address down for me in beautiful, calligraphic handwriting and explained to me how his ancestors had fled, how their neighbours had chosen to begin hating them and how they'd found a kind of peace in Spitalfields.

He said Arbuthnot was a Huguenot name but I've never bothered to look it up, knowing that, at least, will be true. (One quarter of us they say, one quarter have their blood swimming through us in salted memory.)

He'd tried to learn French three times, he said, but he was no good at languages. I thought he was going to cry then and I was glad when we got to London, glad when he helped me open the carriage door.

N22 7AY

I consider carving this moment into a poem. In the half-closed eye of the storm: a still life. Trees and peace and water, a sweet sunlight. I wonder if it was really Monet’s failing eyesight that gave birth to his impressions. I wonder if I should go to Giverny.

Two men stroll past, hand-in-hand, wearing lumberjack shirts and an each-other ease: the grace of God. An Asian couple suck the life out of reeking fags, spark images of Gitanes-posing at a Gordon Road disco and the ignominy of The Last Dance. I hear Bach; I watch brightly-coloured plastic dragons bob on the lake, holding fire as the pretty Polish girl ties them up for the winter. The smell of bacon does its damnedest, ducks squawk, families walk and the mumumumum of a baby mocks my sudden broodiness.

And the People’s Palace watches it all: serene, pragmatic. I can see it from the top of my road, did you know that? There, it looks misty and magical, offers up music and a kind of rhyme. Here, it breathes safety, something quite certain, something quite prosaic.

The pregnant woman at the next table whispers on her phone. I have no thought, no feeling. There is, abruptly, silence. I consider carving this moment into a poem.

Two Roses

I buy one. Red. Of course. Two blonde women – working here forever, mother and daughter – mock-fight to serve me. Two giggles. A quid to you darling.

I have a map. They’ve given me a map. I check it, discreetly: no real man needs a map. No real friend needs a map. No real lover needs… Right over in the corner – so far over it’s in Essex not London – are The Woodland Graves. Sounds like an ’80’s indie band.

I trudge through the spring haze, get lost twice, but there’s no way I’m looking at the map again. Eventually, a sign: ‘No Cards, No Trinkets, No Pictures’. I duck my head, walk through a bramble-covered, badly-creosoted wooden arch. I’ve never had a trinket. Maybe I should have more trinkets?

Headstones: wonky, cracked, ignored. And trees: each with a number engraved on a small metal sign nailed into its body. I suppose this is a copse. A corpse copse. But it’s the wrong place. I think. Yeah, I should know, I should. But a lot’s happened in a hundred years.

I gently leave the rose in this wrong place, leave it lying pure and new on the colourless ground under Tree No.5. Then (I admit it) I look again at the map. The Woodland Glade: that’s it! I think of Winnie The Pooh, Hobbits, The Pogles. And I almost start to cry. If I wasn’t the kind of man who never looks at maps, I would.

I walk back across the centuries, past sinking, bent crosses, past stone Victorian women pointing at the heavens and mausoleums bigger than my house. It’s getting hot. I wonder what the plural of mausoleum is. The women giggle again when I ask for another rose.

I didn’t really know her. A few times, that’s all. But without the sentence, without the question, without her anger: nothing.

The glade is beautiful, childhood-beautiful, almost beautiful enough. This is the right place. There, look: her name, dates of birth and death. I plant the rose in the soft soil, its petals touching the words, obscuring the ‘e’. I breathe. I take a picture. I remember. I realise she’d definitely appreciate the first rose more. I walk back to the station.

Basilica

I have a note I made afterwards. It says, ‘What is the relationship between meaning, context and purity?’ No, no idea what I was going on about either.

I walk in: an embracingly chill air, an exquisite choir. Beyond angels. I soon realise the sweet sound (remember that gulab jamun we had in Harlesden?) is a recording – God’s Muzak – and the voices abruptly stop being beautiful and I start to resent the cold.

There’s a tapestry: Madonna and Child. She has a ‘Don’t you even think about judging me’ look – narrowed, disapproving, Bacallish eyes. He has the face and huge, pasty (washed-out)/pasty (like a pie) English head of a 35-year-old computer programmer and a wide-eyed ‘Yeah? So? I’m breastfeeding. So what?’ look.

I leave them to it. Outside, there are four Italian tourists. Three have selfie sticks.

Man Crush

So your carte is entirely blanche 

and you must name one man you fancy

she says, 

having just listed twenty-six women 

she fancies,

having lured me outside,

umbrellaless,

into the strained, ecstatic rain of fantasy.

I think. I Think. I THINK.

Paul Simonon, I say. In 1977. Not now. 

Who? she says.

Paul Simonon. Does that make me gay? I say.

It depends, she says.

On what? I say.

On whether I'd fancy him too, she says.

Oh, I say.
 

Sometimes I wonder if anyone else

finds it all quite as confusing

as I do.