The Day The Music Died

I’m wondering if I have fallen out of love with music.

Or, to be precise, new music. The discovery of it. The giving a go of new bands. The trying something new. I seem to have become as locked into the music of my formative years as my parents were when I was a kid.

Why does that happen?

When I was a teenager (though I came to record buying late) I was an avid music consumer. I would buy a batch of records every week. Singles, EPs, LPs, picture discs, I couldn’t get enough. I can remember going to a record shop in Birmingham and spending so much money that the shop assistant was kind enough to not ring the amount up on the till to save me from embarrassment. I must have blown an entire week’s wages in one go on rare records and collectibles. That seems so obscenely hedonistic now.

In no time at all I had built up an impressive collection of literally hundreds and hundreds of records (which I still own). They took over my entire bedroom. All of them boxed, alphabetized and inventorized. It was a collection that I lavished love and time on. And each weekend I’d carefully load up my turntable with my latest acquisitions, carefully wiping the dust off them with the special cloth I had bought for this purpose and savouring each hiss and pop of the needle swinging itself into the opening groove.

It was my life.

And then somehow, in the nineties, my expenditure dropped off, my interest waned and was pulled elsewhere. I moved on and got into other things. Books, computers, gadgetry, travel. The fact that the nineties were an awful decade for decent music only hastened me out of the scene.

And now, here in 2009, I’m somehow completely on the outside of it all. On the outside looking in but unsure of where the door is or if I even have enough interest to want to open it and step inside. A few new bands have caught my ear – The Doves, The Editors – but I haven’t gone as fanatically overboard on them as I did when All About Eve arrived on the music scene in 1985 or when Kate Bush released “Hounds Of Love” in the same year.

The passion for new music has left me.

My MP3 player is proof of this. The majority of its contents have been sucked from my CD collection and I’d say that 90% of that is from the eighties. I’ve become trapped in my very own time warp.

I’m no longer “down with the kids”. I’m looking at them and frowning at the infernal noise they listen to and dare to call music – much the same way, I suspect, as when my father just couldn’t appreciate the blisteringly fierce music of The Jam’s “Funeral Pyre” and dismissed it as tuneless rubbish. At the time his music of choice was Buddy Holly and Marty Robbins.

Is this the fate that has now befallen me?

Worryingly, checking my MP3 player this morning, I can’t fail to notice that “El Paso” is already on there...

*Sigh* It’ll be “Rave On” next.

And not in a cool way either.

"Ang Is A Sket"

This particularly informative piece of graffiti appeared on the road outside my house late last week. Applied with white aerosol paint the letters are about a foot high and each word has been rendered with a wobbly capital.

I have, I admit, been tempted to take a photo of it to publish it here for your delectation but, much as I love you all, being run over by a passing BMW or a souped-up moped doesn’t strike me as a suitable pay-off for my photographic skills so you’ll just have to use your imagination.

I had to Google the word "sket". I’m afraid I’ve long lost touch with street slang and youth speak but there are some bizarre resources available online which can bring one up to speed in no time at all (the Urban Dictionary being invaluable). Sket, for your information, means a loose woman of elastic morals. Or thereabouts. You get the picture I’m sure.

So basically some love-struck teen has discovered that his gal has been spooning some other chap behind his back and it’s soured his brandy somewhat to the point where he feels he must besmirch her good name in the nature of a painterly public broadcast announcement to warn all us other chappies to steer well clear of her unless we’re not averse to taking sloppy seconds.

How sweet.

I can’t help feeling sorry for Ang for all that she may be no angel. I can’t help but think of her every morning as the wife, kids and I pile into our little red Peugeot and inevitably drive over her name as we set off for our various destinations in town.

She’s been condemned without a fair trial. She may be innocent and of unblemished character but the tarmac now accuses her of base harlotry. She may even be guilty, may lie on her back nightly with a whole regiment of thrusting young bucks... but there may be mitigating circumstances. Maybe her "official" boyfriend is something of a sket himself or just plain nasty and she has sought comfort in the arms of someone more worthy and more understanding of her needs.

Whoever she is, I can’t help thinking how upset she must feel to see her name cast so indelibly to the dirt in this way. How awful if she lives in the same street (which presumably she does) and has to pass this graffiti every day with her parents or her siblings. What must they think? The shame must be burning her up inside.

I hoped, when I first saw the lettering, that a good rain shower or two might wash it all away. But no, Mr Paragon Of Virtue Himself saw fit to spray his snide little missive in permanent paint. Nearly a week later it’s still there, as bright and brazen as when it was first applied. Hester Prynne must be turning in her fictional grave.

Whoever you are, sir, I put it to you that there are worse things in life than being a sket.

Being petty and immature are two of them.

It’s That Time Of Year Again

I’ve ranted about this before.

But like a poo that just won’t flush away it keeps coming back.

Fireworks.

I’m not trying to ban them. I’m not trying to make them Public Enemy no. 1. But I would, if I’m honest, like to see them more strictly controlled.

Now, I’m not a fun-puritan or a celebration-Nazi but it seems bizarre to me that a shop needs a license to sell fireworks but any idiot with a debit card or the cash can buy them.

Absolutely any idiot. Any idiot at all.

And they do. In droves. (Actually what is the collective noun for idiots? A pranite? A trough? A smear?)

We’re only half way through October but already we’ve had our evenings disturbed by the war in Afghanistan being reenacted outside and this nightly barrage will continue well into November as the shops who greedily stockpiled their weapons of mass disruption continue to offload them onto pyromaniacal youths with expensive Nike’s and cheap cigarette lighters in order to recoup their initial expenditure.

