Bo-muda Triangle.
I think it's time to have lunch with my wife.
Not just any old limp triangles of pappy bread and filling from a corner shop, you understand. Though we might be actually eating any old limp triangles of pappy bread and filling from a corner shop. No. The ingestion isn't the point. Even if it has three. The real symbolism about this lunch will be its location.
The lovely first lady of Momo once said to me that she rather envied the fact that at the end of my working day I can often hand her, or make her read, or firmly encourage her to interact with, or basically force her to listen to an actual thing. A something. A product of some tangible kind. Whereas she, she often felt, couldn't exactly bring home a portfolio of decisions and discussions and demonstrably dreary but confidential reports for me to pin to the fridge.
I'd always point out that I loved her for her all the things she naturally brought home with her every day. Most pertinently, the wage.
But, once we are enjoying that lunch I'm thinking of, it will be churlish of me not to point out then and there that we will be actually, tangibly, most definitely making use of something that she has most certainly made. We'll be sitting IN it, in fact.
A very real thing. A very affecting thing. Rather more so than your average website.
A space.
---
I remember Day One of Year Two of my three-year degree in Graphic Design. It was, I could sense, very possibly the beginning of my redemption from a Foundationy, fantastically arty-farty first year that saw me nearly thrown off the course for blatant, balsa-wood-boring creative ineptitude. Don't judge me. I'd done a BTEC.
Salvation glimmered for me, however, that morning. Sitting there, the Veteran Lovely Chap Proper Old School Designer who then ran the course – or at least, the much neater, cleaner, second two years of it – held up a piece of A4 paper and gazed around the classroom at us in a drawn-out, expectant silence.
"What is this?" he then asked imperiously.
All barely-post-adolescent eyes flicked from him to each other, wondering how to play this obvious duffer trap in a louche, cool way.
Silence hung theatrically. The bit of A4 seemed to fill the room.
Someone cracked. "It's, ah. Well, it's a bit of A4 paper."
The tutor's eye's twinkled with the casual joy of an easy pounce. "No, it isn't."
"Yes it is." we all thought in unison.
"No it isn't," he countered intuitively, pulling a large lever to collapse the trap door underneath the cretin who gave in to blurting out the obvious, "not for you. Not if you plan to be designers."
("Yes it is. It's a bloody bit of A4 paper…" said an echoey voice through cries of bone-broken pain from somewhere beneath us.)
"This…" our wise old tutor continued mystically, waving a hand portentiously around the dimensions of the bit of A4 paper like Paul Daniels in a Saturday matinee on the pier at Great Yarmouth.
"..this is a field."
Silence fell. Noisily.
"Ah." I thought, with some dawning relief, "I may yet be alright on this course. I can do pretentiously ponsey."
"IT'S A BLOODY BIT OF A4!" shouted the voice in the pit below, but some of us were no longer listening.
---
If there's one thing I've learned, and one thing I've banged on about since my clever wife completed her training as an Urban Designer a couple of years ago, it is how universal are some principles of design.
Understanding how to make use of that space – that field – is as important to putting print on a bit of A4 as it is to putting people and buildings on an actual field. Except a bit of A4 comes ready cow-free. But you're missing the point.
Dynamics are all. How things work in the space.
---
People are funny creatures. Like cows, but sometimes nimbler and more complexedly stupid.
We most instinctively respond not to logic and wisdom and clever ideas but to feelings. And I don't just mean obvious emotional theatrics like jealousy, rage, fear, inadequacy, nausea and Jeremy Kyle – which is really all those feelings in one half-hour TV experience. I mean the sort of feelings we spend most of our day being steered by, below the radar of awareness.
Vibes.
Yes, get hippy with it, man. Vibes. You might be a pretentious boob like me and imagine yourself able to analyse your environment at every step like some artistic Terminator and so fancy you'll never be caught unawares by the subtle schemes of discomfort. Or you might just pop to the shops every now and then. But either way, you'll be responding to a thousand secret stimuli between here and the chemist. So deal with it, organic boy.
When things are blatantly awful, they raise above the threshold of subconscious and we may actually notice ourselves reacting. Bad breath. Radio One daytime presenters. Terrible road accidents – that kind of thing.
But most of the time your and my day is affected by stupid things we don't notice are attacking or adding to our wellbeing. And you'd be amazed how stupid these things are.
And how stupid are many of the decisions made by the chief catagory of human supposed to tackle these daily injustices and save us from inexplicable daily misery – designers.
---
Designers are our defenders. The guardians of space. They are the people that are hired, like a SWAT team, to go into a bad situation and basically shoot everybody.
Except they're not. They supposed to ask questions and analyse the situation and come up with a clever plan based on the evidence and brought to life with a little aesthetic flare. They just like shooting everybody.
Whether you're screwing up a flyer before it's even hit your post mat because you can see from the upstairs bathroom that it looks about as reassuringly professional as a Victorian pick-pocket trying to land an airliner, or you're walking into your work environment and suddenly thinking about jumping out of the fourth floor window despite the good night you had lastnight with Dave and all the crazy cats in marketing and the good chance that the window won't open any more anyway, design is the thing at fault. At fault by being absent.
Websites are one of the most effective, efficient and well-practiced ways to destroy large parts of your soul, for example. Try setting up a MySpace account. Now, in 2010. Try it. But do so only with a friend in the room who has sworn to never look over your shoulder and to pull you roughly from the screen when the filthy expletive count rises to one in three.
But anything in print can do the same. You might not know why you're getting a headache while reading a book, but it could be that some fancy-pants designer has set the measure too long – too many words on a line. Or it could be that you're reading a Dan Brown. Either way, your day is made rather worse and you may not know why.
And so it is true of any space at all. Even a public one. If the space isn't working well, it's your autonomic vibe detection ability that will sense it and your wellbeing that will suffer. Either because some engineers have systematically 'worked out' how the space should operate – or more likely, how it is allowed to operate – or because some designers have decided to conceptualise a bold new aesthetic for it.
Brilliant. Hooray for our brilliant space guardians.
---
Enter then, centre stage, the oil-stained, concrete joy of Bournemouth's Triangle.
Here is a part of this gently feel-good seaside resort that is almost smack-centre of town and yet spent 30 years devoid of any pedestrians other than people who got lost coming out of one of the car parks. Haunted and frightened, these creatures never stayed out in the open for long.
But here too is a south-facing open area, lined with shops on all three sides, including a design award-winning new community library, and with an established grassed area with trees in the heart of it. In, may I point out again, the middle of town.
So why were the local traders so grumpy with my lovely wife when she first walked in to their meeting 18 months ago?
Because this space – this daily definition of their working environment – just felt so wrong.
Felt so wrong, and left for so long, that they were ready to pounce on just about anyone from the council foolish enough to walk into their discussions about it.
Lastnight, however – 18 months later – when I picked up Caroline from a sort of official jolly they'd all thrown up there, she was wide-eyed with feel-good. Because all the locals were, those same local traders. Wide-eyed with feel-good and effusive with gratitude at what she'd ensured had happened to this sick space.
---
The design is not flamboyant. It's not tricksy and the team worked hard to spend a minimal amount of council tax money on it. But they focused that spend. And thought about what was wrong. And went with the simple and obvious design solution for the space – and crucially did everything to ensure, through all the very many technical and political possibilities of the process, that that simple and obvious design was not diluted.
Gone is the bus lay-up. Gone is the crumbling high wall to a green space out of reach. Gone is much of the clutter of old street furniture. In its place is another simple green triangle with three new trees on it, but accessible from all points, visible, readable, from everywhere, which accentuates the clean lines of the new library and creates a public space facing it with simple seating steps that is simply pregnant for things to happen in it.
As a result, people can now be seen in the Triangle. And some people are suddenly discovering that Bournemouth has a very nice new library, some ten years after it opened.
---
That so many people had to be involved in making it work is a given. That so many people had recognised that there was a problem beforehand is interesting too. That so many people began to see how to put it right is even more interesting. The Landscape team, Transport guys, town center management people, local traders, local politicians, external contractors and internal specialists. They all helped to realise the new space and all began to see what would work about it.
But I think that the Triangle redesign's apparent success is down to two things; indeed a vindication of them:
Good design, and good diplomacy.
---
Understanding how people ACTUALLY work is crucial to designing something well. Where will they really walk, how will they really 'read a space'? And crucial to understanding how people work is understanding our need to feel placed.
Where am I? What is this place? What am I dealing with and how should I interact with it?
It's as true of a website, or a poster, or a magazine article as it is of a car, or an apartment or a whole part of town. Or any relationship.
Does it put you at your ease? Does it make you feel comfortable? Because if it does, you'll want to hang around it. Whatever it is. At least for a while.
Lastnight, as we drove away, Caroline and her Urban Design colleague Catherine – both playing such crucial roles in co-ordinating everyone's thoughts on the Triangle project – seemed pretty alive with encouragement. Not simply from all the people who'd asked them up there to say thankyou to them quite so enthusiastically, but perhaps most by one final bit of evidence that summed up the success.
Like a scene from an unbelievable 80s movie, a group of street dancers had moved into the Triangle's new open space with a ghettoblaster and were practicing their absurdly cool moves for an hour. Without prompting, these people had walked out of an Urban Design textbook and into the space, owning it without even noticing themselves doing it.
I mean, honestly. I didn't even know Bournemouth HAD any absurdly cool street dancers.
---
The lovely first lady of Momo is not one to make a fuss. You should, and probably do, know this. She is more of an unselfconscious street dancer than a show-boater. Really, you should see her move. So she is insistent on not dwelling on kudos – especially that of a large team of individuals. Many talents renewed the Triangle for many more people.
But I am proud of her as a husband that she is so particularly good at pulling all those very different groups of people together. And I am impressed with her as a designer that she understands the way that well engineered design can change something pretty fundamental to people – their day.
She and Laura and Catherine and the other members of her team are showing some remarkable skills and aptitude between them, across the many projects they're currently working on. But I'm not sure she will pursue my suggestion that the three of them do a photoshoot for BH Life in manner of Charlie's Angels. Which is a shame.
But they certainly are in a remarkable position. As Caroline said to me lastnight over a glass of cheap red and frozen pizzas, "Who gets nights like this in their job? Who gets people saying thankyou to them like that?"
It's been a long time coming for her, you might say. The lovely first lady of Momo has served in very many places and roles that don't get seen or appreciated. But ultimately, lastnight's celebrations are really about the power of good design.
In all matters creative – everything designed for other people – you have to try to hit the sweet spot. To sense what resonates best. Because if you bring the vibe waves into phase, everyone will feel it.
While we are sitting there – there in the middle of the Triangle, in this summer's fortuitously gorgeous weather, eating our limp triangles of pap and sandwich filling, and despite whatever pitfalls and problems that lie ahead – I will point out that the splendid person beside me has certainly made something she can show people.
She has made that crucial thing that is the point of all design.
A difference.
---
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Love the spinner, hate the spin.
Love the spinner, hate the spin.
Hands up if you're secretly sick of the media.
C'mon. Think about it.
All that shouty personal space invading – it adds up. All those pixel missiles fill up your brain like a rapid-fire Tetris. I'm getting shouted out.
Which is probably a bad sign for a person working in the Media.
Okay, so it's very definitely very loosely 'working' and it's obviously only in the provincial shires of the Media where none of your clients are names you've heard of and budgets are at least as ignominious. But still, there I am. Spinning for a living.
So, am I turning into a miserable spinster?
---
..Back from the ad break: No.
I've just had a realisation today, as I've been lounging around with the papers and French music and generally contributing nothing to the nation's economy and cultural wealth but the price of a side-bowl of olives and a slightly fnawing opinion or two on a couple of articles in the Guardian.
Namely: Making art = fun and inspiring. Promoting art = grim and demotivating.
---
Watching the Tour De France as daily as I can this year, I am as inspired as ever by the spectacle, challenge, culture, technicality, scenery and sheer theatre of it all as ever I was. I still want to drive one of the team cars or fly the TV coverage copter all over those crag-staggering Pyrenees peaks. Were I able to stream it into a womb tank I would weep with joy at it all, I'm sure.
But I can't. Never mind the room those things take up, or how hard it is to get the water to a truly neutral temperature – man.
No. It's the enthusiasm with which ITV4 has embraced its enhanced coverage that is trying very shouty pissy-offy hard to ruin it all for me. If the coverage can only be paid for by 50% of the broadcast time being given to advertising – long, frequent ad breaks and dementedly-repeated sponsor spots – then is it worth watching?
I'm really not sure.
---
I like articulating messages for my clients. I like mucking about with pixels and words trying to help them talk a bit betterer. I've always been a reasonably applied and practical creative – as much as you may snort at the idea of applying those words to me in general. Cynic.
So, with practical head on, treating me as my own client, I knew that 2010 would be very much about setting out Momo:tempo's little stall, fairly unflamboyantly. No sweat. All the business tools need putting into place if your 'art' is to be a tangible enough product for folks to grab hold of and take home to place in an intimate spot in their bedroom. Or wherever. Mantelpiece is fine. Next to the kettle wouldn't be a bad spot either when you think about it. Anyway.
My point is that I am now officially sick of uploading songs to different web portals and wondering how to get anyone 'useful' to listen to my bloody tunes.
It's all the worst aspects of the music business – the business. Sheesh.
When I talk to humans who've actually listened to something I've written, they usually seem strangely animated and upbeat about the whole experience. This is nice. Sending out jolly nice press packs to strangers who have hundreds of these things land on their mat every day and so will not respond or be moved to elation and a life-changing new viewpoint after soaking in your sound for half a day is not nice. It's depressing. And pointless.
Ah, but you never know. Do you. You have to WORK. NEVER GIVE UP. BE REALLY CLEVER.
Oh bleedin' heck. That's the bit I'm CRAP at – don't you see?
The bit I like is the whole making music thing. I'm not half bad at that. Would have spent rather more time than even I have this busy year if I hadn't been trying with tears and hot forks to WORK OUT HOW TO MAKE MY MYSPACE PAGE NOT LOOK LIKE THE DESIGN POOP OF A TOTAL RUDDY AMATEUR.
Honestly. I know anyone 'serious' needs to appear in all these places, but do you really think those wan, young, borderline-gormless young things all over every Flash web banner you've ever seen have the faintest idea about online strategies and maximising targeted market share? Of course not. They, like me, are too busy being casually groovy to give a shite. (Run with it, okay).
At last count, Momo:tempo now appears on:
Facebook.
MySpace. (*@x!!**x!!)
iTunes.
iLIke.
Twitter.
Blogspot.
Soundcloud.
E-Music. (Whuh?)
Napster. (Allegedly.)
Deezer. (Now, made up. Surely?)
Last.fm.
To say nothing of my own designed-from-the-ground-up website. And still I'm told I should be on Bandcamp. And Beatport. And I'm not even sure if I'm on Spotify or not but I know damn sure I really should be.
And never mind all the niche websites for electronic music and wotnotsuch. Yet I don't even know exactly what niche I should be IN. My own, I always thought.
This is so much easier when it's for someone else.
It is indeed, as some hitherto-unheard-of cool young thing called Brett Dennen is currently singing at me – from his obviously-successful bid to at least get on FIP's playlist – "Enough to make you go crazy." My point exactly.
---
That's when it dawned on me that when I think about all this, I get pretty deflated. Just want to read the paper and pass derisory comments at the trendy bastards in all the culture sections of the weekend papers. Give up and get a w**kacino. Sod trying to come up with targeted rich content for the fanbase. I don't have a fanbase. I don't even have a fan. I just open a window.
When, however, I consider the next creative adventure, I feel kind of oddly excited. Bless me. It's sweet. You might know it – that irrational fluttery feeling in the tummy that makes you actually bother to get out of bed and which fancifully intoxicates you to one degree or another into believing you can actually add something to the cultural human landscape. Which is the only way I know of that one can. It's clever, that feeling.
So I think I've decided. I shall now attempt very seriously to remain completely hidden from the cultural mainstream. Or sidestream. Or muddy rivulet. I shall launch a bold ad campaign consisting of this almost universally unread blog post declaiming my intention to NOT sell any records or secure any gigs in venues where actual people are likely to be or to do anything other than really rather enjoy the occasional stranger telling me to my face that they irrationally really rather enjoyed something of mine they once heard.
This seems real. Not spun. Some sort of genuine spun gold, in fact. All the finer treasure because it isn't shouty or preening or desperate to be 'somewhere nearer to all the action' as one columnist in a trendy newspaper put it today.
So excuse me while I disappear for a while. Sorry – still don't appear in the first place for a while. I shall be off enjoying myself privately. Spinning a magic tune somewhere.
----
(PS: I forgot Sonic Bids. See? Never heard of it either, have you.)
(PPS: Oh, and YouTube. Ever heard of that?)
Hands up if you're secretly sick of the media.
C'mon. Think about it.
All that shouty personal space invading – it adds up. All those pixel missiles fill up your brain like a rapid-fire Tetris. I'm getting shouted out.
Which is probably a bad sign for a person working in the Media.
Okay, so it's very definitely very loosely 'working' and it's obviously only in the provincial shires of the Media where none of your clients are names you've heard of and budgets are at least as ignominious. But still, there I am. Spinning for a living.
So, am I turning into a miserable spinster?
---
..Back from the ad break: No.
I've just had a realisation today, as I've been lounging around with the papers and French music and generally contributing nothing to the nation's economy and cultural wealth but the price of a side-bowl of olives and a slightly fnawing opinion or two on a couple of articles in the Guardian.
Namely: Making art = fun and inspiring. Promoting art = grim and demotivating.
---
Watching the Tour De France as daily as I can this year, I am as inspired as ever by the spectacle, challenge, culture, technicality, scenery and sheer theatre of it all as ever I was. I still want to drive one of the team cars or fly the TV coverage copter all over those crag-staggering Pyrenees peaks. Were I able to stream it into a womb tank I would weep with joy at it all, I'm sure.
But I can't. Never mind the room those things take up, or how hard it is to get the water to a truly neutral temperature – man.
No. It's the enthusiasm with which ITV4 has embraced its enhanced coverage that is trying very shouty pissy-offy hard to ruin it all for me. If the coverage can only be paid for by 50% of the broadcast time being given to advertising – long, frequent ad breaks and dementedly-repeated sponsor spots – then is it worth watching?
I'm really not sure.
---
I like articulating messages for my clients. I like mucking about with pixels and words trying to help them talk a bit betterer. I've always been a reasonably applied and practical creative – as much as you may snort at the idea of applying those words to me in general. Cynic.
So, with practical head on, treating me as my own client, I knew that 2010 would be very much about setting out Momo:tempo's little stall, fairly unflamboyantly. No sweat. All the business tools need putting into place if your 'art' is to be a tangible enough product for folks to grab hold of and take home to place in an intimate spot in their bedroom. Or wherever. Mantelpiece is fine. Next to the kettle wouldn't be a bad spot either when you think about it. Anyway.
My point is that I am now officially sick of uploading songs to different web portals and wondering how to get anyone 'useful' to listen to my bloody tunes.
It's all the worst aspects of the music business – the business. Sheesh.
When I talk to humans who've actually listened to something I've written, they usually seem strangely animated and upbeat about the whole experience. This is nice. Sending out jolly nice press packs to strangers who have hundreds of these things land on their mat every day and so will not respond or be moved to elation and a life-changing new viewpoint after soaking in your sound for half a day is not nice. It's depressing. And pointless.
Ah, but you never know. Do you. You have to WORK. NEVER GIVE UP. BE REALLY CLEVER.
Oh bleedin' heck. That's the bit I'm CRAP at – don't you see?
The bit I like is the whole making music thing. I'm not half bad at that. Would have spent rather more time than even I have this busy year if I hadn't been trying with tears and hot forks to WORK OUT HOW TO MAKE MY MYSPACE PAGE NOT LOOK LIKE THE DESIGN POOP OF A TOTAL RUDDY AMATEUR.
Honestly. I know anyone 'serious' needs to appear in all these places, but do you really think those wan, young, borderline-gormless young things all over every Flash web banner you've ever seen have the faintest idea about online strategies and maximising targeted market share? Of course not. They, like me, are too busy being casually groovy to give a shite. (Run with it, okay).
At last count, Momo:tempo now appears on:
Facebook.
MySpace. (*@x!!**x!!)
iTunes.
iLIke.
Twitter.
Blogspot.
Soundcloud.
E-Music. (Whuh?)
Napster. (Allegedly.)
Deezer. (Now, made up. Surely?)
Last.fm.
To say nothing of my own designed-from-the-ground-up website. And still I'm told I should be on Bandcamp. And Beatport. And I'm not even sure if I'm on Spotify or not but I know damn sure I really should be.
And never mind all the niche websites for electronic music and wotnotsuch. Yet I don't even know exactly what niche I should be IN. My own, I always thought.
This is so much easier when it's for someone else.
