Monthly Archives: February 2011

You can’t always get what you want

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But then again, sometimes you can.

Want is a funny word, one of those words which has undergone a subtle yet devastating change in meaning in recent times. It is, perhaps, the word which most exemplifies the modern condition, and when I mean modern, I pretty much mean the psychological condition which came about as a result of the reformation.

The reformation, loosely speaking, was predicated on two particular issues, the first being the call of sola scriptura, or back to the bible (that’s a very loose translation), and the second being the insistence that the individual have a personal relationship with god. That is, the bible was re-assessed, re-translated, and presented in the vernacular, so that no interpretation by religious authorities was necessary, and the individual might decide for his or herself how god was to be worshipped (this is a self-serving and only partially accurate analysis of this whole movement, but it will do nicely). Naturally, things weren’t that simple, not least because you can’t have people making their own minds up, because then society becomes a bit of a nightmare. Just ask Calvin. Jean, not Klein …

This general movement towards an individual making their own decisions, rather than behaving as directed, leads directly to the delightful americanese of self-improvement gurus who suggest that you can be anything you want to to. Bless. Plainly nonsense, and the kind of nonsense which can result in abject humiliation: witness those deluded individuals on ‘talent’ shows. Someone has told them they can sing, and what’s worse, they’ve believed them.

Now, the proper (by which I mean the original, whatever that is) meaning of ‘want’ is lack. This is described as ‘chiefly archaic’ by my dictionary, but is current enough to have featured in Pink Floyd’s Us and Them – ‘For want of the price, of tea and a slice, the old man died’ – and still feature in the name of the charity War on Want.

Incidentally, this always confused me when my father said ‘I want doesn’t get’ (one of his favourite sayings), as I surmised that this was a) bleeding obvious, because getting obviates wanting and b) wrong, because ‘I want hasn’t got’ is more accurate.

Anyway.

The modern meaning is something closer to desire.

The two are not synonymous, however, and often what one lacks is not what one desires.

‘IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.’

Not the perfect example because of the qualifier ‘in’, but you get my drift.

 

The obsession with one’s own condition, with desires over needs, is what fuels the modern world. It is, in effect, emotional capitalism. We are continually encouraged to seek more, look beyond, grab more, take whatever we want. And so we do.

This change in meaning accords with a change in thought processes – and if thought is itself predicated upon, even effected by, language and our usage thereof, then this is the perfect example – where once we would simply have known that which we lack, and either sought to remedy the situation, or simply accept the impossibility of it being made available to us, we now insist on choice.

Except that our society is so hide-bound by rules, by prescription, enveloped in such a colour-by-numbers world, that the faculty of decision-making is denied us. Where once we might have relied on our discretion, now the better part of valour is something else entirely.

Now, we want to eat our cake and have it – oh, and preferably sell it on, too.

When presented with a zero-sum game, we want not only to sit on the fence, but to balance the money, the fame and the girl equally on both knees while we do so.

 

It seems perfectly typical that where a word used to indicate lack, it now pinpoints greed. Who’d have thought that Mick Jagger would have been so cunning?

Shakespeare, education and independence

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I, along with many, many others, have done and do still bemoan the state of preparedness of students when they rock up to university, clutching their brace of braces, their four poached A*s.

Obviously, it depends on the tutor they end up with, but should they alight on one such as I, they tend to get one hell of a shock on receipt of their first essay mark. ‘But, but, but I always get As’, they say, staring in disbelief at the steaming C grade which rises from the page like an indoor firework, promising much, delivering sweet FA.

Just to give you an example or three, here are some real (and I mean real) lines from real essays:

 

‘I have insofar presented observations of kate’s convincement …’

‘shakespeare might not have anticipated an audience of 2009; therefore he cannot be held accountable for our distaste’

‘our youth is fleeting and spent in poverty and old age,’

 

It seems odd that not one of these students chose to read what they had written before submission – and these are by no means the worst offenders. They were simply the first ones I found that I’d noted down. I’m not sure which is worse, their writing or their reading. Too, too often I hear the fateful words ‘that wasn’t what I meant’, and my heart sinks.

Many moons ago, I was studying music in Los Angeles and was in a class run by Scott Henderson, one of the fusionistas of the day. He recounted that when he was recording with Joe Zawinul, legendary keyboard stroker of Weather Report fame, he recorded a solo and immediately asked if he could re-record it. ‘Why?’ he was asked. ‘Because it’s not what I wanted to say’. ‘So why did you say it?’

It’s different with writing. You write. You read. You edit. You polish. It works. Oh, ok. The point. The point is simple. Almost as simple as the essays too often delivered. These students are brought up in a culture where they are taught to test. They are simply not taught to read. They don’t have the time, for starters. They are given lists of what thou shalt write.

A student, and a bright one, on my asking her why she kept using such poncy phrases – you know the ones, those cod-academic words and formulations which scream ‘I have no fucking idea what I’m doing but I think I can fool you if I write lexis often enough’ – said simply ‘we were told that academics never say word, they say lexis’. I sighed and pointed out that it didn’t work in her essay and it sounded poncy and what’s wrong with just saying what you mean. She just repeated her maxim. I asked who told her this, and she said ‘my 6th form tutor’. Ah, I said. Answer me this. Who am I? ‘My tutor’. Yes, but more generally? ‘An … academic?’ Bingo! Did your 6th form tutor have a phd? ‘No.’ Did he/she ever teach at university? ‘No.’ And yet you take their word on what an academic will write over mine? Silence.

Everyone likes to be given simple instructions. Do this, and this will occur. Cause – effect. But the study of literature simply is not like that.

To study literature you need to do one thing above all others – read books. These need to be real books, not books about books. And yet there is increasingly no need.

The Guardian has launched a set of resources for teachers. They are designed, no doubt, with the best interests of both teacher and student at heart. But, like york notes, spark notes and all the rest, the fuck children up. And Universities will increasingly do the same, as parents demand their darlings be drilled rather than educated. Fucking idiots.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad

But only when they attend to your every need. Ignoring the fact that the Guardian may put these cheat books out of business, the real problem is that they replace the one great need for students. It is no longer necessary to read the text, so by the time they’re at university, they have forgotten how to. To add insult to injury, they then proceed to expound with no little eloquence on one text. Impressed at their sudden ‘getting’ of it, you ask a question, or, more daring, pose one.

Suddenly, you’re stuck with Nigel Tufnel being asked the fatefull question, ‘why don’t you just make ten louder?’

