May: Be Nice, Be Kind

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.'