The War of the Roses

War of the Roses Programme

 I’ve been in the loft again. I could spend a lifetime in there looking at the remnants of other lives. Is this what we all get reduced to at some point? All our waking moments diffused into a random assortment of odd items and context-less objects, like the conveyor belt in the Generation game, for our children to make no sense of and pawn or store at a later date? An alchemist’s list of ingredients for transforming gold from base metal, only the instructions have long since been lost. My father rated this play, a compendium of Shakespeare’s histories, as one of the finest he’d ever seen.

Found signs #part 2

Which way are you going?

Found writings #part 1

The village, the old house, the wood

They don’t make maps these size any more, except on request. The old house, it was opposite the church. I love the point in the middle near the top, Neolithic flint axe and rubbing stone found here. Weren’t the cartographers who made this aware that on any half decent site you’ll pull hundreds if not thousands out of the ground? The wood used to be some deep, dark forest in my childish memory, but it’s barely a threadbare coppice if truth be told. There used to be a foresty commission trail with 15 or so points of interest in the 70s, one was a pile of rocks with fossils in, one was the cross section of a tree demonstrating the art of dendrochronology, another was a post you could see butterflies from at the right time of year. The trail didn’t last and the wood became the haunt of over precious gamekeepers and lumberjacks, the paint rubbed away from the posts but if you go there now I bet there’s one or two rotting posts standing aloof having all but forgotten their original purpose.  

Narrow gauge railways

As a child, narrow gauge railways were my obsession. Errr I’m not really sure why…

Just a map of the stars

Did I mention that my father used to make things? By things, I don’t mean art or books, I mean physical objects such as toy castles, or chessboards, although in his later years I did try to encourage him to take up art or sculpture, something he never did. I think he had too much respect for the creative process, as though something mystical was attached to it, as though you had to accumulate years of experience and learning before even attempting to tame the savage muses.It wasn’t that something like Richard Long’s simple lines created by walking, or Rachel Whiteread’s casts of empty spaces weren’t art, but that they had been arrived at by a life time of education in art schools. As though anything you create has to be encumbered by the baggage of learning. I think he was wrong not to do anything, but I could never express why.

There was a farm a couple of miles north from our village, where a farmer had reclaimed some old ploughs or furrows and blended them into two rusting peacocks, tails thrust like gargantuans claws, frozen as though by the Medusa’s gaze.Whenever I’d ask him if he’d do something like that, he’d just give a smile and gentle shrug of the shoulders, while sat there wreathed in smoke, a thriller in his hand. The artefacts he created were repositories, facsimiles, mirrors of his obsessions. The last obsession of his life was languages, or more accurately the history of languages and relationships between them. He’d spend ages just drawing up diagrams, charts of how they correlated and intermingled, the different cultures, which language spawned which
dialect. Before that, his obsession was sculpture and he’d create scrapbooks of photographs and postcards of them, before that it was computers, and before that castles. I still have a box of index cards for every castle in the country, no matter whether it was a royal residence or a few ditches and a couple of blocks of medieval rubble. There would be a short description transcribed from one or other reference book. How many hours did he spend on this?

I mentioned in a previous blog about how objects could take on their own lives. These items he left have now have the status of runes, or ancient parchments or menhirs. Knowledge communicated through the ages. What knowledge will persist of our civilization? If the electricity is turned off and the oil dries up, and the houses become mossy ruins with windows like open staring eyes, and the water runs over the pages we’ve written. Then perhaps only the oral tradition should remain. If blogging has done one thing for me, it’s made me attempt to become a storyteller again. If I saw something of interest, I’d keep it down inside, blissfully buried, for my own illumination only. That’s me silent and brooding. So instead I of sitting silently when relatives come round I tell them some of the stories I’ve written in these blogs, like the one about the marbles in the christmas cracker, or the light sabre one, and they laugh, and I’m not as silent or brooding any more.