It is indeed, as some hitherto-unheard-of cool young thing called Brett Dennen is currently singing at me – from his obviously-successful bid to at least get on FIP's playlist – "Enough to make you go crazy." My point exactly.
---
That's when it dawned on me that when I think about all this, I get pretty deflated. Just want to read the paper and pass derisory comments at the trendy bastards in all the culture sections of the weekend papers. Give up and get a w**kacino. Sod trying to come up with targeted rich content for the fanbase. I don't have a fanbase. I don't even have a fan. I just open a window.
When, however, I consider the next creative adventure, I feel kind of oddly excited. Bless me. It's sweet. You might know it – that irrational fluttery feeling in the tummy that makes you actually bother to get out of bed and which fancifully intoxicates you to one degree or another into believing you can actually add something to the cultural human landscape. Which is the only way I know of that one can. It's clever, that feeling.
So I think I've decided. I shall now attempt very seriously to remain completely hidden from the cultural mainstream. Or sidestream. Or muddy rivulet. I shall launch a bold ad campaign consisting of this almost universally unread blog post declaiming my intention to NOT sell any records or secure any gigs in venues where actual people are likely to be or to do anything other than really rather enjoy the occasional stranger telling me to my face that they irrationally really rather enjoyed something of mine they once heard.
This seems real. Not spun. Some sort of genuine spun gold, in fact. All the finer treasure because it isn't shouty or preening or desperate to be 'somewhere nearer to all the action' as one columnist in a trendy newspaper put it today.
So excuse me while I disappear for a while. Sorry – still don't appear in the first place for a while. I shall be off enjoying myself privately. Spinning a magic tune somewhere.
----
(PS: I forgot Sonic Bids. See? Never heard of it either, have you.)
(PPS: Oh, and YouTube. Ever heard of that?)
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Momo:limbo.
Momo:limbo.
Oh, for Pete's sake. Sometimes you just can't get anything done.
I mean, how do high-flying types ever get off the ground? There's always a complete tool box of nuts and bolts to sift through before you can seem to find even two things that fit together. And anyone who ever visited their dad's garage and tried lifting that old tool box of stray nuts and bolts will know what a dead weight that is. Think I've pulled something just sitting here thinking about it.
And so there's the truth of it – I have nothing interesting to report.
I am mainly just watching the Tour de France and daydreaming about driving one of the team cars – or better still, flying the TV chopper – while responding to all manner of vaguely paid, vaguely creative work. That's about it.
None of it onerous, really. Some copywriting, some event branding, a couple of regular magaziney things, the odd emaily thing, a few advertisementy things. Plus, there are a couple of new telly-tunery things on the horizon too.
And all to a backdrop of largely very sunny stuff outside the window – and certainly where last weekend was concerned, some four days straight of driving between very jolly social engagements, seeing all manner of new and long-standing nice people.
..But oh dear. Still feels like a bit of a limbo.
Except, why do they call it a limbo? Being 'in Limbo' is surely nothing like doing a rum-induced stunt of freakish flexibility to the sound of rampant Cajun beats and a backdrop of excessively groovy people clapping and grinning rhythmically.
Languishing in the nether world is meant to be dull, isn't it?
Unless I've gotten completely the wrong end of this particular sentence of Limbo.
Jeepers, while I'm dozing into a torpor waiting around for all these stray nuts and bolts to magically screw themselves together into something brilliant, perhaps I'm actually expected to be trying to liven the place up. Mix up some cocktails, turn up some beats, chop up some coconuts, I dunno.
Well, if I had the energy and clear head to piddle about with all that, I wouldn't be DOING that, would I? I'd have my chuffing album out already and glittery showbiz launch gig in the diaries of the rich and famous. Woudn't I. Dippy.
Mind you. All this while I've been telling people that 2010 is just about Momo setting out its little musical stall in a largely empty church hall on a rickety trestle table at a poorly-advertised village jumble sale, I could have been telling people it was more like a Caribbean beach party.
Yeah, I could have done that.
Similarly low-tech metaphor. Apart from the sound system.
Way sexier.
Right. So something else to put on the interminable To Do list.
Hate the nuts and bolts of all this. I just want a nap.
Oh, for Pete's sake. Sometimes you just can't get anything done.
I mean, how do high-flying types ever get off the ground? There's always a complete tool box of nuts and bolts to sift through before you can seem to find even two things that fit together. And anyone who ever visited their dad's garage and tried lifting that old tool box of stray nuts and bolts will know what a dead weight that is. Think I've pulled something just sitting here thinking about it.
And so there's the truth of it – I have nothing interesting to report.
I am mainly just watching the Tour de France and daydreaming about driving one of the team cars – or better still, flying the TV chopper – while responding to all manner of vaguely paid, vaguely creative work. That's about it.
None of it onerous, really. Some copywriting, some event branding, a couple of regular magaziney things, the odd emaily thing, a few advertisementy things. Plus, there are a couple of new telly-tunery things on the horizon too.
And all to a backdrop of largely very sunny stuff outside the window – and certainly where last weekend was concerned, some four days straight of driving between very jolly social engagements, seeing all manner of new and long-standing nice people.
..But oh dear. Still feels like a bit of a limbo.
Except, why do they call it a limbo? Being 'in Limbo' is surely nothing like doing a rum-induced stunt of freakish flexibility to the sound of rampant Cajun beats and a backdrop of excessively groovy people clapping and grinning rhythmically.
Languishing in the nether world is meant to be dull, isn't it?
Unless I've gotten completely the wrong end of this particular sentence of Limbo.
Jeepers, while I'm dozing into a torpor waiting around for all these stray nuts and bolts to magically screw themselves together into something brilliant, perhaps I'm actually expected to be trying to liven the place up. Mix up some cocktails, turn up some beats, chop up some coconuts, I dunno.
Well, if I had the energy and clear head to piddle about with all that, I wouldn't be DOING that, would I? I'd have my chuffing album out already and glittery showbiz launch gig in the diaries of the rich and famous. Woudn't I. Dippy.
Mind you. All this while I've been telling people that 2010 is just about Momo setting out its little musical stall in a largely empty church hall on a rickety trestle table at a poorly-advertised village jumble sale, I could have been telling people it was more like a Caribbean beach party.
Yeah, I could have done that.
Similarly low-tech metaphor. Apart from the sound system.
Way sexier.
Right. So something else to put on the interminable To Do list.
Hate the nuts and bolts of all this. I just want a nap.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Sumhead.
Sumhead.
Have you known a year like this in many an English year? One where we actually get seasons?
A summer so hot and sunny and summery, it's blotted the memory of a winter so long and snowy and wintery it eventually blotted the will to live. Even I was getting tired of the definite barometric work when May had a nippy wobble and made me get out my long coat again.
Now? How long ago does that feel?
We've been taking beachy bike rides and seafront strolls every damn evening and weekend we can. There's a permanent dusting of sand on the hall carpet. And on Saturday, we just sort of camped out in Bournemouth lower gardens with strawberries and Marks' takeaway Chardonnay glasses.
The summer's a funny thing, though. All the feelgood makes you want to down tools and say Sod It. And this year is probably exaggerating the thing.
The new chancellor's ball-punchingly painful budget has cemented the idea of a Tory outlook in Westminster, with poor people and those daft enough to be on benefits of any kind whatsoever sort of casually cuffed about the head, while bankers smugly tell us all and any hope of legislatively toe-punting their crown jewels to go do the necessary to ourselves.
Meanwhile, a decent toe-punt would have been nice to see from the desperate shower we sent to South Africa to represent us to the sporting world this month.
And did we bother to say the words: Afghanistan, or: Gulf Of Mexico? No. These too seem like gigantic, insurmountable things.
So a bit of lax summer heat is enough to make us all down tools and up tumblers.
---
So blessed indeed are the moments that restore hope. And music is so often the mysterious magician that will do it, against all the logical odds.
The Glastonbury Festival is forty this year. As will I be. And as cosmically resonant and harmonious as it would have been to see posters all over Michael Eavis' good farm this summer emblazoned with the words: MOMO:GLASTO – Tempo Takes To The Pyramid or similar, alas my interminable efforts to set out my little musical stall have not so far led me to the mainstage at the country's favourite music festival.
For some reason, they got in some soul singer. Wonder somebody? Steven Wonder?
Catching up on the iPlayer from lastnight's concluding headline set, I spent this afternoon trying to concentrate on some magazine type changes but was finding it hard not to just sit and soak in
some legendary and strangely spiritual soul music, expertly executed by a stage full of sobbingly good creative talent.
Higher Ground made me want to throw myself out of the window with funky joy. Stevie's preach before Living For The City had me cheering and looking for someone to hug like a moron in the crowd who'd not slept for three days. And to pick Human Nature from Thriller to cover as one of the most poised, pretty soul songs Jackson ever did... man. Just, man.
God has this guy on his iPod.
..God has a lot on his iPod.
I think everything, in fact.
But Wonder At Glasto Forty is on repeat, believe it.
For us, I might say that the summer is another limbo time – albeit a hazy warm one between the positive ideas of new musical experiences and possibly moving on to a new chapter.
There is a certain sadness and worry for many people over this beautiful spell of weather, and I would say that the muggy wait of it is having the same effect on us in the background too.
And there's that weird thing about too much summer – it is meant to be a limbo. A heat-haze-blurred, hammock-lulled limbo. A wait for the chill bite of change. A recharging of want. A lazy hang-around built about the understanding that eventually, however warm and splendid the present, there comes a time when sanity is almost crying out for change, for an autumn breeze.
When you are wishing you could get out of the hammock and get on with something fresh.
..All of which is something I will get to just as soon as that kicks in. Really. You'll be the first to know.
Still half hoping it's not just yet though, eh?
Top up the Gin tumbler, mother.
Have you known a year like this in many an English year? One where we actually get seasons?
A summer so hot and sunny and summery, it's blotted the memory of a winter so long and snowy and wintery it eventually blotted the will to live. Even I was getting tired of the definite barometric work when May had a nippy wobble and made me get out my long coat again.
Now? How long ago does that feel?
We've been taking beachy bike rides and seafront strolls every damn evening and weekend we can. There's a permanent dusting of sand on the hall carpet. And on Saturday, we just sort of camped out in Bournemouth lower gardens with strawberries and Marks' takeaway Chardonnay glasses.
The summer's a funny thing, though. All the feelgood makes you want to down tools and say Sod It. And this year is probably exaggerating the thing.
The new chancellor's ball-punchingly painful budget has cemented the idea of a Tory outlook in Westminster, with poor people and those daft enough to be on benefits of any kind whatsoever sort of casually cuffed about the head, while bankers smugly tell us all and any hope of legislatively toe-punting their crown jewels to go do the necessary to ourselves.
Meanwhile, a decent toe-punt would have been nice to see from the desperate shower we sent to South Africa to represent us to the sporting world this month.
And did we bother to say the words: Afghanistan, or: Gulf Of Mexico? No. These too seem like gigantic, insurmountable things.
So a bit of lax summer heat is enough to make us all down tools and up tumblers.
---
So blessed indeed are the moments that restore hope. And music is so often the mysterious magician that will do it, against all the logical odds.
The Glastonbury Festival is forty this year. As will I be. And as cosmically resonant and harmonious as it would have been to see posters all over Michael Eavis' good farm this summer emblazoned with the words: MOMO:GLASTO – Tempo Takes To The Pyramid or similar, alas my interminable efforts to set out my little musical stall have not so far led me to the mainstage at the country's favourite music festival.
For some reason, they got in some soul singer. Wonder somebody? Steven Wonder?
Catching up on the iPlayer from lastnight's concluding headline set, I spent this afternoon trying to concentrate on some magazine type changes but was finding it hard not to just sit and soak in
some legendary and strangely spiritual soul music, expertly executed by a stage full of sobbingly good creative talent.
Higher Ground made me want to throw myself out of the window with funky joy. Stevie's preach before Living For The City had me cheering and looking for someone to hug like a moron in the crowd who'd not slept for three days. And to pick Human Nature from Thriller to cover as one of the most poised, pretty soul songs Jackson ever did... man. Just, man.
God has this guy on his iPod.
..God has a lot on his iPod.
I think everything, in fact.
But Wonder At Glasto Forty is on repeat, believe it.
For us, I might say that the summer is another limbo time – albeit a hazy warm one between the positive ideas of new musical experiences and possibly moving on to a new chapter.
There is a certain sadness and worry for many people over this beautiful spell of weather, and I would say that the muggy wait of it is having the same effect on us in the background too.
And there's that weird thing about too much summer – it is meant to be a limbo. A heat-haze-blurred, hammock-lulled limbo. A wait for the chill bite of change. A recharging of want. A lazy hang-around built about the understanding that eventually, however warm and splendid the present, there comes a time when sanity is almost crying out for change, for an autumn breeze.
When you are wishing you could get out of the hammock and get on with something fresh.
..All of which is something I will get to just as soon as that kicks in. Really. You'll be the first to know.
Still half hoping it's not just yet though, eh?
Top up the Gin tumbler, mother.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
When the last vuvuzela sounds, only the posh will survive. Apparently.
When the last vuvuzela sounds, only the posh will survive. Apparently.
Do you have any idea how much oil has been pumped into the Gulf of Mexico?
Do you? Well, I’ll tell you – I have no idea either. I can’t count past a squillion. They’re telling me it’s reached some new, invented, numeric milestone; perhaps one spillion.
Which I think simply adds up to: We Might As Well Stop Counting And Start Sobbing. Or Possibly Drinking.
Such an unimaginable quantity of toxic vomit rupturing into the environment is exactly the kind of thing that especially environmentally-minded souls have been warning us about in tones of doom for 100 years. Because it is, they say, exactly the kind of thing we would go and do – we being shaved apes shown the possibility of a dirty great supply of free bananas. We’d, y’know, go bananas. And start slipping up.
We have, as it turns out, been prat-falling through recent history in a distinctly un-funny manner since we first discovered the goopy black gold. Only this time it feels that little bit more apocalyptic. As if any oil spill doesn’t look like some dark, viscous end to part of the world.
---
With “austerity measures” very in vogue around the world at the moment, the planet is not feeling like a jolly place. At least to those foolish enough to ever turn on a broadcast reception device.
As BP’s executive, Tony Hayward, vows to “get his life back” as soon as he can, stockmarketeers have noted that the international oil giant can basically afford the odd global catastrophe, it is that wealthy. Something like one in six share dividends paid in the UK are BP’s. One in six. Of the entire FTSE. That is a truly giant business. That is mind-boggling influence.
The thing is, giant business is, we are gradually being reminded, the bedrock of the modern world. It is the wealth creator that sustains whole countries. Has been for that same century.
Only, I don’t want to alarm anyone, but giant business has a poor safety record. Giant business likes to do deals at parties with governments to avoid safety inspections, in fact.
Giant business also does rather like to borrow money to bet on things, and lend money to people who technically can’t afford it at all to create something else it can then sell and make more money on – some ingeniously sensible thing called debt assets. And with all this apparently easy money, giant business rather likes to make giant promises and get everyone all excited – about jumping into a river of wealth that gets only wider and deeper as you swim harder.
Giant business likes to encourage you to stop worrying about the details in life and instead envision a bigger better picture of life; something in a glittering future. Something better than what you have now. Which must be good indeed, given that for an ever-widening strata of middle-class earthlings life has never been so conceivably good.
---
Essentially, giant business might say, it likes to find resources of any kind and put them to good use – animal, vegetable or mineral. Build something bigger from what we have at our, ah, disposal.
Yeah. The teeeeny tiny floor in this plan is that it is built on a promise that is nicely, temptingly, beautifully simple… but unhelpfully, and fairly obviously, bollocks. Growth. Growth alone.
Only growth adds up, says big business. Only, it doesn’t. It subtracts: Check the column marked: ‘Duh’. There are only so many resources, it turns out.
If only consolidation sounded sexier to share holders. If only survival did.
Thing is, while giant business keeps implying that we should stop worrying about the details and think big, it can be easy for everyone tempted by this idea to miss a fairly crucial point that it’s really making about its most valuable resource: individual humans are mere details.
Damn right we are. And where is that Devil.
---
Simplistically cynical view of capitalism? Of course; this is a stupid blog, fuelled by latés and G&Ts bought with some of the money of the giant wealth creators. But you try talking to anyone who's worked for, say, one of the massive international banks. Ask them how valued they feel in their glass hutch.
---
Anyway, with economies teetering and whole eco-systems taking a pounding around the world, an awful lot of us are desperate for some good news. Or some immersive distraction at least. Which is why world economies are unlikely to gird their loins any time before the merciful summer distraction of the World Cup. And why most of us watching it will be doing our best to blot out the thought of the Tick-ravaged townships and fear-soaked poverty cluttered around the perimeter of Johannasburg’s glittering new international football stadium. We feel depressed and helpless enough, chaps. Now blow that vuvuzela, someone.
Y’know, it must be tempting for escatologists to flip to the back of their bibles and wag a smug finger at the rest of us. Given that people obsessed with the end of the world can find a way to crow about all the death and foolhardyness at any time, they must be whipping themselves into frothing frenzy at the moment. We are reaping what we are sowing – we are naturally greedy, vain, short-sighted creatures and the end result will imminently be a fallen world finally flipping into the abyss.
That vuvuzela is probably the last trumpet. Wouldn’t be surprised.
I have found, therefore, a weirdly deep sense of comforting distraction from a little bit of television drama that is based on just such an appaulingly bleak and human historic possibility.
It’s a television drama based on an appaulingly bleak and basically apocalyptic possibility that will, however, probably have you laughing when you first clap eyes on it. Before you realise that it, like the death virus it’s narratively built around, has gotten under your skin.
For this is a very conspicuously, amusingly old bit of TV, populated by flares-wearing Rada-trained upper-middle-class people acting their socks off in rain-sodden, un-CGIed Hertfordshire in 1975. A programme surely impossible to find seriously thought-provoking in this day and age.
A programme called Survivors.
----
It’s taken us most of the year to date, but we’ve just finished watching the final episode of this three-series BBC production and I feel two kinds of subtle grief about it. One, that it’s finally over and we’ve had to start catching up on the slightly less amiably ambling Season 7 of Spooks, and two that these plucky posh people won’t be there to turn to, when the vuvuzela of armageddon blares.
It shouldn’t be affecting. The acting is often am dram church hall stuff, driven by wooden scripts that seem only written to ram home plot points, the camera work is wobbly and uncompromisingly un-post-productioned, the fashions are absurd, the weather is awful, the budget is utterly non-existent-looking and you spend most of the time distracted by wondering what all the actors are doing now in their late nineties.
But, so help me, it IS affecting. And it’s many of the technical shortcomings that help it get into your head. Dare I even say it, your heart.
When Jenny and Pet are slopping out pigs, that uncompromising 70s VT stock and reluctance to cut away and reduce the effect of Real Time doesn’t half make it real. Un-dressed-up. In some cases, apparently unrehearsed.
The wonky dialogue and stumbled lines and goofiness of it all can just be annoying, of course. Characters appear and disappear with sometimes no reference to the fanciful concept of continuity at all, and it does seem that egos and amateurish bickering wrecked any remaining hope of production consistency, with actors, writers, directors and managers routinely fired or stropping off. Chaos.
But I just know what the recent remake of Survivors will be like. All helicopters and running and shooting and shouting and jittery action camera work and beautiful direction of photography and worthy attempts at real human dialogue and barely any screen time that isn’t orchestrally saturated. Y’know. A proper bit of production. With little chance of penetrating all that slick-hard entertainment gloss.
Meanwhile, in 1975, Terry Nation was dreaming of something properly bleak to cheer everyone up during the winter of discontent: Hideous Death Virus escapes from Chinese test lab and kills 95% of people on the planet. Which seems to have included almost anyone working class; one of the first people you see on screen is Peter Bowls, which should set the scene for you.
Fun. And added to the production sensibilities and possibilities of pre-Thatcher, pre-digital, pre-ironic British television, by jiggery is it bleak.
It’s also fast apparent what it’s motives are. It wants to teach you about survival. Like Lord Baden-bleedin’-Powell. It wants to sit you down and make you think about what the utter collapse of the modern world would really mean. From sanitation to sewing needles. In the style of your favourite 70s geography teacher.
And it’s precisely this academic premise, adhered to in every single one of it’s nearly 40 modules, that is the best bit, the reason you love it. So help you, you ARE made to think.
You’re made to think that no-one will have complete mental breakdowns at the sheer sudden torrent of incalcuable death, loss, horror, fear and psychological ripping away of fundamental context, true. Everyone gets on with stealing old Bedford vans to look for guns and tins of beans immediately, and at no time stops to think for a moment and then flee screeching into the woods tearing their own eyes out.
But Survivors does swivel its little spotlight of attention onto every implication of human annihilation it can think of, from learning to grow food and form communities, to considering eventually how to rebuild the infrastructure of society.
