10 favourite books

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There’s a meme doing the rounds on Facebook at the moment to list out your 10 favourite books. At risk of turning this into Buzzfeed I thought I’d note my choices here, mainly in the spirit of trying to reflect on what, if anything, I could glean about my own writing from my selection of reading. Other than oh-my-god-I-could-never-write-as-well-as-that, of course…

Subject to change on a whim, with a break in the weather, or depending on what I’ve just had for breakfast here are the 10:

One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey. This is my all time favourite and the book that fired my entire interest in 60s counter culture in the States. From here I went back to Kerouac and forwards to Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. Sadly I never drove across America in a brightly painted bus with flowers in my hair but perhaps there is still time. If you know the film then you’ll know that it is a brilliant thing but the book is far richer and more nuanced. It works as a straightforward story but also allegorically to describe the entire movement Kesey was associated with: a freeing of the mind from tradition and authority. It’s very funny, deeply sad, and, by the end, redemptive and hopeful.

The Lord Of The Rings – JRR Tolkien. Yes it’s somewhat predictable. And yes I have read many fantasy genre books since that I consider “better”. However, this is the one that opened an 11/12 year old me up to an entire genre that has given me significant pleasure and escape over the past 30 years. If there’s a fantasy closet then I’m coming out of it. Two books in and another that’s possibly now more famous for the film version which may say something about either my taste or the steady decline of Western Civilisation. Or both. Either way the films nail the scale and scope but the key to why I love this, which the books inevitably had long before Peter Jackson could speak, let alone speak Elvish, is imagination. All of that stuff. Out of one person’s head. Imagination was Tolkien’s great gift to me.

Unreliable Memoirs – Clive James. I’m not sure if the rules for this list specified works of fiction. I’m not particularly sure that Clive James took much notice of the fiction / non fiction distinction in his collection of memoirs anyway so it probably evens out. This is here simply because the man writes so beautifully; few craft a phrase as eloquently as James and few could guide you through their formative years with such humour, candour, and grace. His command of voice leaves me mildly awestruck – each page is perfectly and consistently him. This is the book that made me look at fifteen odd years’ worth of diary entries and want to chuck them all in the bin.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy – Douglas Adams. Eminently quotable, much cleverer than it’s given credit for, and extremely funny. I think, reflecting on it, that what I really like about Hitchhikers is the sheer number of ideas in it. Whilst it’s difficult to know how much ended up on the cutting room floor I like to imagine that Adams chucked everything in that was running through his head, inventing ever more complex problems for his narrative to solve. The slight cheat, of course, was that he was writing both SF and comedy so when things got too tough he could always fall back (with a knowing wink) on deus ex machina.

Generation X – Douglas Coupland. I’m instinctively wary of something that had the whole “defines a generation” tag foisted on it but this book caught me at exactly the right time. Reading it in my mid 20s it felt authentic to me at a time when I was wondering what else was. I haven’t read it since and suspect that it may not speak as loudly now as it did then albeit it’s interesting that the central premise of the book – that three disempowered friends tell each other stories as a means of expression – is one that I seem to have unconsciously processed and am vaguely channeling in this year’s writing project.

The Lions Of Al-Rassan – Guy Gavriel Kay. There are a number of fantasy books (other than LOTR) that I could have picked but Kay has steadily worked his way to the top of my pile in recent years. His early work was very Tolkien-esque (relatively unsurprising given that he worked on editing some of Tolkien’s unpublished writing) but he has subsequently mined a richer seam that weaves fantasy with historical fiction. Al-Rassan is set in a parallel mediaeval Spain and chronicles a regional power struggle between various political and religious factions. The central characters are brilliant, it’s tightly plotted, lyrically written, and a fabulous exercise in world building (or, I guess, world borrowing).

The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera. Another book I read in my mid to late 20s and which, I think, stuck with me precisely because it was so overtly philosophical. It was probably the first time I’d encountered a style that very consciously called out the themes that the book was seeking to explore in its narrative, often directly framed to the reader almost as non fiction. I like that authorial voice speaking from the page alongside the narrative voices and I like that this is a book that is unashamedly about the big stuff: existence, love, being, life.

Stoner – John Williams. The newest book on my list in terms of when it was read. This popped up last year to a fair degree of fanfare as a “lost classic” and I picked it up whilst taking a 6 month sabbatical from work. In that sense it’s probably another case of right book at the right time given that it deals almost exclusively in reflecting on the course of a relatively ordinary life and its significance. It’s quite slow, nothing much happens, but it’s breathtakingly beautiful and heartbreakingly sad.

The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald. I read it for English Literature A level. I didn’t get it. See also Pride And Prejudice. I had one teacher, a man, who taught me Arthur Miller, dystopian visions of the future, and Shakespeare. I got all that. I had another, a woman, who taught me Gatsby, Austen, and the Romantic poets. For a long time I didn’t get it all. She persevered with my immaturity and wall of rationality until, between us, we knocked it down (or, at least, took a couple of bricks out). Gatsby is magical, poetic, heady, dizzying, and, in a common theme for me, also, at its core, very sad. I love it now, just as I also learned to love Austen, and Keats, and anyone else that understood how to make your heart beat a little faster through words.

Fantastic Mr Fox – Roald Dahl. This is the one I read and read and read as a child. Reading Dahl again now, to my daughter, is a great pleasure but this was the one that I loved as a kid and probably most obviously started me off into all of the other books listed above. I also loved those Enid Blyton books about all girls’ boarding schools as a kid: not really sure what that was all about and perhaps best we let that one lie…

Tomorrow I will remember with a groan something really obvious that I’ve missed out. Let me know in the comments what your favourites are and what I’m missing out on.

Fission

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“His wife’s dead lieutenant.”

“General ?”

“She’s dead. The British know she’s been dead since ’41 but they’ve been keeping it from him so he stays… stays motivated shall we say”. General Groves sat back in his chair behind his impeccably tidy desk and motioned to his subordinate to stand at ease. There was no trace of doubt or regret in his voice.

