In some ways this is nice; it’s a little trip down memory lane. But in other ways it’s actually slightly scary: the amount of sentiment stored up in what is, at root, junk, is pretty impressive. Of course some of it is good old fashioned false-economy… “Maybe I’ll need that, one day….” One never specifies what contingency might render it necessary to have (say) three feet of sealed-air anti-shock packaging so immediately available that having to order some would constitute personal or professional disaster. But still, there are little tendrils — and let’s get this in perspective, I’m talking about the very tiniest of barely-detectable twinges, not great wracking aches here — of guilt or regret or something like them, wrapped cobweb-like around these things in their places.

I suppose in a way this is like moving. Every time I did it as a kid (plenty, though not obscenely frequently) I felt (in retrospect) the freedom of complete self-reinvention, the discarding of a previous life like an outgrown shell. This is how I came out: on my first day at sixth form, four hundred miles from my comprehensive, I mentioned it in passing, was an object of headline curiosity for a month, and carried on with everything else in life with an iron self-confidence borne of that reinvention. And though I’ve moved since I’ve been in London, it’s always been within the same job, or within West London, or in some way just not really a “proper” move: there has been no sense of daring, with all due love and respect to my former (and brilliant) housemates, no real sense of jumping in the deep end or changing horses.

So perhaps this is my ode to doing something a bit more quotes-unquotes dangerous….

Personally, I spent 8 minutes yelling “ASK HER MORE ABOUT THAT BIT!!!!” at my former self, but hearing her voice again after getting on for 17 years was pretty extraordinary in itself. Thanks I guess are due to whichever of my teachers at Treviglas got me to do it; I suppose it must have been Mr. Firmston (history), but it could equally have been Mrs. Sleep (English).

Anyway, my own personal blast-from-the-past. 1991 or 1992 vintage. I rescued this off tape; how long will an mp3 on the internet last? Makes you feel like a donation to the Wayback Machine, or “rogue archivist” Carl Malamud, or if you like the big picture, the Long Now foundation.

Plymouth in the Blitz

Plymouth in the Blitz

Do yell if this doesn’t work in your browser.

1. “Gosh, a lot of you are actually driving very sensibly” — which is a shame, because a lot of them actually are for once.
2. “Your strategy of revving it high, throwing it in first and then rapidly releasing the clutch has achieved its predictable effect in making you go sideways. Why do you look so perplexed?” — because not everyone has quite got the hang of it.
3. “I don’t care, ma’am, if one word from your children could bring peace to the Middle East: I am not walking in the road to avoid them when you have them strung out across the entire pavement.” — because I am not always completely lovely to everyone
4. “Yes, you’re right; your rear fog intensifier *should* be turned on, even though there is no snow and visibility is perfect. It is, as you so astutely surmise, an infra-red lamp which melts away the snow to the benefit of the driver following you. You are being public-spirited and are not merely an idiot who is blinding everyone.” — because sometimes I’m not above low sarcasm
5. “Would you like to get in?” — which I would have said, after stopping and opening the boot, to the woman following me home from work, who had dyed her hair three shades darker and whose roots were starting to show. Not that she was close or anything.
6. “This looks just like a chocolate box” — because it really does, down my road. Smoke curling out of chimneys, tree branches laden with snow, little fox footprints everywhere…

Do feel free to share your own words of wisdom, frustration or delight in the comments….

Nine silences for a friend

I
Please listen carefully
I speak quietly
Of very small things
which could not change my life
or heal my soul. But which
Twist and soar in their own joy,
large enough to share some
at the rest of us, such as:
How I knew I was at rest at last
and not danger, how I recognised
my past and was suddenly so
not at war with truth but admit
the pierce of sunlight into dusty
book-room.

Please tread softly and slowly
For this moment is scared of sudden
movement and should not have its spell
broken. Listen to this stilled air
of perfect knowing ourselves, because
our clumsy voices are finally listening
as loud as speech; that said,
Here is the symbol and the end of
understanding, here is lazy ease,
thick and heavy as bone should be
to be the final symbol.

I have had weight inside
and know that life’s completion:
this small voice asks
very happily
not for revolution or
New Mystical Knowledge Of The Ancients
but instead says,
these were some small things
that got thought by me
and that I have now told you
and that can’t make anything
better but can quietly be themselves
and with you.

II
Here we are again
In my small safe space.
I wanted to invite you to
have one for yourself.