‘But … this one goes up to eleven …’

And, once more, you hold you head in your hands. Stop it, Guardian. You’re not helping. In fact, you’re making it worse. This may well be why so many of your bright young journalistic things write such egregious tosh. It’s not because they don’t read, but because the can’t – they see the words, but no meaning reaches their dull little brains. And when they read it back, they don’t think to themselves ‘what a load of shit’. They just smile, and wait for the credits to appear in their bank accounts.

They may not be able to read, but they sure can count.

 

 

A day in bed

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Sometimes, there’s simply nothing one can do to rouse oneself from one’s torpor, and actually extract oneself from the fetid pit that is one’s bed. Today has been one of those days. I am still there, wrapped in my dressing gown (or robe, as it apparently comes to be known after midday – when does it revert?), listening to the six o’clock news, and contemplating the creation of fishcakes for dinner.

I am still there because I am moderately unwell. I have what is commonly called a stinking cold, along with its concomitant sore throat and general feeling of fuzziness. My neck hurts, my chest hurts. My thumb hurts (though this is not connected to my cold. It comes courtesy of a cricket ball), and my shoulder, such an irritation since my bad fall in December (not that kind of bad fall, the ju-jitsu kind of bad fall) has been strapped up by a physiotherapist so while it doesn’t hurt for a change, it’s rather lacking utility, as I can only move it through 50 or 60% of its usual movement. Even Ginger seems listless and enervated.

I have spent the day writing – well, editing – my kids’ book. I wish I could say that it has been a successful day, but I fear that most of today’s edits are flaccid, fuzzy, slightly scummy. Remarkably similar to the way I feel. I have no spark, no energy, no … vocabulary.

So considering my utter feebleness, and the manner in which this is transferred into my writing, why on earth am I blogging?

This is a good, good question.

I think it’s something to do with control, with expectation, with my future.

Right now, my lethargy and [pick another word which seems to work] are the result of a virus. A wee beastie has invaded my system, and all of the symptoms from which I suffer are, oddly enough, signs of my body kicking the living crap out of it. Now that is irony.

I have already noted how odd it is to suffer from a cold, to feel all of the symptoms. These days, you slip yourself a lemsip fuck-me-I’m-practically-crack max and the symptoms are gently massaged away. One of the drugs I take, Rasagiline, prevents such things. It reacts with the decongestants and can cause unpleasantries associated with the heart. Again ironic considering yesterday.

It’s doubly ironic because eventually I’ll feel rancid, flaccid, fuzzy and woolly. But it will not be an external invader, and the symptoms will not be signs that I’m fucking that little virus up … it will be my own body fucking with itself, and the symptoms will be simply be signs that my body is failing. They won’t get better. They will simply increase.

To know that I’ll be doing it to myself will be rather irritating. To say the least.

Little epiphanies – thinking about god

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Disclaimer: I have not found god. Don’t worry.

I had a particularly strange experience yesterday afternoon. And god was involved. You can bet I was surprised!

There are several issues here that I, to be frank, struggle with somewhat. God is one of those ‘things’ that follows you around throughout your life in many and varied ways. From being accused of being involved in a papist conspiracy at the age of seven to being followed all around Trafalgar square by evangelicals at fifteen to failing to bed a girl simply because she was christian … well, you get the picture. Probably not, actually. She was lovely. We were both seventeen, and used to go out and hang out and wrestle and it was kinda funny. Kinda sweet. Utterly frustrating.

I guess it’s every teenager’s fate to be continually hassled by these strange people. You’re young, feeling your way in the world, desperate to find some way in which you fit, somewhere you’re accepted, welcomed, celebrated. You’re weak, easily suggestible. Sorry. It may sound patronising, but it’s true. So they target you. Everywhere you go.

I argued philosophy with one, darwinism and the complexity of the eye with another (an asian doctor who said the eye was too complex to have occurred by chance. The usual guff. Probably an opthalmologist. And not a good one). They’re very persuasive. Well, not that persuasive. I struck up a friendship with twins in my ‘home’ town, they were serious evangelicals. The sort who stood on benches in the high street and preached. Eventually they admitted defeat and we just said hi every now and then – my chief memory is that if I passed them in full flow on a bench or whatever, with a small audience, they’d stop mid-harangue, ‘Hi Pete!’, and then dive back in without so much as a missed beat.

Now, I’m an equal opportunities disbeliever, and I found the sorts of juvenile anti-god arguments just as pitiful. ‘If god is all powerful, why does he let X happen?’ The modern Lisbon earthquake. I am no Pangloss, but neither am I a Cassandra. Ditto Dawkins et al. None of them seem to understand the nature of belief.

God is unproveable. Either way. Hence Pascal’s wager.

Just in case you’re unfamiliar with the mathematician’s views on god, allow me to explain. These are the options:

a) Believe in god

b) Don’t believe in god

And these are the possibilities:

c) there is a god

d) there is no god.

Now then, once one dies, the following combinations obtain:

a + c = e

where e is eternal bliss

a + d = f

where f is mild embarrassment at the point of realisation, but after death, nothing.

b + c = g

where g is you saying ‘bugger’ as you’re led down to the place where the guy with the pointy tail and bad breath plies his trade

b + d = h

where h is blessed relief as this world of shit has to carry on without you.

Now then, any equation involving d may result in temporary embarrassment, while an equation involving c may lead to eternal bliss or having a hot poker inserted rectally.

Logic, decided Pascal, dictated that one ought to believe in god, because if you’re right, you win! And if you’re wrong, you merely die anyway.

So far, so logical. He did, naturally, fail to take into account an omniscient deity, who may take offence at your feigning belief because it’s logical.

It’s a little like the kindness of dolphins. You never meet the swimmer whom the dolphins, clicking their clicky little laughs, gently pushed away from the shore. You only meet the one with the wonder story. Clever little bastards, they truly understand the value of a carefully placed story.

God is all about belief. You either believe in him/her/it, or you believe that there is no him/her/it. It’s simple.

Believing in nothing is, frankly, quite reasonable, and actually quite impressive considering we humans will believe practically anything if it’s said loudly enough. Tony Blair. Lots of people believed in him. Margaret Thatcher. If you believe what people say, she usurped power for thirteen years, as no-one ever voted for her. I once had a argument about how the country felt when Kinnock held his ‘victory rally’ in Sheffield the day before he got stiffed in the general election. I’m not sure he had even been born when it happened, but he was adamant that he knew better than I did what the reports of it did to his campaign. He might have argued on fact convincingly, after all, politics is what he does, but to argue on a subjective matter with someone who was there, when you yourself were not, is foolhardy at best.

