Lived here long?

Here's a thing. I have a desperate need to be understood. The best way to describe it is I feel the distress of being misunderstood physically. It's something I have to consciously let go in social situations or conversations are ruined, gatherings rendered awkward.

Here's another thing. The most rewarding work I ever did, certainly the stuff I felt most passionately, was for an aspiring community arts charity, running projects and helping organise our town's revived annual feast of St John using and adapting what remained on record of the traditional festivities. It blossomed in to a long weekend of fairs, markets, gigs and huge colourful processions and dances through the town's traffic free streets. In time it became a ten day arts festival. Most importantly, we sought to use it as a vehicle, as a means of instilling pride and sense of place in one of the UKs most impoverished communities with year round projects. 

In a nutshell, our ambition wasn't matched by funding and a few years back the whole edifice came crashing down. The charity wrapped up, our year-round work and our wider agenda died with it and some well meaning folk stepped in to "save" the annual celebration as a standalone endeavour.

Now, how do you feel about this joke?:

Two sailors from Newlyn were shipwrecked on a desert island. After the initial shock they found the island had an abundance of food. They built a comfortable shelter and over time various outbuildings. A settlement.
One morning they spotted a ship on the horizon. Beside themselves with excitement, they hurriedly lit the bonfire they'd built on the islands highest point ready for this very day.
Their signalling was acknowledged by the ship and soon the captain was being rowed ashore. Salvation.
The captain was hugely impressed by the shipwrecked Newlyn men's endeavours and was fascinated by what they had built. They showed him their pig sty, vegetable plot and how they had salvaged a semblance of civilised life from what could have been a fatal situation. 
"Tell me, what's that building half way up the hill?" asked the captain.
"That's our chapel" said one of the sailors
"This is extraordinary" said the captain "A testament to faith and mans will with God's breath behind him." 
The men glowed with pride.
"And the building a little further up?" asked the captain
"Oh, that's the chapel we don't go to."

Anyone born here, or indeed anyone with roots in a small community, will recognise this joke and for what it's worth I think it's one of my favourites.

Not so one of the new leading lights of our "saved" festivities - a person from somewhere else - who not only didn't find it even vaguely amusing, but expressed great sadness at how hateful it is and bemoaned the damage religion does.

Which is where I came in. The need to be understood. I don't mean to single out individuals here and I trust I've stayed just the right side of not identifying anyone - But imagine. Imagine arriving from elsewhere in to the middle of something fundamental to the character, the very being, of a place and being so incapable of understanding what you're in the middle of that you think you can run it.
  I need to be understood. Instead I see what I understand to be the embers of my culture appropriated and presented back to me as carnival. Still a spectacle, yes, but at it's heart interpreted as no more than a huge party.
Not only that, when what I understand as my culture has the temerity to assert itself, say in that joke or at Christmas with our local carols sung in pubs, it's thrown back as regressive. "Do you HAVE to include religion?" or "I don't come to the pub to have religion rammed down my throat, sing something cheerful" (an actual comment AT CHRISTMAS).

So here we are. Not being understood and some are incapable of understanding. An upshot of this is I can never go back to the thing that at one time was my life's passion - Infact, I'm not sure I can go home, even though home is where I am. 

Someone asked me if I'd ever thought of getting involved in the events the other day. I made a joke about not playing well with others and walked away.

" You mean you actually live in the village all year round ?"

I had occasion to be wondering around Mousehole a few months back. I was on a mission to buy some postcards for a thing. 

Mousehole, the darling fishing village of lifestyle magazines. Home of The Mousehole Cat and Tom Bawcock. The real life home of the tragically heroic Penlee lifeboat crew - lost with all hands at Christmas. Christmas illuminations! Starry Gazey Pie! A place you may have read about, where you wake in your holiday cottage overlooking the picturesque harbour, crammed with boats, and watch the local fisher-folk starting their days work. A hand roasted coffee perhaps, before you throw back the Egyptian cotton sheets and pop out to pick up some artisanal bread and olives for brunch. I'm told that you'll see local artists at work en plein air. Later you can go to one of the fabulously appointed restaurants and dine on the fruits of those fisher-folk's labours. No mention of what "fresh local produce" actually means, of course, but you can assuage any residual guilt about food miles by not asking. Any tell-tale accent is lost when the lobster hits a boiling pan.