You can see the speech
hang in the white air, here
and be accustomed to your own ideal
and stillness can allow weak

bluster to seep away alongside
snide pretence born, we know it,
of fear, and for me I am no longer
anything I need worry for.

I see you live on the world and
with and for it and under it
and I hurt when you stumble
and rage when you hurt.

All this is simple. But some of it
is possibly true and possibility can
be kind to us sometimes if
we can bring ourselves to let it.

III
I have no muse or useful
psycho-illogical back-flip
powering the writing forward but….

I have made every false
start before and maybe again
all because of the urgency of
rain and the kindness of strangers
stapling my soul into a
crumpled sheaf, an extraneous leaf
who’d feel better in a textbook than
in Mills & Boon or Irvine Welsh
but falls like a page of Python
in a world of pain

But then I open.

IV
So the work is, what,
an indifference? Rather everything else
that doesn’t not care but from
maybe this illusory altitude and
very still where the winds of change
have not been grouped together

we have allowed the sun to rise on
an agreement, celestial Canutes,
knowing our powerlessness and so proving
ourselves in harmony in some way
as yet unknown to Gossip Science
or that vague beery clarity when it
is as simple as a fist to solve things.

I cannot bear that I have had to
come away in this direction so far
from so many of you. And I cannot
bear to return and then leave once more
to be again alone. But when I walk
away I do so knowing love & affection
to be truth and my need for them also
leads me away from those others who were
never self-confidence or extraversion
or capacity or any of the other things
(which were not so very other)
that I tried to make them be.

Hopeless naming names or describing colours.
I would rather hold you dazedly as
this stormy sea brings in joy & fear
and I would still rather help you out
very timidly but the voyage is not mine to take.

V
This poem will not try to be anything
which it is not.

VI
I have wandered around the house
looking for this poem.
I could not find these words.

(If these are the words I could not find,
around whose house did I wander?)

VII
I have never estimated
the value of precision or
the shying away from the
precipice. I have made a
virtue of navigation and so
I know I will go off well
desert-isolated and not hurt you.
Now these roads are well-worn
as am I
and I am granted a spring of the
soul to draw light forth from the
dappled branches and see the mirror
from a different angle. Where I
should be, stands someone else. I am
unfamiliar and hatchling. I am not
ever very far beyond this.

So onwards and inwards is the
difficult mission to make
and to return having learnt
the value of stopping, or How
Not To Fear Imperfection.

VIII
Sullen silences are not those
at peace with themselves
but they happen more:

the pause between the question and
the answer
for calculation

the silence between the lightning and
the thunder
in which the explosion gathers itself
blanketing other sound
sealing it up, soaking it up
to finally form itself.

or the instant response to the
news of his death
… what? (lost.)

IX
Rare silences flower and
cannot be examples but
must be moments trapped
in the mind’s rose-tinted amber.

So this perhaps florid recommendation
is just that, not wanting nor able to be an exemplar.

And these very careful words
very carefully
want you to follow them
to where for a split
second it is quiet and safe
and you can think.

Just doing my duty….

1. To pack, simply sort through your belongings and throw 50% of them out, until you have twice what you started with
2. Whilst packing, you will suddenly remember your favourite shirt/blouse/t-shirt and, despite not having thrown a single piece of clothing out for the last 20 years, will be utterly unable to find it
3. You will make a careful and concise list of what goes into each box, and will label each box clearly with its own unique code. Even as you are doing this, you know with a chilling insight that your list will be wrong and the boxes will somehow arrive unlabelled.
4. As you unpack the contents of your previous studio flat into your new 12 bed semi in Berkshire, you will realise rapidly that there isn’t enough space for all your stuff.
5. If, upon unpacking, you actually look at anything as you take it out, you will think that at least 50% of it could be thrown out, and will wonder why you didn’t do that before you moved
6. All of this will be uppermost in your mind while you are in the process of moving. Having moved, it will settle back down in your mind with other interesting facts you don’t use every day (how to programme the video-tape recorder, which FM frequency Radio 4 is found on in Cheltenham, and the fact that my phone number when I was seven was “Weasenham St. Peter 306″, I kid you not) and in consequence you will approach your next move with a happy-go-lucky and inordinately perilous sense of impending success.
7. Estate agents cannot tell “up” from “down”, “front” from “back” nor, I suspect, in some cases, “arse” from “elbow”

“Like the Murphy’s, I’m not bitter.”

Hope you’ve all got widescreen monitors. Sorry.