a seventieth poem...'jane austen vs.'

Jane carries

A six-shooter on

Her hip.

Dark hair tied

In a stern bob.

First up is

Lizzie Bennett,

But Jane is too quick

On the draw,

And fires a hole

The size of a fist

Through Lizzie’s

Bonnet - Lizzie’s

Brains slither like blancmange

Down the living-room wall.

Jane frowns, and

Then, on hearing

Footsteps in the

Hall, gathers her

Skirts and crouches,

Best she can, behind

The Regency writing table.

Enter the eponymous Emma

All hubris and peril

And lo she slips in

The pool of fresh

Blood, pulsing from

Lizzie’s obliterated

Skull. Quick as a flash

Jane is on her

Heels and first blows

Emma’s gun shoulder

Apart, before delivering

The coup de grace – a

Dead-eye shot

Straight through Emma’s

Unrequited heart.

Out in the parlour,

Fanny Price takes

Her powdered cheek from

Darcy’s smoking jacket and

Prepares to duel.

a sixty ninth poem...'listening'

Hannah had some news

For Jeremy.

They were sat together

In some bar

Or other.

Before long Hannah broke off

What she was saying

Since Jeremy had started

Reading the sports pages

Of the newspaper.

‘Are you listening?’

Hannah demanded.

Jeremy paused,

Reached into his pocket

And looked up

The definition of

‘listening’ on his

Smartphone app,

While Hannah waited,

Incredulous.

Eventually, after perhaps

A minute had passed,

Jeremy said:

‘No, because listening

Is a neurological cognitive

Regarding the processing of

Auditory stimuli’.

a sixty eighth poem...'albuquerque'

Neil recorded

Some guitar, one

Foot in a bucket of

Cow poop;

Then he hollowed

Out a buffalo’s

chest, and inserted

A sound desk –

This made the

Engineer smile.

And yet,

Neil’s wish to

Have the drum skins

Covered with vacuum-

Sealed ham n’ eggs,

Was to prove

A step too far.

a sixty seventh poem...'tracy's fancy'

Tracy got a kiss

From the guy she

Thought she fancied,

That felt more like

A kick in the teeth.

When she looked

In the bathroom mirror

Her gums were

Lipstick red,

And her head

Was all woozy.

Then, she returned

To the bar

And her best-friend, Suzie
Had stabbed him to death.

a thirty second cartoon...'expecting rain'

One of the tricks to maintaining some degree of contentment in life is, in essence, to live in the moment - this is widely known as mindfulness.  It's hard, however, to escape futures and pasts for very long: what has gone cannot be changed, and what will happen in the future is largely out of hand; and yet, at least, how we choose to prepare ourselves for what is to come can be changed, all the way up until the moment arrives.  

a thirty first cartoon...'bad luck lullaby'

This to the Mother Hen who cannot lay...

a sixty sixth poem...'new town'

Tommy was dreaming of crystal spires

A new town, a glass ceiling

A clear view

Up

A clear line

Ahead;

Anywhere but the city of

Mud and steel,

Ruin - 

Where the sewers bled

Sludge, sludge and more sludge.

a thirtieth cartoon...'bar'

Where do you go to silence the 'existential hum'?  The bar, of course - among the painters and decorators.

a twenty ninth cartoon...'just be simple'

a twenty eighth cartoon...'driving home'

This is another cartoon inspired by the music of Jason Molina, it’s called ‘driving home’ for no particular reason, other than perhaps in reaction to the overwhelming sense of foreboding in many of his songs, as if the narrative of his life was driven by an inexorable momentum towards an all-too-early end, which in spite of him being 'at the wheel', he did not necessarily wish to try and arrest.  It's also in part inspired by a moving sequence in the film Brokeback Mountain.  

a twenty seventh cartoon...'almost was good enough'

A friend introduced me to a rather marvelous singer/song-writer over the weekend - Jason Molina, who died from organ failure last year as a result of persistent alcohol abuse.  His music is genuinely soul-stirring, sad, beautiful and also cathartic; a wonderful gift.  The idea that in life the more you put in the more you get out does not always ring true - sometimes you give a lot, and you don’t get quite the same back; in some of these circumstances it might be worth accepting, where possible, that almost was good enough.

The Buyer

‘It’s a necrotizer,’ the man said.

The other man nodded, making it look as though he knew what that meant.

‘Look.’

The man with the necrotizer led the other around the stall to the cage. Inside was a ragged and glum chimpanzee. The salesman explained: ‘They are our closest living cousins; 97% the same DNA don’t you know. So they make the best demonstration models. It is possible to use these new Synthiskin dummies, but there’s no real substitute for living flesh.’

At that, he pointed the necrotizer at the impassive chimp. It looked like a cooker-top espresso maker, but matt black, and with dials to set the firing radius and so on. The salesman pulled the trigger. There was nothing to see and no sound apart from a slight metallic hum.

The buyer raised his eyebrows at the salesman. ‘Keep watching,’ he said. The buyer did so.

The chimpanzee began to hop about, itching its right arm and side furiously with its left hand. A high-pitched bark came through its bared teeth. The buyer watched fascinated, any kind of purchaser’s uninterested air falling away, as the ape’s skin began to crater, big flakes of flesh dropping to the cage floor. Raw wounds opened up and spread outwards craggily, leaving blackened clumps of blood and muscle behind. The chimp screamed and screamed as its flesh disintegrated. The test model was silenced, however, as the encroaching wounds spread over its throat and chest. Soon, it was dead, a mound of unspeakable gore in the cage.

The buyer gaped for a moment then closed his mouth. The salesman took up his patter. ‘You see, the necrotizer signals every body cell in its range to go through necrosis, which is the most violent and rapid type of cell death…’

The buyer cut him off with a wave. ‘I don’t need to know how it works. I’ll make a starting order of fifty thousand for the field trials. If my client is pleased, which I’m sure he will be, more orders will be forthcoming.’ He handed the salesman his card.

The salesman smiled to himself, pleased at how the necrotizer sold itself. ‘Certainly, sir. Now, can I interest you in any other products?’