You'll be hard pressed to get a sliced loaf and a pint of milk, but trips to an out of town Sainsburys is what the four-by-four is for. You could pick up some premium-priced Cornish butter while you're there. Nice on tomorrow's hand-formed croissants. 

You, the visitor peering in the estate agents window, won't know the agent's office used to be the Post Office. Wandering back to your cottage, you won't know that place on the left used to be Kneebones the butchers. You won't know that where you buy your souvenirs was once a thriving general stores and how could you know those new looking places there used to be Warrens cafe where we'd have cheap breakfasts as 16 year olds while camping on the cliffs, two miles from home,  picking spuds in Ben Pearce's handful of fields? 

But this was January month and apart from a few elderly locals and one or two out of season, mildly underwhelmed visitors finding the posh places shut and the boats out of the water for winter, the streets were mine. 

I say "mine", they weren't. That's a poor choice of words in this situation. The thriving village I recall from my youth is very definitely, clearly "owned" now, but not by the old Mousehole faces I remember. Now whole chunks appear owned by people who don't live here at all. Some whose dream has been to own a piece of it, but maybe can only visit for a week now and again. People who pay for their dream homes by selling that dream to other holidaying folk, a week or two at a time.

Until the last few years the "winter let" was an integral part of the local housing scene. Many of us made our first steps to independence with a six month let for the winter. A winter let served the tourism industry by providing homes between live-in seasonal jobs and was also a life-line for people in housing difficulties. Now the burgeoning holiday home market doesn't even provide that.

Almost everywhere I went that morning, back lanes, streets, smelt of fresh plaster and concrete. Everywhere a sort of modern petrichor. the smell after rain, but cement. No exaggeration. It was in the air along with the scaffolding. I've never actually smelled change before. The sound of power tools rising above the seagulls. I realised that the few greetings I'd exchanged whilst wandering around had been with mates who are builders. Money has arrived. Compared to the economy it displaces, big money. To whose advantage is moot, but, suffice to say, someone is selling the old places. Because of that, resentment towards "incomers" is hugely misplaced. We're selling the place by the metric tonne. It's one of the many paradoxes afflicting not just Mousehole, but any place like it.

I mentioned postcards. A friend of mine is a teacher in one of the most deprived areas in the UK. Most of her students families don't have a pot to piss in. They arrive with her, behind in attainment and often struggling with lessons, behaviour, authority. Everything that goes hand in hand with inter-generational impoverishment. As a class project, and being an easy read, she introduced them to the story of The Mousehole Cat. As I'm kind of local to it, I was approached to be their resident "expert". The plan was for me to send some postcards and information about the place to go on the class wall and for lessons. I was ages in Mousehole trying to find somewhere I could buy them. Apart from a few artists galleries, all the shops were closed bar the newsagents and I ended up buying most in neighbouring Newlyn and a few in Penzance.   

 The students wrote me letters asking engaged questions about Mowser the cat, Tom Bawcock, the weather (which some imagined had mystical properties) and the village where the story is set. I wrote back, answering their questions in detail and lying that I am related to Tom Bawcock. In their own way, their questions were as enlightening to me as my answers turned out to be for them. They saw the place from a distance, I think, in a way those life style magazines can't. By asking basic, upfront questions about life here and 'how it is'.

It strikes me that most of those 11 and 12 year olds will probably never visit Mousehole, yet in some respects understand more about it than some of the people who now own bits of it. Which is rather sad. Though it also occurs to me that if they don't visit they'll never uncover the fact that I don't live there and nor am I related to Cap'n Tom.  

Swings and roundabouts, really.

MIDDLE CLASS OR NO?

Am I middle-class? 

Not that it's a competition. Most of the time I forget about it, but it comes back sometimes in the form of an unwelcome accusation or short-hand label from others. I'm not trying to establish credentials here, really, I'm not - Just trying to nail something down.

I went to infant's school during the mid 60s, at the top of a steep hill. We didn't tend to go down and others didn't tend to come up. The hill was crowned with a council estate, built to replace (not altogether successfully) the demolished "slums" of the fishing and quarrying village below - a story in itself - and "The Board School" as it's huge granite lintel proclaimed, complete with the invariably warm, third of a pint bottles of free milk and regular slaps or slipperings from our teachers. The school's catchment area, covering maybe half a mile, had been lived in by the same families more or less, our families, for generations. Home for lunch every day. It was hyper-local. Without modern guile or heritage projects, we were steeped in "our place". 