So. I’m chatting to a friend. She’s highly intelligent, spiky as anything, but a fine example of womanhood (and I mean that in its total sense, not in a simply physical sense, whatever). She knows what she wants, and gets it. She has been seeking the perfect man. She is the sort for whom nothing less will do. Naturally, she’s having trouble finding him (my good self excluded, equally

naturally). We skype. We haven’t spoken for, well … weeks …

The conversation goes something like this …

Me: I’d just been thinking where you’d vanished to …

Her: I haven’t vanished dearest. Still here, but significant things have happened to me…

Me: ooh … good things?

Her: Well, unspeakable things … in some circles at least! I have found my faith again – and have been on a serious high for 2 weeks … I include you in my prayers every day, in fact. I hope you don’t mind – can’t do any harm … Don’t worry … it’s nothing weird … Church of England and very high church at that … not a charismatic me

Naturally, I am somewhat taken aback. After all, of all the people she might have plighted her troth to, god? I am at the very least perturbed.

Me: that is unspeakable! Of all the people … couldn’t you have become a lesbian instead?

I truly think that a milestone in your life has been passed by when you don’t bat an eyelid if someone comes out, but get worried when they find god. Now, I know she’ll read this, and also that she’ll appreciate that I have to say what I feel. She also knows I mean no disrespect, I’m merely taken aback.

I mention that I ought to find a way of making her recant, while pointing out that of all the men … she replies that she didn’t expect it, either:

Her: But you see God chooses one – even if one does everything to avoid it. I used to be very spiritual and then lost my faith when I witnessed the aftermath of the Tsunami at Christmas 7 years ago. I was there and just couldn’t cope with the devastation…

She continues: If you think about it actually, Pete – I am looking for perfection. There is only one who is perfect ..

Me: no, don’t give me this god chooses you BS …

Me: it’s a mental illness!

In any other walk of life, hearing voices (not that I’m saying she’s hearing voices, but it is a common enough thing to hear people mention) suggests that you have some sort of, well, mental imbalance.

The conversation ranged on until we agreed to talk of something else. Partially because I was in shock that someone so able had taken such an easy way out, abrogated her own responsibilities (I’m already anticipating the flaming email here …).

Her: Look – write me off as someone who’s gone mental … but there were and are some rather more impressive characters than me who have a strong faith … I recommend you go and see the fantastic French film “Of Gods and Men” …

I would never write her off, but it’s a poor argument.

A good friend of mine’s mother once (I know, u-turn) went into an off-licence to buy him a bottle of whisky.

She informed the assistant of her need, finishing with the words ‘I hear that Glenfiddich is very popular.’

The assistant smiled indulgently (I’m making this up. An indulgent smile aimed at this lady might prove fatal) and simply said ‘madam, its popularity has thus far failed to make it any good.’

(with apologies for inaccurate renditions)

We touched back on the subject:

Me: god is only perfect because he doesn’t exist …

Me: oh, I’m quite upset

Her: Pete, sweetheart – be a little more tolerant. I still have all my intellectual faculties

Me: I’m in shock

Her: Don’t be upset … I am very happy

Me: oh, of that there’s no doubt …

Me: but oh …

Me: just o.

Her: Anyway, I’ll still pray for you …

Me: noooo …

We’ll argue about this more, without doubt. It’s what we do best with one another.

More to the point (what was my point?) this life is full of little epiphanies. Those times when you discover something, or are told something, which acts as punctuation. BIG punctuation.

Sometimes, you realise at that point that you have truly lost someone. They have gone. Like Anna Karenina, they are dead to you.

[disclaimer no. 2: I do not, in this instance, mean that this individual is dead to me. They still rock. Just thought I'd clear that up!]

This is very, very sad.

I am very, very sad.

To shave or not to shave, that is the question

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Don’t you just love women?

Well, yes, actually, but what the hell. This morning an ‘article’ was published in the Guardian about the trend towards pubic hair removal. Ostensibly about permanency, it soon turned, well, ugly. Actually, downright offensive (as well as factually inaccurate)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/feb/11/womens-pubic-hair-removal-porn
I have several problems with this piece. The first is perhaps the juvenile nature of its rant: ‘If porn told you to jump off a cliff …’ This is pitiful, playground stuff. This is meant to be an intelligent paper. It’s no surprise that comments were not opened.

If Bidisha wants to discuss this intelligently, then all well and good. She might consider asking people their thoughts. She might find that for some, it enhances sexual feeling, especially cunnilingus, and allows the ‘linguist’ greater access to sensitive areas … this leading to more pleasure for the woman. Surely that’s allowed?

Bidisha makes one frankly stunning assertion: ‘They [men] are not going to make the effort to do anything to please a woman, at the cost of their own comfort.’

Really? What a sad bunch you must think we are. And you respect that? Good heavens. This is offensive and, quite obviously nonsense.

More to the point, I believe that more and more men are following the trend – it’s not called a back, sack and crack for nothing.

But she ignores the vast, gaping hole in her argument. Men have been shaving for years. Now, what on earth does shaving one’s chin represent? Let’s ask Shakespeare:

Fulvia perchance is angry; or who knows

If the scarce-bearded Caesar have not sent

His Pow’rful mandate to you:                                                (Antony and Cleopatra, I.i.20-22)

Now Jove, in his next commodity of hair,

send thee a beard                                                                      (Twelfth Night, III.i.44-45)

You may light upon a husband with no beard.

What should I do with him? dress him in my apparel

and make him my gentle-waiting-

woman? He that hath a beard is more than a youth,

and he that hath no beard is less than a man;                   (Much Ado About Nothing, II.i.32-37)

Hmm. The prosecution rests with the fearsome Beatrice.

So, by Bidisha’s logic, shaving the chin is designed to imitate the youth. Or, in Shakespeare’s terms, the boy. Imagine if I, a man, wrote this:

‘A woman who likes a man without facial hair despises adult men so much that she wants us to resemble children. She should stay at home instead in front of a computer, masturbating alone to the hair-free images she reveres.’

And yet she feels it is fine and dandy to write this:

‘A man who likes a woman without pubic hair despises adult women so much that he wants us to resemble children. He should stay at home instead in front of a computer, masturbating alone to the hair-free images he reveres.’

And we’ll not even think about all those men who wax their chests … none of whom are ever presented as sex objects to women. No, no, no.