‘I’ll browse the other stalls for a while, thanks all the same.’

The buyer shifted away to continue around the show. There was plenty on offer, from stratospheric jets to shares in keyhole satellites to permanganate explosives. The buyer had a slight but poised frame, his age only showing in his white neat hair – his face was almost clear of wrinkles. He looked rather distinguished against the oily other buyers and the slick, sharp-suited salespeople. The necrotizer had shaken his cool somewhat, which was why he chose to move on.

The buyer rounded a partition clad with posters advertising consulting services, missiles and other arms expos, and came face to face with a hologram. The flickering, washed-out form was yelling, but the volume was muted: ‘Boycott these merchants of death! End mechanised warfare and crush the military-industrial complex!’ After the Frankfurt Accord, hologram was the only legal form of protest at this kind of event. Organisers had had enough of their clients being bombarded with eggs and insults on their way in and hired the best lobbyists around. Violent invasions were still often planned and had to be routed. The buyer swept around the hologram and approached the next stall. It was small by the expo’s standards, and had glass tanks stacked up with rats inside, rather than the more expensive but more impressive chimpanzees. The air holes at the top had grease smeared all around their edges. There was a tub of petroleum jelly atop one of the tanks to replenish it if necessary.

The salesperson was a small, earnest looking young woman, with hair that was slipping out of a bun. The buyer recognised this as a new start-up type affair. Maybe this was even their first time at an expo. The saleswoman was somewhat flustered and excited.  

‘Sir, can I interest you in the latest developments in nano-warfare? From the laboratories of the world’s most prestigious universities, I present the most advanced nanobots yet produced.’

The buyer smiled, since he’d heard that a number of times before, but he thought he may as well take a look. He had a certain soft spot for these small companies, run out of some PhD student’s bedroom, driven by just a passion for the science and barely a thought for the applications. After all, this was where the buyer had started out; after graduating top of his class, as they called it in the Ivy League, he joined a then-tiny group named simply Military Solutions, working on their cruise missiles, now laughably rudimentary. The company ended up folding in the wake of giants like A and A, but the buyer got in as a junior dealer with a noble militia in the far east. By now, he was their key buyer and chief advisor to the arsenal. He was kept busy; there was always some crackpot rebellion to be quashed.

‘Show me,’ he said shortly.

‘Ah yes, of course…’ she said, and fussed with the laptop behind her, which had a small signal broadcaster stuck into one of the ports on the side. ‘Look at tank two please sir.’

Tank two had sawdust on the floor, like the others, and a rat in the corner. The buyer leant in and saw the sawdust begin to tremble, as though a large speaker had been placed underneath it. The intensity of its vibration increased and then it began to move in little streams as if the sawdust was being slowly tipped and poured away. The streams converged on the rat, which hadn’t seemed to notice the moving flooring. Suddenly its twitching nose froze, and the rat simply melted like an ice cube having boiling water spilt over it. Only damp sawdust remained.

‘Impressive,’ the buyer said kindly. ‘Among the best I’ve seen. But tell me, how is the battlefield control? How reliable is the enemy recognition, and how much friendly fire can I expect?’

The woman shifted from foot to foot. ‘The product is not yet fully ready for market,’ she admitted. ‘We are here to secure further investment to fund our research.’

The buyer smiled benevolently. The saleswoman reminded him of his daughter; nervous but confident of her own intelligence.

‘My client may be interested. They do have a taste for the… exotic.’ The buyer touched the tip of his nose. ‘I’ll take your card.’

‘Thank you, thanks,’ she gushed, pressing the card into his hand. They shook hands and the buyer patted her forearm in a fatherly manner with the other hand.

He was just stepping away to continue browsing when there was a commotion from across the exhibition centre. A surge of people swept across the room, seeming to move slowly against the gigantic space.

‘Stop them!’ security guards shouted. Most people stepped nervously out of the way of the column of protesters; a rare successful live demonstration. They were all dressed in black, tight clothes; easy to move in. They wielded almost comical weaponry in the context: cricket bats and flash bangs, which went off occasionally as they moved across the hall. They were far enough away to not bother the buyer yet, but a few seconds’ assessment found the security staff wanting. Priceless prototypes and animals’ tanks and cages were wantonly smashed by the protestors.

The buyer stayed composed, moved with customary economy. He stepped around the panicking young woman, any nostalgic resemblance to his daughter banished from mind. He yanked the laptop from the nanobot stall, leaving the cable dangling. He fetched the tub of petroleum jelly and moved quickly, without running, across the hall, away from the protestors’ devastation.

He settled in a space between stalls, which were by now deserted by their salespeople. He couched on the floor, placed the laptop at his feet and proceeded to smear a generous moat of petroleum jelly around him in a circle. The buyer scowled as he wiped his hand on his expensive woollen trousers. He sat cross-legged in his unusual fortress and opened the laptop. The nanobot control program was still running, but the lines of code were difficult to comprehend. The buyer was by no means illiterate in programming languages, but he was out of practice. So this may take a few minutes, he thought.

Glancing up, he saw one protestor pull another away from a dead macaque, where he had been immobilised in horror at the mutilated body. The pair advanced on the nanobot stall next, swinging bats. As the buyer had predicted, it was inevitable. The protestors smashed all the glass tanks; there must have been twenty of them. Out of a couple, lucky surviving rats dashed. The buyer could not see clearly from his vantage point, but he pictured the sawdust swirling, then the glass of the tanks begin to shimmer like puddles disturbed by a drop of rain, then the concrete floor shift in a disorientating fashion, redolent of quicksand. What he could see was one of the protestors stop still, a look of utter terror on her face. The black-clad figure dropped first to her knees, the trouser legs now horribly empty, then face down. The other protestor could not move in his bewilderment as he saw her clothes hollow out, like a cruel optical illusion.

The buyer was scrolling back up through the code, looking for a likely ‘cancel all bot activity’ –type instruction. Around him, protestors, salespeople and customers alike were putrefying with barely time to call out. He tried a couple of lines of code, but the nanobots relentlessly carried on destroying all living tissue in the space.