We were being conditioned to it even.

When not at school, which for a year or two I wasn't very much, once or twice a week, we'd have rides on Charlie North's horse and cart. He was the fruit and veg man, much of the muddy produce grown himself on a bit of land up The Coombe where he lived in a dirt floored cottage. Sometimes he'd give us a bag of crisps to share - plain salted of course - a big treat, sat two, sometimes three, in a row behind his old cart horse. Probably a few kids from Park Road remember when he started doing Corona fizzy pop, soon to be displaced by a rival pop delivery business with a van. Charlie had two flavours, lemonade or limeade. Neither of which contained anything vaguely resembling the juice of a citrus fruit. There was a deposit charged on each bottle and they were very much for birthdays and high days. Certainly not something that was just in the fridge. Mr Richards' corner shop (always "Mr Loit's", for insulting reasons I may explain elsewhere) at the bottom of Adit Lane by the orchard, was an occasional treat too, once a week I'd be allowed a half-penny ice cream for fetching mum's shopping, a banana flavoured item in the shape of a pole which, in the same lab-designed manner as the bottles of Corona, had never been anywhere near dairy products.

There were no domestic phones just a box at the end of the street. Mum and dad didn't have a car until I was 10, Dad went to work on a scooter until one morning, in the dark and wet, he hit a badger at top speed, I think that forced his hand and we became poshoes with an already rusting Austin A40. 
Most homes had TVs. Watch with Mother at 1pm then the test card until a five minute animation preceding the news at 6. When I was ill, which I was a lot, I'd sit through feverish, curtained afternoons waiting for the schools programmes to come on. Watching the modern, scientific looking timer count down. There'd be a couple each day. They were never interesting, but the novelty of TV outside normal hours was irresistible.

Days were spent in the yards, streets and lanes. As we got older and began to spread our wings, we'd hang out around the harbour. Mucking about on the berthed fishing vessels, sometimes putting an optimistically baited line out ourselves, shrimping, learning to roll fags. Then, in time, onwards to Penlee Quarry, a massive scar in the landscape just outside the village, where dads, grandads and uncles worked, blasting out then prepping blue elvan rock for the autobahns of Germany and London's South Bank, making concrete blocks with the residue in a huge pressing tower. These were places the workmen would probably never visit themselves, but the coasters (white and yellow Brook boats), hungry for the stone under our feet, and their crews came and went from and to these foreign places, two or three a week. 

One of the Brook boat seamen, a Langstaff from Whitehaven, met and married my gran here. He'd been a boxer in his youth and having run away to sea at 14 was easily settled with the natives. Apart from his thick Cumbrian accent which he never lost and his, for then quite outrageous, nautical tatoos, one thing marked him out; he had a fierce, almost psychopathic, commitment to unions and socialism. Anathema to our local work force, with their mix of Methodism and the unfathomably proud subservience peculiar to the Cornish, but his enduring legacy to me. Consequently he got through a lot of jobs and would often find himself out of work before packing his bags and returning to sea where they'd always have him.

In the evenings at the quarry the rock-crushing machinery and the tiny steam engine and trucks which, six days a week, dragged the stone to the waiting coasters, sat silent, willing us to play our dangerous war games and to find our feet in our unusual generation's pecking order. 

I say "unusual" because some fundamental social engineering had been going on around us. Maybe even FOR us.

I have an early memory of walking to my gran's at the far end of the village with my aunt. A short cut would take us through a patch of gravelly scrub, what's now a car-park in Newlyn Town, by The Narrows if you've ever been. Set in to the top of this patch were bits of what had obviously been cob walls, with now pointless fire places and collapsing chimney-less breasts and, by one abandoned hearth, a small piece of yellow wall paper, just hanging on and flapping in the sun. I'd always imagined it a bomb site. "That was our living room, your mum's and mine, when we were little" my aunt said out of the blue, "That was our wallpaper" and she went on to tell me how as children they'd been moved to the new council estate at the top of the steep hill near my school. The government inspectors had decided their old homes were unfit, slums. So off they went to 'Homes Fit For Heroes' - Not how they're seen now, sadly. Besides our grand parents and great-grandparents mortification at being described "slum dwellers", what I didn't understand until much later was how that had changed their sense of community. They still 'belonged', but to what? 

