Being Morrissey

   for Neil Laurenson

Morrissey is under an iron bridge,

tied to the back of a car.

He has a thorn in his side,

his Walkman has melted,

and his bicycle has a flat tyre.

He is feeling very sick and ill,

throwing his homework on to the fire,

and panicking.

While being criminally vulgar,

he falls out of bed, twice.

Now, he is miserable.

He jumps in front of a flying bullet,

smells the last ten seconds of life,

and knows: it’s over.

Every day is like this,

in the job he never wanted.

Beauty and the Beauty

   for Pippa

My mind still in the past,

I sat inside the Village Hall,

transfixed by Pippa as the Prince,

who, seconds earlier, before

the cloud of smoke, had been The Beast

(perhaps even more magical than

when Adrian had made a jug

of milk clean vanish down his sleeve).

Reminding her of this, I’d written,

‘You changed – from Beast to Beauty? – in

a puff of theatrical smoke.’

‘I turned into a handsome Prince!’

she wrote, by way of a reply.

I sat there thinking to myself:

those bloody Freudian slips, eh?

Yesterday

for Adrian, Mimi and Pippa

On a day for memories, I thought of you all; found some of my childhood and remembered.

There I was, that smiling child, lying on the carpet, transfixed by the lift in Adrian’s old toy garage. Up and up and up, then whoosh; paint-chipped Dinky toys racing down the ramp; no sound was more satisfying.

I saw myself sitting at the table outside your kitchen, with Mimi and Pippa (who seem to be something of a sisterly double-act in my recollections), sitting opposite me, cajoling an uncertain Fergus into taking a teaspoon of ‘medicine’ (I’m practising for when I’m a nurse, said Mimi). And when I refused (medicine is surely yuck), Pippa, who always had a laugh in her voice, telling me that it wasn’t really medicine, but rose-hip syrup. I didn’t believe you (roses are flowers!). I relented, of course, and was so amazed that I became a willing patient.

Joanella telling me to wake Adrian up by tickling his feet (That should get him up! or words to that effect). Who’s that tickling my feet? like a teenage troll from the Billy Goat’s Gruff. When I asked What’s that? he put his headphones on my head and almost blew my little mind, although they weren’t as cool – nothing was – as his digital watch. I throw it across the room when the alarm goes off in the morning! he said, to my disbelieving dismay. And, now that I think about it, I’m still amazed that he managed to pour a jug of milk into a newspaper without spilling it on the living-room floor (on my ?4^th birthday).

Mimi, or perhaps Pippa, explaining in excited tones how the TV wasn’t working because it had exploded! Being taken to a bedroom to be played a record by (I think) either Marc Bolan or David Bowie, and I thought it sounded awful, but when Mimi (was it?) played ‘Sailing’ on the downstairs music system, I couldn’t get enough of it.

And roses (not rose-hips), and yapping Tara, and your mother being the only person (apart from my wife) who has ever called me darling, and forever equating horses with Pippa, and Adrian taking me out on my 11^th and 12^th birthdays at the dreaded Ampleforth (and also to the theatre for the first time when I was 14, to see a bedroom farce), and nervously ushering at Pippa’s wedding, and Frant, and Gilpin Cottage, and being loved by your mother, and always feeling happy whenever we saw the Slatterys (sp?!).

It’s probably rather sentimental of me to say so, but I think that neuroscientists (not many sentences about sentimentality contain this word, but I suppose there’s a first time for everything) are looking in the wrong place when trying to find which part of the brain houses memories, because, so far as I can tell, they form in your heart; and that is where we find them.

11th Birthday Bumps! (photo: Joanella)

How to Be Happy

Although he is as taciturn as ever

I tell the tree what is troubling my mind.

Ten minutes in, he still has no reply.

I carry on, not feeling in the slightest

bit mad (although I start to, just a little).

An hour in, tree clears his throat and says,

Perhaps next time you might trouble the flowers

instead? ‘But you’re a metaphor for paper,’

I say. But flowers might cheer you up, he answers.

‘They aren’t a metaphor for anything,’

I say. They might be; you never can tell.

I ask my cat what she thinks. Birds. Miaow.

Beyond those thoughts, I couldn’t really say.