“He’s asking for news again sir.”

“My hands are tied lieutenant, this is for the British. Rotblat’s with Chadwick and I don’t think they want that group disrupted. If Oppenheimer needs Chadwick and Chadwick needs Rotblat then our job is to make sure nothing gets in the way of that.”

“Then what do we tell him sir ?”

“Use your initiative lieutenant. Find out what the British are telling him and tell him the same. The Soviets are going to take Poland, it’s a mess. No one knows what’s going on in there. Tell him we’re doing everything we can to establish contact with her.”

The lieutenant fell silent and lowered his eyes to the floor. There was a short intake of breath as if he was about to speak but then thought better of it. Groves noted the reaction implacably.

“Do you know the story lieutenant ?” he asked suddenly.

“Sir ?”

“Rotblat’s story. How he got here.”

“No. No sir, I don’t. He doesn’t talk about it to us.” By “us” Groves assumed the lieutenant meant the military personnel on the project. He nodded briefly in acknowledgement.

“He’s a brilliant man. All of them, of course, are brilliant men lieutenant. We won’t build this thing without that. They need to be able to see this..” he thumped the desk abruptly “…and this…” he rolled a piece of paper between his thumb and forefinger “…in a way we can’t comprehend.” He stood and spread his arms to take in the room. “All of this lieutenant, this desk, this room, you and I, they need to understand all this as matter, as constituent particles, as the building blocks of the universe.”

“I don’t think I understand sir”

Groves laughed.

“I don’t need you to lieutenant. I need you to make sure that nothing distracts them from their task. Rotblat’s mind should be on atoms and nuclei and reactions, not on flesh and blood. They are scientists lieutenant – I need them to deliver the most extraordinary science project man has ever devised not ponder on the nature of humanity.”

“But he keeps asking after his wife sir.”

“Rotblat left Poland two days before Hitler invaded.” Groves paused. He was a practical man and war had hardened his pragmatism but he was not entirely without heart. “She was supposed to come back to England with him lieutenant but she was unwell. He was needed back with Chadwick and left her behind. Way I’ve heard it she was supposed to follow as soon as she was well enough. She never left Poland and our intelligence suggests she died, maybe in Majdaenk, maybe in the Warsaw ghetto.”

Groves sat down again behind his desk and lowered his voice, almost as if voicing his private thoughts aloud, softly.

“He writes to her. He still has hope. He writes to her every week, mailing the letters to his old address even though he’s heard nothing for almost three years. He knows about the camps and he knows what’s happening in his country but he still writes. Hell, somewhere in that head of his he must know we intercept every piece of mail that leaves this base. What does he think ? That we’d allow correspondence from the most important project in the war to a country occupied by the enemy ?” Groves shook his head. “He doesn’t think that. He knows those letters don’t go anyplace. I think he just writes to remember. I think he writes because it’s the only way he can talk to her.”

“So when he asks… ?” started the lieutenant.

“When he asks…” snapped Groves, his precise military tones returned, fixing his stare directly on his subordinate. “…you tell him what the British are telling him and keep his mind on the work.”

……

My dearest Tola,

Forgive my habits but I trust that you understand them well enough by now. I must write to you each week, the thought of you reading my words sustains me through the project and I fear that I need that sustenance now more than ever.

I am a foolish man writing letters that may never be read but I carry their words in my heart and will tell them all to you when we are reunited. It is my intention to return home soon to do whatever I must to find you; the Soviets loosen the Nazi grip on our home daily and surely the war’s end must be near ?

Our work here is close to being done Tola but the nearer we get to completion the more my concerns grow. Chadwick is committed and I owe him so much that it pains me to even contemplate what I am coming to realise I must do. The work itself is exceptional. You would not believe what we have achieved ! It is truly a miracle of scientific co-operation. We have come so far in understanding the power in the tiniest fragments of matter in such a short time. It is overwhelming and impossible not to be caught up in the thrill of such an endeavour.

And yet, at the same time, my doubts grow. They brought us here to contribute to the fight against the Nazis, to unleash an energy never before unleashed in the world. I understood the urgency; we all understood the consequences if the Germans built a fission weapon first but I don’t know that I believe that they can anymore. They still have Diebner and Schumann but everyone else of any standing is here, the sum total of our knowledge of atomic power is here. When I see what we have achieved I can’t believe they could have done so much. How could they without Oppenheimer ? Without Chadwick ? Without Fermi ? Even without Groves. I’ve never seen a man so driven, so certain of an outcome.

Only now I don’t know what outcome Groves seeks. What is he being asked to do ? We dined at the Chadwick’s last week and, quite off-the-cuff, I heard him remark that the project was really designed to subdue the Soviets. He laughed it off but I took something of truth there in what he said. Are we building a bomb to end this war or to start the next one ?

My love I will be with you soon. My mind is almost made up. The price of us being split apart was perhaps worth paying to end Hitler’s menace and free our home but my conscience will not allow for that price to be the end of all things. Patience, sweet Tola. Wait for me a little longer. I will be with you soon.

Always yours,

Jozef

……

Joseph Rotblat was an extraordinary man: winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 and the only person to leave the Manhattan Project on grounds of conscience before its completion. Most of the bare facts in this story are – I hope – true although the devices by which the story is told are all fictitious. I have no idea if Rotblat wrote to his wife but I like to believe that perhaps he did.

This is the second story in my series of 42 shorts that I’m writing to raise money and awareness for Mind, the mental health charity. Please share if you liked it. If you’re interested in donating to a great cause then please visit my fundraising page: https://www.justgiving.com/42shorts/

Beginnings ?

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There should be a beginning, a middle, and an end, right ? That’s how stories work. So you’re probably wondering what this is ? The beginning ? The end ? Somewhere in the middle ? 

Let’s give ourselves something to work with. I’m clinging to the hand rail on the Severn Bridge, wind blowing in my face, cars rushing past behind me. Does that make this the end ? I haven’t told you on which side of that hand rail I am standing. What did you suppose ? Is this just an innocent walk from England to Wales or the prelude to a plummet into the tidal depths of the water below ?