And perhaps, only by ambling around the countryside haphazardly with these characters can we get a sense of the empty reality of trying to actually survive under such circumstances. It is the understatement that creates the tension. And reveals the humanity. I’ll bet no-one on the new cast of Survivors has become an accomplished horseman as a result of the job. Everyone in the old series looked comfy on a shire horse by the end. Trotting around.
That’s sort of lovely. How bored would everyone one be after a single episode of that now?
---
As a result, I feel two challenges.
One, it’s obvious that if we are to survive, it will be together or not at all. Resources have to be valued and every detail of life counted like last pennies, not taken for granted. More than that, survival means understanding the invaluability of every single individual. Every skill counts. Every heart adds to the beat. A concept blurred away from your field of view by the giddy heights of teetering giant business.
And secondly, I really should be developing some practical skills of some kind. Instead of standing around watching the action and periodically blowing my own trumpet.
My one hope is that the well-enunciated posh-sounding will, in the end, be in with a chance.
Think we might all need to clean up our act, though.
Do you have any idea how much oil has been pumped into the Gulf of Mexico?
Do you? Well, I’ll tell you – I have no idea either. I can’t count past a squillion. They’re telling me it’s reached some new, invented, numeric milestone; perhaps one spillion.
Which I think simply adds up to: We Might As Well Stop Counting And Start Sobbing. Or Possibly Drinking.
Such an unimaginable quantity of toxic vomit rupturing into the environment is exactly the kind of thing that especially environmentally-minded souls have been warning us about in tones of doom for 100 years. Because it is, they say, exactly the kind of thing we would go and do – we being shaved apes shown the possibility of a dirty great supply of free bananas. We’d, y’know, go bananas. And start slipping up.
We have, as it turns out, been prat-falling through recent history in a distinctly un-funny manner since we first discovered the goopy black gold. Only this time it feels that little bit more apocalyptic. As if any oil spill doesn’t look like some dark, viscous end to part of the world.
---
With “austerity measures” very in vogue around the world at the moment, the planet is not feeling like a jolly place. At least to those foolish enough to ever turn on a broadcast reception device.
As BP’s executive, Tony Hayward, vows to “get his life back” as soon as he can, stockmarketeers have noted that the international oil giant can basically afford the odd global catastrophe, it is that wealthy. Something like one in six share dividends paid in the UK are BP’s. One in six. Of the entire FTSE. That is a truly giant business. That is mind-boggling influence.
The thing is, giant business is, we are gradually being reminded, the bedrock of the modern world. It is the wealth creator that sustains whole countries. Has been for that same century.
Only, I don’t want to alarm anyone, but giant business has a poor safety record. Giant business likes to do deals at parties with governments to avoid safety inspections, in fact.
Giant business also does rather like to borrow money to bet on things, and lend money to people who technically can’t afford it at all to create something else it can then sell and make more money on – some ingeniously sensible thing called debt assets. And with all this apparently easy money, giant business rather likes to make giant promises and get everyone all excited – about jumping into a river of wealth that gets only wider and deeper as you swim harder.
Giant business likes to encourage you to stop worrying about the details in life and instead envision a bigger better picture of life; something in a glittering future. Something better than what you have now. Which must be good indeed, given that for an ever-widening strata of middle-class earthlings life has never been so conceivably good.
---
Essentially, giant business might say, it likes to find resources of any kind and put them to good use – animal, vegetable or mineral. Build something bigger from what we have at our, ah, disposal.
Yeah. The teeeeny tiny floor in this plan is that it is built on a promise that is nicely, temptingly, beautifully simple… but unhelpfully, and fairly obviously, bollocks. Growth. Growth alone.
Only growth adds up, says big business. Only, it doesn’t. It subtracts: Check the column marked: ‘Duh’. There are only so many resources, it turns out.
If only consolidation sounded sexier to share holders. If only survival did.
Thing is, while giant business keeps implying that we should stop worrying about the details and think big, it can be easy for everyone tempted by this idea to miss a fairly crucial point that it’s really making about its most valuable resource: individual humans are mere details.
Damn right we are. And where is that Devil.
---
Simplistically cynical view of capitalism? Of course; this is a stupid blog, fuelled by latés and G&Ts bought with some of the money of the giant wealth creators. But you try talking to anyone who's worked for, say, one of the massive international banks. Ask them how valued they feel in their glass hutch.
---
Anyway, with economies teetering and whole eco-systems taking a pounding around the world, an awful lot of us are desperate for some good news. Or some immersive distraction at least. Which is why world economies are unlikely to gird their loins any time before the merciful summer distraction of the World Cup. And why most of us watching it will be doing our best to blot out the thought of the Tick-ravaged townships and fear-soaked poverty cluttered around the perimeter of Johannasburg’s glittering new international football stadium. We feel depressed and helpless enough, chaps. Now blow that vuvuzela, someone.
Y’know, it must be tempting for escatologists to flip to the back of their bibles and wag a smug finger at the rest of us. Given that people obsessed with the end of the world can find a way to crow about all the death and foolhardyness at any time, they must be whipping themselves into frothing frenzy at the moment. We are reaping what we are sowing – we are naturally greedy, vain, short-sighted creatures and the end result will imminently be a fallen world finally flipping into the abyss.
That vuvuzela is probably the last trumpet. Wouldn’t be surprised.
I have found, therefore, a weirdly deep sense of comforting distraction from a little bit of television drama that is based on just such an appaulingly bleak and human historic possibility.
It’s a television drama based on an appaulingly bleak and basically apocalyptic possibility that will, however, probably have you laughing when you first clap eyes on it. Before you realise that it, like the death virus it’s narratively built around, has gotten under your skin.
For this is a very conspicuously, amusingly old bit of TV, populated by flares-wearing Rada-trained upper-middle-class people acting their socks off in rain-sodden, un-CGIed Hertfordshire in 1975. A programme surely impossible to find seriously thought-provoking in this day and age.
A programme called Survivors.
----
It’s taken us most of the year to date, but we’ve just finished watching the final episode of this three-series BBC production and I feel two kinds of subtle grief about it. One, that it’s finally over and we’ve had to start catching up on the slightly less amiably ambling Season 7 of Spooks, and two that these plucky posh people won’t be there to turn to, when the vuvuzela of armageddon blares.
It shouldn’t be affecting. The acting is often am dram church hall stuff, driven by wooden scripts that seem only written to ram home plot points, the camera work is wobbly and uncompromisingly un-post-productioned, the fashions are absurd, the weather is awful, the budget is utterly non-existent-looking and you spend most of the time distracted by wondering what all the actors are doing now in their late nineties.
But, so help me, it IS affecting. And it’s many of the technical shortcomings that help it get into your head. Dare I even say it, your heart.
When Jenny and Pet are slopping out pigs, that uncompromising 70s VT stock and reluctance to cut away and reduce the effect of Real Time doesn’t half make it real. Un-dressed-up. In some cases, apparently unrehearsed.
The wonky dialogue and stumbled lines and goofiness of it all can just be annoying, of course. Characters appear and disappear with sometimes no reference to the fanciful concept of continuity at all, and it does seem that egos and amateurish bickering wrecked any remaining hope of production consistency, with actors, writers, directors and managers routinely fired or stropping off. Chaos.
But I just know what the recent remake of Survivors will be like. All helicopters and running and shooting and shouting and jittery action camera work and beautiful direction of photography and worthy attempts at real human dialogue and barely any screen time that isn’t orchestrally saturated. Y’know. A proper bit of production. With little chance of penetrating all that slick-hard entertainment gloss.
Meanwhile, in 1975, Terry Nation was dreaming of something properly bleak to cheer everyone up during the winter of discontent: Hideous Death Virus escapes from Chinese test lab and kills 95% of people on the planet. Which seems to have included almost anyone working class; one of the first people you see on screen is Peter Bowls, which should set the scene for you.
Fun. And added to the production sensibilities and possibilities of pre-Thatcher, pre-digital, pre-ironic British television, by jiggery is it bleak.
It’s also fast apparent what it’s motives are. It wants to teach you about survival. Like Lord Baden-bleedin’-Powell. It wants to sit you down and make you think about what the utter collapse of the modern world would really mean. From sanitation to sewing needles. In the style of your favourite 70s geography teacher.
And it’s precisely this academic premise, adhered to in every single one of it’s nearly 40 modules, that is the best bit, the reason you love it. So help you, you ARE made to think.
You’re made to think that no-one will have complete mental breakdowns at the sheer sudden torrent of incalcuable death, loss, horror, fear and psychological ripping away of fundamental context, true. Everyone gets on with stealing old Bedford vans to look for guns and tins of beans immediately, and at no time stops to think for a moment and then flee screeching into the woods tearing their own eyes out.
But Survivors does swivel its little spotlight of attention onto every implication of human annihilation it can think of, from learning to grow food and form communities, to considering eventually how to rebuild the infrastructure of society.
And perhaps, only by ambling around the countryside haphazardly with these characters can we get a sense of the empty reality of trying to actually survive under such circumstances. It is the understatement that creates the tension. And reveals the humanity. I’ll bet no-one on the new cast of Survivors has become an accomplished horseman as a result of the job. Everyone in the old series looked comfy on a shire horse by the end. Trotting around.
That’s sort of lovely. How bored would everyone one be after a single episode of that now?
---
As a result, I feel two challenges.
One, it’s obvious that if we are to survive, it will be together or not at all. Resources have to be valued and every detail of life counted like last pennies, not taken for granted. More than that, survival means understanding the invaluability of every single individual. Every skill counts. Every heart adds to the beat. A concept blurred away from your field of view by the giddy heights of teetering giant business.
And secondly, I really should be developing some practical skills of some kind. Instead of standing around watching the action and periodically blowing my own trumpet.
My one hope is that the well-enunciated posh-sounding will, in the end, be in with a chance.
Think we might all need to clean up our act, though.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Simple life.
Simple life.
I found myself watching my good friend Laura's 'pin-up vicar' again this week. Peter Owen-Jones. There is something very comforting about this chap.
It's not simply his calm, almost langourous air, it's actually something to do with his earnest kind of mis-placedness. He doesn't seem to completely fit in this world, and he half knows it. And only half knowing it seems to keep him half searching for something.
His latest three-part doc, How to lead a simple life, is a fairly mis-placed-seeming affair itself. It's almost like three hours of extras, for fans who really wanted to find out more about the charming, interesting chap who went Around the world in 80 faiths, being hardly structured narratively at all. It's almost a video diary of this Sussex C of E minister, bimbling about a little haphazzardly, having a stab at living like Francis of Assisi in the home counties. You can imagine the incongruity of this. Especially with a film crew in tow.
You could argue glibly that villages in the sumptuous Downs are actually kind of cloistered themselves – from the real bits of Britain.
Rural parts of the UK can seem like sacred spaces set apart from urban realities and the most cosy of places to attempt to give up the cloying anesthetics of money and consumer sustenance. And sure enough, Reverend O-J has to rely on the steadiness of his parishioners' incomes in order for him to hand away his wallet. They all turn out to be kindly local community members, able to spare their barmy vicar lifts, chickens, lamb, walnuts or cakes. It didn't exactly blow wide open the Vicar of Dibley myth of the countryside, or expose the poverty and hardship of many rural livelyhoods. And it wasn't attempting to.
Ultimately, it was one of the many bleedin-obvious component parts of the average 21st century life that made the wheels come off. When push came to shove, the three-parish vicar's down-at-heel Vauxhall Astra would have been towed had he not caved in at MOT time and reached for the plastic, renouncing his vow of fiscal abstinence. Dropping a few walnuts in a wheel trim were not to be enough. The experiment could not have lasted for ever.
And you can imagine the cynicism of many commentators afterwards.
Yet there it was; the comfort. Watching this ex ad-man ask fundamental questions, apparently naiive questions, about how the modern world makes us feel and think was oddly encouraging. If you were watching for it, he unearthed some simple but profound truths – about how much we need to rely on each other. Giving and sharing, needing and admitting, spending time, inspiring kindness in eachother… profound human life-givers of behaviour that seem as relevant to us as at any time that Franciscan orders have practiced austerity to highlight them.
Prophetic living, I think.
---
Don't you wish you could get off? The pressure to be obviously good at something, to keep your lifestyle in its best shape, to reach that bit further. Cliches of modern living that still seem to smother us with a subtle kind of fear.
We're looking for a new place to live at the moment, and this seems particularly relevant. On the one hand, a home is a tool – for helping others, and for recouperating yourself, to keep in shape to be of use out there somewhere. On the other, a home is a thing you can't properly afford.
---
Momo keeps me at that grindstone, even as it appears to offer me an alternative. It's not hard to feel busy or to feel fullfilled by a varied-looking itinerary in the studio. I love it. But if you are as concerned about your portfolio as I am, you can end up working very hard for little more than vanity. I don't remember renouncing money officially. But some jobs are too good to turn down, even though their budgets look decidedly Franciscan.
That portfolio might feed your soul, but it can clog it up too. Straining to do the next good thing. I'd like to give up on it and go get an easy, dull, regularly-paid job. Wouldn't you? Something with an obvious point and an obvious reward. Something simpler.
For, fitting in is the truly simple life.
And I'd quite like to.
---
The question we all have to answer periodically is: am I wasting my time? Is this thing I'm toiling at worthwhile? Because, it had better be.
I like to imagine that with some things, it's still too soon to tell. That way, you can keep having a go until someone blatantly screams at you that you're an idiot. I am still waiting for someone to do this to me, in manner of Mogatu to Derek Zoolander.
Until this happens, however, I am likely to keep going. Like the charming, comforting Rev Peter Owen-Jones. Searching and trying and looking a little lost, but still having a go.
You never know when you might suddenly, like some old prophet, barking in the wilderness, have some crumb of encouragement brought to you by the birds.
---
"Momo is shortlisted for the Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip Great Britain remix competition"
I found myself watching my good friend Laura's 'pin-up vicar' again this week. Peter Owen-Jones. There is something very comforting about this chap.
It's not simply his calm, almost langourous air, it's actually something to do with his earnest kind of mis-placedness. He doesn't seem to completely fit in this world, and he half knows it. And only half knowing it seems to keep him half searching for something.
His latest three-part doc, How to lead a simple life, is a fairly mis-placed-seeming affair itself. It's almost like three hours of extras, for fans who really wanted to find out more about the charming, interesting chap who went Around the world in 80 faiths, being hardly structured narratively at all. It's almost a video diary of this Sussex C of E minister, bimbling about a little haphazzardly, having a stab at living like Francis of Assisi in the home counties. You can imagine the incongruity of this. Especially with a film crew in tow.
You could argue glibly that villages in the sumptuous Downs are actually kind of cloistered themselves – from the real bits of Britain.
Rural parts of the UK can seem like sacred spaces set apart from urban realities and the most cosy of places to attempt to give up the cloying anesthetics of money and consumer sustenance. And sure enough, Reverend O-J has to rely on the steadiness of his parishioners' incomes in order for him to hand away his wallet. They all turn out to be kindly local community members, able to spare their barmy vicar lifts, chickens, lamb, walnuts or cakes. It didn't exactly blow wide open the Vicar of Dibley myth of the countryside, or expose the poverty and hardship of many rural livelyhoods. And it wasn't attempting to.
Ultimately, it was one of the many bleedin-obvious component parts of the average 21st century life that made the wheels come off. When push came to shove, the three-parish vicar's down-at-heel Vauxhall Astra would have been towed had he not caved in at MOT time and reached for the plastic, renouncing his vow of fiscal abstinence. Dropping a few walnuts in a wheel trim were not to be enough. The experiment could not have lasted for ever.
And you can imagine the cynicism of many commentators afterwards.
Yet there it was; the comfort. Watching this ex ad-man ask fundamental questions, apparently naiive questions, about how the modern world makes us feel and think was oddly encouraging. If you were watching for it, he unearthed some simple but profound truths – about how much we need to rely on each other. Giving and sharing, needing and admitting, spending time, inspiring kindness in eachother… profound human life-givers of behaviour that seem as relevant to us as at any time that Franciscan orders have practiced austerity to highlight them.
Prophetic living, I think.
---
Don't you wish you could get off? The pressure to be obviously good at something, to keep your lifestyle in its best shape, to reach that bit further. Cliches of modern living that still seem to smother us with a subtle kind of fear.
We're looking for a new place to live at the moment, and this seems particularly relevant. On the one hand, a home is a tool – for helping others, and for recouperating yourself, to keep in shape to be of use out there somewhere. On the other, a home is a thing you can't properly afford.
---
Momo keeps me at that grindstone, even as it appears to offer me an alternative. It's not hard to feel busy or to feel fullfilled by a varied-looking itinerary in the studio. I love it. But if you are as concerned about your portfolio as I am, you can end up working very hard for little more than vanity. I don't remember renouncing money officially. But some jobs are too good to turn down, even though their budgets look decidedly Franciscan.
That portfolio might feed your soul, but it can clog it up too. Straining to do the next good thing. I'd like to give up on it and go get an easy, dull, regularly-paid job. Wouldn't you? Something with an obvious point and an obvious reward. Something simpler.
For, fitting in is the truly simple life.
And I'd quite like to.
---
The question we all have to answer periodically is: am I wasting my time? Is this thing I'm toiling at worthwhile? Because, it had better be.
I like to imagine that with some things, it's still too soon to tell. That way, you can keep having a go until someone blatantly screams at you that you're an idiot. I am still waiting for someone to do this to me, in manner of Mogatu to Derek Zoolander.
Until this happens, however, I am likely to keep going. Like the charming, comforting Rev Peter Owen-Jones. Searching and trying and looking a little lost, but still having a go.
You never know when you might suddenly, like some old prophet, barking in the wilderness, have some crumb of encouragement brought to you by the birds.
---
"Momo is shortlisted for the Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip Great Britain remix competition"
Monday, May 10, 2010
The dark celebrity barge.
The dark celebrity barge.
There is something darkly positive about the UK election result. It actually reflects something of what's going on in the country – confusion. And dissatisfaction.
Something openly negative about the UK election result is that I have rediscovered my prejudicial, biased, reactionary old anti-Tory self. I thought it dead. De-evolved. A childish past. Turns out it might be a childish future.
I'm not proud of it. It's not pretty. I am a neanderthal Liberal after all. Hoorah to Ya Boo politics.
..And >pthllpppthllpppthllpppthllpp< to all you fat Tory swines with your snouts in the trough of the poor working man, shouting for more baby to go with your venison. Boo yeah. If you wanna be da man, prepare to have it stuck to you.
Yes. Welcome to tonight's edition of You're Not Helping.
---
Anyway, the pressure is – to understate it just a yellow smidge – on Nick Clegg.
What can he do? Electoral reform is actually on the table. Lots of tables. It's now or never, Nick. But how could he persuade the Conservatives to go near it?
Can we get a new Britain out of this exciting mess? Or just the same old long, brown, slow-moving British politics?
I think a nation of cynics knows. But for a weekend at least, this mess created a breath of fresh air.
Read Armando Iannucci's take on election night, including the symbolism of a power-less BBC barge full of celebrities.
There is something darkly positive about the UK election result. It actually reflects something of what's going on in the country – confusion. And dissatisfaction.
Something openly negative about the UK election result is that I have rediscovered my prejudicial, biased, reactionary old anti-Tory self. I thought it dead. De-evolved. A childish past. Turns out it might be a childish future.
I'm not proud of it. It's not pretty. I am a neanderthal Liberal after all. Hoorah to Ya Boo politics.
..And >pthllpppthllpppthllpppthllpp< to all you fat Tory swines with your snouts in the trough of the poor working man, shouting for more baby to go with your venison. Boo yeah. If you wanna be da man, prepare to have it stuck to you.
Yes. Welcome to tonight's edition of You're Not Helping.
---
Anyway, the pressure is – to understate it just a yellow smidge – on Nick Clegg.
What can he do? Electoral reform is actually on the table. Lots of tables. It's now or never, Nick. But how could he persuade the Conservatives to go near it?
Can we get a new Britain out of this exciting mess? Or just the same old long, brown, slow-moving British politics?
I think a nation of cynics knows. But for a weekend at least, this mess created a breath of fresh air.
Read Armando Iannucci's take on election night, including the symbolism of a power-less BBC barge full of celebrities.
Friday, May 07, 2010
Well hung.
Well hung.
"This election has been the most exciting since we first had the idea of doing one on the moon in disco costumes."
Or something.
People have been telling me for three weeks now, mainly through the famously level-headed, objective medium of the telly box, that the UK's 2010 general election has been the most exciting in a generation / since records began / since [see above]. But ever since Cleggmania hit after the first 'x' factor debate and everyone claimed to be suddenly so 'excited' by the pedantic pantomimes of the square mile, I have held my nerve on getting worked up myself.
What I will say by now, at 1.40am, alone here on the sofa with the BBC News Eternal Election Coverage, is that it does feel like we're facing an unknown. And facing an unknown is a reasonably definitive scenario for some sort of excitement.
I guess. If you like staring into an abyss.