Now I don’t in any way intend to belittle the many, many serious issues that pornography raises. The fact of the matter is, that is articles like Bidisha’s, this is what the author unwittingly does.

She draws a delightful conclusion thus:

I worry about these men too, of course, those poor poonani-policing body fascists. They are now in danger of returning to a Victorian naivety. They may well believe that, like the hairless, passive and benign feminine allegories of grand masters’ paintings, women naturally do not have any body hair. Upon seeing some real hair on a real woman for the first time they may well vomit or faint, or both. That is something I’d like to see: a man so dizzied by the shortfall between reality and his own ignorance that his brain can’t take it and he loses consciousness.

Bless her and all who sail in her, as they say (don’t be filthy minded).

She finishes with this rather odd paragraph:

‘As for the women, don’t you have anything more interesting to do than dutifully coif your cassoulet? I got “cassoulet” from The Joy of Sex, by the way. It means “general musky pussy area”. Check out the original 70s hand-drawn illustrations. The couple are as hairy as anything, but they look like they’re having a lot of fun, fur and all.’

Now, ignoring the possibility that she doesn’t know what a cassoulet is (in the Guardian? Purlease!), and no, I’ve never heard it used as a euphemism, either, I wonder whether she thinks that the hairy figures in the Joy of Sex are any less stylised than the ‘grand masters’ paintings’. Furthermore, might she vomit or faint should she encounter partner who doesn’t have a lot of fun, ‘dizzied by the shortfall between reality and her own ignorance’?

Bless her. And I’m being ironically patronising. Because I can be.

Well, I’ve got that off my chest – now then, ought I shave, wax, or curl?

Semiotic trichology

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of greying hair does not want distinction. Women, on the other hand, tend to treat the first indication of silvery whisps with horror, as if they are usurping threads deserving only of immolation. Well, maybe just dying. Or ought that be dyeing?

Hair, wherever it is found (and yes, the pillow counts, too) occupies an uniquely interstitial place with regards our identity.

The body is, give or take a few gym sessions, stable. It is rare that it can shift far or fast enough to materially affect either our sense of self, or others’ sense of us. Yes, it’s true to say that there are corporeal changes which can radically adjust our sense of self, but these are generally deeply traumatic, or involve the mere giving of a name to a problem which already exists. The assignation of an emotive word to a purely physical problem invariably causes problems. To whit a recent headline in the Guardian:

Comedy is a way to survive

Laura Linney on TV after her father’s cancer death

Now, there are several problems with this – and, note, it was an article serving as PR for the aforementioned actress’s new vehicle, The C Word. I’ll maybe bleat about that soon.

The first is the rather dreadful phrase ‘her father’s cancer death’. As was pointed out to me, this rather implies that this was merely one of his deaths. Presumably it was the final, fatal one.

I also wonder about ‘Laura Linney on TV’. Does this mean that for her TV has been changed by his death, or that she’s, er, on TV after his death (in a sort of temporal sense)?

[disclaimer – by the way, I'm talking about the headline and standfirst. I cast no aspersions on either the actress or her late father. If you misconstrue, then it's you, not me.]

Perhaps the most pernicious is ‘Comedy is a way to survive’. Now, I don’t know about you, but when you have the words ‘survive’ and ‘death’ in the same construction, it suggests to me that they are connected. Plainly, her father didn’t survive. Just as plainly, the actress did. I presume Ms Linney was never in any danger, so comedy didn’t make any difference to her. I also presume that she has not been at death’s door since. It certainly didn’t help him in the survival stakes.

[I refer the hyperventilating reader to my previous parenthesis].

So, utterly fucking stupid bit of subbery. Don’t use survive as a metaphor (it’s crap, anyway) for ‘cope’ when you use death in its literal sense (that is, death) immediately afterwards.

So, adding the word ‘cancer’ makes people feel much, much worse (and those around them much, much more mother Theresaish.

So. the body can change things, but only slowly. The speedy change comes verbally.

Clothes can effect instantaneous change. But clothes are an accoutrement. They are not part of us, but a facade erected in front of our us-ness to enable us to assert ‘what we want us to be-ness’. You are most certainly are not what you wear. You merely wear it.

The hair, however, is very different. It is simultaneously part of us and a facade. Simultaneously us and not-us, real and contrived. If you meet a woman you haven’t seen for a while, you automatically compliment her on her hair. It’s practically foolproof.

There is nothing quite like the hair for allowing instantaneous and radical changes to both our sense of self and that of others. Shaving off one’s beard, for example, completely changes the way you feel, and how people look at you – especially if, like me, your beard is speckled with grey. It’s especially effective if you’re a girl, of course … consider how many looks a girl can rock. She can go from slut to sophisticate, from chav to cheltenham ladies college in half an hour.

The simple quantity of elderly men who rock the 50s rocker’s DA is astonishing. Old habits, and old signs of tribal allegiance, or perhaps simply old projections die hard. (with or without comedy). Style your hair as you did when you were 18 and you feel 18 again. If only for a moment.

Styling one’s hair changes your mood. If you have long hair you can wear it down, or up … it changes your mood completely. And for those of us with long hair, considering chopping it off is utterly terrifying. It’s saying goodbye to one’s youth. One’s youthful identity.

Fuck. It’s growing up.

Next time you visit the hairdresser, don’t tell them how you want them to cut your hair. Just tell them how old you are, and how old you want your hair to be.

And if that doesn’t work, there’s always comedy.

Richard thompson full transcript

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This is the full transcript of my interview with Richard Thompson back in September 2010, on the subject of his album, Dream Attic. A very pleasant fellow, he was most interesting perhaps on dichotomies …

Oh, and this interview is owned by me, so if you must steal it, at least have the grace to ask permission first!

 

Yours is a career that’s constantly evolving … would you consider writing an autobiography?

RT – I don’t think my life’s very interesting. It’s not as exciting as other people’s. I love to read biographies, but what do I ever do?

[new areas]that’s sort of internal – autobiographies, the good ones, are those where people get married eight times, there’s lots of licentious stuff in there, you know … the occasional trip to the south pole or something … [no plans?] you can always find time to go to the south pole … my life seems a little mundane to be up there in print … [space?] in the sense that a lot of one’s time is taken up, as in i’m either on the road or i’m at home, and when I’m at home I’m writing, and there isn’t time for a lot of other things, a bit of gardening … I live a very colourful internal life, I sublimate a lot and put a lot of the things I don’t do into songs, things I’m frustrated at not doing I channel them somehow into the song process.