He noticed the floor outside his circle of grease begin to quiver, like tarmac on a blazing day, but movement ceased at the edge of his protective circle, the nanobots mired in the sticky jelly. Eventually the buyer spotted a line further up the page of code with a likely looking ‘=abort’ term in it. He typed the full command at the bottom of the page and the floor stopped moving.

The buyer closed the laptop and stood. He looked around the exhibition centre. There were few survivors. Wet empty outfits were scattered on the floor like some weird art installation. He sighed, touched the tip of his nose, and fished out the woman’s business card. The buyer assiduously scraped the outside edge of the petroleum jelly border up with the card and smeared it back into the tub. With the laptop and tub tucked under his arm, the buyer stepped carefully over the remainder of the moat and headed for the car, the airport, and a satisfied client. 

a twenty sixth cartoon...'sheffield elvis'

The title of this cartoon is intended to be tongue-in-cheek.  Richard Hawley is not Sheffield’s answer to Elvis in spite of his hair; he is very much his own man, and a great singer-songwriter to boot.  Very few vocalists possess Hawley’s deep, rich baritone, and he has re-claimed the chiming tones of the Gretsch guitar for a modern generation.  The style of the image is intended to pay homage to The Old Grey Whistle Test, hence the desiccated grain, and garish pinks and purples.

a twenty fifth cartoon...'city lights'

Either side of the Olympic Games, and in conjunction with London’s new claim to be the Financial Capital of the World over New York, there has been a lot of building in the City.  While these towering sky-scrapers are on one-level monuments to a perhaps less-than-savoury form of capitalism, from an architectural perspective alone, many of them are exciting designs – daring even.  Still, it is amusing that each new monolith has been infantilised by press and public alike: ‘the Gherkin’, ‘the Cheese-grater’, ‘the Mobile-phone’ etcetera.  Or is it?! Either way, passing mention should be made to Leon Kossof and John Virtue, who have done London justice with their excellent city-scapes in recent years.

a twenty fourth cartoon - 'warhol'

Andy Warhol’s genius is too often under-estimated.  The contention that his works are simply derivative is being disingenuous to his vision and his legacy.  Instead his works are often brilliant, ironic and, of course, enduring iconic portrayals of commercial advertising and our fixation with the zeitgeist; he understood the power of repetition as an art form perhaps like no other, and under-scored everything he did with a  keen aesthetic.

a twenty third cartoon...'rear lights'

Everyone of us has at least one moment in life where we have no option but to take some sort of plunge into the unknown.  If we’re lucky, we’ve someone to come with us. Here the car is a metaphor for our bodies, the vessel that carries us through life, and the red rear lights imply the threat of danger and the point of no return.  2013 saw the release of a wonderful horror movie In Fear, in which nothing of the implicit terror was revealed to the viewer until the final reels, the audience kept in the dark; indeed the image of a car’s rear lights is veritably cinematic, and I was also thinking of David Lynch’s Lost Highway when making this cartoon.

a twenty second cartoon...'blue monday'

‘Blue Monday’ is traditionally the Monday in the last full week of January, known in bad science as ‘the most depressing day of the year’.  Mondays are often days of conflicting emotions – hung-over from the weekend? And yet stimulated by the start of a new week and the possibility it brings; I guess on ‘Blue Monday’ these possibilities seem instead impossibilities.  Hi ho!   

a twenty first cartoon...gatsby

The image of the dead Gatsby floating on a lilo in the middle of his millionaire swimming pool is one of the most iconic in the world of art and literature; it’s also a potent symbol of man as an island, aloof and lonely in his own reality - in life and in death. And yet when glamour and tragedy combine, death has almost an incandescent quality. 

a twentieth cartoon...'end of the world'

Recently I had a vivid dream about the end of the world – all of my friends were there, and what’s more, nobody seemed to really care that much!  We piled into a car, headed presumably for nowhere in particular, and began drinking wildly.  Naturally, the roads were deserted and the whole occasion turned into a bit of a joy-ride through the urban ruin.

a nineteenth cartoon...'auto-graveyard'

The first time I came across the cold and yet emotive phrase ‘auto-graveyard’ was in J.G.Ballard’s novel Crash.  John Salt, meanwhile, has made a career out of painting car-wrecks and knackers yards – very expertly.  I love the idea of the ruined automobile as the carcass of the human spirit, as well as the detritus of neo-liberal capitalism. 

an eighteenth cartoon...'winter road'

There have been a number of rather special art exhibitions in London over the last few years – the best, however, has surely been David Hockney at the Royal Academy in 2012.  I spent nearly 20 minutes in front of the first painting, an enormous landscape of the Grand Canyon, alone; although most of the works were of places in the British Isles, capturing the four seasons in eye-popping colour.  Here’s a very quick and very humble tribute of my own.  

a seventeenth cartoon...'sea #2'

‘That was the river, this is the sea!’ – Mike Scott, the Waterboys.  There have been many wonderful songs about the sea, after all it is a mysterious body of water and makes for a very romantic vista.  As well as 'This is the Sea' by the Waterboys, you might have 'The Ocean' by Richard Hawley, nearly anything from 'Pacific Ocean Blue' by Denis Wilson, or 'Sloop John B' by his brother, Brian.

a sixteenth cartoon...'dusk'

It can be an ethereal experience to walk from a lighted room into a darkened one at dusk, especially with the curtains open; you feel almost at once removed from whatever is going on the other side of the double-glazing and there are the strange colours in front of your eyes. This is, approximately, the view from my kitchen window.

a fifteenth cartoon...'trailer'

I’ve always been strangely fascinated by itinerant lifestyles, trailer parks, and the ‘edgelands’.  A distant relative of mine through marriage is the photo-realist painter John Salt.  He made his name in New York in the 70s, 80s painting wrecks of automobiles and trailer homes – he saw in them the dissolution of the American Dream.  He’s a very humble man, and his source material is too, as well as beautifully melancholic.  In this piece I’ve adopted John’s subject matter and the style of another photo-realist painter, Patrick Caulfield, in an attempt to celebrate the simple life.