I start to tell the flowers what I told

the tree. We heard, they sang (sang?). Look at it

like this: we’re pink, you’re pink; we’re delicate,

admit it – so are you. You’re basically a flower.

‘So when I’m talking to you flowers,’ I say,

‘really, I’m talking to myself?’ That’s right!

And thus it was I found myself less troubled.

Found

We crossed that border, you and I,

and found an unfamiliar land.

There were no signposts, milestones, maps,

just empty roads, and you and me.

We walked in wordless silence;

we walked until the darkness came.

I could not see you as I stumbled

towards a grey, unquiet sleep.

*

I stared at brick walls when I woke:

the curtains drawn, the door left open.

There were no mirrors to be seen;

there were no pictures, only frames.

Your absence made my heart a stone,

ice-water ran inside my veins.

I wandered through that house for years;

and wondered where it was you’d gone.

*

I left that place and crossed a border;

I found my own familiar land.

My blood returned, my heart grew back:

I made a new house with my love.

We painted walls; made shining mirrors;

our stories lit up laughing rooms.

And when we saw our home was built,

we fell into each other’s arms.

The Teacher’s Song

The classroom where you teach is just a room:

it has four walls, a ceiling and a floor;

the colour scheme is bland; the furniture

is functional. This room does not inspire.

And yet. And yet. Inside this room there is

a door. You will not see it with your eyes,

you cannot touch its frame, or turn its handle,

for it is of the mind. Unopened. Locked.

No ordinary key unlocks this quite

extraordinary door, it takes a special one:

a key of words, of thoughts, of wisdom’s reach;

an incantation woven by a teacher.

Unlock this door, and then invite your children

to push it open for themselves, and walk

into the world that waits for them: a world

of knowledge, and all the freedom knowledge brings.

Sgt Pepperland

Like many people, I was a Beatles obsessive in my youth. Unlike many people (or, I suspect, any people), I took my obsession to a whole new level of nerdiness: I asked the Director of Music at Ampleforth to let me write my 5,000 word O’Level music project on the music of the Beatles. He countered with, “If you like songs, why not study Schubert?” I pointed out that we were already studying his string quartet in A minor. It was still a no. He eventually relented after I presented him with an analysis of “Yesterday” and a working title: The Styles and Forms of the Beatles Melodic Lines. (What was wrong with Melodies? ‘Melodic Lines’? Pffft. What a waffler.) It remains the only piece of academic work I wrote which had any originality or insight, and which I am proud of.

Thirty-three years after my Magnum Opus, I find myself in Sgt. Pepperland, being regaled by “It was 50 years ago today…” nostalgia. It’s a decadal event (it was twenty years ago… now thirty years ago… now forty years ago…), which is fitting, I suppose, given that ‘Sgt, Pepper’s Lonely Hearts’ Club Band’ is an album which you only need to listen to every ten years – to remind yourself that, yes, most of the songs are a disappointment. 

This is a common criticism, and there are two counter-arguments which are put forward in mitigation: (i) the sonic innovations were revolutionary; and (ii) the album was a 'cultural event' enjoyed many millions of people.

In answer to point (i): Revolutionary sonic innovations are startling at the time, but there’s only so many times one can be impressed by a flange on the lead vocal; and what was once an innovation eventually becomes either old-hat or dated – because if you innovate a studio effect which everyone else can copy, then they will. The thing with revolutions is that everyone else wants to join in. The Beatles spent nine months in the studio on the sound of the songs, rather than on the songs themselves. A great deal of icing for a small amount of cake. You may disagree. I’ll always find ‘When I’m 64’ embarrassing; think of ‘She’s Leaving Home’ as the second photocopy of ‘Yesterday’ (‘Eleanor Rigby’ being the first photocopy); fast forward ‘Within You, Without You’; cringe at the lyrical tweeness of ‘Lovely Rita’; take a pass on the cloying sweetness of ‘With a Little Help…’. Elsewhere, the problem with the songs is an imbalance in the Lennon/McCartney partnership very heavily in favour of McCartney. Personal preference also plays a big part in my disliking of this album: I don’t like big production.

As for point (ii), I’m put in mind of Seneca’s letter to Lucilius ‘On Crowds’: ‘Lay these words to heart, that you may scorn the pleasure which comes from the applause of the majority… have you any reason to be pleased with yourself if you are a person whom the many can understand?’