---
Brown has just given his acceptance speech in his constituency, returned to him again as a place that wants him to represent them in Westminster. He is still an MP tonight. But his speech sounded a little like it was accepting, at last, something more. An end, not a beginning. It seemed sad.
And by that I mean something genuine. Some real bit of emotion or meaning detectable there in that scene.
And this reminds me why I've kept my own emotional powder dry while following the political circus. The issues that unite the UK at the moment are all too real, rather like Gordon's brave face – the future of our economic stability is as sobering as modern peace-time gets, perhaps. As I type, the American markets are crashing in fear of a domino collapse of confidence in major European states. Greece is the word on Wall Street, even as the streets of Athens are full of protesters and tear gas. The bond markets here are open now. Now, 1.30am. That's pretty serious, I think.
An election campaign is, however, a big show. A dance, painfully over-choreographed and rehearsed. And it's no dance-off between competing candidates – it's a tango between politics and the media.
They're like mad dogs howling at each other. Getting each other all worked up and over-excited. Hyperbole and overstatement and over-simplification are the only rules of the game. An obvious game that almost everyone in the country is not invited to. We are simply expected to watch and, I guess, be entertained. Lucky us.
Given that this particular high-point in the game happens only every five years, you can see how feverish and primed and droolingly anticipatory the news agencies are before anything's even started. Their highly-amplified, super-sensitive mics are thrust in all directions, ready to make earwigs and flowers sound deafening.
These two world views do not go together; the real and the plastic. And I think it's been especially obvious to everyone this time.
Which has, in turn, given me my own sort of duality as I watch it – I am feeling both a bit depressed and a bit elated by it.
---
As I've watched the coverage, it's struck me that there are two main forces at work on us, the UK electorate, in this election.
One is the long-developing fact that politics in this country have converged somewhere near the middle of the spectrum. The other is that politicians are so versed in message manipulation and the sacred rule book of How Voters Like You To Talk To Them, that they all act and sound the same.
Together, these factors render our politics and politicians passingly indistinguishable. At least to those of us only showing periodic interest in the political circus rather than obsessing over the minutiae of it all like love-lorn nerds. Which is just about everyone outside Westminster.
Journalists and politicians alike seem to be especially out of touch with the rest of us on this. They all seem unable to stop the language and the moves of the game, supposing they do actually even notice that almost everyone else in Britain Does Not Give A Shit.
The net result for the gameplay is that the politicians are forced to bicker over any points of difference they can find. Like fighting over scraps of food. It's almost pitiful. And the media fill our screens with tedious details. WHO CARES ABOUT WHAT LABOUR INHERITED IN 1997 NOW?
That's the depressing bit. In a weird sort of way, though, the obviousness of this irrelevance to the rest of us might be what's making me feel distantly hopeful.
It's like the politicians are all blah-ing away emptily, somewhere in the midrange, while the sobering breadth of the country's thoughtful mood is expansive enough to make the scuffle of tumbleweed seem a fuller sound.
The tragedy of Gordon Brown trying to smile is painfully obvious to everyone. We don't want him to try to bend his bulk around that BS. We like a grumpy sod, if he's truly being himself and if he also appears to know what he's doing. Shouldn't his spin doctors know this?
I've shouted at the screen many times in the last fortnight "Stop smiling, all of you. Stop talking to me personally down the lens. Stop obeying the public speaking rule book. STOP AGREEING WITH ME. SOMEBODY TELL ME TO F*** OFF!"
But the thing is, really and truly, I've been watching three men who are sort of being themselves. Going through the motions of the game to do their job. I don't see any villains there behind those three podiums. I see a few behind them, of course. But I think the three party leaders are secretly as daunted as we are. And maybe that's kind of unifying.
Oh dear. Are things so bad that that seems like a positive to me now? That we're all clueless? Sheesh.
---
But the reality of the country's circumstances seems to have lead to so much turn-out today, that all over the country people have been locked out of polling stations, queuing up until 10.00pm when they legally had to shut. Putting aside the fact that we really should have gotten our backsides out of bed earlier, it's a heartening picture of Britain taking part again. People actually want to vote.
Extraordinary as a result is the possibility of a hung parliament. The markets are mooted to be scared of this, heightening the sense of impending doom. But I think this would be an honest result. We all had our say and showed that no-one won our mandate sufficiently. That's democracy. That's us telling the politicians what we think.
That's us screwing ourselves, probably. But hey.
---
What I think is what I've always thought. I've been on the losing yellow team my whole life. The nice but uncool lot. I'm a liberal. I love the word and hate the fact that so many good people are scared of it. I voted Lib Dem.
Upping the basic rate of income tax to £10,000, for example, to me seems like a bold move towards getting people working again. Not renewing Trident would honestly make me nervous as a PM – a certain amount of swagger is what leadership needs behind it – but it's probably the gutsy-wise thing that needs doing in our defense strategy. Investing in science and green economies are surely essential to building a sustainably strong future Britain, and no-one seems to have been championing this more. And trying to take a practical, realistic look at our current state of immigration is what it will take to actually sort it out. Tub-thumping jingoism isn't enough.
What will a Tory government do to local services? Are we really ready to have a right-wing government in again? Thatcher made more of us rich and dragged the UK out of the post-war dark ages. But she did it by selling our soul and tearing the heart out of the UK community. We are still reaping the chaos of this now, even as we spend more on Amazon.
And Labour? Surely so many good-intended things turned sour alarmingly fast. Accountability and measurability became the scourge of modern working – target culture. The inhuman hell of it for teachers, doctors, policemen. Slavery to the word Choice is driving us all mad with selfishness, being fed into our children's lives – "what do YOU want my darling three-year-old?" And can-do, make-a-change decisiveness lead to reams of poorly-thought-out legislation and a wildly monitored, control-freaked high street.
We need some properly fresh thinking. And here's an interesting testimony: Lib Dem support is geographically evenly spread, much more than the traditional Labour and Conservative heartlands. The clear implication being that many of their ideas make sense wherever you are. Whoever you are.
Holy crap in a breadmaker, do we badly need some of that right now.
---
No party podium pumping for me, though. The Liberals have been a bickering, petty lot too often. And party politics is a donkey. But it's what we have to work with.
Whoever can manifesto it up, what we need is a society that creates, sustains and defends freedom.
Freedom to fly as high as you want to – or not. Freedom to be vulnerable – because we understand it is fundamental to being human. The freedom to be you – and to choose to contribute all you are to those around you. Little or much.
We need a culture that believes that anyone can make more of themselves and anyone can really f**k up. We have to plan around these two possibilities.
The only way to do this, I think, is to build a society that inculcates responsibility; I must defend the right of the person next to me to be who he or she wants to be because I recognise that I need them. Nature's great survival secret is diversity. But the person next to me has no rights – only those I bestow upon him or her. Only those we fight together to defend, through education, art and building a joint identity.
---
In the end though, have we chickened out of change? Been typically British?
I don't know. I know what I'm feeling increasingly as I prepare to go to bed; no-one can call it yet. No-one seems to know where this night is going. And as I consider the very real possibility of a hung parliament, I think we would be doing democracy well in its event.
And I think that gets me feeling a little excited. Even as we stare into the unknown.
"This election has been the most exciting since we first had the idea of doing one on the moon in disco costumes."
Or something.
People have been telling me for three weeks now, mainly through the famously level-headed, objective medium of the telly box, that the UK's 2010 general election has been the most exciting in a generation / since records began / since [see above]. But ever since Cleggmania hit after the first 'x' factor debate and everyone claimed to be suddenly so 'excited' by the pedantic pantomimes of the square mile, I have held my nerve on getting worked up myself.
What I will say by now, at 1.40am, alone here on the sofa with the BBC News Eternal Election Coverage, is that it does feel like we're facing an unknown. And facing an unknown is a reasonably definitive scenario for some sort of excitement.
I guess. If you like staring into an abyss.
---
Brown has just given his acceptance speech in his constituency, returned to him again as a place that wants him to represent them in Westminster. He is still an MP tonight. But his speech sounded a little like it was accepting, at last, something more. An end, not a beginning. It seemed sad.
And by that I mean something genuine. Some real bit of emotion or meaning detectable there in that scene.
And this reminds me why I've kept my own emotional powder dry while following the political circus. The issues that unite the UK at the moment are all too real, rather like Gordon's brave face – the future of our economic stability is as sobering as modern peace-time gets, perhaps. As I type, the American markets are crashing in fear of a domino collapse of confidence in major European states. Greece is the word on Wall Street, even as the streets of Athens are full of protesters and tear gas. The bond markets here are open now. Now, 1.30am. That's pretty serious, I think.
An election campaign is, however, a big show. A dance, painfully over-choreographed and rehearsed. And it's no dance-off between competing candidates – it's a tango between politics and the media.
They're like mad dogs howling at each other. Getting each other all worked up and over-excited. Hyperbole and overstatement and over-simplification are the only rules of the game. An obvious game that almost everyone in the country is not invited to. We are simply expected to watch and, I guess, be entertained. Lucky us.
Given that this particular high-point in the game happens only every five years, you can see how feverish and primed and droolingly anticipatory the news agencies are before anything's even started. Their highly-amplified, super-sensitive mics are thrust in all directions, ready to make earwigs and flowers sound deafening.
These two world views do not go together; the real and the plastic. And I think it's been especially obvious to everyone this time.
Which has, in turn, given me my own sort of duality as I watch it – I am feeling both a bit depressed and a bit elated by it.
---
As I've watched the coverage, it's struck me that there are two main forces at work on us, the UK electorate, in this election.
One is the long-developing fact that politics in this country have converged somewhere near the middle of the spectrum. The other is that politicians are so versed in message manipulation and the sacred rule book of How Voters Like You To Talk To Them, that they all act and sound the same.
Together, these factors render our politics and politicians passingly indistinguishable. At least to those of us only showing periodic interest in the political circus rather than obsessing over the minutiae of it all like love-lorn nerds. Which is just about everyone outside Westminster.
Journalists and politicians alike seem to be especially out of touch with the rest of us on this. They all seem unable to stop the language and the moves of the game, supposing they do actually even notice that almost everyone else in Britain Does Not Give A Shit.
The net result for the gameplay is that the politicians are forced to bicker over any points of difference they can find. Like fighting over scraps of food. It's almost pitiful. And the media fill our screens with tedious details. WHO CARES ABOUT WHAT LABOUR INHERITED IN 1997 NOW?
That's the depressing bit. In a weird sort of way, though, the obviousness of this irrelevance to the rest of us might be what's making me feel distantly hopeful.
It's like the politicians are all blah-ing away emptily, somewhere in the midrange, while the sobering breadth of the country's thoughtful mood is expansive enough to make the scuffle of tumbleweed seem a fuller sound.
The tragedy of Gordon Brown trying to smile is painfully obvious to everyone. We don't want him to try to bend his bulk around that BS. We like a grumpy sod, if he's truly being himself and if he also appears to know what he's doing. Shouldn't his spin doctors know this?
I've shouted at the screen many times in the last fortnight "Stop smiling, all of you. Stop talking to me personally down the lens. Stop obeying the public speaking rule book. STOP AGREEING WITH ME. SOMEBODY TELL ME TO F*** OFF!"
But the thing is, really and truly, I've been watching three men who are sort of being themselves. Going through the motions of the game to do their job. I don't see any villains there behind those three podiums. I see a few behind them, of course. But I think the three party leaders are secretly as daunted as we are. And maybe that's kind of unifying.
Oh dear. Are things so bad that that seems like a positive to me now? That we're all clueless? Sheesh.
---
But the reality of the country's circumstances seems to have lead to so much turn-out today, that all over the country people have been locked out of polling stations, queuing up until 10.00pm when they legally had to shut. Putting aside the fact that we really should have gotten our backsides out of bed earlier, it's a heartening picture of Britain taking part again. People actually want to vote.
Extraordinary as a result is the possibility of a hung parliament. The markets are mooted to be scared of this, heightening the sense of impending doom. But I think this would be an honest result. We all had our say and showed that no-one won our mandate sufficiently. That's democracy. That's us telling the politicians what we think.
That's us screwing ourselves, probably. But hey.
---
What I think is what I've always thought. I've been on the losing yellow team my whole life. The nice but uncool lot. I'm a liberal. I love the word and hate the fact that so many good people are scared of it. I voted Lib Dem.
Upping the basic rate of income tax to £10,000, for example, to me seems like a bold move towards getting people working again. Not renewing Trident would honestly make me nervous as a PM – a certain amount of swagger is what leadership needs behind it – but it's probably the gutsy-wise thing that needs doing in our defense strategy. Investing in science and green economies are surely essential to building a sustainably strong future Britain, and no-one seems to have been championing this more. And trying to take a practical, realistic look at our current state of immigration is what it will take to actually sort it out. Tub-thumping jingoism isn't enough.
What will a Tory government do to local services? Are we really ready to have a right-wing government in again? Thatcher made more of us rich and dragged the UK out of the post-war dark ages. But she did it by selling our soul and tearing the heart out of the UK community. We are still reaping the chaos of this now, even as we spend more on Amazon.
And Labour? Surely so many good-intended things turned sour alarmingly fast. Accountability and measurability became the scourge of modern working – target culture. The inhuman hell of it for teachers, doctors, policemen. Slavery to the word Choice is driving us all mad with selfishness, being fed into our children's lives – "what do YOU want my darling three-year-old?" And can-do, make-a-change decisiveness lead to reams of poorly-thought-out legislation and a wildly monitored, control-freaked high street.
We need some properly fresh thinking. And here's an interesting testimony: Lib Dem support is geographically evenly spread, much more than the traditional Labour and Conservative heartlands. The clear implication being that many of their ideas make sense wherever you are. Whoever you are.
Holy crap in a breadmaker, do we badly need some of that right now.
---
No party podium pumping for me, though. The Liberals have been a bickering, petty lot too often. And party politics is a donkey. But it's what we have to work with.
Whoever can manifesto it up, what we need is a society that creates, sustains and defends freedom.
Freedom to fly as high as you want to – or not. Freedom to be vulnerable – because we understand it is fundamental to being human. The freedom to be you – and to choose to contribute all you are to those around you. Little or much.
We need a culture that believes that anyone can make more of themselves and anyone can really f**k up. We have to plan around these two possibilities.
The only way to do this, I think, is to build a society that inculcates responsibility; I must defend the right of the person next to me to be who he or she wants to be because I recognise that I need them. Nature's great survival secret is diversity. But the person next to me has no rights – only those I bestow upon him or her. Only those we fight together to defend, through education, art and building a joint identity.
---
In the end though, have we chickened out of change? Been typically British?
I don't know. I know what I'm feeling increasingly as I prepare to go to bed; no-one can call it yet. No-one seems to know where this night is going. And as I consider the very real possibility of a hung parliament, I think we would be doing democracy well in its event.
And I think that gets me feeling a little excited. Even as we stare into the unknown.
Friday, April 30, 2010
#ashtagged: Planes, trains and souzamaphones.
#ashtagged:
Planes, trains and souzamaphones.
You’ve heard of that bloke. Homer.
Came out with some profound stuff. Apparently very memorable.
And it is of just such profound narratives and timeless tales of human perseverance that I am thinking now. Of high adventure… and low expectations. Of acts of God, and… more desperate acts.
Of passenger ships and… one-liners.
Anyway, whether you’re now thinking of the mythical bloke from Springfieid or the one from Smyrna, my point is that, long ago, I wrote a tune. A simple little bit of electronic sing-songery that made it in some theatrical incarnation to Momo’s forthcoming debut LP; a tune called Asylum Seeker.
Its slightly karaoke New Romantic chorus includes the lines: ‘I am the refugee, come and rescue me; I am the lost at sea, send a boat for me’.
I’d always rather pictured any accompanying video to this showing middle class business men and trendy metro dandies looking displaced and uncomfortable, lost and sockless. Barefoot in the urban jungle, or somesuch. Artistic social commentary if ever there were such a thing.
Yes. So. Funny how a spot of cheesy keyboard pop can turn out to be prophetic.
---
We set sail in the spring of 2010. A simple Sell Your Soul For A Quick Break Abroad cheap flight from dear old Bomo to Palma de Mallorca. Nothing complicated. Shouldn’t be incidental, we thought. Cop a feel of some nice Mediterranean air and Eurozone splendidness, saunter around the old city, loll in a few leafy coves, and restore the ol’ S. Possibly fitting in a few s-bends in the precariously new little Fiat we plundered locally.
With all these simple aspirations comfortably present and correct nearing the end of our sojourn to the good Bally-Es, we tripped on the hotel room news box one languid afternoon, post obligatory siesta, and saw an item of passing interest:
UK AIRSPACE CLOSED. CLOUD OF LOOMING DEATH SPREADING SOUTH FAST. FOR GOD’S SAKE, SIT ON THE FLOOR AND PRAY.
“Uh… huh” we mused. And opened the mini Pringles.
---
Well, you know this story. You may well have been caught up in the ash cloud of doom yourself and know it first hand. Bit of a bugger to say the least. And not just the ruddy name. But also because there was, it appeared to clouds of British holiday makers all over the continent, absolutely no-one to blame.
This left everyone strangely subdued.
---
Standing in Palma international airport, I began to feel a niggling doubt, that Saturday morning, that my cavalier plans to be canny were unraveling.
Unencumbered by the patter of tiny feet, the lovely first lady of Momo and I were possibly about to be treated to what we might later privately end up admitting was a jolly wheeze; a game of Get Yourself Home Without Flying. Why, what a simply novel idea, darling!
I’d looked at the maps and felt informed and equipped. I’d looked at the queues of the forlorn and felt the sobering warmth of pity. I’d looked into the middle distance with a flinty glint and said quietly: “Let’s lose these saps.”
We’d find a last flight out of Spanish airspace. We’d make it to France and be in with a fighting chance. We’d get a train. We’d hike an Alpine pass. We’d hitch-hike. We'd mule trek! We were never going to hitch-hike or mule trek. Just sounds like the sort of thing we would have considered from the point of view of spinning the yarn over-confidently in the pub long afterwards. But one way or another, I figured we’d get back to Blighty with our wits and wallets intact.
Then the alternative airlines one by one stopped their flights to Germany. Then France. Then almost anywhere. Then the price of their few remaining seats across the water to Barcelona seemed to be the only things taking off.
The ferry didn’t seem bothered about leaving for the mainland until midnight, or about making landfall until breakfast time, and the trains in Cataluna were rumoured to be actually evaporating in the sheer heat of demand.
So it was that, crestfallen, I found myself actually joining the queue to talk to the one and only human working for Ryanair on Mallorca that morning.
I felt bitch-slapped into submission. Still, if you’re going to drink from the devil’s cup.
---
We made friends in the queue, obviously. We were there for a few days. I think we were on the point of going out for dinner with Pat and Veronica from Dublin as we approached the flimsy booth, understanding by then that there would be no hope of flights resuming to the UK for at least a week. As if anyone knew anything at all.
Then, like stumbling out of an amazon jungle of stiff legs into the seductive sheening glow of Eldorado, we found ourselves actually at the head of the eternal Ryanair queue.
“We can get you on a flight next Saturday” said the remarkably composed and cheery sounding woman inside. It was almost as though the air in that booth had clouded her sense of reality. It would be the full week then. A full extra week late home from holiday. And she didn’t seem to think this was odd.
Now, at this point, it’s worth bringing back into view the only imperative we really had on our time – and it was hardly imperative at all. In fact, despite the weird series of fortunate events apparently impelling me towards it before our hols, I had by this stage comfortably given up on the idea.
Momo’s first ever gig.
As Caroline had said to me there in that four-hour snake of lost souls: “Of course. Of course it takes a volcano to stop you getting back on stage after ten years!” And I had simply nodded.
It was Saturday afternoon by this stage. More or less exactly 48 hours before we needed to be casually strolling into the Troubadour in Earl’s Court with our down-at-heel flight cases and world-class horn players. I looked at the booth woman.
“Are you flying anywhere else?” I said quietly. She frowned in thought at her monitor. We waited. Time slowed down. Clocks started ticking loudly at low pitch.
“Well… there is this little flight to Madrid” she said diffidently.
“Madrid!? You’re really flying to Madrid?” I perked. “When?”
She paused again, uplit, staring. Taking her time.
“Now” she replied.
I leant forward into the booth, straining with restraint, torpored brain cells suddenly buzzing with realisation.
“Can You Get Us On It?” I breathed.
---
When an airport is essentially empty, but for lines of sleeping refugees, you can really see where you’re going much easier when running.
We collapsed into the check-in desk in a flurry of English and luggage and stood panting in front of the huddle of bored women still manning this last outpost of hope, far away from any booths. They made a very slow phone call. We watched their every move. We think we understood them saying the polite Spanish equivalent of: “The bloody plane’s gone, hasn’t it? Two English jokers here want to get on it, can you believe it? HAHA! How is your sister, anyway? Really? Yes, her legs are very bad now..Oh, you’re running late. Sure.” >click< “You’re through.”