a fourteenth cartoon...'eyes'

‘Look at me when I am talking to you!’. ‘Look into my eyes!’. Both commands that can scare the living bejesus out of any of us, and for different reasons.  Eyes are strangely hypnotic, windows into another world.  Sharing and maintaining eye contact is a difficult thing, we feel put upon, somehow exposed; to find a pair of eyes where it’s safe to gaze is a rare and beautiful thing.  

a thirteenth cartoon...'bowie'

David Bowie is a strange old bean.  He has famously re-styled himself on many occasions throughout a thoroughly successful, sometimes weird, sometimes wonderful career, now into its fifth decade.  Blimey! Or, as DB might say to himself in the bathroom mirror: ‘You little wonder, you!’

an eighty ninth story...'the old house'

My name is Montgomery A. Morris III.  I come from a long line of Morrises – three Morrises, out of a pathological character trait for repetition, have been christened Montgomery.

All of us Morrises have lived the duration of our lives on planet earth; all of us have been well-to-do travelling businessmen of one kind or another; and yet all of us, including me, I now realise, and I am ashamed to say, have been too cheap and lazy to make life here, there, hell anywhere, a great deal better than it is, and too damn proud to acknowledge our failings.

Last week I had a sobering experience.  I was on a business trip and happened to pass by the town of my birth.  You know, in setting out, I hadn’t even entertained the idea I might travel anywhere near where I grew up; my childhood seems to me another time and place, a time and place the person I see in the mirror every morning perhaps didn’t even experience for real, the child I never was, from where I can’t recall.

Anyhow, I was an hour ahead of schedule, and seeing the name of my birth town on the road signs stirred in me a seldom felt nostalgia to make a short detour.  So I slipped off the motorway at the next exit and joined a tailback heading into the centre. 

I have two memories from my childhood, one perhaps too warm and cosy to be true, the other perhaps too cruel and salient to be untrue.  The first memory is of rolling around my step-mother’s front lawn on a hot summer’s day, the sky eight-eighths blue, with her Labrador puppy licking my face; the second is of being taken to the refuse yard by my father, and there, in among a trough of discarded house-hold appliances, from science ovens to vacuum cleaners, grammar phones to cordless kettles, lay the bloodied remains of a dead kitty-cat.  Someone had run it over, and had treated it with the same sanctity as the unwanted and inanimate objects the kitty-cat was surrounded with.  This was the first, and not the last occasion in life, I have hoped for a better world…somewhere else.

My birth place had unsurprisingly changed a lot in five decades.  New mauls and office buildings had appeared like Lego blocks (how old are architects these days!?), a new one-way system led conveniently toward the retail park, the telephone exchange where my step-mother had worked was derelict - now a great, empty building with a small plastic box in one dusty corner, relaying the telecommunications a staff of fifty would once have relayed, or so I imagined.  And the refuse yard had grown into a small mountain, a slag heap looming precariously over the town.

For the past twenty-five years I have owned what has become a fairly lucrative washing machine business.  We manufacture and sell washing machines for the home and have range of industrial-sized washing machines for industrial laundries as well.  I have a comfortable, spacious, four bedroom apartment and a nice car, both as a result.  My wife is intelligent and beautiful, at least after a fashion, and my kids went to decent schools.  Beyond this, I am at last convinced I have achieved very little else.

My washing machines keep people’s clothes cleaner than they might otherwise be.  My wife, since I am often away, keeps our apartment neat and tidy.  My kids may make the most of their education and wind up putting some of their knowledge back into society.  My guess is they won’t – we Morrises are typical of so many nuclear families of today, we make copies of each other generation after generation.

It’s no surprise mankind very rarely learns from it’s own history, and goes on repeating the same mistakes.

But back to my ad-hoc return to my birth town; I tried, of course, to find my old house.  In my imagination it was a rather elegant red brick two-storey town house, with a large veranda out front, and a lawn, and a neat gravel drive, and a garage.  My only (perhaps real) memory of it, as I have said, is of my step-mother’s Labrador’s tongue on my (perhaps) rosy-red apple cheeks. 

I didn’t find my old house, it may not exist any more.  And without it, I suppose, my childhood means nothing.  And what of the child that grew to become the adult me? What is left? What was there in the first place?

Amidst all of this rambling, what I really want to get across is the singular importance of memory.  I realise I miss mine sorely.  It should be the basis on which I make good and or reasonable decisions, it should be the basis on which I build on my day to day experience of living to the extent I can develop enough to be aware of other people in other spaces over and above the one I inhabit.  My memory should be an aide not just to me but to others too.  It is integral to my intelligence.

However, it has become cluttered with things that don’t seem of very much use for more than a nano-second - modern life leaves very little time for memories to develop and be understood - and except for the names and ages of my kids, and my wife’s birthday (which I sometimes forget, my excuse being that we, my wife and I, live in a distracted world), in the internet I have a memory pool for everything else. 

How do you teach an old, scatter-brained dog like me new tricks when there are no tricks that need to be mastered?

My memory is in danger of becoming largely redundant, sad to say, and my usefulness to others is going with it – aside from helping people keep their clothes clean, from staying away from any house-work to allow my wife a purpose, and giving my kids the slim chance of not turning out like me, Montgomery Morris II, and Montgomery Morris I before that.

It seems to me the question as to whether we can reverse the slow demise of our planet - and give the casual inter-galactic observer the impression that we humans don’t in fact hate the place, and the other creatures that inhabit it - revolves around what we can remember to do.