Some started to redefine themselves through their aspirations instead. Ideas that once would have been considered above their station - How my dad became a teacher. Mum, having been a seamstress before marriage, of course remained at home. Not everybody wanted to move, they were being taken away from their places of work, homes where you could pop your head out of the door to make sure the boat or gear were OK, corner shops, shops in peoples front rooms, all torn down as they were ripped from their neighbours (as they saw it). The demolitions stopped after protestors and the second world war intervened, but the shattering had been done. Homes that survived are now sought after "fishermens cottages" and reach inflated London prices as second homes, investments and the like. We're the ones selling them. 

But I digress. For whatever reason, that bit of wallpaper blew my infant mind. I would look at it every time I passed and one day took a bit of it home with me, like a precious thing, treasure. "That was our wallpaper" mum said, but made nothing more of it. She had moved on, or even up. 

Here I was, growing up in and being shaped, atleast in the psychogeography, by a place where age old social mores and attendant heirarchies still pertained. Still mattered, but the host community was un-moored.

So far so good, not really middle-class at all. 

At eleven things took a turn which, I think, makes me ask the question at the beginning of this. My health had settled and I was attending school regularly for a change. We sat the eleven plus. I wasn't worried about it, so don't know why I remember that silent hall so clearly. I and a hand full of my friends passed, were duly declared to be "in the top ten percent" and sent to the local, all boys grammar school. 

I didn't recognise it, you make the best when you're eleven, but this is when the "class" thing started. The grammar school had a mix of young, modern teachers and a lot of old dudes from before the war with the attendant approach to discipline. There was a strict uniform policy, blazers and caps and a house system which took a bit of getting used to. I wasn't prepared for being labelled because of a random house allocation system. But here we were, with prefects, head boys, a prefects common room that I'm not sure I ever saw the inside of. They weren't allowed to hand out punishments like Tom Brown's School Days any more, but they still did. I took a few whacks and had a number of pages ripped out of my school hymn book before I learned who to avoid and who to be obsequious around. As for the masters, some teachers had actual weapons for "disciplinary uses", I remember in particular a long metal bar with a wooden ball on the end, which would get you arrested these days.

There were rich farmers sons, dentists and doctors sons, posh sounding kids whose parents knew the local MP. A middle-eastern lad called Pervaiz was always a source of fascination to me. These were people whose parents listened to classical music and understood poetry, maybe some of them did themselves. I'm sure most of them wouldn't consider themselves anything special in the poshness stakes, it was intensely provincial, but everything's relative. I mean, I didn't come from a cultureless background, but ours was male voice choirs and the random bookshelves of self-starting readers. These people had big houses and understood the rules of rugby and cricket for God's sake. Above all they had an ease and confidence with things that was different to mine. Being surrounded as I was at home by an unchanging, solid "community" I kind of already knew my place, I'd been given my identity, I'd had no need to fight for it or to establish one until now.  

I never did fit in there, I complied and learnt to walk the walk, but never felt part of the whole. There are many, many things I'm grateful to the grammar school for, not all of them their intended lessons though. I found my tribe, like you always do and instead of academic or sporting achievement found solace and an outlet for rebellion in music. Towards the end of my school days - I was told not to come back as they had "nothing to offer you Williams and you CERTAINLY have nothing to offer us" as one master put it - I suppose I had become some sort of cool amongst my peers, we were the ones playing in bands, putting on gigs and so forth. All of it happening without the school, independent of it.

Meanwhile, the grammar school had busied itself educating me for opportunities that didn't exist here. If I was to go on to the professions I would need to leave Cornwall. If I stayed I was educated a bit beyond what Lands End could offer and had lost the deep connection with a lot of my mates who had gone to the secondary modern.

I ended up drifting in to clerical work, kidding myself that was to enable my real job as a musician and generally not being too sure about what I am.  

If all of this sounds self-pitying or ungrateful nothing could be further from how I feel. It's just how it is, we were kind of half-lifted and left, dangling in mid-air. Not unlike my mum being moved to the estate. They were trying to be kind.

So, there's quite the rambling blog post. Am I middle class? I don't feel it because I don't understand my middle-class peers aspirations. We share scraps of background, but I was never included in. I am not one of them. 