I’m clinging to the hand rail, retching across the side of the bridge, watching flecks of my own vomit disappear, whipped in the wind, down towards the river. There’s a stationary car behind me at an angle across the carriageway, driver’s door open, headlights on. So perhaps this is the middle ? The reaction to what happened in the beginning but with somewhere still to go.

A hand on my shoulder startles me into pulling tighter on the hand rail. I look round to see a woman, her face furrowed with concern, her car pulled to an abrupt halt behind us, headlights left on to illuminate her route to me. She asks if I’m alright and I note the sadness in her eyes even as the wind wraps her long, dark hair across her face. A beginning then ? Two strangers meeting at the mercy of circumstance.

I want to tell her what happened and why I come back. Why it always leaves me like this; physically sick, violently forcing the memories back out of my body. I imagine that you want to know too. That’s how stories work, isn’t it ? If this was the end you’d already know, if it’s the middle then you’d be finding out, but if this is the beginning then you only know what I want to tell you. Perhaps I will tell her and you can listen.

I tell her that I’m okay. She frowns and I don’t blame her. I’m throwing up over the side of a bridge in the middle of the night. I’m clearly not okay. She asks me again, this time assuring me that she just wants to help. I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand and let go my grip on the rail with the other. Really, I tell her, I’m really okay. Just a sudden wave of nausea. Maybe vertigo. Now she starts to look annoyed. I don’t know why I bothered lying or at least I don’t know why I didn’t come up with something even half way believable.

She starts to turn away to return to her car. The bridge isn’t busy at this time but I guess she’s suddenly aware that she’s blocking up the inside lane, was in such a rush that she didn’t flick on her hazards. I take a step after her and start to speak. She looks over her shoulder and says that she’ll be back in just a minute. I watch her clamber back up to the road and walk back to her car, a featureless black silhouette in the headlights.

It’s the hazards that do it. I notice them wink on and then off and it all comes back. Lights flashing on this bridge a year ago. Lights that I could see reflected off the thousands of pieces of broken glass, the fractured remains of a windscreen. Fractured as I’d been thrown through it and onto the tarmac on that still, cold night. I thought it was the end.

And so I come back. I come back because it wasn’t the end but it won’t leave me. I am stuck in some kind of middle.

She finds me again sitting and weeping, my head buried in my knees, wrapping myself up tightly against the echoes of the accident. This time she doesn’t ask if I’m okay, she just sits beside me and puts her arm across my shoulders. I tell her about my friends and our trip to Wales. I tell her about the minibus and how I’d taken to slipping off the seatbelt when I sat in the front so that I could turn around to speak to everyone. I tell her that I should have known he was tired, that we should have done more to share the drive home. We were so close to home though. I tell her that I was thrown out when we hit the central reservation before the bus span around in the road, turned up onto its side and was ploughed into by the lorry behind us. I tell her that I only survived because I wasn’t in the bus. That’s what the police said later. They called it a miracle.

Now that you’ve listened to me telling her I guess this is the end ? This is the first time since I’ve been back that anybody stopped, the first time I haven’t stood on the bridge alone. It’s the first time that I’ve told anyone what happened. It’s the first time I’ve cried. With so many firsts perhaps this is actually the beginning ?

She still has her arm across my shoulders, that worried furrow creasing her forehead, and those sad eyes watching me with concern. I wipe my eyes clear of tears and ask her for her name.

……….

This short story is the first in a series of 42 to try to raise awareness and money for Mind, the mental health charity. Please feel free to share it if you enjoyed it. More details here:  https://www.justgiving.com/42shorts/

O Captain ! My Captain !

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In 1865 Walt Whitman wrote a poem mourning the loss of Abraham Lincoln. “O Captain ! My Captain !” sets out an extended metaphor, using its titular captain, dead on the deck of his ship, returning in victory from some battle, as an elegy for Lincoln, killed but victorious, at the close of the American Civil War. 

O Captain! My Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:

But O heart! heart! heart!

O the bleeding drops of red,

Where on the deck my Captain lies,

Fallen cold and dead.

The poem – or at the very least its title – has become closely associated with the film “Dead Poet’s Society”; it is a moniker the inspirational teacher in the film dares his students to bestow upon him, in part a throwing off of the cloying conformity of their regimented school lives as he teaches them to seek new perspectives, find expression, and think for themselves. At the climax of the film the teacher has been dismissed but has to return to the class to fetch some personal effects. A number of students, in trying to say goodbye, climb atop their desks – a perspective shifting trick he’d previously encouraged in them – and call out “O Captain ! My Captain !” in tribute. It’s a scene that always moves me but I accept that, for some, may seem overly schmaltzy.

The teacher – or the actor playing the teacher – was Robin Williams. He died this week, taking his own life at the age of 63. In the shocked aftermath there’s been something of a conflation of the roles he played and the person he was, which I guess is inevitable when there is so much of him in the public domain, and the inspirational teacher figure seems to have struck a chord. That and the irrepressible funny man: the kinetic, slightly manic, lightening fast mind that seemed to spin relentlessly with ideas. 

I’m not going to lay claim to being a huge Williams fan. I like some of his work, in particular his stand up and some of his movies – “Dead Poet’s Society”, “Good Will Hunting”, “Good Morning Vietnam”. I watched “Mork And Mindy” as a kid. Large parts of his work though passed me by – I didn’t find “Mrs Doubtfire” particularly funny and have never been in a hurry to seek out “Patch Adams”. I thought he was one of the good guys but I’d become pretty ambivalent about his films.

So, in some respects, it has surprised me that I’ve dwelt on his death, that I’ve given it much thought beyond noting it with sadness. Except, of course, that Williams suffered from depression and took his own life and if you’ve ever suffered something similar then news like this is like a flare going up from a stranded boat – some vessel grim and daring perhaps – and you feel your eyes drawn to it. I should stress at this point that I am not currently in a bout of depression nor do I have suicidal thoughts: if you’re reading this and you do then please take some time to reach out to people that can help, The Samaritans, Mind, your doctor, a friend or your family. It may not feel like it but things will get better. There’s no shame in letting people help you.