And minutes later we were watching Mallorca slip below the windows. We were, fairly randomly, now on our way to Madrid.
I looked at Caroline. “Of course, you realise there is suddenly the preposterous possibility that we can still make the gig now?”
She adjusted her eye mask calmly. “Oh yes” she said.
---
Hitting the tarmac running, we managed to pull out our heavy Dorling Kindersley Didn’t Realise How Much You’d Need This After All Did You Guide To Spain at a steady trot, losing only a few strewn items of worn underwear, and planned our route across the Spanish capital. I confidently identified the correct rail station we’d need to reach Bilbao and planned the Metro journey to reach it accordingly, as we haired past a suspiciously conspicuous tourist information booth. We hairpinned back to this instinctively for some reason and learned, while jogging on the spot, of the actual location of the correct rail station we’d need to reach Bilbao and not northern Portugal. Thanking the amazingly calm, pleasantly attractive young woman in the booth, and jogging on the spot there for a barely noticeable minute longer than the lovely first lady of Momo, I took off again to catch her up, stopping not at all to rescue the socks, hairnet, hotel slipper and assorted Hotel Jaime III-branded souvenirs spilled from our luggage. “Casualties of war, darling. TO THE TICKET MACHINE” I boomed authoritatively, sprinting past.
---
Each stage of the journey was like adding another bit of Lego. But proper Lego, old Lego, that didn’t come in very specifically designed model packs that more or less neutered the whole POINT of Lego which is imagination, but magically materialised in your toy box in random combinations. We knew what we were trying to make alright, but each time we reached into the Lego box we had no idea what shape brick we were about to pull out.
So far, we’d found the bit to stick onto the rare and idea-creating flight-shaped bit and reached the Metro successfully. Would we find the crucial train-to-Bilbao-shaped bit?
---
Madrid’s north-serving rail station was muggy and and weirdly post-trauma torpid. Middle class refugees were strewn quietly all over it’s gently bustling Saturday night movement, like a crisis was still going on in transport somewhere, but everyone was a bit too tired and disheartened to still be in a frenzy about it.
We joined another queue, like hard-core patienteers. We swapped and overheard stories from various English speakers and gleaned the essential theme of them all – namely, that ferries and trains and buses and hire cars the world over were basically booked to buggery.
In the end, stepping up to the head of the Travel Information queue, we learned that there wasn’t another train to Bilbao until the following afternoon. Simply because it was, of course, Sunday.
“Thankyou” we said politely and retired to a seat.
“So that’s that” I mused, emptily. “Well, so here’s what we do, “ I then said, not yet feeling fully defeated. “Let’s go check out the bus terminal, just for a laugh. Then go see if we can find a hotel with a room for tonight.”
I stood, pulled on the suitcase handle again and trudged off. “Just for a laugh.”
---
It’s worth pointing out that the whole idea of making for Bilbao had struck me as a bit of a stroke of genius in the first place, a few of hours earlier. There I was, trying to hire a skiff to make for Marseilles to seek passage north in the opium dens of the old city or somesuch, when the sudden option of going to Madrid negated the need to reach Paris at all. Paris may indeed have seemed much nearer home than Palma, but it would still be essentially Not Actually Home, with plenty of miles of road and queue and grumpy French between us and passage to Blighty.
Bil-frikkin’-bao, on the other hand, like a light from heaven, would mean passage on a single boat all the way from Spain to the good waters of the blerry Solent. Now that really was home – I’d been chucking up in those good waters barely a fortnight before.
But what of those ferries? Just how many other people would have thought of that clever, secret route out of the ashcloud?
Really? I mean, how many people really use the Bibao ferry terminals? Eh?
Eh? Huh. Cuh.
..Yes, you can see where this is going, already.
---
Wending our way back across the city’s Metro and emerging into some fake version of daylight, we found ourselves clouded by the hopeful sound and smell of diesel thrattle.
We scanned boards quietly, trying to find signs of north-bound life. More refugees with luggage built for floorless-smooth airport surfaces huddled everywhere in the yellow light, yellow skin and sallow eyes and sorrowful boredom dressing Madrid’s Estaçia de Nord bus depot like the Martian colony of freaks in Total Recall. After they’ve turned off the fans.
Then the lovely first lady of Momo made a little sound. That silent sound she makes when her tenacious brain thinks it’s on to something.
“Queue.” she said, pointing without looking away from a screen, and then surreptitiously marching off.
Clutching our four bags, murmuring Spanish, glancing at blurry screens without my ever-more-needed glasses, I scooched forward into the queue of nonchalant ticket buyers. Most of these characters looked like actual Madridians, not gringo desperados from the Costa Blanca. And they all looked like they were still going somewhere. My heart quickened. Not knowing why.
Then came the tap on the arm.
I turned. With hushed urgency, my resourceful wife simply said: “Get the bags, we’re going to Bilbao” and moved off.
Watching her with steely pride as she slipped through the crowd, I snapped out of my reverie and got moving. Over my case and onto my face in a flurry of passports.
No I didn’t. Not quite. But it’s a funnier punchline-out of the scene.
---
Ticket machine. She’d navigated a blessed ticket machine and now we were here – sitting on a bench, circled by buses in a yellow light, unsure whether we were supposed to be under or above ground exactly, but sure as sure we could be that we were going to bloody Bilbao.
1.30 am overnight bus. We had four hours to rest up and wait.
Delighted, we set out our little stall right there, picnicking one of the best picnics of our lives, taking humble essentials of sustenance, and elevating them to the ennobling status of triumphant feast. For we were going to Bilbao. You suckers.
And there, surrounded by travelers coming and going, we did feast indeed, eschewing any meagre appearance of whatever packed supplies we’d been able to lay our hands on in our desperate flight, and eating heartily. Simply giving thanks for small but crucial mercies. Olives, pate, pesto, assorted cheeses and a full French baguette would have to tide us over.
Caroline tutted and stopped unwrapping her smoked chorizo.
“What?” I asked, concerned.
“No wine.” she said flatly through a mouthful.
We shuddered and held eachother for a moment. Yet, d’you know, I think we still counted ourselves two of the luckiest, richest people in Spain that night.
“Wouldn’t have been room temperature.” I reassured bravely.
----
I didn’t seem odd to us to sit in a corner for a couple hours after that and watch the bleak, cardboard, brilliant original 70s version of Survivors on the laptop. Perfectly normal. The time spooled by comfortably and soon we really were on route to Spain’s famous Basque port, never more grateful to sleep on a bus. And not having had to fight for petrol or steal an old Landrover.
---
I looked at my watch.
6.00am Sunday.
I looked at the map.
“Can’t see the port. But you should know that the Gugenheim is just up the street” I said forlornly.
“I’m thinking Metro” said Caroline, as the bus thrattled into life behind us and pulled out of the dark bus depot back into the dawn.
“But it’s just round the corner…” I said quietly, looking over my shoulder with large, sad eyes as we staggered down some steps.
---
The chap stood for a moment, rubbed his eyes and expertly communicated in just a silent look that he’d only just gotten into his booth here on this Sunday morning. I stood back, allowing my wife’s deftly understated charm to work it’s magic on this kindly middle-aged man.
“Go all the way to the end of the line, the port’s there” he said, handing us tickets. And then we were on an empty Metro platform. In Bilbao. Going to find a ferry to freedom.
“Of course, you realise…” I began, voice echoing around the vast scale of the lonely station.
“Yes,” said Caroline a full minute later, “we could still make it.”
We both continued to sit there, staring forward.
---
Light finally began to creep out of hiding behind the hills and rooftops of Bilbao as the carriage slid along the estuary to the end of the line. Silhouettes of cranes and other coastal industry emerged and passed us. As it came to rest, 20 minutes later, we slipped out of the shushing doors into the delicate quiet of first light and padded out of the station.
Not a sign.
“Ah. Where do you think the very big boat is hiding?” I asked carefully, spaced out beyond emotion.
We stood there a while longer.
“Must be this way” I then said with the utterly uninformed idle confidence of a man, but without the reassuring theatre of being properly awake.
“How do you know?” Caroline said flatly.
“Stands to reason. Or something.” I said flatly.
Whatever our half-hearted conversation there in the pretty desertion of early morning, we began trundling forward, little airport cases still rumbling behind us.
The empty streets were bereft of signage to the town’s principal passenger connection with the outside world but we trudged without emotion along a main road and followed the sound of gulls until we saw one eventual sign, limply hanging from a lampost. Said simply:
“Ferry”.
We dutifully followed its vague direction but began to wonder whether an industrial estate was really going to house something as hard to hide as an umpteen thousand-ton, lorry-swallowing boat built to survive the violent distempers of Biscay. Yet on we trundled. Faith blind, but belligerently in place.
And then we turned one more corner, past one more block of empty offices, around one more empty car park. And there it was. A small portacabin in the distance. And humble but visible was a little sign above its door.
“P&O”
Not a queue in site.
---
There wasn’t a queue inside either. There were only about three other humans in there. But thankfully, at least one of them was behind a booth.
Now, thinking back, to imagine that this poor lady was looking and sounding defeated and frazzled already, is remarkable. Because I don’t know where she felt she had left to go after playing her full emotional hand at seven in the morning, given the particular morning that was, she would discover all too soon, still ahead of her.
“We, ah, don’t have tickets” I opened, perhaps unwisely. She sighed immediately and spoke as if to a crowd.
“ALL THOSE WITHOUT TICKETS, I AM SORRY BUT THE FERRY IS BOOKED. NO TICKETS LEFT.”
Helpful as this cutting to the chase might have been to any waiting crowds, I looked over my shoulder briefly at the empty room and then continued: “So there IS a ferry today?”
“Yes. Is booked.”
“And, the next ferry?”
“Wednesday.”
I felt a little final breath escape me, there at that booth.
“Wednesday?”
“Yes. Is booked.”
I tipped my head and stood there. Just allowing the reality to sink in. Of course. Of course it had always been this.
“I take your name” she said, as if to get me to go tip my head and sink in somewhere else, “but really is futile. Look: I can’t find pen. Look: I talk to colleague as if distracted. Look: pen I find doesn’t work. Look: I eventually write your name in distinctly token manner on scrap of paper that looks like was pulled on bit of elastic from bin. Look, I’m sorry.”
I nodded. We went and sat down.
We stared at the floor. We felt nothing.
And then I thought of something.
“Know what I’m going to do?” I eventually said to the faithful one beside me.
“What?” she said without moving.
“I’m going to have a wee and get myself a coffee.” I said with flat conviction. “Then I’m going to sit here and see what happens.”
“Good plan” she replied quietly as I walked off. “Toilets don’t work.”
---
We sat there in time-lapse. I slowly finished my coffee and watched the little ferry reception fill like a forward bulkhead of the Titanic. By mid morning, children and other loose items were floating on the surface of the humanity bursting out of the building’s seams. We simply sat and watched.
I turned to the window. A vast rust-spewn wall of white grumbled slowly past and halted.
I looked. Blasted out were the words Pride Of Portsmouth. Bolted underneath in their place were the words Pride of Nantes.
“Bloody nora” I said, as it dawned. “ Do these people realise they’re going to the Bahamas?”
And then it happened. As it was always going to happen.
“MEESTER AND MEESES PEACH TO RECEPTION BOOTH PLEASE.” scratched a tannoy.
I turned round again. Looked at Caroline.
I stood. In a dream. I glided past the throng waiting agitatedly to get to the booth, walking straight up to the window, past them all.
I looked calm. I looked serene. I looked like bleedin’ Keanu right near the end of The Matix; the forces of travel calamity could grimace and flail at me all they wanted, I would fend them off with a surreal single hand as I looked with gentle enlightenment at the woman in the booth.
“Eees NOT my responsibility.” she frowned. And pointed to a chap in front of me, I hadn’t seen. He was holding a green ticket. A boarding ticket. He looked at me.
“You agree and is fine. Between you. We just try to help out” she scowled.
I looked at this stranger beatifically.
“Hello, “ he said simply. “I’m Pete. I have a four-berth cabin. And there’s only one of me.”
The sea of humanity around us fell silent.
---
“Really no, you’re very kind!” said Pete as we fought our way out of the riot inside, “But it really wouldn’t be right to accept such a thankyou” he insisted as I tried for a fourth time with piercing stare to simply frenchy his face off. My wanton gratitude was not quite the right currency, it seemed, and I eventually gave up the struggle and let him go. Currency was, in fact, the right currency.
And so we sat on a bench outside, with two new suddenly-firm friends, which included the equally bemused and grateful Paddy, and allowed the truth to sink in. We would be home in time. We were on the ruddy boat.
“We’re on the boat” I said vacantly, as another fight broke out inside.
“We’re on the ruddy ruddy ruddy boat” I uttered, as an old man punched a six-year-old boy in the face somewhere nearby.
“We... we’re actually going to make it” I distantly began to smile, then chuckle, then laugh with maniacal comprehension, long and loud, head thrown back with joy.
“Yep,” smiled Pete good-naturedly, “by 4.30 Monday afternoon we’ll be in Portsmouth.”
I fell backwards off the bench, choking on something apparently suddenly caught in my throat.
----
Funny how things can stick in your mind so you don’t notice. Like the idea that the sail from Bilbao to Portsmouth would take 12 hours. No idea where this fact had alighted in my head from. Had no thought of checking it out for accuracy. Didn’t occur to me that the trip would, in firm fact, take 30.
---
So the question. That bloody question.
Could we still make it? Could we make the gig? And increasingly to the point – should we?
Firstly, was it doable? Well, reluctantly, it wouldn’t be completely impossible in theory, as I did have the laptop with me and it had backing mixes in there. Just not refined ones. But they might still serve. And we would be tantalizingly close to London as we stepped off the ferry with still two hours to go before the doors of the Troob would open. But really, how would we soundcheck?
But secondly, would it be right to ask so much of the band? To get them to travel to London when the band leader is still technically, if you want to be picky, not actually in the country but in fact somewhere off the west coast of France is to create a little potential concern, I would say. Should I push ahead vainly?
The thing is… bloody yes. How absurd would it have been to land at Portsmouth that Monday night after ALL THAT and say a simple “meh” and turn left for home?
So, it was that I began the process of begging by text.
---
As the hour to embark approached, it became clear that the broiling sea of hopeful humanity now frothing out into the car park was not going to blithely part to allow green ticket-clutching tosspots like us to sail smoothly past into the security check area. No Mosaic special privileges for us. We would have to plunge in and swim for it.
Limbs writhed around limbs. Bags bobbed and yanked. Old folk were passed overhead to be claimed by their families. Stray animals appeared here and there, pushed to the surface briefly with surprised, mute looks on their whiskery faces. Waves of scowling tossed over eddies of indifference. Great swells of drowsiness lifted and dropped the phlegmy surface. Birds dropped to pick off a small current of rubbish vortexing itself steadily larger amongst us.
Our team bravely swam. Which is to say, politely pushed, in a distinctly English manner – scorning the impatience of the few opting to openly grow narky and shovey, while all the while secretly screaming OH COME ON YOU RUDE BASTARDS – WE HAVE BLOODY TICKETS.
Across Europe, though, it should be said, the English really showed their continental family members a thing or two about queueing. Our patriotic moaning was almost absent, everywhere that we went at least. A dirty great volcano leaves you with no option but to draw on the last essential cultural arrow in your quiver and wait your turn implacably. Bravo us.
Even in this melee, the predominant English may have let go the reigns of queuing, but total anarchy was kept at bay by our inability to complain directly. Common practice in the face of someone pushing in, is to tut almost inaudibly and then bang on about it loudly long after you’re on different continents.
I caught myself being particularly English as we made it to about half way across the hall, mid-sea.
One ballsy chap came at the crows, at what must have been a calculated run-up from the car park, brandishing two huge cases and a phalanx of family moving in tight formation at his back.
“Let me through. Let me though!” he boomed authoritatively, “I have tickets. LET ME THROUGH PLEASE” push push.
Before I could stop myself, my Uptight was out.
“N..No. NO.” I said firmly, instinctively – and before I could show myself in a better light, my wounded sense of fair play had me reaching out an effete hand to pat him back. “NO. N..NO” was all the words I could muster in my panic.
“I have tickets” he mantra-ed again, cutting a bit of a swathe.
“NO. BUT SO DO WE.” I insisted in a squeaky, less than masculine voice, actually stopping him.
He stopped. His family stopped. We looked at eachother. A moment’s pause passed.
“What the hell am I doing?” I said, “You’re doing bloody well there. Go, man – GO! FOLLOW THIS GUY!”
“I hate people who push in, don’t you?” he said with suddenly slumped shoulders and a smirk.
“I hate uptight blighters – NOW GO!” I said pushing him on.
---
Sitting in the bar, an hour later, looking down on the chaos far below us, I stared into my sparkly, prissy European beer and counted every last blessing, knowing they added up to more bubbles than were bursting at the bottle neck.
I had wondered about whether we should give up our tickets to people more deserving; I had accepted the tickets initially in a bit of a daze. To my guilty relief, and by what miracle of administrative sacrilege I dread to think, but P&O found a way to get every last straggler on the boat. They cleared the terminal. Somehow.
I resisted the urge, you understand, to telephone the captain and tell him to “leave those bloody losers” because we were already an hour behind schedule. Phileas Fogg, under similar pressures, would never stoop so low as to abandon his fellow Englishman. Wager or no.
“Stoopid English” I muttered into my beer as we finally pulled away.
---
Then the fog really fell.
Our immediate route home that day is known for something. Something a bit technical and meteorological, so bear with me if it goes over your head. For the bay of Biscay is known to be a bit of a bastard.
Only a week before, friends of ours had been hanging onto the stern rail as the very same boat plunged nose first into great canyons of swell, spraying as much passenger vomit over her sides in all directions as breaking waves. A more grisly, Dantesque vision of humanity on a booze cruise to the Basque hypermarkets you couldn’t picture, by all accounts.
Leaving port this time however was like some sort of surreal cruise. Clear skies. Flat seas. Sunshine. And against all likelihood, we kept these conditions all the way home. It’s just that, along with these conditions, we kept internet silence and near total phone coverage all the way home too. Obviously. When you think about it.
So I had to sit there. Strolling around the deck. Or lolling in the cabin. Or strolling around the other deck. Or avoiding the ‘entertainment’ theatre. All the time wondering if my band would make it and if I would make it and if I would be in any fit state to climb onto a stage if I actually really did make it. And unable to organise or practice or arrange a single bleedin’ thing.
The 30 hours passed steadily. And, in truth, oddly pleasantly. Pete and Paddy were entertaining company, making it feel more like we were off on some wheeze with chums, and the restaurant did us a good steak and an even better bottle of something red and French. To my head’s chagrin, come Monday morning.
More to the point, we got to rest and even shower.
But really. I felt helpless.
---
Somewhere, mid glassy channel, I had managed to squeeze out some texts. The game was, apparently, on.
The balmy weather had created a haze over the dear old south coast, obscuring everything of home until we slipped past Gunwarf Quays in the evening sun, and we knew it was time to queue one last time.
We packed. I changed into a suit. I prayed for phone coverage. We headed for the muster points and disembarkation.
And then, a chink of English daylight to the huddled masses below. We staggered out, like homecoming soldiers – minus the acts of bravery or service or the snappy countenance, okay, but stop picking holes – onto the gangway and down to waiting terminal buses. We had made it as far as the UK. We were on home turf.
My phone picked up a bar. Then it pinged with excitement; a text. I read.
“We have a drummer.” I said firmly. “The drummer is in place.” A few weary souls around me looked up and wondered why I was announcing this to them with such conviction.
The Lego model of our journey home was looking impressively, improbably close to completion. But still, we crucially needed a taxi-shaped brick, a train-shaped brick and an underground-shaped brick – to say nothing of a dirty-great-amount-of-wits-about-me shaped brick. Oh, mother.
I began to not notice myself joining queues. I snapped out of my automatic stand-and-step mode when a taxi driver took my bag and bundled me into the back of his car like a getaway driver handling someone being papped. I caught a glimpse of a long silver eel of taxies lining up to the rank behind us, glinting in the tea time sunshine to swallow more vulnerable boat people as the saloon pulled sharply away. I eventually noticed that the lovely first lady of Momo had thankfully been bundled with me successfully. As had Pete.
Downtown Portsmouth was groaning as much as every other port in Europe that afternoon. Traffic was thick, but our driver seemed happy to treat it like a scene from a Luc Besson film and we were soon at the rail station. More refugees stood in a gaggle on its steps, perplexed.
“No taxis in town today” the driver grinned, hurling my bag at the entrance and wheel-spinning back into the traffic.
“HOW MUCH?” I heard Caroline’s voice declare.
She pushed a ticket into my hand. “Costing us more to get to London from here than to get to hear from Mallorca via six modes of transport” she muttered, marching for the turnstile.
I looked at the ticket. I wouldn’t be in Waterloo until gone 8.00pm.
My phone pinged.