[not just one RT]

- interesting question … I see what I do as a package, as a performer I try to bring my various skills into the arena, as songwriter, singer, guitar player, I really try to use those skills to make it a better experience for people coming to hear the music … in performance they’re blended [fourth estate?] there’s performance skill, whatever that is, being able to perform, being able to project, making that part of the musical experience … offstage you can see those as separate units, songwriting is a separate thing, but i’m usually writing with an end in mind, and the end in mind is this performance package … is there a time when all three are equally contributing? I try and do that in most songs, in most songs i’m using the guitar really as an accompaniment, and if i’m playing a solo i’m trying to continue the [??? 08.12] of the song … I don’t think of myself as a joe satriani or something, I should be so lucky! I don’t think of myself as an instrumental virtuoso, I see myself as an accompanist, and if I have any merits as a guitar player then it’s as somebody who accompanies a singer

but the polls! [8.35]

– I think there are a lot of guitar players who we admire, who you’d say are not true soloists, they’re more like blenders, they play a rhythmic role or something – keith richards, who always seems to be in the top ten guitar players is not a great player of solos, but he’s a great inventor of riffs, and he’s a great rhythm guitar player, and those virtues seem to put him very much in people’s minds when they’re constructing polls – you could say BB King might think of himself principally as a singer, and the guitar playing is kind of interjections between vocal phrases … perhaps he thinks of himself as equally a guitar player but not as A guitar player …

[your solos tend to spring from the vocal melodies]

– at some point it’s a conscious decision to play in that way, I think it evolved from playing in Fairport in the 60s, back in about 67 where we’d be playing a song and I’d be trying to glide into the solo, to not make it a big sort of, statement at the beginning of the solo, but to creep into it as a sort of continuation of the vocal narrative …

[live album but not a live album]

– in what sense it it not a live album? [normally one associates a live album as a package] – it’s weird for me as well … be reassured it’s weird all round … people come up to me and say I really prefer the live version to the album version, and perhaps there’s something in that, and that we should chop out the studio process, and see if we can record an album of new songs in front of an audience …

[consistency of sound ]

- recorded over eight nights, which was our quality control. We didn’t have choices of whether to overdub, or we chose not to … we felt that the performances were strong enough without having to do any overdubbing or editing or that kind of thing. At one point we were prepared to cheat and say well if we have to redo the vocals we’ll redo the vocals but it just didn’t happen. All the guitar solos are as played, everything’s pretty much as played – we might have fixed like one bass note, flown in another bass note and that was about it … it was chosen over eight nights, and the last three were at the same place [...14.19] and that as probably where most of the performances came from, so there’s a consistency there, the stuff that came from other nights you really can’t tell … another decision that we made was to reduce the size of the room and the size of the audience, so everything’s fairly close-miked, I think we preferred that because it sounds somewhere in between a studio and a live recording …

[then the demos …]

- we were looking to have something as bonus disc, and one of the ideas was to have the rest of the live show, the part two … more older stuff, more familiar material, but then we thought ho about the demos, the things I sent out to the band as guidelines for learning the songs … and we thought they don’t sound too bad, so let’s stick them on there … there are different versions here or there, different lyrics, things have different shapes here and there, and that’s just because when you get into the rehearsal process things change, new ideas occur to you, and think perhaps you’ll add a verse here, perhaps we’ll cut that there …

[changes]

– something like crime scene, it’s a difficult song, structurally it’s a difficult song, thematically it’s a difficult song, on the demo it’s a little bit more succinct, when it gets in front of an audience with a band, it gets longer, it gets more dramatic, there’s a huge dynamic range in that song, and solos become longer, become more expressive, become more intense, it’s much more intense live …

[recording the demos]

– it’s pretty small, I have a very small room in m house, it’s about 8×7, like a monastic cell, really, and I think of the recording process as being rather monastic as well, really … recorded with a digital performer onto a G5 mac – I used my signature model lowden for most of it … i’m lucky that I’ve got some very nice mics [it's very nice sounding] it’s a miracle, really …

[the welding of trad with modern]

– yes, moving the tradition forward, yes, influenced by the tradition yes, close to the tradition yes, but somewhere between tradition and contemporary. As I found with fairport and as I still find today, with Fairport it was still necessary to build a bridge, between traditional music and contemporary music because the bridge had really been burnt, especially in english music as opposed to scottish and irish music, I suppose something similar happened in america with someone like the flying burrito brothers who tried to put country and rock together, the eagles did the same thing, because of people neglecting our own tradition or traditions dying out but being replaced by the gramophone, the radio, there becomes this divorce between popular and traditional music.

In fairport we tried to invent a bridge for that and we were very successful, and i’m really doing the same thing all the time, though less self-consciously, and really I like the music that I play to be contemporary traditional, and is suppse that for this project, for this record, I picked a band that was able to play in that crack. So we have two melodic instruments, we have a fiddle and we have Pete zorn playing the flute or the sopranino sax so you have a kind of melodic section there that can play tradition-based melodies that you hear like for instance at the end of sidney wells, this gleeful, sadistic, serial killer type dance tune, as every album should have … it was going to be stanley wells [in reponse to a joke by me] but I had to back off a bit as his lawyers were getting rather intense …

[other people]

– to take the last part first – living in the states doesn’t affect me stylistically, if anything it makes me more one of those zealous exiles, someone who’s slightly divorced from their own culture so they cling to it even more … I think my father was a bit like that, he was a scotsman who lived in london, and he fiercely celebrated burns’ night and every possible scottish tradition, he was more of a scotsman than someone living in scotland. And I think that even though I live in america I don’t absorb american culture, I watch it from a distance, and it’s pretty frightening … but I really don’t think i’m immersed in it … teddy’s music I see as a slight remove from my own, I think teddy’s a great pop singer and writer, and he’s becoming more traditionally influenced now which is interesting. To some extent everything you listen to influences you, in the sense that you say ‘I absorb this’ or ‘I reject this’, or at least “i acknowledge this’, so you hear things and you intuitively pass judgement on them, and sometimes you take ideas on board from what you listen to and sometimes you don’t. I see teddy in a slightly different musical world, and I think that’s a good thing for him, and I love his music, I think it’s fantastic, but I don’t see it as being similar to mine, other people might see a similarity but I don’t. The thousand years show probably has influenced me, doing research, particularly for the earlier musical forms has been very interesting and it’s made me think about how you structure a song, because these days we have accepted ways of structuring a song, you know, verse, chorus, VC b, c or something, ABABCB, and a few variations on that and as you go back into earlier forms there are different kinds of structure that are quite interesting sometimes and it’s fun to play with those and see what happens. And also melodically in early music you hear things that overlap into traditional music, and it’s interesting to explore some of those themes, some of those modes, that has been influential …