The heavy media coverage has made it difficult to tear my eyes away from that flare even if I wanted to. Some of it sensationalist, salacious, downright irresponsible but some of it at least prepared to try and open up some new dialogue about mental health. Williams doesn’t look like our imagined personification of depression. When Philip Seymour Hoffman overdosed earlier this year – also a long term mental health sufferer – there was a little commentary on the end of another life by a terrible illness. But no substantive change in the narrative: it was seemingly easy to understand his self destruction as another in a long line of tortured, genius artists. Williams, from a media and public perspective, is different. He was a clown, the life and soul of the party, the guy that starred in tender hearted kids’ films. The tragedy, of course, is that in reality they were all too similar: both torn apart by being unwell.

So with Williams’ death we’ve had plenty of the “but how can someone who brought so much joy…”, “but how can someone who had so much…”, “how can someone who was that funny…” questions. Maddening as they are it’s useful, I think, that they’re asked: perhaps this is what it takes to move perceptions. Someone could have everything in the world, could bring endless happiness to everyone, always be the funniest guy in the room, and still be depressed. It does not discriminate. It’s an illness. Sure, we call it “depression” and it’s not as straightforward as that, case to case it doesn’t neatly fit a catch-all, one size fits all categorisation but it’s as arbitrary as cancer, as arbitrary as life. Understanding and empathising with that moves us a long way.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;

Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!

But I, with mournful tread,

Walk the deck my captain lies,

Fallen cold and dead.

There’s a long way to go: the fearful trip is not done but we have lost another captain. A more open discussion of mental health illnesses might be something positive that comes from this loss. It feels finely balanced at the moment – a mixture of some frank, illuminating stories and reporting that set out the challenges in treating mental health issues, against some lurid, tabloid rummaging through the garbage (“he was sober / wasn’t sober”, “he was bankrupt”, “his marriage was breaking up”, “he was in early stage Parkinson’s”). Some of the good has come from surprising sources – Alistair Campbell wrote an eloquent piece in The Guardian that  strongly echoes my own views – which is encouraging. The more we hear stories from people that we don’t think depression looks like the more we can appreciate that it can look like any of us.

It looks like Buzz Aldrin. Winston Churchill. Someone you know at work. Possibly as many as one in five or one in six people in the UK at some point in their life. The person you love. A lot of people you’ve never met. It sometimes looks like me. It also looked like Robin Williams and we need to keep talking about that until the ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done. 

And I could be anything if I just put my mind to it…

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42. Glory Days – Pulp / Glory Days – Bruce Springsteen

53,000 words, 11 months, 300 or so songs, a very loose interpretation of 42 records, and here we are at the end. So what was all that about then ?

On one level it was a set of posts about some records, from Abba to Zevon. Whilst the artists that I did write about were a pretty fair reflection of what I listen to there’s a long list of people and records that somehow didn’t find their way into the list that I could happily make the case for. The Cardigans’ glorious “Long Gone Before Daylight” album is the most glaring omission in terms of records that I love. Bowie never made it. The Manics never made it either: I could find good reasons for “Motown Junk” or “All Surface, No Feeling” or “Your Love Alone” or the entirety of “The Holy Bible”. No Cowboy Junkies. No Smiths. No PJ Harvey. No Kate Bush. Massive Attack. Portishead. Rilo Kiley. Prince. All sorts of people that I adore that never made it. Posts for another time perhaps.

So, if you read any of the posts and discovered some music because of it then I’m glad. To be honest if you read any of it all then I’m glad. Much as I tried not to get too obsessed with the WordPress stats page I really came to hate those double zero days: no visitors, no views. It was all mostly written for my own benefit but, hey, who am I kidding, having an audience makes it all the more gratifying.

As well as the records it was about me. Whilst you may be thinking that I could have wrapped this up in six words – sad man listens to sad music – I have always been a little verbose and chose to ramble on a bit more than that. There was always a risk that this ended up being an extended version of Springsteen’s “Glory Days” – someone past his best reflecting on former glories. That wasn’t the intent but it does give me an excuse to ensure that Bruce gets yet another mention in the 42 and to watch the none-more-80s video:

If it’s not just a collection of boring stories of glory days then what is it ? There’s another song that bears the name “Glory Days”, tucked away on Pulp’s “This Is Hardcore” album. It’s a song that I probably more readily identified with when I was slightly younger – the nods to single room apartments and wasting days in the café by the station are distinctly 20something references – but the spirit of it still rings true.

If it all amounts to nothing these are still our glory days. There it is again. That acknowledgement that there might not be a greater point to all of this but these moments are still what we have. I have bashed myself around the head repeatedly with this fairly simple conclusion, one day if I bash hard enough it may actually sink in. Not entirely seriously, writing the 42 was, in honour of that number, an attempt to work out what it’s all about. The big one. Life, the Universe, everything (rest in peace Douglas). And I think I did. It’s about moments and love and friendship and community.

For me it’s also about writing. If the slightly up-its-own-arse conceit behind writing these posts was about working out the meaning of life via 42 records of personal significance (slightly up-its-own-arse ? disappeared so far up it has emerged from the top of my own head) then actually the real purpose was to write again. Rather than sit and stare forlornly at a blank piece of paper waiting for my novel to disgorge itself this process gave me a route back to writing.

The key lines for me in “Glory Days” (the Pulp one) are the ones about the promise of potential:

Oh and I could be a genius if I just put my mind to it

And I could do anything if only I could get round to it

I hid behind those lines for a long time with respect to actually trying to write something and I won’t hide behind them anymore. I have started again and I won’t be stopping – otherwise it’s Springsteen’s “Glory Days” that becomes the end note to this project and that isn’t what I want. I’ve read all of the entries in the 42 back to myself. Some of it isn’t great and there’s quite a bit I would change but, you know what, some of it isn’t half bad and I’m proud to have seen it through. I’m sure there will be other posts to come about music and possibly some that are about me but I think I will be actively trying to write more fiction now. I may still end up telling my own story but I may use some other characters and other vehicles to do it.