For whatever remains of my existence, and heavens I may not have long, I shall try to remember to recycle my milk cartons; I shall try to remember to say ‘hello’ to my neighbour, and if he should strike up a conversation try to be interested; I shall try to stop and think every now again of my far-flung friends and relatives, send them a postcard, or drop them a line; I shall try and remember to stay away from the internet, try to reimburse my memory bank on my own – perhaps I shall read some more; I shall try to make time to write down my sum experience for my kids, largely what no to do, so that they have an advantage in the memory stakes, so that they wise-up;  I shall try to remember to consider my wife’s beauty and intelligence more often and more seriously; I shall try to use the profits from my washing machine business for something more than keeping people’s clothes clean; next time I pass by my birth town, I will try to have recalled where my childhood took place, my old house, and whether there was a large veranda, a neat gravel drive, a garage,  a lawn and a Labrador puppy.

And I will also retain the memory of that kitty-kat at the refuse yard.               

a twelfth cartoon...'lakes/spring'

The Lake District is a spiritual place, and the air seems freshest in spring, and there is still a little snow on the mountains as well as new flowers in the patchwork fields and valleys.  Mountains are humbling for their sheer endurance and their size; throughout human creation we have been awe-struck by staying-power and big things, they have a kind of beauty since they reaffirm and reassure us somehow.

an eighty eighth story...'birthday'

Frederick was an earthling boy.  Frederica was an earthling girl.  They had just met for the first time in two earthling years at the birthday party of an earthling friend.  Frederick and Frederica had once been more than friends.  It was a strange experience for both of them, and one they had known might be coming for two earthling months since they had seen each other’s name on the guest list.

Frederick was a good deal more relaxed than Frederica, or so it appeared, and yet they got to talking, Frederick asking most of the questions.  They talked about earthling weather, earthling employment, earthling politics, anything under the earthling sun aside from other earthling boys and earthling girls.

Earthling drink can be very intoxicating – the special ingredient being, of course, alcohol.  Since neither Frederick or Frederica knew very many earthlings at the birthday party, they stayed drinking together and chatting about all the aforementioned kerfuffle until they both began to feel a little tipsy.

In the intervening two years between Frederick and Frederica being reunited at the birthday party, Frederick had thought of little else but Frederica, not least in his more idle moments.  Frederica, on the other hand was able to indulge in one fantasy after another with her earthling girl friends every weekend, whereas Frederick was left with his earthling boy friends all of whom had footballs for heads.

Still, Frederick had surprised himself, even surpassed himself about how relaxed he was feeling in front of his Cleopatra (Frederica), and as they continued to chat and drink alcohol, he leaned further in, and touched his Cleopatra more often – touch being a sign of earthling affection.

Eventually, Frederick was compelled to ask Cleopatra what he had wanting to ask for two earthling years.  He asked Cleopatra if she still loved him.  On planet earth asking a question about love is often considered absurd (this is, in part, why hardly anybody lives there anymore – earthlings can be pretty vile, selfish creatures, not to mention insufferably loud and messy).

Cleopatra said ‘no’, and in an instant became Frederica once again.

Frederick wobbled ever so slightly at her reply: a canon ball had just gone off in his chest.  ‘Oh’, said Frederick and looked at the floor.  Frederica for her part couldn’t look at him anymore – what an absurd creature he had become, a desperate and hairless, over-stretched chimp.  This is what she actually thought.

‘Frederick’, she said, ‘you had no right to ask that question, and now I have to go’.  At this, Frederick, who had stood motionless for fifteen earthling seconds like a short-circuited robot, switched back on again.  Automatically he seized Frederica by the wrist.  ‘Wait just one moment’, he said, ‘I have to go to the rest rooms’ (rest rooms are where earthling boys relieve themselves, and earthling girls speculate on the size and performance of the organs with which boys relieve themselves).  Frederica didn’t respond, looked straight through Frederick, but she stayed where she was.

A few earthling minutes later Frederick re-emerged from the rest rooms.  He looked in something approaching agony as he shuffled across the bar back to where Frederica was standing.  Close up Frederica could see anguish all over his features.  ‘Here’ said Frederick, ‘I have a parting gift for you’, and he handed her something wrapped over and over in a bundle of tissue.  ‘Wha..what is it?’, asked Frederica, confused.  ‘Something I don’t need anymore’, said Frederick, wincing as he spoke.  Frederica took a step back, and felt a chill all through her body.  ‘Frede-rick,’ she choked, ‘why have you got your hand down your trousers?’.  In the background someone announced it was time to sing ‘happy birthday’. 

‘To stop the bleeding’, said Frederick turning from grey to green, madly eye-balling Frederica, ‘I…don’t’…need it…any more!’.  And then he fainted.

an eleventh cartoon...'the sea'

The sea has been in the family for centuries, my ancestors are all RN or merchant navy, my father included.  I was born with salt on my lips, light in my hair, sand between my toes; even on the grayest days, I can stand for hours gazing out to sea, waiting for the tide to return. 

a tenth cartoon...'beds'

Beds need rest too, you know: many of us humans don’t travel lightly through life, and some of us spend rather a long time horizontal.

a ninth cartoon...'epitaph'

When the last member of the human race turns out the lights, by the time we have trashed our little planet once and for all, I feel that this would be perhaps the most fitting epitaph, and our sole great achievement in that music almost always soothed, provided companionship and made people, in various ways, warm inside.

an eighth cartoon...'smart phones'

It isn’t yet clear whether people entirely understand the nature of their relationship with their smart phone - the question at the heart of this relationship is simply: who owns who? Smart phones are powerful tools, tools are not neutral, moreover, smart phones are also terribly attractive, and they want to be used and/or fed - a bit like the man-eating plant in Howard Ashman’s A Little Shop of Horrors.  

a seventh cartoon...'smudge'

Someone asked me the other day who the love of my life was.  Naturally, this question came about after several glasses of wine.  I could have answered truthfully, nevertheless I didn’t – I lied and said it was my cat, Smudge, who has been spoiled alive for 17 years.