[covers band … strange covers set … ]

- I think the audience and the performers all know it’s going to be disparate, it’s accepted that every song is not going to sound like every other song, this is why it’s such an insane project, really, and you have to change gears for every song, it’s a hard show to perform and i’m not sure anyone else would find it any more comfortable, it wouldn’t matter which discipline you came from, if you were classically trained that wouldn’t help you, if you played early music that wouldn’t help you after 1700 …

Hugh and I were at school together, and we were friends and we enjoyed talking about music together and at a certain point we started playing music together, and hugh wanted to learn the bass, so he bought a home made instrument off of a schoolfriend, this horrific, really bad home-made bass, just ghastly, anyway he wanted to play and I helped to teach him some things and he picked it up pretty quickly and we added a drummer and for a while we were a band, I think for a couple of years, probably from about the age of 13 to about 16, when I then started to play with the people who became fairport, but we were school chums and bandmates and I just saw hugh about three months ago in los angeles his band played and I got up and we played a song that we’d last played in about 1965 … which was most bizarre … [it went down] great, we did tobacco road, the national teams’ version of tobacco road, which we used to play in our school band and it was interesting to revisit it.

Gear: [30]

the hurdy gurdy]

– playing drone instruments, there’s something soothing about them … you get carried away, too … you sit at home and start playing and before you know it an hour’s gone by, you just get entranced by the sound. I think on an instrument like the HG notes have a lot of value. Every note you play is very significant whereas I think on the guitar you can glide by some notes and it’s not that important it’s more whereabouts you end a phrase o begin a phrase that takes on more significance, but on the HG every note really means something. And it’s just a beautiful thing, it’s got that kind of bagpipe thing which is lovely, it’s also a beautiful melodic instrument, it’s a great vocal accompaniment instrument, it’s comparatively easy to play at a beginner’s level, so it’s easy to get into it, to play it well I think is extremely difficult, to play like Nigel eaton is an extremely tough proposition, but I’d stick myself as somewhere between those two extremes. What you want from any instrument is stability, and what you can get with modern technology is a much more stable HG with tuning pegs, the wheel is more stable, it’s not going to warp, it’s become a more manageable instrument. I have a new one now which is about 50x improvement on my old one, and i’m really enjoying a more stable relationship, should I say …

same with guitars?]

- it’s hard to say. There have been advances in neck design, end pin block design, neck joints are better than they used to be, and I know that the acoustic instruments that I play are very very stable, remarkably stable considering the pounding they get on the road, so i’m very happy about that. The solid body electric guitar was a great innovation, particularly something like a fender, because it’s such a tough, tough guitar, you can fly that thing around the world for years and you hardly have to tweak he neck. It’s ridiculous … I remember pete townshend used to have a very hard time smashing up like a tele onstage …

it’s all about tone – playability’s a factor but I don’t think it’s the first factor because you get to playability later, you can tweak action and strings an frets and heaven knows what, you can adjust them later, but you know the first thing you want is tone, and on an acoustic guitar it has to be there from the beginning, and the tone o most guitars will improve, the more you play it the better it sounds. On an electric guitar it’s down to the wood it’s made of and the pick-ups … there are various theories about what does works and what doesn’t, and it depends what you’re looking for, what sound you’re looking for …

I’ve never been a big fan of humbuckers, so when I owned a gibson I had a gold top LP back in the 60s I liked the old P90 pick-ups, and I still like them, I think it’s a great pick-up, at some point I noticed that the guitar players I liked to listened to were mostly fender players so I switched to fender, and I still play mostly fender type guitars if not actual fenders – I like single coil pick-ups … I like a thinner sound and a slightly more hollow sound …

He’s [danny ferrington] a friend and neighbour of mine and he’s built me several guitars, I’ve got a baritone acoustic that danny built, I’ve got a couple of electrics, and a couple of acoustics as well. He’s a real ideas guy, he really comes up with interesting innovations and ideas, and the electric guitars that we’ve built have been experiments really, a certain kind of a body weight combined with various pick-up combinations, the blue ferrington guitar that I have is more like a test bed really, for different pick-ups and we threw in an assortment and at some point we liked the ones that were in there. I think it’s a p90, and alnicoo strat in the middle and a broadcaster bridge pickup and that seems to work pretty well, and it’s a straight-wired guitar, there’s no tone control, and each pickup has a volume control, so you can blend the pickups in a kind of infinite way by varying the volume on each pickup.

[to lowdon]

– someone brought a lowdon to me when I was playing in washington dc, to the backstage area, and they said you should try one of these, he was trying to sell it to me, of course, and that was just fine, and I tried it and it was a really fantastic guitar, had amazing sustain and great evenness of tone, and he said i’m the biggest dealer in Lowdons in the US, so I’ve got 30 at my shop, so come around tomorrow and try a few, so I went round and tried 30 lowdons and became a convert right there, and I bought one and I used that for years and I became associated with the company, and I now have a signature guitar … and I just think there are some innovations on lowdon guitars that I think are tremendous, and I just think it’s the best small production guitar in the world. I think it’s as good as anything out there …

[tunings]

– I do a lot of stuff just in dropped d, I use DADGAD, I use c modal, which is CG, hang on, CGDGBA, sorry … CG crikey CGBGBE -

I think either way, some definitely start in a tuning, and the tuning inspires what the song becomes, particularly as an acoustic performer, I’m looking for something that sounds full in a certain key – sometimes you start writing a song and you have to fit it to your vocal range, and sometimes you start in the wrong key, so you have to find a better key … and sometimes in finding a better key you have to go into a tuning to make it sound better, make it sound fuller … another interesting way of writing a song is to invent a tuning right there, just something you’ve never tried before, and just see what happens as you try to find chords in this new tuning – it can take you melodically to places you wouldn’t normally go. And then you can rationalise it into a more accessible tuning, but as a starting point it’s sometimes good not to know where your fingers are going to go.

Absolutely, your fingers fall into patterns that’s what they’re supposed to do, you practice scales and things so that they do, but sometimes it’s good to break up the patterns if you’re trying to be inventive (42.48)

usually just chords, then I might practice some runs, it’s good to warm up … I do slow slow stuff …

pre-amp?

