It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track.

A year ago today, I was reading this book on my first tube of the morning. It’s so, so in love with music and with language and with knowing stuff and sharing stuff and with the day and night of being human, that it’s utterly, exquisitely transporting. And for a few seconds that day, I hated - even more than usual - the mundanity of changing trains, hated it for ripping me away from the zest and guts of this burning, wordy thing.

I remember gripping it tightly on the platform at Finchley Road station, freezing cold, breeze-blown, feeling a weird mix of joy and gratitude and yearning. And then sitting on a bench, opening it and starting to read it again. And then missing my train to Uxbridge.

Ian Penman was one of three music writers (Paul Morley and Julie Burchill being the others) who made me both desperate to write (in their very different ways, their raging, tripping words flew so high and were so slap-in-the-face/kiss-on-the-lips, they seemed to call from other, better, worlds) and unknowingly intimidated the scared, shy, silly adolescent me-I-was so much, I couldn’t risk showing anyone my own writing for years. Love/hate.

Penman’s title is from Auden, clever, chameleonic, transport-obsessed Auden, who once, long before I was born, talked about

“...the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”

So. They all - Penman, Morley, Burchill, Auden - still intimidate me a little, but these days reading rare, beautiful books like this mostly makes me want to try and capture at least a little of my own magic, to capture it and share it before the ship sails on. Sometimes Uxbridge just has to wait.