Ham, Jam and My Mam

It was when my mother took my twin sister and me into town that day that I realised the depth and colour of her shame. I also learned a thing or two about my so-called community, but you can make your own mind up about that, and them. We rode the bus; I got the window seat, with Sarah (that’s my twin), next to me. Mam sat in front of us next to her friend Joanne, who was often on the bus when we got on because her stop was one before ours on that impatient road into town, and the buses weren’t so frequent. Like Mam, Joanne didn’t have so many friends; her mother had murdered her father one cool summer night and gone away for fifteen years. Joanne was sixteen then, so she went into supported accommodation instead of getting foster parents. All that hung over her like a grey gauze and it was too much for most of the local people, who spoke sympathetically to each other about how damaged the poor girl must be but rarely spoke to her. Rumour had it that Joanne’s dad was a philanderer and back-handerer, so he had it coming, people would say bravely, but who knows the truth of that. Perhaps her mam was just crazy.

So on the bus that day I listened to Mam and Joanne talking, just about the TV and us kids, as though we weren’t there really. That was ok though; I just breathed on the window and drew little dogs and cats with my finger while Sarah sat and happily scratched up under her wig since Mam had her back to her. I thought adults did that rather a lot: talk to each other as though kids couldn’t hear them. Almost as if they had an ‘adult conversation’ switch that turned off our ears while they talked about other people – the parents of our school friends, oftentimes. I guess, in a way, the switch worked, not because I couldn’t hear them gossiping, but because I just knew somehow that I couldn’t mention Kasey’s dad’s drinking at school, or Anna’s mum’s maybe-affair. This was the kind of thing Joanne would spill to Mam on the bus rides into town. I wasn’t so young that I couldn’t pick up the gleeful edge to their words. It made me sad to hear it.

Our town is just two miles from another town, and after that there aren’t any other settlements for miles around. People from my town would call those from the other ‘jams’, since supposedly they were so poor they couldn’t afford anything but a jam sandwich for their lunch at the coal mine, then at the steelworks and afterwards when actually no, they couldn’t afford anything else. People from my town referred to themselves as ‘hams’, because they could afford a ham sandwich each day. Funny thing was, everyone in the other town used the same nicknames, but the other way around. Hams or jams: it was supposed to be obvious which one you’d want to be. At the time, I wasn’t so sure – I preferred jam. I get it now, of course; maybe that was growing up. Coming to grasp a metaphor.

Hams and jams didn’t hate each other or anything, but you do what you can to lighten the load. Us and them: it’s better than a library or a park for community spirit.

On the long slope down into the town centre, the bus stopped for a couple of old ladies. Mam tapped our legs as they got on, and Sarah and I got up for the pair, who made that cooing and clucking sound that old people make, as though they are trying to sound stupid. They sat down, noticed Mam, and went quiet.

I knew who they were; Mam had told me before. One was the Sunday school teacher when she’d been a kid. But, like most people, they didn’t think too much of a nineteen year old girl having twins by a married man, who moved out of town with his wife and children soon after Mam’s bump started to show. His name, my father’s name, was Ed. That was pretty much the sum total of my knowledge of him: two letters, in reverse alphabetical order.

Mam gets a certain look in her eye if Sarah or I ever ask about him. It’s a look like Mr Simons gets if kids at school ever ask him if he’s gay.

We got off the bus in the centre of town. There’s one pedestrianized street; about half way down is a fancy shop with home ware and furniture and so on. Mam had never taken us in there before, but it was Granny’s birthday coming up and Mam said she deserved something nice.

We stepped softly around the shop, as though the floor was the expensive thing. Mam held her bag to her chest rather than letting it swing from her shoulder. She whispered, ‘Don’t touch’ to Sarah and I. Mam picked up vases and candlesticks and such like, weighing them in her hand. I peered through the shelving at the shop assistant, a narrow-eyed crone with gluey lipstick smeared on. She was following our movement around the shop like a cat watches a spider move across the floor. Mam plumped for a gilded picture frame and took it to the counter. The shop assistant didn’t say a word as she wrapped it in tissue paper and accepted Mam’s cash.

It was a squally day; opening the door was an effort. Sarah came out last, and the door slammed on her, catching her long hair and yanking the wig right off. It slid down the frame of the rebounding door and into a puddle at the edge of the pavement. Sarah immediately started crying hotly, thickly. I looked around and it felt like so many eyes were on my little family: there was the shop assistant, from the inside; the two old ladies had shown up, a couple of men, labourers, from the housing development on the edge of town. People just stared; no one said anything, including Mam. Sarah’s bald head, red with rashes, bobbed up and down ludicrously. Mam bent down and picked up the sopping wig then shoved it onto Sarah’s head, all askew. Sarah cried even harder at the cold wet mass. Then Mam did something she’d never done before. Her hand opened up and she slapped Sarah on the side of her face, hard enough to make Sarah buckle to her right.

There were gasps from the onlookers. It was only much later that I reflected that they were gasping not at the slap itself, but the audacity to do it on the street with other people watching. In my town, discipline occurred behind closed doors. Mam levelled a look of white hot fury at the spectators.

‘There,’ she said, ‘another thing for you to judge me for. My daughter has alopecia. Haven’t you ever seen a bald little girl before?’ Truth was, I suspect, they didn’t know just what to judge her for yet; there was an embarrassment of gossip at hand. It would be champed at on the corners, in the cafes and in the supermarket aisles for weeks to come.

Mam set off down the road, knowing we’d follow. We couldn’t explain ourselves any better than she could.

Later, in the house, Mam sat at the table long after we’d eaten staring a middle-distance stare. I thought about this day many times, even more once Mam had gone and Sarah had moved to Glasgow and there was just me left in this town. I could have left too, naturally, but even this town was capable of giving second chances.  

a sixth cartoon...'deejays'

This is a double portrait of two friends, presented here as their disc-jockey alter-egos: Doc. Hymans and Philip T. Wilson.  Doc. Hymans is one of the world’s leading experts in the field of bluegrass music, as well as a former member of the National Rifle Association.  Philip T. Wilson used to be a preacher until a freak hurricane blew the roof off his church and let the rain in. He turned to music for salvation and found it in Genesis.  He counts Mike Rutherford as a personal friend.

a fifth cartoon...'fish'

Last night I dreamed about fish and girls.  I had fish three times over the weekend, and I went out with the girls on Friday night as well as Saturday night. 

a fourth cartoon...'moyes'