It’s a ridge farm gas cooker, designed for studio use, it’s a 2-channel valve pre-amp that accepts – has phantom power on it – it’s good for the little condenser mic I have on the guitar, and also for the sunrise pickup, which is a magnetic pickup … it accepts both of those very well, matches those very well … it’s not designed to go on the road, we’ve had some modifications so we can take it on the road, it’s a little delicate for all the flying, but we’ve done a few mods it’s a great pre-amp because it eally warms up the magnetic pickup especially … I think amplifying an acoustic guitar is an endless quest, because you’re doing something very artificial, you’re taking something that’s acoustic and trying to make it louder, so it’s all cheating, so the sunrise pickup has tons of gain, so you can really crank it up a long way, and the little internal mic gives it the air … I find that amplifying an acoustic guitar you need two systems, asa one doesn’t really give you enough choices. Because it’s an artificial thing it’s always going to be a compromise …

[the tunes at the heart of your playing]

– maybe perhaps a traditional tune like the choice wife, which is a guitar transcription of an irish pipe tune, that would show some of the influences that go into it … something like turning of the tide, where i’m playing rhythm with a flatpick and my fingers to play leadlines …

I hate all of them [his solos] perhaps hard on me from mock tudor, I think that solos quite good, and there’s a live version of that solo which is longer longer and also, I think quite good …

tunes that no-one seemed to get ]

- there’s a song I used to play religiously for years in live sets, and I thought everyone seems to like this and it goes down really well and this song has to be a staple of my set, and then there were a couple of online polls on my website or wherever where fans would write in and say which their favourite songs were, and this particular song was you know, 185, had half a vote or something, and I was absolutely stunned, it’s interesting to get some feedback from the audience sometimes!

Top 3 players]

– probably as a kid, listening to django rheinhardt was pretty scary, that was in my dad’s record collection, so I’d been listening to django since I was like two or something. Django’s solo on something like running wild which is like terrifying, could put you off guitar playing right there … similarly, there’s probably a Les Paul song … how high the moon by le paul, it’s kind of pre rock n roll rock and roll, it’s writing the book of rock and roll guitar playing in about 1950. that’s pretty extraordinary … [what made you play] probably the shadows. Like so many people of that generation we wanted to play apache, so from the age of 11 that’s what I was trying to do, and I found a friend who was like-minded and we found another and we had a little instrumental band, when we were like 11/12 years old …

pivotal times]

– I suppose when I was in fairport in 1968 when we were thinking of changing our style to play this blend of traditional and contemporary, that was kind of a pivotal point, and i’m really still there, it’s still what i’m doing, it was a kind of lifetime decision really, that guitar technique, probably … on acoustic guitar finding things that you think no-one’s found before, finding things you can do with flatpick and fingers … you can play certain patterns on the bass string you can’t play with a thumb pick, you can’t play with your thumb … but with a pick you can pick up and down, and at the same time you can play a melody with your fingers … I started doing it unconsciously, I didn’t know I was doing it … I learnt fingerstyle, I learnt classical fingerstyle when I was a kid, and I learnt the flatpicking … at some point I was too lazy to put the pick down or something, and I was watching tv and playing and not thinking about it and it just became a style … a few other people have done that, I think albert lee has done that as well, I think glenn campbell plays that way too, it’s a style of convenience, really … but having done that style I then found some things that seemed to be innovations …

I love kittens?]

- well I do … it’s the first line of the song, I didn’t know it was going to be the first line of the record, I wanted to get the audience’s attention, and it’s a good way into the character who’s singing the song …

[narrative]

- to some extent it is folk influenced, it’s also easier to tell a story when you don’t have much time, and in popular music you don’t have much time, you only have a few verses to get something across, so if it’s in the first person you’re seeing things through the eyes of that person, you enter the story quicker,

harder work because of story?]

- harder but it’s easier … it’s harder to get inside the character, but having done that, you’re really just telling a story from someone else’s point of view, and as long as you truly represent the character, then it’s going to be a true picture …

I don’t have a favourite, like I don’t have a favourite child … you shouldn’t favour one child over the other, and I feel the same about songs.

The difference between the two recordings]

- the record is basically the electric (57.24) that’s the one that’s being promoted, the demos are just an add-on … and I wouldn’t see them as important otherwise we would have released it the other way around … people will just have to make of that what they will … I see it as interesting for people to see the process, and there will be some people who are more folk fans who’ll say the acoustic versions are much better than the electric versions, I’m not sure how people are going to take it, and i’m not overly concerned at this point …

diff aud performances ]

- generally we record as live as possible in the studio, inevitably there’s some stuff – you might want to add some backing vocals, but it’s more of an afterthought – you might want to add a saxophone as an afterthought, but we really play as much as we can live because that’s the way that we work better, everyone has different studio techniques, and someone like brian wilson who does things very methodically one thing at a time gets amazing results, but I find I can’t work that way …

rapport]

- the studio is an artificial place to make music because music should always be in front of an audience, so the studio process can feel a little artificial, it can feel a little introverted … a little indulgent sometimes, some people get over that by actually having a few people in the studio, who they can perform to, and if you don’t have that you’re sort of performing to each other …

the influence of the band is stronger than the audience, the band are reacting to each other all the time, you pick up a certain spirit from the audience, if the audience is enjoying the show then you’re probably going to play better, and it becomes more of an interaction, and I suppose the nice thing about the audience is it’s a focus and somewhere to aim the music

autotune]

- I can see how you might use autotune on a record where you just want to sweeten things up a bit, there’s a bass note a bit out of tune, there’s a harmony note a bit out of tune … I think maybe that’s ok, maybe if you didn’t use it it would be better, I don’t know, because some of the records that we like, that we grew up listening to, things are out of tune … things are out of tune, things are out of time, but they’re classic records … and if you sweeten them up too much, if you pull the tuning in too much it’s going to lose something … there’s a certain edge that’s going to be missing … using autotune live I think is very controversial, as far as i’m concerned I don’t like the fact that there are people having their vocals tuned in concert, it feels like it’s kind of cheating, it’s a misrepresentation to the audience, you’re saying that you’re a better singer than you really are … there are also performers who have other singers offstage who are basically singing their parts, if not for them then certainly along with them … so it’s like a double track. Because stage shows are very energetic these days, people are dancing around, it’s almost as if there’s more focus on the show than there is on the musical aspect … it’s the lights, it’s the production it’s the dancing and it’s the singing … and the singing is a component but it’s not the main factor, maybe … so they’re tuning vocals, using other singers, all that kind of stuff … for a tv show .. it’s a talent contest, right? Then it’s about talent, and if you’re tuning vocals you’re giving people more talent than they have … I fail to understand that policy, but I think those shows are disgusting anyway, because it’s a deeply conservative unimaginative non-innovative approach to televising music … i’d like to think that at some time I the future there’ll be a tv talent show in which the most important consideration was innovation … was ideas, performance was almost irrelevant …

would you have entered?]