Hope you enjoyed it and got something from it. So long, for now, and thanks for all the fish.

Made my mind up to be a black winged bird

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41. Black Winged Bird – Nina Persson

This is me.

I love music. Mostly listening but I can muddle my way through a few chords on the guitar. I am tone deaf when it comes to singing – something which I really wish wasn’t true. I briefly had trumpet lessons as a child but the trumpet and I were never going to be close. I used to be able to play the intro to Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” on the piano but it now eludes me. I could probably have a crack at singing it. You might not want me to.

I’m just as likely to laugh at something involved and clever as the crassest, stupidest gag. My all time favourite movie joke is in Steve Martin’s “The Man With Two Brains”: what are those assholes doing on our porch ? Those aren’t assholes… It’s pronounced azaleas. I guess that’s kind of clever and stupid at the same time. That’s the sort of thing I’m most likely to laugh at. I have a good sense of humour (everyone thinks they do though, don’t they ?). I laugh at myself a lot and, given a fair wind and a decent run up, I’d probably make you laugh too.

I sometimes buy books that claim they’ll change my life. Invariably they don’t. I often buy books that don’t claim they’ll change my life. Sometimes they do. Lord Of The Rings changed my life when I was 12 years old (though Star Wars had already done the damage when I was 5). Ken Kesey and Hunter S Thompson and Tom Wolfe blew my mind. Clive James writes in the way that I most aspire to.

I love words. And I mean all words – sometimes if you mean fuck you should say fuck. There’s no offense in words on their own. Context is everything. About a year ago I remembered that I liked to think of myself as a bit of a writer so I started writing again.

I don’t love numbers in the way that I love words but, despite this, I seem to have some aptitude for them. I see patterns in data and build frameworks to understand things. It’s how my mind works. Somewhat accidently I built my career on it. I’m pretty rational and like to see order and causality. I sometimes wonder if my growing realization that life holds far less order and causality than I’d imagined has made me increasingly ill at ease.

I play video games. I was supposed to grow out of it after we got rid of the Commodore Vic 20 when I was about 10. Again after the Spectrum. After the Playstation. Playstation 2. X-box 360. Playstation 3. Still haven’t grown out of it and doesn’t look like I will. Nor do I want to. I mostly play role playing games. So not only do I play video games but I play the nerdiest video games you can play. I usually max out my intelligence stat and make in game choices that are for the common good.

I love sport. Back in the day I was a half decent footballer, what I lacked in finesse I made up for in pace, size, and a low centre of gravity. Or at least I did until I ruptured my anterior cruciate ligament. Bust up my knee. If I’d done it now I’d be in and out of hospital in a day and back to full strength in nine months. I didn’t do it now, I did it then. I’ve had ten operations on that knee: it will never be right and I never kicked a ball again.

I’m an introvert. An introvert in the true sense of the word – my resources and energy are internally focused, not external. People tire me out. Too much external stimulus tires me out. I’m not shy, I don’t entirely lack social skills – it’s just that sometimes I need my own space to recharge. You extroverts might not understand but that’s how we’re built, don’t take it personally. I do sometimes wonder if I correctly balance my need to be alone against feeling lonely.

I’m stubborn and bloody minded about some things, practically horizontal as I’m so laid back about others. If I’m in your corner I’ll fight your corner. I stand my own round. I’m polite, I try to be kind, and I hold doors for people. I think the Oxford comma is a good thing. I serially abuse punctuation though – I am trying to wean myself off dashes and brackets and ellipses (with mixed success…). I get scared and am vulnerable sometimes but don’t much show it. I may have an underlying sense of being weak but a desire to project strength. I over think things.

There are only a handful of people that I love but I love them very deeply. My daughter is the single most important and enriching thing in my life. My wife is the best person I know. They have not always had the best version of me these past couple of years and I sincerely regret that. I have found myself difficult to be around at times so am damn sure other people have too. I’m sorry.

Why ? Well, all of that above is me but then this is sometimes me too:

Churchill had his “black dog”. I have my “black winged bird”. It seems to be a feature of depression that people that live with it characterise it as something separate from them: it isn’t me, it’s this other thing that comes and takes up residence from time to time. The black winged bird that picks me up and takes me away from myself. I can see everything from up there but I’m a long way removed and can’t be reached.

This song isn’t really about depression. It’s hard to read but it’s probably about a failed relationship. That is the sense in which I’ve appropriated it I guess: hard to read and about my failed relationship with myself, or, at least, all parts of myself. It reminds me of aching sadness and absolute loneliness and depression. Perversely I also find it extraordinarily beautiful. The Nina Persson cover is the one I came to first (released as part of loose Irish collective “The Cake Sale”) but the Emm Gryner original is also fantastic.

I guess the point of this post is that I’m not sure what the best way of dealing with depression is. I know… 41 records in with only one to go and I still haven’t worked it out. Slacker. Until very recently I had held it apart from myself, given it some kind of external name – in this case let the talons of some black winged bird rip me out of myself. It might not need such grandiose metaphor and analogy, it might just be a chemical imbalance. The pharmacological solution so readily offered up my local GP might be the right solution. Even if it is then it’s not something to be externalized: it’s part of me. Accepting that it’s part of me and treating it – treating myself – with some compassion might be more helpful than wishing it would go away.

This is sometimes me but I will not let it be all of me. I am all of the things in this post and I don’t want to define myself by my depression or anxiety. It might be part of me but then, so is an occasional compulsion to listen to Meatloaf’s “It’s All Coming Back To Me” and I don’t define myself by that either. Don’t judge (mainly for the Meatloaf thing but, you know, all that mental health stuff too…).