Nobody said it was going to be easy for David Moyes – and it hasn’t been.  He looks like a man feeling the strain.  For this quick cartoon my inspiration was L.S.Lowry’s Head of a Man (Man With Red Eyes), a striking portrait of a working-class fellow, tired and exhausted by his unforgiving work, and at the bleak prospect of a future in (a then industrialised) Manchester.

a third cartoon...'selfie'

The phenomenon of the ‘selfie’ – typically a suggestive photograph taken of one’s self – has been the bread and butter of the Mail Online in the last year (this and the usual stories about how the French are inflating house prices, and how gays are ruining the memory of Diana).  And there are hoards of bright, young things (largely women, from Kelly Brook to Rihanna, since they can really get the old perverts among Daily Mail readership going) who’s principal concern in life seems to be their appearance.  I am bothered by my wonky nose which I broke a few years back and have never had fixed. So here it is, as well as the rest of my face.   

a second cartoon...'printheadz'

This is a Printhead (plural: Printheadz).  The style inspired by the book cover of American Psycho by Bret Easton-Ellis (Picador; 1991), as well as the art of Francis Bacon; the design, of course, from the print-head from a standard Inkjet.  A Printhead, I suppose, is someone who enjoys bold, colourful and challenging writing on a wide range of themes, as we try and cover in this blog, Phil and I.

a barbara cartoon...'the unknown soldier'

The Unknown Soldier is yet another depiction of the myth.  I was thinking of the young men who have died (often needlessly) in war, and how, to use a sporting vernacular, they have 'taken an early bath'.  A bath tub, in a sense, resembles a coffin, and indeed has been a place of death throughout our history, Murat, Morrison etc.  In dying there is also a sense of salvation, and of things being made clean (if, of course, there is an afterlife).  At the same time the cartoon is intended to be simple and eloquent, and as unequivocal as death - the airbrush paint 'splodges' are supposed to represent funeral flowers, blood, and bomb craters all at once.

an eighty seventh story...'vice'

He had been in a helicopter crash, survived ninety-two days in the wilderness, his first wife died of cancer, his father died the day after his helicopter crash.  We’re sitting downstairs in my oak-paneled office, spidery sunlight splayed out across the leather-top desk between us.  He’s a woodsman, hands folded in his lap he looks relaxed in his chair, at one with the furniture – furniture and language, perhaps the two things that separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom. 

There are some parents who come before me and hover over their seat as if it’s made of an alien material, as if they can’t wait to get rid of their children and back to the Hive, to the computer screen – many of them place their smart phones on the leather-top desk as if their CNS won’t function without the thing in their line of view.  It’ll go ‘Bzzzz’ every now and again and you can see their nerves twitch and panic flit across the whites of their eyes.

The woodsman is a heavy man, and in middle age, in spite of the extra girth, you can tell he’s as strong as mahogany, his hands folded in his lap are large and thick, his shoulders round and wide, as is his neck, and yet his face is boyish and alive, with a ready smile.  We have a mile long line of sycamores flanking the drive to the front of school, it’s an impressive entrance first time around.  ‘I love trees’, he says, ‘you came up the drive’, I say, ‘yes’, he says and leaves it at that. 

I heard the woodsman on the radio a month back and feel like I know about him.  He came across as very open, and it impressed me.  ‘Your child’, I say, ‘is from your first or second marriage?’, ‘first’ he says, still smiling, ‘I see’, I say, remembering his first wife, ‘I couldn’t fix it’, he says almost immediately as if reading my thoughts, ‘cancer’, he says, ‘yes,’ I say.  I haven’t met his boy yet, but I want to – we need some fine young men at our school; his grades were unspectacular, though I suspect it’s because he has better things to do than to waste his youth at study.

‘Would you like a smoke?’, I ask, opening my cigarette case, and taking out a couple, one for him, one for me, and to my vague surprise he says ‘yes’, and reaches out with one of his big, thick hands – in his fingers the cigarette is the size of little, white stub.  I ease back in my chair, and light up, take a drag, he does the same.  ‘You have a vice!’, I say, ‘yes’, he says, inhaling deeply, his broad chest rising and falling, the spidery sunlight crawling through the blinds, illuminating the plumes of smoke rising from his cigarette, ‘and you?’, he says. 

I hit a child once, with the back of my hand, and I didn’t feel proud of it afterwards. Nothing came of it, however - the child seemed overcome by apathy the whole time he was with us.  And I shot a deer once, and not, would you believe, entirely on purpose.  Again, it made me feel dreadful.

‘A vice?’, I say, ‘yes’, says the woodsman shifting in his seat.  I pause, and wonder if I should tell him, after all it used to be common place for men in my position to indulge it, even enjoy it, so long as it didn’t become the wreck of you. The woodsman is looking just above my eye-line, perhaps at the oil painting of the founder of the school in his academic robes that hangs directly behind me.  I lean forward and flick the ash from the end of my cigarette into the silver ashtray in front of me.  ‘A vice?', I say, 'I hit a child once’.  The woodsman looks away and then back again, this time directly into my eyes, ‘you hit a child…’ he repeats.

Ten minutes later, and after the woodsman has left, I’m shaking.  The spidery sunlight has retreated from the leather-top desk, the room has darkened, the afternoon has become overcast.  In the top pocket of my blazer I find my keys, and fumblingly open my desk drawer at the second attempt.  There underneath my school diary and my papers is my beloved bottle of Scotch. I sigh and relax: my beloved Scotch, my vice.

an eleventh reflection...'river'

I’ve been living down by the water so long now it’s like I can tell the rain.  I can read the brooding anvil clouds, I can smell the rain coming.  It’s what happens when you’ve so much water so close to home.  When I lie in bed I can hear the river run by the house, some days gushing like a light, virginal mountain stream, other days, after the rain, roaring and rushing.  I am a fisherman but with only so much line, I’ve been without proper work for a year.  But I catch fish and eat them, at least when the river isn’t so high.  I’ve a gas-light stove and I cook the fish on there, wrapped in old foil.  Living down by the water, you have to get used to the old ways, let the river run through you.  There’s no telephone and my nearest neighbour is three miles up a dirt track, so the pace of life is the river, and the water that flows in her, or somedays surges up her banks.  She’s burst a couple of times, and I’ve had a basement full of her, but bailing her out is something to do when I’m not writing, or fishing, or watching the sky and the clouds morphing shapes, the sky about to rain.  Rain on a river is a special thing to see when the river’s quiet and slow, a humbling thing too: in a sense that’s all I am, rain on a river, disappeared into a great, ever moving body of water as soon as I arrived – in a sense we all are.  Living down by the water, the river knows, she knows and is the best company a man could want for, if you let the river flow.                  

a sixty fifth poem...'gerald's dream'

Gerald sat on the settee

In his usual place,

A handkerchief to his

Runny nose

In the centre of his

Blubbery face.