Am I working class? Depends who I'm talking to.

I think the honest answer is I'm neither fish nor fowl. Sometimes I'm glad of that and others I resent it to hell.    

LEAVING

I see and hear a lot of things leaving from here.

Living by a harbour things feel transient. Groups of tourists mingle with waterside industry. Tall ships, small ships, yachts and tenders. Passing through, never sticking. Until the winter storms come and wash away all trace for another year.

It starts early, more often than I'd like in a fitful half-dream, maybe 6am, the first train of the day, leaving for that London. Dipping on to and off the south coast for 5 or 6 hours, past beach huts and ice cream parlours, before hanging a left and hitting Paddington, the big city. Ever the melancholic, Hank Williams and his lonely whistle is my morning ear worm ...

From my bedroom I can see trawlers, beams sometimes down in anticipation, heading off for a week's slaving. Leaving. And the small day boats and tripper boats, heading out for mackerel or spotting seals and dolphins who never stick round.

Once I'm up and about with my coffee - macchiato, one sugar per shot, cheers - 9.15 The Scillonian sounds her horn, tip-toeing astern, meekly at first. Then full-ahead in to the relative calm of the bay before hitting the swells of three seas off Lands End. I hear the roar of her engines.  A flat-bottomed, stomach pump of a boat. They'll be on the islands for lunch time, hundreds of them, left with little appetite and even less for the homeward journey.

In the distance is Culdrose. A naval airfield with a constant change over of helicopters and small jets, from who knows where and carrying who knows what.

And over the bay are the jet streams from the real big planes, visiting the world.

Usually when I'm asleep, but oftentimes awake too, my imagination takes me to another place and someone else's life. 

But this is my life, surrounded by leaving. And here I am. Staying. 

From The Threshold

“Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come / Whispering ‘It will be happier.’” — Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

I don't thrive at New Year. The rigidly enforced bonhomie, overheated crowds excited by the calendar, the couples at midnight. Reflection. Infact, sometimes my dislike tips over in to something altogether less comfortable.

I saw 2014 in, anonymous and unnoticed on a stage (a phenomenon perhaps unique to middle-aged banjo players) in front of 200 revellers. Strangers ... Ten! Nine! Eight! ... Midnight struck, cheering, handshakes, kissing. K.I.S.S.I.N.G. ... The playing was hard work.  I sipped my Guinness, looked at my lifeless phone and waited in the corner by the fire exit to get home. "Having a fag" I told them. Get me out.

What a difference a year makes. At New Year 2013 the way ahead looked different. I saw it in with my girlfriend. I was positive, happy and untroubled. Soon enough the year took to twisting. My romantic involvement ended in a confusing flurry a couple of months later. In my inimitable style I have seen that catastrophise in to evaporated confidence and persistent regret. My home of fifteen years, jointly owned with my son's mother and where he was born, sold at around the same time. I found a flat for me and my son, an enforced move, really. I had loved living there. We had barely got moved when serious illness raised it's head in the family. Christmas was marked by trips for bloods at the hospital, the big day itself saw dinner delivered to the housebound. And me, confronted by mortality, exuding adult calm. A time of deeply unwelcome reminders. Emotional batteries discharging at a rate of knots. 

Now, I don't write these blogs to provide entertainment, I really can see how self-pitying my wittering is. There was much to take and shine-up last year. It's a question of perception. I write as honestly as I can to try to make sense of my feelings most days. Sometimes I publish to test myself. 

Right now, my feelings make little sense to me. I feel alone without a map. I feel as though easy negotiation has abandoned me. Awash with unfocussed sadness over unexplained and unspoken details, anxious. Most of all I feel alone. Not 'lonely', I have friends, but alone. The Universe, sensing emptiness, has obliged by pushing it's own plans on me. 

Perhaps that's what it is. Like billions of others, I had no control over the major events in my life last year, only my reaction to them. I find that a cold comfort when I'm in this frame of mind. Trying to maintain a positive, or rather a 'measured' response to this stuff takes a lot of mental energy. I am obliged by circumstance to maintain, yet seem to lack the means to recharge myself. For now, I feel I'm casting around for a missing piece. Something that will fix all this. That piece, of course, is me. 