“We have a sax player.” I said, a moment’s read later, and racheted through the turnstile.
---
We bid a quietly sad goodbye to Pete. His company in particular had been most entertaining, civilising the last chapter of our epic adventure very nicely. To my delight, after 30 hours of amusing re-enactments of scene’s from The Blackadder’s many incarnations, like some kind of post-modern traveling am dram society, Pete was to prove his worth a week later by sending me a random text in the middle of an Amanda Palmer concert that simply said, in quotes: “One more thing: don’t get drunk and let him try to shag you on the veranda.”
Class Englishman.
For yes, we were to survive and get home and resume our old adventureless life later that week – but not before the following few hours had done their best to string out the story.
---
Here’s a truth. Two truths. Perhaps two sides of the same truth.
In a crisis, it is the tiniest things that will unearth your true metal. And there is better mobile phone reception in the Bay of Bloody Biscay than there is anywhere near Guildford.
Chewing chunks out of my fist with delirious frustration, as two dappled hours of trundling train-play trundled past, it was only as we neared Waterloo, that I finally knew.
“We have a trombone player.” I said, looking up. “And a horn player. We have the full band.”
“Minus you, you tit” said my wise companion, throwing my bag at me as the platform slid past the windows.
Except she wouldn’t say something exactly like that. But those were none-the-less true sentiments as we pulled on our bag handles one more time and tottered out into the London evening.
---
Earl’s Court isn’t all that far by tube from Waterloo. But it was enough time to wonder what on earth I was supposed to do when I eventually staggered into the Troubadour, assuming we found it, two hours into the Unofficial Book Fair Fringe Party.
When I finally saw the legendary pub’s name, there on Old Brompton Road, and fumbled with its shabby door, and staggered down it’s windy little staircase, and exploded into Sebastian’s moody book reading in a shower of tumbling cases and expletives, I was beyond caring about making a tit of myself that night. We’d bloody made it.
We’d actually bloody made it.
WE’D ACTUALLY BLOODY MADE IT!
And, as if in a movie about an unknown but plucky but poorly-hair-styled musician, battling the odds to make it for his big night, his big coming out, everybody actually cheered. The place went wild.
…Or as wild as about twenty people can go in a small cellar bar. But you’re missing the point.
To my disproportionate delight, Sebastian – compare, talent and event organiser – had been reading out my Tweets. I had been expected. Our story had been followed. And we had brought the story alive by actually ruddy, bloody, chuffing, sodding-well making it.
---
Conclusion.
You’re going to ask me about the gig, I suppose.
Did it go passingly well?
Did I pass out before or during my performance?
Did I, in fact, make a right royal tit of myself?
Well, you ask a good question. And I would begin my answer by saying that, trust me, you never ever want to do “live soundchecking” ever. Not when you are a band of noisy horns and souzamaphones and drumamabobs and a speaky-word titamaboob on a teeny tiny stage, trying to play to a bleeping computer mix. No.
But, opening-number-wincing apart on my part, remarkably – nay improbably, absurdly, ridiculously – the first ever line up of the Momo:tempo Electro Pops Orchestra appeared to make a walloping great crowd-pleasing ker-thwallop of fun.
Which ever way you look at it, apparently… baby we’re back.
“We floated into its land-locked harbour silently by divine guidance, right up on the beach: and disembarked to lie where we had landed for two days and two nights, our hearts devoured by fatigue and pain.”
Homer, from The Odyssey.
“Rock stars ... is there anything they don’t know?”
Homer Simpson.
---
To see a few pictures and a couple of videos from the show, click to momotempo.co.uk
or momo:tempo on Facebook.
#ashpendix:
The Tweets
Me llamo Momo. Y at this rate I may be doing my London gig live via satellite from the Balearics.
#ashcloud So then Europe is spinning its wheels furiously. People sleeping on terminal floors everywhere and we’re stuck in the bally Erics.
9:10 AM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Monday’s gig aside, the staying/trying to go spend ratio here is compelling. Doing nothing is not spending nothing.
9:12 AM Apr 17th
#ashcloud So we are attempting to catch the last plane out of here, off the island. So to speak, anyway. We’re packing as we speak.
9:13 AM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Should we be hanging around – comfy room, WIFI, nothing to do? Sounds like more of a holiday than a holiday. Perhaps, yes.
9:17 AM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Going to try to catch a plane to somewhere in France. Failing that, even Barcelona. Then hunt for local trains.
9:18 AM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Tomorrow is Sunday, of course. Will anything be operating? It would be easier if we weren’t out here in the middle of the Med.
9:19 AM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Well, best pioneering foot forward. Let’s see where the airport and our wallet are prepared to take us. If anywhere.
9:20 AM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Putting last things in the case now. About to check out of the hotel and make for the airport. Here goes.
9:30 AM Apr 17th
We have checked out of the nice hotel. We now currently live on a bus.
10:31 AM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Hah! In your FACE fellow European nations - the Brits know how to queue in a crisis; look at that ordely snake. No clumping here.
11:16 AM Apr 17th
#ashcloud No flights from Mallorca to virtually anywhere in Europe. Flights to Spain clogged and expensive. Trains, roads, ferries - eesh.
12:03 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud “It was the beginning of the rout of civilisation! (with orderly murmering) DUH-DUH DAAAH!” They should tannoy War Of The Worlds.
12:12 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Genius. Just heard that the French railways are on strike today! Tay Jay no Vay. Gotta love the Gaul.
12:17 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Forced to queue in Ryanair queue now for hours. Feel my ingenuity bitch-slapped into submission by dwindling options. Am a drone.
1:13 PM Apr 17th
Wait. I have the backing beats with me in the case. WE’RE DOING THE GIG RIGHT HERE IN DEPARTURES.
1:16 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Has it come to this? Hugging a pillar because our arrival at it in the queue represents genuine achievement?
1:59 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Getting a booth swoon on; it’s suddenly so close. Booth, don’t tease me drunk with your utterly false sense of purpose.
2:02 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud If booth rumours are to be believed, you’ll never believe what they are about to tell us.
2:07 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud We were offered a seat on NEXT Saturday’s flight to Bomo. .. OR a flight to Madrid NOW. ..NOW! GO!
2:37 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud We are apparently getting on a plane to Madrid. Right now. Then we are trying to find a train to Bilbao. Then a ferry home?
2.45 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Momo is in Madrid! Just getting off the plane now. Random. Are we back in the game, gang? 4:47 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud The art of the queue is being learned all over Europe this weekend. Is Saturday night in Madrid always this sweaty and slow?
7:10 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud May take a while to find out if any trains are even going to Bilbao tonight. Or if we’re in the right estacion. Doh!
7:14 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Tired interaily group of youths ahead have hopeful but feeble sign limply strewn on their bag pile: “France! Por favor”.
7:18 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Everyone is still queueing calm, but all think all is bust. “You in the green number streams - what silly sod broke the matrix?”
7:24 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Denied. No train to Bilbao until tomorrow afternoon. Checking out buses. Also thanking God for Haribo, with no guilt.
7:40 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Madrid train station was like last plane out of Casablanca - middle class refugees everywhere.
8:25 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Now at Madrid bus station. More refugees but a bus to Bilbao at 01.30? Really? And space on it? Soon find out.
8:33 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Get in! Caroline shoots and scores from well outside the box, bypassing the queue with a nifty ticket machine shot. Bilbao bound!
8:45 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Can you believe - odyssey continues! Coffee from the nice lady at the kiosk in the middle of the chugging bus terminal. An oasis.
8:49 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Set up camp on a bench surrounded by buses and commuters - have all the essentials, like olives, baguette, pate, pesto, Dairylea.
8:52 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Very happy. But Caroline’s face drops suddenly, middle of decadent feast: “Nuh,” she scowls, “no vino Tintoretto”. Rats.
8:55 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Surrounded by other refugees, waiting for the bus to leave, we’re watching 1970s’ Survivors on the laptop. Brilliant.
10:56 PM Apr 17th
#ashtag We are on and we are off. Looks like ours is a specially-laid-on second big bus to Bilbao. What fates await us at sunrise?
12:39 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag It’s still dark. But they are turfing us off, the heavy implication being that we are IN BILBAO.
5:16 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag Bleerily staring at a map, I see that the Guggenheim is a mere potter along the road away from the bus terminal. So near.
5:38 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag Instead of art, culture or bed we are once more underground; nocturnal mole people, seeking the one true light of our people’s quest
5:40 AM Apr 18th
- the correct train to the P&O ferry port. >yawn<
5:42 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag So, half six on this Sunday morning, as we wait for our connecting train we ask ourselves: how fat is the chance of finding a ferry?
5:44 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag As dawn rises over the ferry port close to Bilbao, we sit and ponder; there IS a ferry today. It is booked up to buggery.
6:44 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag The next ferry is Wednesday. It too is fully booked. Only a miracle will get us out of Spain soon; have we used up too many already?
6:47 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag The shabby ferry terminal fills up with more families of holiday refugees, all imagining there would be more ferries. Ah, no.
8:00 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag We sit, exhausted. What next, then? >sigh< “Meester en Meesees Peeech to main desk please” the tannoy suddenly barks. Whuh?
8:03 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag Feel free to utterly disbelieve this. I am in a daze. At the desk is a chap with a four-berth cabin. He is alone.
8:06 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag in front of a weary throng of queuing hopefuls we are offered two tickets. Place goes silent with the concentration of all eyes.
8:08 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag Am I Charlie in the chocolate factory, or a heartless bastard? A kid whines. An old man looks at me with watery eyes.
8:16 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag I take the bloody tickets in a swift snatch. WE’RE ON THE BOAT.
8:18 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag Can it be true? Are we really going to make it? We sit in fatigued dilerium with our two new chums. The second bloke is from Bomo.
8:54 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag I can’t believe it; we’re going to make it. I laugh an empty little laugh. Momo will make the gig! I lean back, beginning to relax.
8:57 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag “Yep,” says one of the chaps with a grin, “by 4.30 Monday afternoon we’ll be in Portsmouth.” I fall backwards off my seat.
8:59 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag How? How did we not know this is a 30 hour voyage, not a 12 hour? 4.30. Now look at the gig event page again. Now do the math.
9:02 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag I have a LOT of calls to make on that bloody boat. And some pants to scrub out.
9:04 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag Sitting here waiting, I think: “Sheesh, where can I get a piano?!” Then tannoy woman barks: “Come to the piano desk!” OH STOP IT.
9:28 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag Realise momentarily she said “P&O desk.” Ah. That makes more sense, yes.
9:30 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag I appear to be sitting in front of a bottle of flimsy European beer on board a dirty great boat. I’m on the ruddy boat.
11:13 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag We are aboard - but is this the Pride Of Bilbao or Thunder Child? Might hear a cheer as we get a blast of heat ray trying to leave.
11:27 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag Carnage in that little hut, trying to board. People tried hard to keep nice. Ferry just not big enough. How the hell did we make it?
11:30 AM Apr 18th
So, gang - the gig. Can it yet be done? After all that, can I make it onto the Troob’s little stage wih something worth showing and telling?
11:35 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag If we CAN find a way from Portsmouth to London fast-as-arse on Monday and I run out into the spot, will I STILL be in THESE PANTS?
11:42 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag I still need a piano. And a tamborine. And a funny-voice harmoniser. And the rest of the band. And this boat NOT to be leaving late.
11:46 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag The boat’s leaving late obviously. But, thanks to the prayers of this guilt ridden man, it IS leaving with the watery-eyed old man.
11:48 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag Have to say, huge props to Pete and Paddy for becoming our bunk buddies. Pete’s had thankyou offers from all three of us.
11:58 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag BA announce no flights tomorrow. The cloud is over most of Europe now. People are doing amazingly at coping with eachother.
12:04 PM Apr 18th
#ashtag Meanwhile, we ARE pissed.
12:05 PM Apr 18th
#ashtag No we’re not; we have souls. Itchy knickers make you say impulsive things. Someone hose me down in the yard.
12:07 PM Apr 18th
#ashtag Pete: “On the whole, I think I’ve enjoyed being ashed.” Momo: “That’s just the boat talking.”
12:10 PM Apr 18th
#ashtag Paddy’s asked the skipper to get me to London pronto. I believe the skipper said: YOU’RE NOT HELPING. HOW DID YOU GET IN HERE?
12:13 PM Apr 18th
#ashtag Of course, I do know that the money I’ve spent doing this roaming nonsense could have flown me home on a private bloody chopper.
12:17 PM Apr 18th
#ashtag BACK! WE’RE BACK! Aledgedly, through the thick haze in front of me, is the blessed Isle of Wight. And that very nice lobster cafe.
3:31 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Biscay was inexplicably flat and sunny the whole way - no swell at all. Channel was like glittering glass this morning. Sweet.
3:33 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag A boat full of passengers have been jolly and bonkers for 30 hours, forgetting their discomforts fast. But everyone is delierous.
3:35 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag No 3G or other Internet for 30 hours. Almost no phone nets either. Quiet. Odd. We’ve spent most of the time dozing and drinking.
3:37 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Approaching Portsmouth. Unbelievable luck to be here. Gunning for the gig still, insanely. I have at least half a band promised.
3:38 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag So. Have to go below. Have to berth. Have to get off. Have to find taxi fast. Have to find train. Back in a bit, gang - here goes...
3:39 PM Apr 19th
@johnmclear Bilbao and Santander only have sailings 2 or 3 times a week. We cheekily just turned up but all is officially booked out.
4:17 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag A throng is waiting at the passenger doors to disembark. More queueing and crossing of streams and Excuse Mes and sudden standing.
4:22 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Someone’s having a last laugh with us vulnerable middle class refugees by standing up decisively with their bags. So did we all.
4:32 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Denied. Pushy bunch on a boat from the Channel Isles get to ‘discharge’ before us. Rufians. Bounders. All the nice people here sigh
4:36 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag ..and then sensibly squash forward a little more. ‘15 more minutes’ be hashed, skipper - WE’RE STORMING THE BORDER. RIGHT EVERYONE?
4:40 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag The lifts are beside us. The doors forlornly open and close periodically on the stuck throng. One bloke has appeared three times.
4:44 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Conspicuous thunk-rumble below; his was the car right at the very front, presumably.
4:47 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag A rumour flashes round: the doors are open! A rumour started by the skipper on the tannoy. We surge.
4:52 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Off. Air. Daylight. ..More queueing.
5:01 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Just heard from the drummer. He’s at the Troubadour and set up. That’s one of us. We have one.
5:03 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Clutching passports and bags we emerge, blinking into the evening sun. And a cue for the taxi.
5:17 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag TV cameras roam. People thank the god of phone network coverage. Others suffering a touch of the Stockholms sit where they are.
5:19 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag In a cab. Queues of them flank around Portsmouth, crawling into the port. Can’t get one in town apparently. More refugees then.
5:23 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Portsmouth, like ports across north Europe, is clogged. Driver said he saw Gatwick yesterday - “ghost town”.
5:31 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Have train tickets, sitting on the platform in the evening south coast sunshine. 17.50 train to Waterloo.
5:43 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Commuters are stranded on the steps of Portsmouth & Southsea station. Cabs are obviously ditching those regular losers.
5:46 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag We’re on the train. We’re going to London. Dawns on us that we are going to LONDON not HOME.
5:52 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag After however-many hundred miles of trapseing around Europe, why the hell are we now going to LONDON? Momo’s set is only 30 mins.
6:21 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Now heard from both the sax player and the trombone player - they’re nearly there, WITH the stand-in horn player.
6:23 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag I’ve never met the stand-in horn player. I am turning up to a gig to go straight onto a stage, without soundcheck, with strangers.
6:27 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Let you know how that works out for me then.
6:29 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag So Mark, Dave, Patrick and Tom are there. We have the talent. Just need the prat at the front. And the laptop at the back.
6:31 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Incidentally, network coverage loss in middle of Biscay = understandable niggle. Near Guildford = last straw. >picks up chair< ...
6:48 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Approaching London town. How clear is my head going to be by the time we bowl in to the Unofficial Book Fair Fringe Party?
6:58 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag How demented is this? All bets are off on demented levels after this week; warships are dispatching to get holiday makers. SN=AFU.
7:01 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Said goodbye to new chum Pete. The British can keep themselves endlessly amused in adversity with queues and quotes from Blackadder
7:05 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag I can see the London Eye. I can see us actually making the ruddy gig. Actually.
7:24 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Waterloo. Need the loo.
7:29 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Better reception on the District line than all bleedin’ day.
7:51 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag We are at Earl’s Court. We are walking out of the station. We are turning right and hoping we saw the map up the right way.
7:56 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag We can see the Troubadour!
8:25 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag We are SITTING IN THE TROUBADOUR.
8:25 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Chilling at the Unofficial Book Fair Fringe Party. Sublime sounds, friends all around. All is good. We are actually here.
9:13 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag The horns quickly found the Fabulously Cool Booth to hang in. Look like a Miles Davis album shot or something. Somebody smoke!
9:18 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Tonight, I all of a sudden appear to have a band.
9:19 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Hello. I am on the stage of the Troubadour.
10:44 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag We are going home. The first ever incarnation of the Momo:tempo Electro Pops Orchestra was brilliant. Much love for all support.
12:17 AM Apr 20th
#ashtag How the hell did we make it home? Thoughts to all who are not yet home. Hope you at least get a good story out of it. Godspeed.
12:20 AM Apr 20th
#ashtag Keep an eye on momotempo.co.uk for the sordid video evidence sometime soon.
12:22 AM Apr 20th
# #ashtag Ruddy nora, I’m ashed. Ciao for now. X
12:23 AM Apr 20th
Planes, trains and souzamaphones.
You’ve heard of that bloke. Homer.
Came out with some profound stuff. Apparently very memorable.
And it is of just such profound narratives and timeless tales of human perseverance that I am thinking now. Of high adventure… and low expectations. Of acts of God, and… more desperate acts.
Of passenger ships and… one-liners.
Anyway, whether you’re now thinking of the mythical bloke from Springfieid or the one from Smyrna, my point is that, long ago, I wrote a tune. A simple little bit of electronic sing-songery that made it in some theatrical incarnation to Momo’s forthcoming debut LP; a tune called Asylum Seeker.
Its slightly karaoke New Romantic chorus includes the lines: ‘I am the refugee, come and rescue me; I am the lost at sea, send a boat for me’.
I’d always rather pictured any accompanying video to this showing middle class business men and trendy metro dandies looking displaced and uncomfortable, lost and sockless. Barefoot in the urban jungle, or somesuch. Artistic social commentary if ever there were such a thing.
Yes. So. Funny how a spot of cheesy keyboard pop can turn out to be prophetic.
---
We set sail in the spring of 2010. A simple Sell Your Soul For A Quick Break Abroad cheap flight from dear old Bomo to Palma de Mallorca. Nothing complicated. Shouldn’t be incidental, we thought. Cop a feel of some nice Mediterranean air and Eurozone splendidness, saunter around the old city, loll in a few leafy coves, and restore the ol’ S. Possibly fitting in a few s-bends in the precariously new little Fiat we plundered locally.
With all these simple aspirations comfortably present and correct nearing the end of our sojourn to the good Bally-Es, we tripped on the hotel room news box one languid afternoon, post obligatory siesta, and saw an item of passing interest:
UK AIRSPACE CLOSED. CLOUD OF LOOMING DEATH SPREADING SOUTH FAST. FOR GOD’S SAKE, SIT ON THE FLOOR AND PRAY.
“Uh… huh” we mused. And opened the mini Pringles.
---
Well, you know this story. You may well have been caught up in the ash cloud of doom yourself and know it first hand. Bit of a bugger to say the least. And not just the ruddy name. But also because there was, it appeared to clouds of British holiday makers all over the continent, absolutely no-one to blame.
This left everyone strangely subdued.
---
Standing in Palma international airport, I began to feel a niggling doubt, that Saturday morning, that my cavalier plans to be canny were unraveling.
Unencumbered by the patter of tiny feet, the lovely first lady of Momo and I were possibly about to be treated to what we might later privately end up admitting was a jolly wheeze; a game of Get Yourself Home Without Flying. Why, what a simply novel idea, darling!
I’d looked at the maps and felt informed and equipped. I’d looked at the queues of the forlorn and felt the sobering warmth of pity. I’d looked into the middle distance with a flinty glint and said quietly: “Let’s lose these saps.”
We’d find a last flight out of Spanish airspace. We’d make it to France and be in with a fighting chance. We’d get a train. We’d hike an Alpine pass. We’d hitch-hike. We'd mule trek! We were never going to hitch-hike or mule trek. Just sounds like the sort of thing we would have considered from the point of view of spinning the yarn over-confidently in the pub long afterwards. But one way or another, I figured we’d get back to Blighty with our wits and wallets intact.