I like to skewer my own self importance with bad jokes. My other favourite joke, apart from the Steve Martin one, is that one about a man taking his wife on holiday to the Caribbean. Jamaica ? No, she wanted to go.

This is me.

Are you alright there ?

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“Are you alright there ?” asks the girl with the green hair behind the till.

I set down the books I’m buying on the counter: “Overcoming Anxiety”, “Mindfulness: Finding Peace In A Frantic World”, and “Man’s Search For Meaning”. Oh, and Robin Hobb’s “Ship Of Magic”. Three parts self help, one part pure escapism.

Her question isn’t literal. I know that. It is a very British way of wrapping up “hello” and “can I take some form of payment for those books you’re holding ?”. It doesn’t need a response. Certainly not an honest response; that would be a clear violation of social etiquette. You don’t really tell someone whether you’re alright. Particularly someone  you’ve never met.

But the books… It’s so obvious. It seems too absurd to be asked that question, lay down those books, and not say anything. And she has green hair. I had already decided, in a distracted moment in the queue, that nobody who had green hair could be a bad person.

“Evidently not…” I offer apologetically. “As you can see by my choice of books”.

It hangs there uncomfortably between us. As soon as I say it I feel awful. She clearly now feels desperately awkward. There had been nothing in the Waterstone’s customer service training that covered this terrain. Nothing, frankly, in much of our usual social intercourse amongst strangers that covered it. I was in clear violation of all of the unspoken rules and I knew it and regretted it.

“Well I hope the books help…” she starts. A pause. “I suffer a little with anxiety too so I know what it’s like…”

She leaves it hanging there. What had started as a straightforward transaction – small pieces of paper handed over for larger, bound ones – had turned into a mental health confessional. A tiny, strange connection.

“Books help most things, don’t they ?” I offer back.

“Yeah” she agrees. “And it’s good you’ve got the Robin Hobb. Bit of self help and then a big story to get lost in”. We are silent for a moment as she scans the books and I pay. “Hope they help” she says again, putting the books into a bag, folding my receipt, and handing them both back to me.

“Thanks” I say. Not just for the books but for forgiving my intrusion, for acknowledging my admission, for showing some empathy, some vulnerability, and for liking Robin Hobbs. I didn’t say those bits. My ingrained social etiquette is back in control.

I hope she knew that was what I meant anyway. At the very least I hope I didn’t mess up her day. Our briefest moment of recognition was pretty much the highlight of mine.

Go on and make a joyful sound

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40. For A Dancer – Linda Ronstadt & Emmylou Harris

As I’m closing in on the end (of writing about 42 records of personal significance, not “the end”) then I thought I should lighten up proceedings by sticking together a few words about death. You know, just to take the edge off all those pieces about depression and anxiety and all that laugh out loud fare. If there are a set of recurring themes in my writing then uncertainty is certainly one of them – this, however, is one point of certainty: we’re all going to die.

The irony, of course, in thinking about death is that it quickly becomes thinking about life. It’s reasonable when confronted with mortality to give some urgent thought to how you’ve lived, how best to spend the time left, and to wonder what it’s all about. That hoary old chestnut. Nothing like a midlife crisis to bring on a sudden search for meaning.

In some respects my chosen position on a couple of things, namely a belief that this is all there is, no second chances, no afterlife, and that there isn’t a higher, guiding force in the universe, can lead to some on-the-face-of-it bleak conclusions. The point-of-it-all may well be that there is no point. Particles reacting and colliding predictably, governed by the immutable laws of physics, but the major events in your life governed arbitrarily; order and chaos, humans with free will running amok amid those immutable rules. I think the tension between the two is important – there has to be a belief that you’re the master of your own destiny else you either give up or write everything off to fate or surrender yourself to something ineffable. At the same time there’s too much evidence of chaos to ignore: planes crash, people blow themselves up on trains, maniacs run into schools with automatic weapons. Tell the innocents in each of those scenarios that they were masters of their own destiny.

So, in my version, perhaps meaning is found in those moments of balance between the chaos and order; in control whilst things are out of control. Perhaps it’s more an acceptance that things are out of control and the prospect of that is so terrifying that it’s at the heart of that loose conglomeration of neuroses and mental health issues that I like to wrap up as “my problems”. Wiser people than me have grappled with it. The broad consensus, secular position seems to be that fully experiencing the individual moments of life, being very present in those moments, is probably as good as it gets, probably as much as there is. Teenage Fanclub’s “Ain’t That Enough” (number 26 previously in this series of posts) and Po Girl’s “Take The Long Way” (number 31) cover this territory far more eloquently than I have here.

Jackson Browne’s “For A Dancer” fits within that family of songs albeit it’s the only one of the three that ponders life through the lens of death. The version of the song that I know is the one on Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris’ “Western Wall: The Tucson Sessions” album which, in turn, I’d come to via their brilliant collaborations with Dolly Parton. In truth this is more or less a solo Ronstadt record with Harris adding harmonies (is there any less selfish singer than Emmylou Harris ?) and given the news that she won’t sing again having being diagnosed with Parkinson’s it has acquired further poignancy for me. Chaos up to its arbitrary tricks again.

The song is sung from the perspective of someone saying goodbye at a funeral and reflecting on what it all means: I can’t help feeling stupid standing ‘round, crying as they ease you down. My direct experience of such events is, fortunately, very limited but in all cases Browne / Ronstadt’s next line rings true in spirit to me: ‘cause I know that you’d rather we were dancing, dancing our sorrow away, no matter what fate chooses to play.

The solemnity and sorrow of each occasion was no real reflection of the life that had passed and that we were mourning. That’s not to say that there isn’t and wasn’t value in soberly giving respect to the loss of loved ones but there seems to me to be a difference between that ceremony and the one that the dead might choose for themselves. Do we mourn for ourselves, for the space in ourselves left by the one that is gone ? Speaking on behalf of my future dead self then I’d far rather everyone was dancing. Not some sombre shuffle either: give it your best Jagger strut and, aging limbs allowing, pull a star jump and remember me.