There's plenty of advice out there for when you are afloat, but not swimming. Exercise, sensible diet, everything the mind turns to at the hated New Year. As ever, I find myself returning to 'acceptance'. I don't have the wherewithall to move any of this. Life with all it's complications has to happen at it's own pace. I can no more change it than hold back the sea.

Sure enough, coincidence becomes serendipity. Taking a break from writing, a friend has posted an article on Facebook: "14 Fucks I Refuse to Give in 2014" ... There, nestling at number twelve: "The fastest way to lose yourself? Focus all of your energy on something or someone that was never really there. Eventually you’ll wake up alone. Worse, you’ll wake up a stranger." ... I will be trying very hard to avoid just that. There's my resolution. Not to be chastened by the idea (I have never reacted well to a telling off, even from myself), but to carry it and act on it ... The search for that missing piece continues.    

Down By The Jetty

"Black Telecaster, red scratchplate ... Doesn't show the blood. Don't want to scare the men"


Once in a blue moon something comes along that brings me up sharp. That happened today. Proper sharp. It was an on-line announcement from the manager of one of my lifelong musical heroes. Guitarist, Wilko Johnson, has been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. He has decided against chemotherapy and will see out his last few months playing farewell shows and producing one last album. He's 65.

I'm not embarassed to say I welled up. Perhaps it was the painfully measured dignity of the announcement, the news hasn't left me all afternoon. I decided to get out, have a walk and a think about exactly why this awful, personal tragedy for a man I've never met, is affecting me quite as much as it is.

I guess everybody has a place and a time for thinking. For me, particularly when troubled, it's evening time and a walk down Newlyn Harbour. I spent hours there as a boy, day and night. Most evenings with a bag of chips and batter bits from the fryer. I bought some tonight. The vinegary whiff of those chips  was like a time machine. 

I could already tie the odd knot, but would have been 13 or 14 when I learnt to roll fags, in Dummy's shed down on the harbour. And it was the same time, I suppose I was 14, that I first saw Wilko play. I like to think it was The Old Grey Whistle Test. Most likely, though, it was Top Of The Pops or one of the pale ITV imitations. I had no idea who he was, but his bowl haircut, lanky, edgy persona and dodgy suit made an immediate and indelible impression. He didn't look weird to me. He made perfect, instinctive sense, though I've no idea why, even now. Here was a grown man running and jumping around, quite literally running and jumping, as though the red curly lead from his battered Telecaster guitar was plugged in to the mains and rammed up his arse. I didn't know what he was or where he was coming from but I wanted some. People talk about the first time they heard Elvis, it's not over egging it to say this was my Elvis moment. 

I was already messing about with guitars. I had a cream coloured Jedson, bought with savings from Fred Olds' second hand shop, which I fondly imagined as a Telecaster. Fred had thrown in an Audition amplifier (Woolworths own brand) with the deal. A 15 watt, solid state, intermittently earthed, Japanese nightmare. The guitar was like an egg slicer with action to match. Even with the subsequent, thrilling addition of a yellowy-orange plastic, Kaye fuzz box, I had no idea how I was going to use it to play "Sylvia" by Dutch instrumental loons, Focus. Worse, I was buggered if I could get the hang of Mama We're All Crazee Now. I had a rough approximation of a couple of Gary Glitter songs and Status Quo seemed to offer something I could get my head around, but that was about it. Whatever the noisy musical delusions my parents had to suffer night on night, I was what Donald Fagen terms, a guitar "owner".

That all changed after Wilko. There was something bonkers about his playing that set me alight that winter. I spent hour, after hour, after hour trying to be him. No Youtube, no video, just a low quality cassette recording to pour over. Then one night, I dont know how I realised it, but I did, I figured he wasn't using barre chords. Revelation number one! By fingering the chord over five strings with all four fingers and using my thumb on the sixth, wrapped over the neck instead of my, by now, very sore index finger I was starting to sound like him. This was more to do with pain and a playing action measurable in centimetres than actual design on my part, but blimey! It worked! I was off. My playing came on in leaps and bounds and within a short time I was starting to look at playing with other people. Other people! Imagine! A band!