I’ve also been getting bored with the stories I’ve been reading to N, so I’ve rummaged through the books in the loft my father left, and also the stories K had assembled from her time at school. They’re mainly perhaps slightly too old for him, but I’m so sick of Harry Potter – J.K. Rowling’s ramblings that read like interminable directions for the “soon to be made” feature film, lacking dramatic tension or compelling plots. They don’t impart insight, or character, they just describe scenes for those devoid of imagination. So we started on Alan Garner’s “The Owl Service” instead, and within minutes he’s absolutely hooked, telling me it’s the best book ever.
It’s short, it’s dark, it hovers in my thoughts as I go out running in the dark. K thinks I’m utterly bonkers going out in this, the thermometer outside reads -3, there is snow on the ground, but over Xmas I’ve been become indolent, lazy and fat, although anybody who knows me would almost certainly kick me for saying the last one, but then fatness is a state of mind, not necessarily of body. Anyway I just had to go out and once away from the village, where there are suddenly no cars, no people, just my footsteps and pillows of freezing breath, like I’d vomited up parts of a spectral bed. And there are eyes. The eyes blink and disappear. And then reappear just a bit further along. Yellow eyes. Green eyes. Bloody hell, I’d never considered that the scenes from Scooby Doo cartoons or Bambi bore a dangerous relation to reality. The trees rustle. The hedgerows crackle. Gradually I get used to it, the crack of ice beneath my feet, the hooting of owls, the sheep trying to extricate their heads from the barbed wire gaps that frame the most luscious tufts of grass, but what spooks me most is the inanimate. The two white figures that seem to materialise out of the darkness like lost souls moving between dimensions and taking on physical form. Fuck. Oh yeah gateposts. Of course. That’s what happens when you’re still thinking about mysteriously smashing plates and outlines of owls appearing in the pebble dash. Thank you Alan Garner! I should really be at home eating what Xmas leftovers remain.

On Xmas day L weighs up the turkey and the nut roast before declaring “I’m vegetarian”. I’m probably guilty of this confusion, having been one for over twenty years. Meat isn’t really purchased in the house, so to see it at the dinner table is a rarity, a luxury for our guests. The boys are allowed to eat whatever they like when they eat out, but at home, fish is the most they get. J and N are happy to indulge, but in doing so they allow L to stake his territory. He devours the nut roast instead, before meekly asking, “can I have some turkey? ” “I thought you were vegetarian” K asks somewhat mischievously, and she picks it up to offer it to him. “No” he screams, looking mortified, “NOT THAT turkey”. He bursts into tears, “I want the turkey in the
fridge”. “Ah” I twig, “you mean the Quorn ham”. “Yes”, he nods, salt water flowing down his cheeks. “Because I’m vegetarian”.

The next day we have guests again and we create a buffet, meat segregated carefully at the far end of the table, just so the drunken veggies don’t get confused (i.e. me). N and J help themselves to the chicken drumsticks. L comes up to me and says “Daddy, you know I’ve been vegetarian a long time”. “Yes” I say, somewhat in jest. “Well it’s been 1, 2, 3 and even 4 years now.” I nod, “uh-huh”. “And that’s too long now for me, that’s a long time.” I indicate I’m still listening. “Well can I have a drumstrick then?” He skips off happily with one clasped in his hand, although later when I come to tidy up I notice, he’s taken at most one bite out of it.

The concept of time passing is still something none of the boys have quite got to grips with. One morning a couple of days ago L comes bounding into the bedroom asking excitedly, “Is it June yet?” “Err no, not for 6 months, we’re in the middle of winter and that’s in summer.” “Oh” pouts L. “Why do you want to know?” “Well because June comes nearly before February and February is my birthday” he explains. It’s hard not to laugh at his furrowed brow, the pursed lips, the serious expression on his face. “You don’t mean June do you L, you mean January and yes it’s nearly January,” I explain and at once he’s happy again. L has been busily assembling a birthday list
despite the fact that his Xmas presents are barely unwrapped. Today he enters the room asking with an undisguised glee, “is it my birthday today?” “Errr no, not for another month” He buries his face in our pillow and remains inconsolable for at least the next minute or so.

But what he needs most for his birthday is it seems a pile of empty party poppers and some discarded bubble wrap. To explain I need to digress back into children’s literature again. If one thing has escaped the children’s slush pile, it’s AA Milne. Ok I gather he probably he had some sad crypto-fascist leanings at some point that someone once told me about, or that I read about, or that entirely possibly I am making up, but some of those stories make me laugh and make N laugh too. Especially the one about Eeyore’s birthday, and how Pooh and Piglet only find out about it on the day and they bring Eeyore a pot of honey and a balloon, except that Pooh eats all the honey on the route, and Piglet falls over and bursts the balloon, and all they have to give him is an empty jar and the burst bits of balloon, and Eeyore forever mournful spends the time joyously putting the balloon in and taking it out of the jar. L enters my office while I’m trying to work, and says “can I do art?” I say of course, and instead of scouring my printer for paper, he brings in the discarded party rubbish and starts assembling the empty party poppers in the shape of a cross on the bubble wrap, carefully placing each one of 50 in a line. When he’s finished he implores that I don’t mess it up, which I don’t. I would have liked to shown it to my father and said, there you don’t need learning, just an open heart.