- a talent show like that, no – I did enter talent contests when I was young, they had battle of the bands kind of things, just around north london where they’d get four bands or six bands and everyone would go on and play and there’d be a prize at the end, maybe a record contract, and our band entered a couple of those, we usually finished last – probably deservedly so, we were usually the youngest band, by about five years, and we just weren’t as polished as the other bands,

study?]

- I study music a lot, I listen to a lot of forms of music, a lot of jazz, a lot of classical music, styles that I don’t play, because i’m listening for new harmonic ideas, and i’m looking to extend my harmonic vocabulary … a lot of C20th classical, I like some of the idea where it comes close to dissonance, or becomes totally dissonant, I think those are ideas you can incorporate into popular music to a small extent …

speaking to a young player ]

- I think i’d say it’s an overcrowded music profession, and rock and roll has been around for 50 years, and the longer it goes on, the fewer new ideas, and I think to stand out these days musicians have to make a virtue of their individuality, that’s what you have to emphasise, instead of trying to blend with everybody else, be different …

absolutely, I think we absolutely did, in fairport that’s what we did at a time when there was a much smaller music business, and actually in 1967 audiences were either stoned or confused or just plain generous, and would accept a whole range of different music styles. I’m not sure you find that openness any more, and certainly the music business was much more open to new ideas then, basically because they didn’t know what was going on, they were signing everything, for fear of being left out – it’s harder now …

backwards and forwards ]

- the first thing is that you have to know your musical history to know that you’re not repeating something, if your musical roots are shallow, if you go back 20 years musically the chances are that you’re going to be recycling ideas that really aren’t that profound, if you know where your heroes got their ideas from and go back a couple of generations you learn so much more.

What started the folk ]

- i’d been listening to folk music since I was very small and it didn’t eem to be important, when I was younger I was hearing trad scottish dance music, and as a kid I used to read scottish ballads, this was when I was like [ …] just because it wa in the book collection at home, and at school we learnt folk songs, some of which were pretty good songs, it was part of govt policy to teach kids traditional music, but it didn’t seem as exciting as the kinks or muddy waters, that seemed far more exciting, and it wasn’t until fairport made this decision to go back to those roots that we really started to feel the importance of that music

I don’t remember the actual catalyst … the catalyst was probably ashley hutchings, who was probably thinking about this before the rest of us, and I think when sandy joined the band she actually came to the band with some traditional music, and that was the point where we actually started to play [ … 68] …

© Pete Langman 2010 – please ask nicely before you steal it!

The garden of forking paths

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Like most of us, I have my own pet fears, the fear that mildly paralyses, the fear that renders one strangely impotent.

One of mine is the fear of making the wrong decision. Taking the wrong path. Wearing the wrong shirt. It manifests itself in several distinct ways.

Today, for example (and I use the word today in the sense of one large expanse of time rather than midnight to midnight), I set about the tidying up of what is fast becoming my last academic hurrah. It’s an eight thousand word essay on how William Rawley, Bacon’s chaplain, secretary and amanuensis appropriated Sylva sylvarum, a work Rawley published in 1626/7, the year of Bacon’s death, to his own ends. He manipulated the paratexts, that is, the stuff the text is wrapped in, in such a way as to turn Bacon’s work into an approach to the new king, Charles, for patronage. Now, there’s nothing wrong with doing this, except that in not noticing that he was being, ahem, a little disingenuous in his presentation, the work, and its companion piece, New Atlantis, is misread.

The tidy up ought to be simple. A bit of clarification here, a tweak there … but as usual, I spot something and start to think to myself, ‘hang on a second, are you speaking nonsense here …’, and before I know it, I’m knee-deep in texts trying to find that quotation which floats in the back of my head but won’t quite give itself up … a passage I was so sure of suddenly becomes weak, vulnerable. I want to return to how I read it before, but don’t actually think I trust it any more.

So, at the crossroads of my career, and careering is a pretty accurate word for it so far, I’m obsessing over getting this piece just fucking so … and this makes me wonder am I doing the right thing?

There is a job going. My area. But a fellowship at Cambridge. Now. Tutorial fellowships at Oxford and Cambridge are renowned for being set-ups. Almost invariably there is an internal candidate already on the job sheet, the interviews are for show and to fulfill legal obligations. We all know it, we all know people who have been pre-selected (and sometimes they’re stupid enough to tell everybody). But do I waste a day of my life filling in what may as well be a lottery ticket, on the off-chance, knowing that it’ll only piss me off more, or do I hold my hands up and say ‘enough, no more … not so sweet and all that shit.’

The latter, I feel. But I’m terrified that that is the job with my name on it.

I walked home tonight along a foggy seafront, tumbling over similar questions in my mind. When I fucked up last year, I fucked up good and proper. In doing so I broke the heart of someone I loved very much. I then made an error of judgement, a colossal, pitiful error. Possibly an error made through my reluctance to make a judgement. An error made largely because I refused to make the decision, to admit to myself how I felt. This error – and yes, error is an awful word, a useless word that utterly fails to communicate the thought processes that may or may not have occurred, the awfulness of my behaviour. This error shut the gate. And, it seems, locked it. Simultaneously I understood. I understood. Understandably, all attempts at redress made since have been firmly, and generally politely, rebuffed. I want, well, not to return, but to underscore and move on, but in the same plain.

But I wonder. Is it simply because I hate to think I took the wrong path, because that path was comfortable, good, great actually … or because I’m scared that it was wrong all along and I really just hate to lose. Especially something so good. Well, there’s the answer.

Do I ignore the bad bits now?

And what of the path which is opening up before me?

What, indeed.

A little bit of what you fancy

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I’m unsure about this.

Not only that, but I’m unsure about what, exactly, I am unsure about.

I can, however, categorically state that at 3.39am, one really ought to be spark out, preferably in close proximity to the person you’d most like to be in close proximity to, so that should one, for some unknown reason, rise from one’s slumber (did someone mention a ginger cat?), it will be beside a warm body, breathing gently into the night air, seeding it with their fragrance.

How much space is it really necessary to leave between these lines?