Although a healthy dose of culture is just what the
doctor orders from time to time, it's always good to be back in the parallel
world of what a friend calls 'Shangri-La'. For all the interminable to-dos, there's
a calmative sense of unreality about the place. Only the other morning, for
instance, Daphne and I were on the return leg of the first of our twice-daily
round trip when we encountered the sturdy carthorse from the field by the bins
clip-clopping ponderously down the road towards us, followed by a very
slow-moving car. I'd been chatting to the poor solitary creature only 20
minutes prior to this revelation. Perhaps the electric barrier had failed and
he had decided to wander off in search of companionship.
I remember a huge muscular horse pulling a milk float in
our north London suburb during my earliest years, but once they went electric
the sight of a horse in an urban street became as rare as rag-and-bone men. Despite
the reassurance of the woman in the car that the owner had been contacted, I didn't
see my redoubtable mate since crossing him on the road. The awful thought was
that he might have clip-clopped his ponderous way down to a main road where the
drivers are less patient than the woman in the blue car.
So... we'd been talking for years about a trip to the
Brighton Festival in May. Alack, there wasn't much on of any note in the very
year we chose to go. The organisers published their programme late and we had
to book early to avoid disappointment and obtain train tickets at a sensible
price. At least a very long train journey for two is part of the package,
offering a rare chance for mutual snacking and protracted reading. Having
decided last month that I could and would re-read E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel, I had to ingest it
in 20-page bursts. So intense it was that only by interspersing calming doses
of MP3 did I recover enough mental strength for the next exhausting chapter.
We broke our journey in Crystal Palace: a suburb of south
London now voted the best place to live in the Metropolis. Or some such
specious accolade. We stayed in one of two houses in the street with a yellow
front door. Curiously, the other house belongs to recent friends from the
parallel world of rural France. Asked by our hostess to select from the huge
menu of culture, we opted for the new Stanley Kubrick exhibition at the old
Commonwealth Institute in Holland Park, now the refurbished Design Museum. A
nice building, but the permanent collection was a little sparse. No such
paucity, though, when it came to the Kubrick. We went round it in three hours,
only because we were all flagging. With a pinch of meth-amphetamine, we might
easily have managed five. So much to see, so much to read, so much to ponder.
Seeing his extraordinary attention to detail made it clear just why Leon Vitali
– the subject of a fascinating documentary on Kubrick's 'film worker' – would
devote his prime years to slaving for an artistic genius.
The next day, the three of us went down to Brighton by
train. In my childhood, when TV programmes were also sparse, they would fill
gaps in the schedule with little film-ettes, like the potter's wheel that
turned a lump of clay before your very eyes into something recognisably
pot-like. My favourite was London to Brighton by train in a minute. The viewer
rode with the driver in his cab and journey flashed by at the speed of a
passing Superman.
At Crystal Palace station, we witnessed a young American
father of three make an asshole of himself by berating the ticket vendor on
account of some credit card that wouldn't function. His three children watched
their father – in shorts over Lycra leggings, I should add – with bewilderment,
while their mother (presumably accustomed to such dull-witted demonstrations) said
nothing. I had to bite my tongue. Now
look here, my good man. I know you Americans think you own the world, but what
sort of example do you think you are giving to your children? With more
confidence in my physical prowess, I would have swung into action and nutted
the tosser. As it was, we behaved instead with compensatory civility to the man
behind the safety glass. An African gentleman, I believe. Later, on the train, I
looked at our tickets and realised that I'd probably paid far too much for our
return journey. Keeping up appearances can be a costly business.
Brighton has changed, terribly changed, in the 30+ years
since I met The Good Wife there back in the year of the great hurricane, which ripped
through the town and uprooted many of its finest trees. For a start, it's
officially a city now. Back in my day, it was a good place to be a student, but
it wasn't as it is now Studentsville, UK. Every ten paces, there's a vintage
clothes shop or a vegan café, or both. The streets throng with youthful and
seemingly privileged life. There were and presumably still are two infamous
sink estates, but they were generally out of sight and out of mind until I went
to work in the Unemployment Benefit Office. Whatever possessed me? Nowadays,
you can't escape the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. In trying to
avoid their eyes, you risk tripping over all the homeless people cocooned in
crusty old sleeping bags and propped up against shop windows.