The last artefact I dig up from the book case with my father’s objects is the map of the stars. It’s one that my father painstakingly reproduced in the days before these were sold in shops made from shiny black plastic, where if you move the dial you can identify which constellations are visible in the sky, in any month at any time of night. We’d stand there for hours in the winter air, following the meteors like chalk smudges across a blackboard, I can still tell from memory how to find the nebula in Orion’s dagger, or the galaxy of Andromeda marooned near Pegasus, with the same pair of binoculars we had then. And thousands of years ago the locals had the same idea, they constructed the stone circles to align perfectly on winter’s midnight solstice with the stars in the belt of Orion. By the shores of the black waters of Siblyback Lake, as I run, everything is still, the night sky mirrored in the polished glass still in brutal symmetry, so clear you can see Sirius the dogstar, glinting like specks of iron pyrite in a block of Bodmin granite as though deep underwater. If I can’t follow now my father has gone, then I can still trace those evenings in his map of the stars.

Purple Ice

The present day – a frozen puddle on Craddock Moor.

Le vieux roi

A postcard. Not one of mine, I think one of my father’s but I’m sure he said some of the postcards that were left were my mother’s.  I have a vague recollection that she didn’t care for much modern art, but then I’m not sure that was accurate, was that my father’s supposition, or my own, because in my early teens I was hostile too?

This has always been a favourite. Georges Roualt painted pictures of the poor, of clowns, some of the bleakest religious paintings I’ve ever seen, and he painted satires of authority figures – of the judiciary and their blind incompetence. For once though, he changed tack, in this picture for me he captures, world-weariness, a sense for once that the position bestowed comes on merit. I’ve seen this picture described as being the satires by other commentators, as a merciless ruler desperately clutching a shrivelling bloom, but I don’t see that at all. I see someone worn down, trying to his best to make do.

The guide to Dovedale

This one is strange. The cover and pictures in it have almost hyperreal colours, in that 50s-60s sense, one you don’t totally get a feel for in the scan, yet the guide says 1985.This dates it to after my mother’s death.  The people’s fashion sense inside the leaflet says otherwise. I remember visiting the place, it was an overcast day when we went there, a feeling of serenity, gazing at the slumbering brown trout in the translucent waters and having a definite intention to return. We never did return, but about 12 years later I was delivering election leaflets in the Hall Green suburb of Birmingham, where many of the roads are named after places in Derbyshire, and I was most definitely envious of the regal 1930s houses there, with cats upon the doorsteps and parasols of oaks and sycamores checkering the daylight on the pavements.

You should always be careful what you wish for because 12 months later I was able to afford a house in that area after inheriting half of my father’s house. We asked the estate agent’s if they had something on one of the roads such as Kedleston or Tixall, and when there turned out to be a detached on a little known cul-de-sac called Dovedale I knew it had to be the one.

Did you ever?

It’s occurred to me that this is becoming like flea market version of the conveyor belt round Bruce Forsyth’s generation game. I’m just waiting for the cuddly toy to turn up next, except I’m not sure how I’d fit it in the scanner.

When I was a child my parents owned the sum total of three singles. These were Eye Level by the Simon Park Orchestra (the theme tune to Van der Valke – no I don’t remember it either), the 1972 Eurovision song contest winner “Come What May” (or Apres toi in the original French) by Greek singer Vicky Leandros, a bellicose ballad in true epic Eurovision style http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0Ar-YiiPFs, and of course Lee and Nancy’s hip wigglingly suggestive, but fairly minor addition to their discography “Did you Ever.” This discounts the various BBC sound effects records. If there are astrologists, palmologists, numerologists and graphophologists and diviners of every hue to tell us what our handwriting or breath might mean, then what might these three tell us?

As a child I soon gravitated onto the hardcore stuff, the only lp in the house, an early Abba greatest hits, pre “Money, money, money.” This still takes me back to a different world, Top of the Pops night, being sneaked down while my sister slept to see “It’s a knockout” followed by Abba at Number 1. Of course Abba weren’t always number 1, and there was great disappointment if something offensively faux disco (such as Baccara’s Yes sit I can boogie) was there in it’s place. I couldn’t quite picture how the public could like songs other than Abba (it didn’t occur to me until years later that they could only be number 1 if they actually released a single), and woe betide if something beastly and ever-so vaguely punk like the Stanglers would appear in the top 10. Gruff voiced men who couldn’t sing. They scare me still.