Then the alternative airlines one by one stopped their flights to Germany. Then France. Then almost anywhere. Then the price of their few remaining seats across the water to Barcelona seemed to be the only things taking off.
The ferry didn’t seem bothered about leaving for the mainland until midnight, or about making landfall until breakfast time, and the trains in Cataluna were rumoured to be actually evaporating in the sheer heat of demand.
So it was that, crestfallen, I found myself actually joining the queue to talk to the one and only human working for Ryanair on Mallorca that morning.
I felt bitch-slapped into submission. Still, if you’re going to drink from the devil’s cup.
---
We made friends in the queue, obviously. We were there for a few days. I think we were on the point of going out for dinner with Pat and Veronica from Dublin as we approached the flimsy booth, understanding by then that there would be no hope of flights resuming to the UK for at least a week. As if anyone knew anything at all.
Then, like stumbling out of an amazon jungle of stiff legs into the seductive sheening glow of Eldorado, we found ourselves actually at the head of the eternal Ryanair queue.
“We can get you on a flight next Saturday” said the remarkably composed and cheery sounding woman inside. It was almost as though the air in that booth had clouded her sense of reality. It would be the full week then. A full extra week late home from holiday. And she didn’t seem to think this was odd.
Now, at this point, it’s worth bringing back into view the only imperative we really had on our time – and it was hardly imperative at all. In fact, despite the weird series of fortunate events apparently impelling me towards it before our hols, I had by this stage comfortably given up on the idea.
Momo’s first ever gig.
As Caroline had said to me there in that four-hour snake of lost souls: “Of course. Of course it takes a volcano to stop you getting back on stage after ten years!” And I had simply nodded.
It was Saturday afternoon by this stage. More or less exactly 48 hours before we needed to be casually strolling into the Troubadour in Earl’s Court with our down-at-heel flight cases and world-class horn players. I looked at the booth woman.
“Are you flying anywhere else?” I said quietly. She frowned in thought at her monitor. We waited. Time slowed down. Clocks started ticking loudly at low pitch.
“Well… there is this little flight to Madrid” she said diffidently.
“Madrid!? You’re really flying to Madrid?” I perked. “When?”
She paused again, uplit, staring. Taking her time.
“Now” she replied.
I leant forward into the booth, straining with restraint, torpored brain cells suddenly buzzing with realisation.
“Can You Get Us On It?” I breathed.
---
When an airport is essentially empty, but for lines of sleeping refugees, you can really see where you’re going much easier when running.
We collapsed into the check-in desk in a flurry of English and luggage and stood panting in front of the huddle of bored women still manning this last outpost of hope, far away from any booths. They made a very slow phone call. We watched their every move. We think we understood them saying the polite Spanish equivalent of: “The bloody plane’s gone, hasn’t it? Two English jokers here want to get on it, can you believe it? HAHA! How is your sister, anyway? Really? Yes, her legs are very bad now..Oh, you’re running late. Sure.” >click< “You’re through.”
And minutes later we were watching Mallorca slip below the windows. We were, fairly randomly, now on our way to Madrid.
I looked at Caroline. “Of course, you realise there is suddenly the preposterous possibility that we can still make the gig now?”
She adjusted her eye mask calmly. “Oh yes” she said.
---
Hitting the tarmac running, we managed to pull out our heavy Dorling Kindersley Didn’t Realise How Much You’d Need This After All Did You Guide To Spain at a steady trot, losing only a few strewn items of worn underwear, and planned our route across the Spanish capital. I confidently identified the correct rail station we’d need to reach Bilbao and planned the Metro journey to reach it accordingly, as we haired past a suspiciously conspicuous tourist information booth. We hairpinned back to this instinctively for some reason and learned, while jogging on the spot, of the actual location of the correct rail station we’d need to reach Bilbao and not northern Portugal. Thanking the amazingly calm, pleasantly attractive young woman in the booth, and jogging on the spot there for a barely noticeable minute longer than the lovely first lady of Momo, I took off again to catch her up, stopping not at all to rescue the socks, hairnet, hotel slipper and assorted Hotel Jaime III-branded souvenirs spilled from our luggage. “Casualties of war, darling. TO THE TICKET MACHINE” I boomed authoritatively, sprinting past.
---
Each stage of the journey was like adding another bit of Lego. But proper Lego, old Lego, that didn’t come in very specifically designed model packs that more or less neutered the whole POINT of Lego which is imagination, but magically materialised in your toy box in random combinations. We knew what we were trying to make alright, but each time we reached into the Lego box we had no idea what shape brick we were about to pull out.
So far, we’d found the bit to stick onto the rare and idea-creating flight-shaped bit and reached the Metro successfully. Would we find the crucial train-to-Bilbao-shaped bit?
---
Madrid’s north-serving rail station was muggy and and weirdly post-trauma torpid. Middle class refugees were strewn quietly all over it’s gently bustling Saturday night movement, like a crisis was still going on in transport somewhere, but everyone was a bit too tired and disheartened to still be in a frenzy about it.
We joined another queue, like hard-core patienteers. We swapped and overheard stories from various English speakers and gleaned the essential theme of them all – namely, that ferries and trains and buses and hire cars the world over were basically booked to buggery.
In the end, stepping up to the head of the Travel Information queue, we learned that there wasn’t another train to Bilbao until the following afternoon. Simply because it was, of course, Sunday.
“Thankyou” we said politely and retired to a seat.
“So that’s that” I mused, emptily. “Well, so here’s what we do, “ I then said, not yet feeling fully defeated. “Let’s go check out the bus terminal, just for a laugh. Then go see if we can find a hotel with a room for tonight.”
I stood, pulled on the suitcase handle again and trudged off. “Just for a laugh.”
---
It’s worth pointing out that the whole idea of making for Bilbao had struck me as a bit of a stroke of genius in the first place, a few of hours earlier. There I was, trying to hire a skiff to make for Marseilles to seek passage north in the opium dens of the old city or somesuch, when the sudden option of going to Madrid negated the need to reach Paris at all. Paris may indeed have seemed much nearer home than Palma, but it would still be essentially Not Actually Home, with plenty of miles of road and queue and grumpy French between us and passage to Blighty.
Bil-frikkin’-bao, on the other hand, like a light from heaven, would mean passage on a single boat all the way from Spain to the good waters of the blerry Solent. Now that really was home – I’d been chucking up in those good waters barely a fortnight before.
But what of those ferries? Just how many other people would have thought of that clever, secret route out of the ashcloud?
Really? I mean, how many people really use the Bibao ferry terminals? Eh?
Eh? Huh. Cuh.
..Yes, you can see where this is going, already.
---
Wending our way back across the city’s Metro and emerging into some fake version of daylight, we found ourselves clouded by the hopeful sound and smell of diesel thrattle.
We scanned boards quietly, trying to find signs of north-bound life. More refugees with luggage built for floorless-smooth airport surfaces huddled everywhere in the yellow light, yellow skin and sallow eyes and sorrowful boredom dressing Madrid’s Estaçia de Nord bus depot like the Martian colony of freaks in Total Recall. After they’ve turned off the fans.
Then the lovely first lady of Momo made a little sound. That silent sound she makes when her tenacious brain thinks it’s on to something.
“Queue.” she said, pointing without looking away from a screen, and then surreptitiously marching off.
Clutching our four bags, murmuring Spanish, glancing at blurry screens without my ever-more-needed glasses, I scooched forward into the queue of nonchalant ticket buyers. Most of these characters looked like actual Madridians, not gringo desperados from the Costa Blanca. And they all looked like they were still going somewhere. My heart quickened. Not knowing why.
Then came the tap on the arm.
I turned. With hushed urgency, my resourceful wife simply said: “Get the bags, we’re going to Bilbao” and moved off.
Watching her with steely pride as she slipped through the crowd, I snapped out of my reverie and got moving. Over my case and onto my face in a flurry of passports.
No I didn’t. Not quite. But it’s a funnier punchline-out of the scene.
---
Ticket machine. She’d navigated a blessed ticket machine and now we were here – sitting on a bench, circled by buses in a yellow light, unsure whether we were supposed to be under or above ground exactly, but sure as sure we could be that we were going to bloody Bilbao.
1.30 am overnight bus. We had four hours to rest up and wait.
Delighted, we set out our little stall right there, picnicking one of the best picnics of our lives, taking humble essentials of sustenance, and elevating them to the ennobling status of triumphant feast. For we were going to Bilbao. You suckers.
And there, surrounded by travelers coming and going, we did feast indeed, eschewing any meagre appearance of whatever packed supplies we’d been able to lay our hands on in our desperate flight, and eating heartily. Simply giving thanks for small but crucial mercies. Olives, pate, pesto, assorted cheeses and a full French baguette would have to tide us over.
Caroline tutted and stopped unwrapping her smoked chorizo.
“What?” I asked, concerned.
“No wine.” she said flatly through a mouthful.
We shuddered and held eachother for a moment. Yet, d’you know, I think we still counted ourselves two of the luckiest, richest people in Spain that night.
“Wouldn’t have been room temperature.” I reassured bravely.
----
I didn’t seem odd to us to sit in a corner for a couple hours after that and watch the bleak, cardboard, brilliant original 70s version of Survivors on the laptop. Perfectly normal. The time spooled by comfortably and soon we really were on route to Spain’s famous Basque port, never more grateful to sleep on a bus. And not having had to fight for petrol or steal an old Landrover.
---
I looked at my watch.
6.00am Sunday.
I looked at the map.
“Can’t see the port. But you should know that the Gugenheim is just up the street” I said forlornly.
“I’m thinking Metro” said Caroline, as the bus thrattled into life behind us and pulled out of the dark bus depot back into the dawn.
“But it’s just round the corner…” I said quietly, looking over my shoulder with large, sad eyes as we staggered down some steps.
---
The chap stood for a moment, rubbed his eyes and expertly communicated in just a silent look that he’d only just gotten into his booth here on this Sunday morning. I stood back, allowing my wife’s deftly understated charm to work it’s magic on this kindly middle-aged man.
“Go all the way to the end of the line, the port’s there” he said, handing us tickets. And then we were on an empty Metro platform. In Bilbao. Going to find a ferry to freedom.
“Of course, you realise…” I began, voice echoing around the vast scale of the lonely station.
“Yes,” said Caroline a full minute later, “we could still make it.”
We both continued to sit there, staring forward.
---
Light finally began to creep out of hiding behind the hills and rooftops of Bilbao as the carriage slid along the estuary to the end of the line. Silhouettes of cranes and other coastal industry emerged and passed us. As it came to rest, 20 minutes later, we slipped out of the shushing doors into the delicate quiet of first light and padded out of the station.
Not a sign.
“Ah. Where do you think the very big boat is hiding?” I asked carefully, spaced out beyond emotion.
We stood there a while longer.
“Must be this way” I then said with the utterly uninformed idle confidence of a man, but without the reassuring theatre of being properly awake.
“How do you know?” Caroline said flatly.
“Stands to reason. Or something.” I said flatly.
Whatever our half-hearted conversation there in the pretty desertion of early morning, we began trundling forward, little airport cases still rumbling behind us.
The empty streets were bereft of signage to the town’s principal passenger connection with the outside world but we trudged without emotion along a main road and followed the sound of gulls until we saw one eventual sign, limply hanging from a lampost. Said simply:
“Ferry”.
We dutifully followed its vague direction but began to wonder whether an industrial estate was really going to house something as hard to hide as an umpteen thousand-ton, lorry-swallowing boat built to survive the violent distempers of Biscay. Yet on we trundled. Faith blind, but belligerently in place.
And then we turned one more corner, past one more block of empty offices, around one more empty car park. And there it was. A small portacabin in the distance. And humble but visible was a little sign above its door.
“P&O”
Not a queue in site.
---
There wasn’t a queue inside either. There were only about three other humans in there. But thankfully, at least one of them was behind a booth.
Now, thinking back, to imagine that this poor lady was looking and sounding defeated and frazzled already, is remarkable. Because I don’t know where she felt she had left to go after playing her full emotional hand at seven in the morning, given the particular morning that was, she would discover all too soon, still ahead of her.
“We, ah, don’t have tickets” I opened, perhaps unwisely. She sighed immediately and spoke as if to a crowd.
“ALL THOSE WITHOUT TICKETS, I AM SORRY BUT THE FERRY IS BOOKED. NO TICKETS LEFT.”
Helpful as this cutting to the chase might have been to any waiting crowds, I looked over my shoulder briefly at the empty room and then continued: “So there IS a ferry today?”
“Yes. Is booked.”
“And, the next ferry?”
“Wednesday.”
I felt a little final breath escape me, there at that booth.
“Wednesday?”
“Yes. Is booked.”
I tipped my head and stood there. Just allowing the reality to sink in. Of course. Of course it had always been this.
“I take your name” she said, as if to get me to go tip my head and sink in somewhere else, “but really is futile. Look: I can’t find pen. Look: I talk to colleague as if distracted. Look: pen I find doesn’t work. Look: I eventually write your name in distinctly token manner on scrap of paper that looks like was pulled on bit of elastic from bin. Look, I’m sorry.”
I nodded. We went and sat down.
We stared at the floor. We felt nothing.
And then I thought of something.
“Know what I’m going to do?” I eventually said to the faithful one beside me.
“What?” she said without moving.
“I’m going to have a wee and get myself a coffee.” I said with flat conviction. “Then I’m going to sit here and see what happens.”
“Good plan” she replied quietly as I walked off. “Toilets don’t work.”
---
We sat there in time-lapse. I slowly finished my coffee and watched the little ferry reception fill like a forward bulkhead of the Titanic. By mid morning, children and other loose items were floating on the surface of the humanity bursting out of the building’s seams. We simply sat and watched.
I turned to the window. A vast rust-spewn wall of white grumbled slowly past and halted.
I looked. Blasted out were the words Pride Of Portsmouth. Bolted underneath in their place were the words Pride of Nantes.
“Bloody nora” I said, as it dawned. “ Do these people realise they’re going to the Bahamas?”
And then it happened. As it was always going to happen.
“MEESTER AND MEESES PEACH TO RECEPTION BOOTH PLEASE.” scratched a tannoy.
I turned round again. Looked at Caroline.
I stood. In a dream. I glided past the throng waiting agitatedly to get to the booth, walking straight up to the window, past them all.
I looked calm. I looked serene. I looked like bleedin’ Keanu right near the end of The Matix; the forces of travel calamity could grimace and flail at me all they wanted, I would fend them off with a surreal single hand as I looked with gentle enlightenment at the woman in the booth.
“Eees NOT my responsibility.” she frowned. And pointed to a chap in front of me, I hadn’t seen. He was holding a green ticket. A boarding ticket. He looked at me.
“You agree and is fine. Between you. We just try to help out” she scowled.
I looked at this stranger beatifically.
“Hello, “ he said simply. “I’m Pete. I have a four-berth cabin. And there’s only one of me.”
The sea of humanity around us fell silent.
---
“Really no, you’re very kind!” said Pete as we fought our way out of the riot inside, “But it really wouldn’t be right to accept such a thankyou” he insisted as I tried for a fourth time with piercing stare to simply frenchy his face off. My wanton gratitude was not quite the right currency, it seemed, and I eventually gave up the struggle and let him go. Currency was, in fact, the right currency.
And so we sat on a bench outside, with two new suddenly-firm friends, which included the equally bemused and grateful Paddy, and allowed the truth to sink in. We would be home in time. We were on the ruddy boat.
“We’re on the boat” I said vacantly, as another fight broke out inside.
“We’re on the ruddy ruddy ruddy boat” I uttered, as an old man punched a six-year-old boy in the face somewhere nearby.
“We... we’re actually going to make it” I distantly began to smile, then chuckle, then laugh with maniacal comprehension, long and loud, head thrown back with joy.
“Yep,” smiled Pete good-naturedly, “by 4.30 Monday afternoon we’ll be in Portsmouth.”
I fell backwards off the bench, choking on something apparently suddenly caught in my throat.
----
Funny how things can stick in your mind so you don’t notice. Like the idea that the sail from Bilbao to Portsmouth would take 12 hours. No idea where this fact had alighted in my head from. Had no thought of checking it out for accuracy. Didn’t occur to me that the trip would, in firm fact, take 30.
---
So the question. That bloody question.
Could we still make it? Could we make the gig? And increasingly to the point – should we?
Firstly, was it doable? Well, reluctantly, it wouldn’t be completely impossible in theory, as I did have the laptop with me and it had backing mixes in there. Just not refined ones. But they might still serve. And we would be tantalizingly close to London as we stepped off the ferry with still two hours to go before the doors of the Troob would open. But really, how would we soundcheck?
But secondly, would it be right to ask so much of the band? To get them to travel to London when the band leader is still technically, if you want to be picky, not actually in the country but in fact somewhere off the west coast of France is to create a little potential concern, I would say. Should I push ahead vainly?
The thing is… bloody yes. How absurd would it have been to land at Portsmouth that Monday night after ALL THAT and say a simple “meh” and turn left for home?
So, it was that I began the process of begging by text.
---
As the hour to embark approached, it became clear that the broiling sea of hopeful humanity now frothing out into the car park was not going to blithely part to allow green ticket-clutching tosspots like us to sail smoothly past into the security check area. No Mosaic special privileges for us. We would have to plunge in and swim for it.
Limbs writhed around limbs. Bags bobbed and yanked. Old folk were passed overhead to be claimed by their families. Stray animals appeared here and there, pushed to the surface briefly with surprised, mute looks on their whiskery faces. Waves of scowling tossed over eddies of indifference. Great swells of drowsiness lifted and dropped the phlegmy surface. Birds dropped to pick off a small current of rubbish vortexing itself steadily larger amongst us.
Our team bravely swam. Which is to say, politely pushed, in a distinctly English manner – scorning the impatience of the few opting to openly grow narky and shovey, while all the while secretly screaming OH COME ON YOU RUDE BASTARDS – WE HAVE BLOODY TICKETS.
Across Europe, though, it should be said, the English really showed their continental family members a thing or two about queueing. Our patriotic moaning was almost absent, everywhere that we went at least. A dirty great volcano leaves you with no option but to draw on the last essential cultural arrow in your quiver and wait your turn implacably. Bravo us.
Even in this melee, the predominant English may have let go the reigns of queuing, but total anarchy was kept at bay by our inability to complain directly. Common practice in the face of someone pushing in, is to tut almost inaudibly and then bang on about it loudly long after you’re on different continents.
I caught myself being particularly English as we made it to about half way across the hall, mid-sea.
One ballsy chap came at the crows, at what must have been a calculated run-up from the car park, brandishing two huge cases and a phalanx of family moving in tight formation at his back.
“Let me through. Let me though!” he boomed authoritatively, “I have tickets. LET ME THROUGH PLEASE” push push.
Before I could stop myself, my Uptight was out.
“N..No. NO.” I said firmly, instinctively – and before I could show myself in a better light, my wounded sense of fair play had me reaching out an effete hand to pat him back. “NO. N..NO” was all the words I could muster in my panic.
“I have tickets” he mantra-ed again, cutting a bit of a swathe.
“NO. BUT SO DO WE.” I insisted in a squeaky, less than masculine voice, actually stopping him.
He stopped. His family stopped. We looked at eachother. A moment’s pause passed.
“What the hell am I doing?” I said, “You’re doing bloody well there. Go, man – GO! FOLLOW THIS GUY!”
“I hate people who push in, don’t you?” he said with suddenly slumped shoulders and a smirk.
“I hate uptight blighters – NOW GO!” I said pushing him on.
---
Sitting in the bar, an hour later, looking down on the chaos far below us, I stared into my sparkly, prissy European beer and counted every last blessing, knowing they added up to more bubbles than were bursting at the bottle neck.
I had wondered about whether we should give up our tickets to people more deserving; I had accepted the tickets initially in a bit of a daze. To my guilty relief, and by what miracle of administrative sacrilege I dread to think, but P&O found a way to get every last straggler on the boat. They cleared the terminal. Somehow.
I resisted the urge, you understand, to telephone the captain and tell him to “leave those bloody losers” because we were already an hour behind schedule. Phileas Fogg, under similar pressures, would never stoop so low as to abandon his fellow Englishman. Wager or no.
“Stoopid English” I muttered into my beer as we finally pulled away.
---
Then the fog really fell.
Our immediate route home that day is known for something. Something a bit technical and meteorological, so bear with me if it goes over your head. For the bay of Biscay is known to be a bit of a bastard.
Only a week before, friends of ours had been hanging onto the stern rail as the very same boat plunged nose first into great canyons of swell, spraying as much passenger vomit over her sides in all directions as breaking waves. A more grisly, Dantesque vision of humanity on a booze cruise to the Basque hypermarkets you couldn’t picture, by all accounts.
Leaving port this time however was like some sort of surreal cruise. Clear skies. Flat seas. Sunshine. And against all likelihood, we kept these conditions all the way home. It’s just that, along with these conditions, we kept internet silence and near total phone coverage all the way home too. Obviously. When you think about it.