The dancing in “For A Dancer”, of course, doesn’t have to be literal, it’s just a metaphor for living. Browne extends it to wonderful effect in laying down advice from the dead to those left behind:

Just do the steps that you’ve been shown
By everyone you’ve ever known
Until the dance becomes your very own
No matter how close to yours another’s steps have grown
In the end there is one dance you’ll do alone

There’s no belief here in certainty (pay attention to the open sky, you never know what will be coming down) but you’d best meet the chaos as well as you can (keep a fire burning in your eye). There’s also something stirring and deeply moving in the unflinching lack of sentimentality in the song’s overall message:

Perhaps a better world is drawing near
And just as easily it could all disappear
Along with whatever meaning you might have found
Don’t let the uncertainty turn you around
(The world keeps turning around and around)
Go on and make a joyful sound

Essentially we’re in the same place, with the same conclusion, as “Ain’t That Enough” and “Take The Long Way”. This is it. Experience it, savour it, try to enjoy it and maybe, just maybe, there doesn’t have to be a point to it all. Embrace the chaos.

So you can play this song at my funeral during the sad bit before everyone gets drunk and strikes some poses on the dance floor. It’s about as close to anything in a four minute pop song that gets at the big one: what’s it all about ?

Into a dancer you have grown
From a seed somebody else has thrown
Go ahead and throw some seeds of your own
And somewhere between the time you arrive and the time you go
May lie a reason you were alive but you’ll never know.

Part of you pours out of me in these lines from time to time

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39. A Case Of You – Joni Mitchell

Heartbreak. Has ever a subject preoccupied so many songwriters, so many songs ? Specifically the kind of heartbreak that follows the break down of a love affair. Maybe falling in love is the only subject that’s covered even more comprehensively. So, evidently, there’s something potent, something that’s felt deeply, in the marriage and subsequent divorce of hearts and minds. This begs the question: where are those songs in this list ? Other than “December” back at number 9 this has been a heartbreak free zone. Sure, it’s not exactly been a party zone either but songs about lost love haven’t really figured. Have I been so lucky ?

Well, yes, in most senses I have. This is a different post on failings of the heart than I’d have written fifteen or twenty years ago. The perspective inevitably changes when you are fortunate enough to meet and fall in love with someone with whom you don’t subsequently fall out again. The passing of time and security of partnership lessen the memories of those previously painful partings. It’s tempting to discard the past – as much out of respect for the present as anything – but I don’t think my lasting relationship with my wife would have been possible without the prior experiences of loving and learning. There are people (a small number of people) who are inextricably a part of who I am even though our paths have now diverged; paths that ran together once, for varying lengths of time.

At those sharp points of reckoning, the places we agreed (or one or the other declared) to walk separately, there were many, many records of gut wrenching heartbreak. All About Eve’s eponymous debut album and follow up “Scarlet & Other Stories” managed the neat trick of soundtracking both the beginning and the end of my first love. I once found Teenage Fanclub’s “Mellow Doubt” so apposite following the break down of my second love that I was inspired to buy it as a gift for my ex. On reflection its opening lines it gives me pain when I think of you may have needed some explanation to avoid confusion. Wonder if she still has it ? The debut Embrace record was basically purpose built for regret and I had it on repeat for much of early 1999 as my third love disintegrated. I think I appropriated Dylan’s “Blood On The Tracks” to further rub salt into my own wounds.

Had I been writing about any of these at the time then the emotional blood on and in the tracks would have been more evident; that gruesome mixture of anger, sadness, failure, rejection, pain and guilt that stews as heartbreak. From a distance it’s easier to touch the beginnings of those relationships – the happiness, the recognition of yourself in someone else, the process of falling in love – than the end. It’s easy with hindsight but the reasons – which at the time may well have been framed in terms of blame – they ended were important as they were about working out who you are and what you need and what you can give. If there was a way of doing that without anyone getting hurt… If you could bottle that and dispense it in pharmacies they’d be queuing round the block. And that’s my only regret in each of those relationships – not that they ended but that someone got hurt in them ending. I wonder if learning that something isn’t right requires getting beyond a point at which you’re so emotionally entangled that it’s impossible to disentangle without something breaking. Usually a heart, or hearts.

The record that’s closest to this expression of lost love and that sense of reminiscence and reflection, remorse and regret, is “A Case Of You”. It’s a measure of Joni Mitchell that she nails a sketch of an entire relationship in three verses, vivid fragments from before our love got lost. We start with a rueful, knowing Mitchell reflecting on things said in better times:

Just before our love got lost

You said “I am as constant as a Northern Star”

And I said “constantly in the darkness, where’s that at ?

If you want me I’ll be in the bar…

Her shoulder shrugging retreat to the bar is exquisitely captured with a wonderfully precise image of her drawing out her old lover’s face and the outline of a map of Canada on the back of a beermat.

On the back of a cartoon coaster

In the blue TV screen light

I drew a map of Canada – oh Canada !

With your face sketched on it twice

The lover in question is reputed to be Leonard Cohen (hence Canada) but it’s the imagery, the poetry, that is so strikingly beautiful in this song. In eight lines we have a complete outline of love gone awry. For me there is pretty much nothing so flawless as the opening verse and chorus of “A Case Of You”. If the point of writing about records is to find those moments where words and music coalesce to cast light on something true then this positively dazzles. It is wonderful. There is nobody – and I mean nobody Bob – who combines poetry and melody like Mitchell.

The other verses flesh out the backstory, deftly colouring in the outline as Mitchell remembers the passion she shared with the unnamed man – her the lonely artist (I live in a box of paints) drawn to someone that seemed fearless (I’m frightened by the devil and I’m drawn to those ones that ain’t afraid). The past and the present collide as she remembers words they shared in the full throes of love and how there’s a thread that still connects them even now the relationship is over.