Many are bivouacked along the main shopping street that
runs down to the Pavilion from the Clock Tower. There are two big banners
suspended across it for the duration of the Festival. One says 'BE NICE' and
the other says 'BE KIND'. Lovely sentiments in a world increasingly without
compassion, but how do you give alms to one and not the others? Late one
evening, down near the seafront, I witnessed a gang of foxes darting past
traffic and down side streets in their quest for something to eat. It struck me
that these poor lean creatures, like the human caterpillars on the streets, are
the pariahs of today's society.
My friend Tony was a nice man, and very kind. He died in
2017 of a virulent cancer after spending the last decade of his life in a
wheelchair with multiple sclerosis. According to his widow, he remained
positive to the end and barely ever expressed a word of self-pity. I saw him a
few weeks before the end and could hardly bear to look upon his face and body
ravaged by terminal illness. We stayed in their tardis in the Lanes. Although
you walk straight from the street into their sitting room, the narrow house
goes up and up, with shelves on every available wall space crammed with Tony's cultural
artefacts. We slept in a room with swathes of Frank Zappa CDs and books by and
on William Burroughs. Tony was a beatnik at heart, who should really have grown
a beard and recited poetry with cymbals on his fingers.
With few Festivalities in prospect – other than a visit
to a synagogue near the now decrepit Hippodrome where Max Miller would perform
his 'blue' routines, and an exhibition of Stephen Jones' outlandish hats in the
Royal Pavilion, the most outlandish architectural folly of them all – we took
The Daughter and Min the Schnauzer with us on the train to Hassocks for a walk
to the woodland cemetery where Tony now lies at rest in the lee of the Downs.
We sprinkled petals of flowers past their display date on his modest grave and
Carol lit some incense sticks while we stood and quietly contemplated the
meaning of life. Afterwards, we walked up to see the Jack and Jill windmills
close-up for the first time. Tilley, Min and I later ran back down the steep
grassy slope as if in a scene from a French film with Jeanne Moreau.
The walk back to the station took us past the mouth of
the tunnel that swallows speeding trains and spits them out at the other end.
Another landmark and another folly, the tunnel entrance has been embellished
with the facade of a fortress, crenellations and all. That moment just before
the plunge into darkness was probably my favourite part of the old monochrome
dash from London to Brighton. It is, I realised, an incredibly busy line.
'It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry.' From
what cranial recess did Dylan dredge up such a title? I don't know, but our
eventual return trip to France took a train or three. We arrived in Brive at
midnight on the dot. We were both all read out from hours on the parallel
rails. I finished both The Book of Daniel
and Nick Kent's memoir of a rock journalist, Apathy For The Devil, grabbed as light relief in a Brighton charity
shop. You don't get to read like that even here in the parallel world.
Now I've embarked on Dig
Infinity!, a biography of Lord Buckley from Tony's collection. It's a
rambling, discursive, stompin' 'oral
history' with contributions from the likes of Robin Williams, Ken Kesey and
George Harrison. Since it was my learned friend who hipped me to His Lordship,
the jive-talking raconteur, it seemed the most appropriate choice on being
asked to select a memento from his library. Buckley was a nice man, apparently,
if as crazy as a finger-poppin' coot. No one had a bad word to say about him.
Not even Ed Sullivan, whose spendthrift friend reputedly owed him $300,000 at
the time of his death. That's one hell of a lot of money even now, and quite
some test of friendship.
By the way, my friend the redoubtable horse has been
found, I have now discovered. Some kind soul has thought to put him in a bigger
field, with a herd of Limousin cows. They don't seem to have much in common and
the presence of so many four-footed females doesn't appear to have stirred the
creature's mighty stallion-hood, but at least he's got company. Other than
flies.
Let me finish this month's protracted ramble with some germane
words of wisdom from Buckley's 'church of the living swing'. 'I'll tell you
what we have to do, you see. We have to spread love... People of this nation
have got to learn to be kinder, more gracious... They must be more generous.
The people who have things who are living next to people who haven't got things
should give them some of the things that they have. We have to learn to give
more. We have to learn to tighten, to magnetize this nation by love in this
coming fight that we're in.'