So I had to sit there. Strolling around the deck. Or lolling in the cabin. Or strolling around the other deck. Or avoiding the ‘entertainment’ theatre. All the time wondering if my band would make it and if I would make it and if I would be in any fit state to climb onto a stage if I actually really did make it. And unable to organise or practice or arrange a single bleedin’ thing.
The 30 hours passed steadily. And, in truth, oddly pleasantly. Pete and Paddy were entertaining company, making it feel more like we were off on some wheeze with chums, and the restaurant did us a good steak and an even better bottle of something red and French. To my head’s chagrin, come Monday morning.
More to the point, we got to rest and even shower.
But really. I felt helpless.
---
Somewhere, mid glassy channel, I had managed to squeeze out some texts. The game was, apparently, on.
The balmy weather had created a haze over the dear old south coast, obscuring everything of home until we slipped past Gunwarf Quays in the evening sun, and we knew it was time to queue one last time.
We packed. I changed into a suit. I prayed for phone coverage. We headed for the muster points and disembarkation.
And then, a chink of English daylight to the huddled masses below. We staggered out, like homecoming soldiers – minus the acts of bravery or service or the snappy countenance, okay, but stop picking holes – onto the gangway and down to waiting terminal buses. We had made it as far as the UK. We were on home turf.
My phone picked up a bar. Then it pinged with excitement; a text. I read.
“We have a drummer.” I said firmly. “The drummer is in place.” A few weary souls around me looked up and wondered why I was announcing this to them with such conviction.
The Lego model of our journey home was looking impressively, improbably close to completion. But still, we crucially needed a taxi-shaped brick, a train-shaped brick and an underground-shaped brick – to say nothing of a dirty-great-amount-of-wits-about-me shaped brick. Oh, mother.
I began to not notice myself joining queues. I snapped out of my automatic stand-and-step mode when a taxi driver took my bag and bundled me into the back of his car like a getaway driver handling someone being papped. I caught a glimpse of a long silver eel of taxies lining up to the rank behind us, glinting in the tea time sunshine to swallow more vulnerable boat people as the saloon pulled sharply away. I eventually noticed that the lovely first lady of Momo had thankfully been bundled with me successfully. As had Pete.
Downtown Portsmouth was groaning as much as every other port in Europe that afternoon. Traffic was thick, but our driver seemed happy to treat it like a scene from a Luc Besson film and we were soon at the rail station. More refugees stood in a gaggle on its steps, perplexed.
“No taxis in town today” the driver grinned, hurling my bag at the entrance and wheel-spinning back into the traffic.
“HOW MUCH?” I heard Caroline’s voice declare.
She pushed a ticket into my hand. “Costing us more to get to London from here than to get to hear from Mallorca via six modes of transport” she muttered, marching for the turnstile.
I looked at the ticket. I wouldn’t be in Waterloo until gone 8.00pm.
My phone pinged.
“We have a sax player.” I said, a moment’s read later, and racheted through the turnstile.
---
We bid a quietly sad goodbye to Pete. His company in particular had been most entertaining, civilising the last chapter of our epic adventure very nicely. To my delight, after 30 hours of amusing re-enactments of scene’s from The Blackadder’s many incarnations, like some kind of post-modern traveling am dram society, Pete was to prove his worth a week later by sending me a random text in the middle of an Amanda Palmer concert that simply said, in quotes: “One more thing: don’t get drunk and let him try to shag you on the veranda.”
Class Englishman.
For yes, we were to survive and get home and resume our old adventureless life later that week – but not before the following few hours had done their best to string out the story.
---
Here’s a truth. Two truths. Perhaps two sides of the same truth.
In a crisis, it is the tiniest things that will unearth your true metal. And there is better mobile phone reception in the Bay of Bloody Biscay than there is anywhere near Guildford.
Chewing chunks out of my fist with delirious frustration, as two dappled hours of trundling train-play trundled past, it was only as we neared Waterloo, that I finally knew.
“We have a trombone player.” I said, looking up. “And a horn player. We have the full band.”
“Minus you, you tit” said my wise companion, throwing my bag at me as the platform slid past the windows.
Except she wouldn’t say something exactly like that. But those were none-the-less true sentiments as we pulled on our bag handles one more time and tottered out into the London evening.
---
Earl’s Court isn’t all that far by tube from Waterloo. But it was enough time to wonder what on earth I was supposed to do when I eventually staggered into the Troubadour, assuming we found it, two hours into the Unofficial Book Fair Fringe Party.
When I finally saw the legendary pub’s name, there on Old Brompton Road, and fumbled with its shabby door, and staggered down it’s windy little staircase, and exploded into Sebastian’s moody book reading in a shower of tumbling cases and expletives, I was beyond caring about making a tit of myself that night. We’d bloody made it.
We’d actually bloody made it.
WE’D ACTUALLY BLOODY MADE IT!
And, as if in a movie about an unknown but plucky but poorly-hair-styled musician, battling the odds to make it for his big night, his big coming out, everybody actually cheered. The place went wild.
…Or as wild as about twenty people can go in a small cellar bar. But you’re missing the point.
To my disproportionate delight, Sebastian – compare, talent and event organiser – had been reading out my Tweets. I had been expected. Our story had been followed. And we had brought the story alive by actually ruddy, bloody, chuffing, sodding-well making it.
---
Conclusion.
You’re going to ask me about the gig, I suppose.
Did it go passingly well?
Did I pass out before or during my performance?
Did I, in fact, make a right royal tit of myself?
Well, you ask a good question. And I would begin my answer by saying that, trust me, you never ever want to do “live soundchecking” ever. Not when you are a band of noisy horns and souzamaphones and drumamabobs and a speaky-word titamaboob on a teeny tiny stage, trying to play to a bleeping computer mix. No.
But, opening-number-wincing apart on my part, remarkably – nay improbably, absurdly, ridiculously – the first ever line up of the Momo:tempo Electro Pops Orchestra appeared to make a walloping great crowd-pleasing ker-thwallop of fun.
Which ever way you look at it, apparently… baby we’re back.
“We floated into its land-locked harbour silently by divine guidance, right up on the beach: and disembarked to lie where we had landed for two days and two nights, our hearts devoured by fatigue and pain.”
Homer, from The Odyssey.
“Rock stars ... is there anything they don’t know?”
Homer Simpson.
---
To see a few pictures and a couple of videos from the show, click to momotempo.co.uk
or momo:tempo on Facebook.
#ashpendix:
The Tweets
Me llamo Momo. Y at this rate I may be doing my London gig live via satellite from the Balearics.
#ashcloud So then Europe is spinning its wheels furiously. People sleeping on terminal floors everywhere and we’re stuck in the bally Erics.
9:10 AM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Monday’s gig aside, the staying/trying to go spend ratio here is compelling. Doing nothing is not spending nothing.
9:12 AM Apr 17th
#ashcloud So we are attempting to catch the last plane out of here, off the island. So to speak, anyway. We’re packing as we speak.
9:13 AM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Should we be hanging around – comfy room, WIFI, nothing to do? Sounds like more of a holiday than a holiday. Perhaps, yes.
9:17 AM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Going to try to catch a plane to somewhere in France. Failing that, even Barcelona. Then hunt for local trains.
9:18 AM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Tomorrow is Sunday, of course. Will anything be operating? It would be easier if we weren’t out here in the middle of the Med.
9:19 AM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Well, best pioneering foot forward. Let’s see where the airport and our wallet are prepared to take us. If anywhere.
9:20 AM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Putting last things in the case now. About to check out of the hotel and make for the airport. Here goes.
9:30 AM Apr 17th
We have checked out of the nice hotel. We now currently live on a bus.
10:31 AM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Hah! In your FACE fellow European nations - the Brits know how to queue in a crisis; look at that ordely snake. No clumping here.
11:16 AM Apr 17th
#ashcloud No flights from Mallorca to virtually anywhere in Europe. Flights to Spain clogged and expensive. Trains, roads, ferries - eesh.
12:03 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud “It was the beginning of the rout of civilisation! (with orderly murmering) DUH-DUH DAAAH!” They should tannoy War Of The Worlds.
12:12 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Genius. Just heard that the French railways are on strike today! Tay Jay no Vay. Gotta love the Gaul.
12:17 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Forced to queue in Ryanair queue now for hours. Feel my ingenuity bitch-slapped into submission by dwindling options. Am a drone.
1:13 PM Apr 17th
Wait. I have the backing beats with me in the case. WE’RE DOING THE GIG RIGHT HERE IN DEPARTURES.
1:16 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Has it come to this? Hugging a pillar because our arrival at it in the queue represents genuine achievement?
1:59 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Getting a booth swoon on; it’s suddenly so close. Booth, don’t tease me drunk with your utterly false sense of purpose.
2:02 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud If booth rumours are to be believed, you’ll never believe what they are about to tell us.
2:07 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud We were offered a seat on NEXT Saturday’s flight to Bomo. .. OR a flight to Madrid NOW. ..NOW! GO!
2:37 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud We are apparently getting on a plane to Madrid. Right now. Then we are trying to find a train to Bilbao. Then a ferry home?
2.45 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Momo is in Madrid! Just getting off the plane now. Random. Are we back in the game, gang? 4:47 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud The art of the queue is being learned all over Europe this weekend. Is Saturday night in Madrid always this sweaty and slow?
7:10 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud May take a while to find out if any trains are even going to Bilbao tonight. Or if we’re in the right estacion. Doh!
7:14 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Tired interaily group of youths ahead have hopeful but feeble sign limply strewn on their bag pile: “France! Por favor”.
7:18 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Everyone is still queueing calm, but all think all is bust. “You in the green number streams - what silly sod broke the matrix?”
7:24 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Denied. No train to Bilbao until tomorrow afternoon. Checking out buses. Also thanking God for Haribo, with no guilt.
7:40 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Madrid train station was like last plane out of Casablanca - middle class refugees everywhere.
8:25 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Now at Madrid bus station. More refugees but a bus to Bilbao at 01.30? Really? And space on it? Soon find out.
8:33 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Get in! Caroline shoots and scores from well outside the box, bypassing the queue with a nifty ticket machine shot. Bilbao bound!
8:45 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Can you believe - odyssey continues! Coffee from the nice lady at the kiosk in the middle of the chugging bus terminal. An oasis.
8:49 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Set up camp on a bench surrounded by buses and commuters - have all the essentials, like olives, baguette, pate, pesto, Dairylea.
8:52 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Very happy. But Caroline’s face drops suddenly, middle of decadent feast: “Nuh,” she scowls, “no vino Tintoretto”. Rats.
8:55 PM Apr 17th
#ashcloud Surrounded by other refugees, waiting for the bus to leave, we’re watching 1970s’ Survivors on the laptop. Brilliant.
10:56 PM Apr 17th
#ashtag We are on and we are off. Looks like ours is a specially-laid-on second big bus to Bilbao. What fates await us at sunrise?
12:39 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag It’s still dark. But they are turfing us off, the heavy implication being that we are IN BILBAO.
5:16 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag Bleerily staring at a map, I see that the Guggenheim is a mere potter along the road away from the bus terminal. So near.
5:38 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag Instead of art, culture or bed we are once more underground; nocturnal mole people, seeking the one true light of our people’s quest
5:40 AM Apr 18th
- the correct train to the P&O ferry port. >yawn<
5:42 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag So, half six on this Sunday morning, as we wait for our connecting train we ask ourselves: how fat is the chance of finding a ferry?
5:44 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag As dawn rises over the ferry port close to Bilbao, we sit and ponder; there IS a ferry today. It is booked up to buggery.
6:44 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag The next ferry is Wednesday. It too is fully booked. Only a miracle will get us out of Spain soon; have we used up too many already?
6:47 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag The shabby ferry terminal fills up with more families of holiday refugees, all imagining there would be more ferries. Ah, no.
8:00 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag We sit, exhausted. What next, then? >sigh< “Meester en Meesees Peeech to main desk please” the tannoy suddenly barks. Whuh?
8:03 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag Feel free to utterly disbelieve this. I am in a daze. At the desk is a chap with a four-berth cabin. He is alone.
8:06 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag in front of a weary throng of queuing hopefuls we are offered two tickets. Place goes silent with the concentration of all eyes.
8:08 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag Am I Charlie in the chocolate factory, or a heartless bastard? A kid whines. An old man looks at me with watery eyes.
8:16 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag I take the bloody tickets in a swift snatch. WE’RE ON THE BOAT.
8:18 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag Can it be true? Are we really going to make it? We sit in fatigued dilerium with our two new chums. The second bloke is from Bomo.
8:54 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag I can’t believe it; we’re going to make it. I laugh an empty little laugh. Momo will make the gig! I lean back, beginning to relax.
8:57 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag “Yep,” says one of the chaps with a grin, “by 4.30 Monday afternoon we’ll be in Portsmouth.” I fall backwards off my seat.
8:59 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag How? How did we not know this is a 30 hour voyage, not a 12 hour? 4.30. Now look at the gig event page again. Now do the math.
9:02 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag I have a LOT of calls to make on that bloody boat. And some pants to scrub out.
9:04 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag Sitting here waiting, I think: “Sheesh, where can I get a piano?!” Then tannoy woman barks: “Come to the piano desk!” OH STOP IT.
9:28 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag Realise momentarily she said “P&O desk.” Ah. That makes more sense, yes.
9:30 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag I appear to be sitting in front of a bottle of flimsy European beer on board a dirty great boat. I’m on the ruddy boat.
11:13 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag We are aboard - but is this the Pride Of Bilbao or Thunder Child? Might hear a cheer as we get a blast of heat ray trying to leave.
11:27 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag Carnage in that little hut, trying to board. People tried hard to keep nice. Ferry just not big enough. How the hell did we make it?
11:30 AM Apr 18th
So, gang - the gig. Can it yet be done? After all that, can I make it onto the Troob’s little stage wih something worth showing and telling?
11:35 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag If we CAN find a way from Portsmouth to London fast-as-arse on Monday and I run out into the spot, will I STILL be in THESE PANTS?
11:42 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag I still need a piano. And a tamborine. And a funny-voice harmoniser. And the rest of the band. And this boat NOT to be leaving late.
11:46 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag The boat’s leaving late obviously. But, thanks to the prayers of this guilt ridden man, it IS leaving with the watery-eyed old man.
11:48 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag Have to say, huge props to Pete and Paddy for becoming our bunk buddies. Pete’s had thankyou offers from all three of us.
11:58 AM Apr 18th
#ashtag BA announce no flights tomorrow. The cloud is over most of Europe now. People are doing amazingly at coping with eachother.
12:04 PM Apr 18th
#ashtag Meanwhile, we ARE pissed.
12:05 PM Apr 18th
#ashtag No we’re not; we have souls. Itchy knickers make you say impulsive things. Someone hose me down in the yard.
12:07 PM Apr 18th
#ashtag Pete: “On the whole, I think I’ve enjoyed being ashed.” Momo: “That’s just the boat talking.”
12:10 PM Apr 18th
#ashtag Paddy’s asked the skipper to get me to London pronto. I believe the skipper said: YOU’RE NOT HELPING. HOW DID YOU GET IN HERE?
12:13 PM Apr 18th
#ashtag Of course, I do know that the money I’ve spent doing this roaming nonsense could have flown me home on a private bloody chopper.
12:17 PM Apr 18th
#ashtag BACK! WE’RE BACK! Aledgedly, through the thick haze in front of me, is the blessed Isle of Wight. And that very nice lobster cafe.
3:31 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Biscay was inexplicably flat and sunny the whole way - no swell at all. Channel was like glittering glass this morning. Sweet.
3:33 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag A boat full of passengers have been jolly and bonkers for 30 hours, forgetting their discomforts fast. But everyone is delierous.
3:35 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag No 3G or other Internet for 30 hours. Almost no phone nets either. Quiet. Odd. We’ve spent most of the time dozing and drinking.
3:37 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Approaching Portsmouth. Unbelievable luck to be here. Gunning for the gig still, insanely. I have at least half a band promised.
3:38 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag So. Have to go below. Have to berth. Have to get off. Have to find taxi fast. Have to find train. Back in a bit, gang - here goes...
3:39 PM Apr 19th
@johnmclear Bilbao and Santander only have sailings 2 or 3 times a week. We cheekily just turned up but all is officially booked out.
4:17 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag A throng is waiting at the passenger doors to disembark. More queueing and crossing of streams and Excuse Mes and sudden standing.
4:22 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Someone’s having a last laugh with us vulnerable middle class refugees by standing up decisively with their bags. So did we all.
4:32 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Denied. Pushy bunch on a boat from the Channel Isles get to ‘discharge’ before us. Rufians. Bounders. All the nice people here sigh
4:36 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag ..and then sensibly squash forward a little more. ‘15 more minutes’ be hashed, skipper - WE’RE STORMING THE BORDER. RIGHT EVERYONE?
4:40 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag The lifts are beside us. The doors forlornly open and close periodically on the stuck throng. One bloke has appeared three times.
4:44 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Conspicuous thunk-rumble below; his was the car right at the very front, presumably.
4:47 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag A rumour flashes round: the doors are open! A rumour started by the skipper on the tannoy. We surge.
4:52 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Off. Air. Daylight. ..More queueing.
5:01 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Just heard from the drummer. He’s at the Troubadour and set up. That’s one of us. We have one.
5:03 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Clutching passports and bags we emerge, blinking into the evening sun. And a cue for the taxi.
5:17 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag TV cameras roam. People thank the god of phone network coverage. Others suffering a touch of the Stockholms sit where they are.
5:19 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag In a cab. Queues of them flank around Portsmouth, crawling into the port. Can’t get one in town apparently. More refugees then.
5:23 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Portsmouth, like ports across north Europe, is clogged. Driver said he saw Gatwick yesterday - “ghost town”.
5:31 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Have train tickets, sitting on the platform in the evening south coast sunshine. 17.50 train to Waterloo.
5:43 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Commuters are stranded on the steps of Portsmouth & Southsea station. Cabs are obviously ditching those regular losers.
5:46 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag We’re on the train. We’re going to London. Dawns on us that we are going to LONDON not HOME.
5:52 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag After however-many hundred miles of trapseing around Europe, why the hell are we now going to LONDON? Momo’s set is only 30 mins.
6:21 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Now heard from both the sax player and the trombone player - they’re nearly there, WITH the stand-in horn player.
6:23 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag I’ve never met the stand-in horn player. I am turning up to a gig to go straight onto a stage, without soundcheck, with strangers.
6:27 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Let you know how that works out for me then.
6:29 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag So Mark, Dave, Patrick and Tom are there. We have the talent. Just need the prat at the front. And the laptop at the back.
6:31 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Incidentally, network coverage loss in middle of Biscay = understandable niggle. Near Guildford = last straw. >picks up chair< ...
6:48 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Approaching London town. How clear is my head going to be by the time we bowl in to the Unofficial Book Fair Fringe Party?
6:58 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag How demented is this? All bets are off on demented levels after this week; warships are dispatching to get holiday makers. SN=AFU.
7:01 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Said goodbye to new chum Pete. The British can keep themselves endlessly amused in adversity with queues and quotes from Blackadder
7:05 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag I can see the London Eye. I can see us actually making the ruddy gig. Actually.
7:24 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Waterloo. Need the loo.
7:29 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Better reception on the District line than all bleedin’ day.
7:51 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag We are at Earl’s Court. We are walking out of the station. We are turning right and hoping we saw the map up the right way.
7:56 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag We can see the Troubadour!
8:25 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag We are SITTING IN THE TROUBADOUR.
8:25 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Chilling at the Unofficial Book Fair Fringe Party. Sublime sounds, friends all around. All is good. We are actually here.
9:13 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag The horns quickly found the Fabulously Cool Booth to hang in. Look like a Miles Davis album shot or something. Somebody smoke!
9:18 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Tonight, I all of a sudden appear to have a band.
9:19 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag Hello. I am on the stage of the Troubadour.
10:44 PM Apr 19th
#ashtag We are going home. The first ever incarnation of the Momo:tempo Electro Pops Orchestra was brilliant. Much love for all support.
12:17 AM Apr 20th
#ashtag How the hell did we make it home? Thoughts to all who are not yet home. Hope you at least get a good story out of it. Godspeed.
12:20 AM Apr 20th
#ashtag Keep an eye on momotempo.co.uk for the sordid video evidence sometime soon.
12:22 AM Apr 20th
# #ashtag Ruddy nora, I’m ashed. Ciao for now. X
12:23 AM Apr 20th
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It was sublime musicianship and soul. And it made me want to forget about any work plans and dogged, sensible ambitions and just go write some tunes and words that no-one may ever hear without any worry about it.
Who cares? God has your tunes on his iPod, man. Including all those even you didn't realise you'd written.
And this is one of the coolest things about lots of sun: It eventually gets to your head.
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