I remember that time you told me

You said: “love is touching souls”

Surely you touched mine ‘cause

Part of you pours out of me in these lines from time to time

This section seems key to the song to me. That recognition that those you loved are never completely lost, part of them stays with you, changes you, even as you part and carry on your separate lives. It’s at the absolute heart of the melancholic contradiction in the chorus:

You taste so bitter and so sweet

Oh I could drink a case of you darling

And I would still be on my feet

I would still be on my feet

That curious mixture of the sweetness of love and bitterness at its end: that sensation that someone that used to intoxicate you doesn’t anymore. I’ve seen alternative interpretations of this record as a straight “love song” – that the could drink a case of you should be read as “I can’t get enough of you” rather than “I can take all of you but it has no effect”. This song ain’t that. It tells you it’s not that in its first line. Mitchell has written plenty of lyrically oblique songs but not many of them are on “Blue” and this is direct and straightforward – and all the more affecting because of it.

There are a handful of records that I believe are perfect: music, lyrics, context, and performance. This is about as perfect as it gets. A perfect song about that most imperfect state of affairs, the end of love. There won’t be other heartbreak songs in the 42 but there doesn’t need to be as this one says it all.

It’s not going to stop ’til you wise up

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38. Wise Up – Aimee Mann

If there was ever a movie version of this blog – just suspend belief for a moment – then it’s becoming apparent that the director would need to change the ending. There are five records left to cover, including this one, and in the movie you might reasonably expect those final musical musings to build to some sort of rousing conclusion. A happy ending.

However – *spoilers* – we are probably not headed for a neat and tidy finale in which our hero (again, suspend some of that belief for me) unravels the question to the life, the universe, and everything, unpicks whether the answer really is Deep Thought’s 42, and achieves a deep and abiding sense of contentment. It’s going to be more like the end of Empire Strikes Back than Return Of The Jedi, put it that way.

All of which is a slightly convoluted way of ‘fessing up that the road back from anxiety and depression – assuming optimistically that there is a “back” – seems to be a difficult one. In the neat and tidy version of this blog I returned to work after my sabbatical with a renewed and refreshed perspective on how I wanted to live and floated through productive days in a state of Zen like calm. In the real version I’m still artificially moderating my adrenaline levels with pills, still struck with irrational panic in seemingly innocuous scenarios, and still sometimes hating myself for what has happened to me. Or what I seem to be doing to myself, albeit subconsciously. I’m not even really sure which it is. I guess it’s what I’m doing to myself.

I’ve never really been very good at expressing how I feel. Turns out I may not even be very good at feeling how I feel. I seem to have something of an aversion to fully experiencing how I’m feeling and being okay with it, in all its glorious, uncontrollable, maddening cadences. Just for clarity, I’m not a psychopath, I haven’t lost the capacity to feel, it’s just that I seem to have stopped allowing myself full range of expression without even realizing it. It’s almost as if I have become distrustful of giving free reign to experiencing emotion and have tried to lock it away, either to project some notion of strength or to protect against something painful. It is a very difficult thing for me to admit to vulnerability. I realise that sentence looks somewhat incongruous written on a publically viewable blog, somewhat contradictory, but there’s a distance here – between me writing and someone reading, even if it’s someone that knows me – that feels okay in a way that telling someone the same wouldn’t. Put another way, possibly more simply, it is not too difficult to write here that I cried on my way home from work this week because I felt so defeated by my illness (if that’s what it is – I guess that’s what it is) but I would almost certainly never let you see those tears.

For a long time I have tried to keep a lid on it. Keep it under control. Inevitably it’s all still there, bubbling away under the surface – constant maintenance of which requires no little effort (the Manic’s “No Surface, All Feeling” was on my long list of songs for this blog). That’s not to say that I think that everything would be okay if I magically transformed into a creature driven entirely by its emotional impulses, that would seem to me to just be a different kind of hysterical mess. There’s a balance somewhere and I haven’t found it, don’t seem to know quite how to find it, and the consequence of that is that stuff (eat your heart out Jung) builds up inside me, isn’t given expression, and ends up popping out in other ways: lately in anxiety, previously in depression. In that context anxiety really is a fucker (eat your heart out Freud) as it becomes like a loop – repressed emotion feeding an anxiety response which in turn provokes a repression of emotion for fear of an anxiety response. Rinse and repeat.

Even this post is telling about my essential modus operandi. It’s a pretty rational, balanced assessment of something that is happening to me – or something that currently is me – rather than a splurge of feeling. It’s fairly dispassionate and detached. And that might well be part of my issue. The point of it, I guess, is a recognition and acknowledgement of that fact. The process of actually giving up the barriers I duck behind emotionally may take rather longer.

All of which 6th form psychology brings us to Aimee Mann. I’ve alluded to the fact before that there were a number of artists whose place on the list of my 42 records was never in question and she was absolutely one of them. I first heard her properly via the film “Magnolia” (and this song is part of the soundtrack) and the album she released around the same time, “Bachelor No. 2”. She is consistently smart, sharp, wise, funny, melancholic, warm, and melodic. There are very few wry observers of the human condition via the medium of three minute pop songs that I admire more.

“Wise Up” is a pretty simple song – a beautiful song but pretty simple. In the context of “Magnolia” it works to tie together the stories of the various lost characters in the film, asking each of them to recognise that things won’t improve for them unless they acknowledge some things about themselves and change. It’s about as straightforward as it gets in terms of wrapping a record in to my own personal narrative. The last line of the song might be heard as ambiguous – it’s not going to stop so just… give up – but I have always heard that line as “giving up” modes of behaviour or habits that are damaging rather than the more blunt sense of just giving up entirely. It’s a hopeful giving up rather than a fatal one.

So I suspect, in four record’s time, that not all of this will be resolved; there will be room for a sequel (although I’m not committing to writing about another 42 records). It may even turn into a saga – perhaps I could franchise it and sell tee shirts or something (“keep calm and take propranolol hydrochloride” or something equally snappy). I will try at the very least to ensure it remains a story of wising up and giving up.