Even his lips were fat,

His teeth, black

Half-way down,

His gums drowned

In mucus.

Gerald had the flu:

His whole body

From his swollen ankles

To his frog-like chin

Ached;

This he knew,

And wished

His mind,

For it was agile

And lithe,

Didn’t have to carry

His flabby frame

That needed food and rest

From day to day,

Cradle to grave.

At night Gerald dreamed

Of being a gas.

a tenth reflection...'humiliation'

The lights in one of the new flats were out this evening.  It’s Monday night, and everybody is back in town from their Christmas holidays.  Except the lights in one of the new flats were out, the big sheet-glass windows black.

Last Tuesday was New Year’s eve, a time when friends, families, loved ones gather together, stay up to the bells and see in the next twelve months of their lives.

On the morning of New Year’s eve, I awoke unusually fresh, left my house and crossed the road that runs parallel with the new flats. 

I was heading to buy provisions for a New Year’s eve bash I’d be hosting – twenty five, thirty of my friends were going to be there, we’d eat and drink, laugh and do whatever else young people of my age get up to.

I looked right, toward the Bank of Swans, a boarded up public house no one I know ever dared set foot in; I looked left, and there outside the new flats were a phalanx of policemen, women, police cars, an ambulance – the road was cordoned off.  We’ve had a shooting on our road before, whichever way you look at it a tragedy, whatever the time of year.

Then later in the afternoon I headed out again - I’d rustled up something of feast in the kitchen and yet had realised I was short of pop for when midnight came, and we would all gather in a circle, sing Auld Lang Syne, swig from various bottles on the go - and heading out I ran into my elderly neighbour who lives in the flat below.

‘Did you see the policemen?’, she said, ‘yes’, I said, ‘it was a suicide’ she said.

Suicide?

Suicide is pretty final; very final – it takes care of everything.

And as Kurt Vonnegut wryly quipped, it also takes care of your mortgage.

Somebody’s New Year’s eve tragedy on the road where I live, a suicide, is an act that has perhaps crossed many a person’s mind when suffering anguish and pain. 

For one person to go through with suicide remains, of course, one person too many, however, mercifully of the people suffering anguish and pain, a sizeable majority do not let the thought of suicide become manifest.

For those however that do, and either attempt to take, or succeed in taking their own life, the root cause, I would suggest, often involves some sort of humiliation.

Humiliation is everywhere in our society today, a society where so many of us absolutely have our hearts set on earning more money, climbing as high up the greasy career pole as is (often unreasonably) possible, attaining through the accrual of possessions (including everything from a plasma television to a partner) some kind of fulfilment: a feeling of all being well we hope will last until we’re too old to care anymore.

Granted, some succeed, but almost always at a cost to others, and beyond a passing acknowledgement, perhaps not enough of us stop to help, or give the time of day to people on the way down, or people who are simply left behind.

Life is largely lived in our heads, looking after number one is perhaps on a deeper, more primal level all we know; the rest is what society and the various communities it has spawned over the years has taught us.

And yet, today, societies and the communities therein are retracting, heading indoors, or online, and away from a communal sense of living where people’s problems were known about.

In an increasingly private world, and a world which values far and above all achievement, we risk alienating members of our community, whether it be a community of friends, a community of indigenous but unrelated people, who perhaps have suffered anguish and pain, or indeed, have always done so, have always known failure and rejection, have never achieved, from one point of view, anything.

With alienation comes hand in hand the feeling of being friendless and alone, with being alone comes sadness and guilt, with sadness and guilt comes anger and fear, anger and fear can result in violent action of one sort or another, including suicide.

Suicide leaves people behind.  It may be that the hardest thing a human being can do is contemplate death, especially the sudden departure of someone close.  And where sometimes there are no traces left, or suggestions as to why a person should choose to take their own life, it may be that the sad sequence of thoughts that conspired in the act began with a humiliation.

I feel too many of us in modern life live lives of quiet desperation, knowing, that by some measures, we can never become successful in the way society today decrees.  We may have very little money, and career opportunity; we may be friendless, and single; we may be ‘mad’, or at a physical disadvantage, whether it be ‘good looks’ (yellow teeth, bad skin, a wonky nose), or unable to use our limbs, our eyes, our ears properly, if at all; we may simply be old; we may be a couple unable to have children – we are all likely to be lacking in some function in life, in fact, we all surely are.

And it is important to realise and accept the failing(s) in ourselves, and the fact they also exist in others, and avoid wherever possible being judgemental, unfair, impolite and risk humiliating one another.

Words are powerful, we must use them carefully.  Words lightly thrown can land very heavily on someone else if we are not prepared to consider how they might be feeling at any given time.

Actions are also powerful, we must try at all times to be kind. 

Some people in life can be too much, but however grating their words and actions, it is important to remember they may be suffering anguish and pain, and it is absolutely vital we do everything we can not to humiliate them and provoke a violent reaction.

Humiliation.

It is not a fact of life (as being born and dying are, as is the oxygen we breath, and the earth under our feet), it has arisen from circumstance, and yet if we are able to live better together, it need not play such a part in the future of the human race, and dare I say it, nor does violence, including suicide on New Year's eve.