So, anyway, I was thinking about all this as I walked back along the seafront. I was fourteen, growing up in a Methodist fishing village, 8 miles from Lands End and a strange man from Canvey Island had burst in to my consciousness, me a Grammar School boy, and changed everything. I say "a strange man" because the other members of Wilko's band, Dr Feelgood, were just coat hangers for his extraordinary presence, as far as I was concerned. I had no appreciation of John B Sparks' bass or Big Figure's metronomic drums. Singer, Lee Brilleaux seemed like a growly, scary man. Their names struck me, the names were cool, but I was interested in Wilko.

Over time I've learned a lot more about the mysterious "Wilko". I learned that his real name is John Wilkinson, his nick-name being a classically cheesy play on words. That at one time he was an English teacher, he had studied Anglo-Saxon literature and the ancient Icelandic sagas at university. That he painted. In the early 70's he travelled overland to India, a proper hippy, and in more recent years he nursed his late wife, Irene, until her own untimely death through cancer. I had often wondered who the "Irene", who suddenly popped up in song, was. He still talks about her, with a glassy-eyed broken heart. He has lived in the same house since his early success and after Irene's death he built an astronomical observatory on the roof and spends most nights up there. Watching the stars. I hope he's doing that this evening.

Watching the stars. That's what I was doing. I think I picked a good hero.

SONGLINES

"... the labyrinth of invisible pathways ... known to Europeans as 'Dreaming-tracks' or 'Songlines'; to the Aboriginals as the 'Footprints of the Ancestors' or the 'Way of the Law'.


Well, for a while atleast, the blogging fell into disrepair.  Despite, I'm sure, frequent appearances to the contrary, I'm not that comfortable talking about myself. Particularly as I haven't gone down the anonymous route. I'll talk all day about my opinions, but I've never really been much for talking about what makes me tick. There's reasons for that; people don't always want to know, I have dignity to consider, but most importantly, I haven't always known myself. Nonetheless ...

Here I am, with a stinking cold and it's gone for my weak point. It's bringing me down. To be honest, at times over the last weekend I've been wondering if I've ever really got better. If the fog of depression ever left me or if I've just become used to it. I'm haunted by a nagging idea I may have reduced my expectations and life experiences to reach an accord with it. A state that doesn't challenge and presents little risk of hurt. 

Looking at me from the outside, I'd like to think anyone would say that's rubbish. I play music in front of people, I keep house and home together, I'm inclined to take up social invitations, I'm romantically involved again after too long on the sidelines. 

But, hey, don't give me that positivity while I'm busy being hard on myself. 

I find it surprising, having reached this stage in my life, that these emotions still lurk. Old, unsettling feelings that I find hard to pin down, let alone adequately describe. Maybe like a fever from childhood. That. Anxiety, deep in the stomach and tingling the scalp. 

I've been doing everything I should. Eating well, reminding myself that I tend to cope and how I've changed. I may seem the same to people who have known me, though the way I look at things is different now. Different so that my new internal dialogue is still, occasionally, unrecognisable to me and my thoughts get jumbled. That's where I was this weekend.

"Jesus, the self pity", I hear you say. "A bad day with man-flu. We all get them. Man-up". Well, yeah, fair cop. It was just a bad day, it didn't last forever. The thing is, if you've ever had that bad day feeling, and it's lasted for months, the first inkling of it sets off alarms.

That's what prompted this entry. When things go askew we all of us tend to follow a kind of script. Hard-wired behaviour in trying circumstances. It's the basis of the great tragedies, how big stories get written and, on a more mundane level, I guess it's why I feel that same old panic whenever I get down.

A while back, I had what on first impression is a rather bland, self-helpy kind of thought: The familiar patterns, my personal songlines, mired in myth and hazy memory, are in large part a struggle against accepting. The struggle makes things ten times worse. It sets me up to lose every time,  because I need to accept how I feel as a part of who I am. If I accept my feelings as the fleeting sensations they always prove to be, as a familiar part of me, they begin to lose their negative charge.

What's required isn't a passive acceptance of circumstance, but pro-active acceptance of my own feelings. It's not pulling my socks up nor putting on a brave face. But I have the blessing of self awareness. By being aware I can start to influence my emotional environment.

The surprise ingredient for me, the thing that starts me moving out of these doldrums, is an acceptance of responsibility for how my feelings and mood impacts on those around me. It's a matter of trying to maintain emotional responsibility when things aren't right with me. Maintaining at least a semblance of something. 

Much in the same way as I keep doing the dishes.