Where do these youths get the money from to buy all this gunpowder? I’m not talking about the odd bang every hour (hey – sounds like a great night in) but a whole orchestra of explosions and aerial eruptions. A veritable symphony of aural fire and destruction. And I’m not talking about little fizzes and popping noises either; I’m talking about the kind of detonations that could dissolve kidney stones if the sufferer was standing close enough.

The windows shake. The cable TV connection twitches. Pacemakers pause (literally) for a heartbeat.

The kids are disturbed. I’m disturbed. The TV is disturbed. And animals... well, animals just become disturbed.

And for what? Some pretty coloured lights in the sky. And that’s before we get onto the subject of burns, accidents, malicious damage (great name for a record company) and the number of deaths caused by unregulated firework usage in the UK alone.

I have personally witnessed youths launching fireworks horizontally down the middle of the road in a bid to prove how dumb and dumberer (great name for a film) they really are. Or worse still, throwing them – ignited – across a road. And then you read about the ones that launch fireworks through people’s letterboxes or light them inside a house or tie them to the tail of someone’s pet... on and on it goes. People who can’t be trusted with a bottle of Clearasil are being allowed to play with gunpowder at night on our own streets! It’s positively insane!

In my opinion it’s criminal.

So. I’m not saying “let’s ban fireworks”.

I’m saying let’s ban the sale of fireworks to individuals. Let’s have properly organized displays only. They’re safer. They’re more cost effective. They’re more entertaining. And, even better, they’re confined to a single night of the year.

Sorted.

So am I making sense? Or am I just an older banger with a short fuse?

Answers on a rocket to the usual address please...

Meeting The Locals

Wednesday evenings have somehow become take-away night. The reasons for this are far too mundane to go into so I shall skip them. But being a connoisseur of the fish & chip supper I’ve been taking myself off to the local chippie at the appointed hour there to purchase the finest cod and chips that my hard won money can buy.

It’s a mere 5 minute walk to the top of the street but it does take me through the badlands – the rough end of the street; the wrong side of the tracks, etc.

By and large I’ve encountered no trouble but have passed some sights that have encouraged an occasional bout of rubber-necking. Couples arguing in cars. The contents of front rooms scattered over DIY gravel drives. And enough snotty nosed 7 year old smoking Marlborough’s to make me think this country’s potential population explosion might be naturally capped in about 40 year’s time.

This Wednesday, however, was different.

There I was, my freshly wrapped chips slung under my arm, heading towards home when 4 lanky youths disembarked very untidily from a house on the other side of the street.

Naturally, minding my own business, I attracted their dubious attention.

Initially I got the ubiquitous “alright mate”. I admit I didn’t respond. I’m rather choosy about whom I consider to be a mate. Maybe this was my mistake? The next two comments were plainly insults – I can’t even recall what they were – followed by loud, rather effeminate hooting laughter.

I didn’t respond again. I carried on walking. Neither quickening nor slowing my pace. Curiously I didn’t actually feel threatened. I’d quickly surmised that these paragons of teenage virtue were no more than 14 or 15 and were merely being buoyed up by each other’s leaking testosterone. On their own they wouldn’t have said boo to a goose.

But afterwards I did feel angry. Not seething, blood boiling angry but angry in a “maybe I should have crossed the road and lamped one of them” kind of angry. Why should they be allowed to get away with such behaviour? What makes them think they can act so aggressively to complete strangers and not have any come-back?

I know, I know.

It’s not worth the risk of a flick-knife in the guts. I’ve got a wife and kids at home. I’ve got cod and chips under my arm. All they’ve got is their own inferiority driving them on to acts of desperate foolhardiness.

But nevertheless the anger was there. Little shits.

In the past I have responded when a complete stranger has seen fit to be arsy with me in the street. I haven’t really thought about it. I’ve just hit boiling point straight away and launched in with some particularly nasty vitriol. The old adage that lions roar so loudly to avoid combat has held true. My opponent has usually turned tail and beat a mouthy retreat.

Afterwards I’ve usually kicked myself for being so damned stupid. But I can’t deny that I’ve also felt a small, glowing sense of satisfaction that I’ve held my own. Stuck up for myself. Taken no shit.

This Wednesday I was just too tired, too preoccupied, and possibly more sensible.

But even so. I can’t help wishing I’d kicked some ass.

Do you think it’s possible I have been exposed to a small dose of gamma radiation?

Making New Cheese Out Of Old Cheese

I don’t believe it.

They’re bringing back Knight Rider.

Re-made, re-cast and possibly retro-fitted, Michael Knight and his camp Kit car are already gearing up to turbo-boost back onto our TV screens sometime this Autumn.

And I feel nothing but dismay.

Some things are just best left alone.

Most of the TV shows from the eighties being a case in point.

Although I have fond memories of Knight Rider, The A-Team and Airwolf et al, they are time-locked into a small, blessedly sealed, period of my teenage years and that is where I’d prefer them to remain.

My teenage years weren’t great. I was shy, geeky and nerdy and not particularly a success with the ladies. I lived most of the time in my head, my imagination fuelled by the shows above, my morals and political outlook to a degree informed by the heroes who machine gunned their way to justice and democracy for all. In my innocence I bought unthinkingly into the American way.

Yes folks. I wanted to be Michael Knight. I wanted to be David Hasselhoff.

Oh the shame. And I’d rather not have to relive it.

Well, to be honest, I never wanted to actually be Michael / David. But I did covet the car. I coveted the car in a big way. Yes, I wanted a car that looked butch but was, at heart, gay... Though that gayness is only apparent in retrospect. At the time it wasn’t so obvious. Kit was, well, just Kit. Just as C3PO was just C3PO (and not a metallic version of Charles Hawtrey – which he plainly is).

Looking back on it it’s plain to see why I was such a messed up teen.

But that aside, I’m just sick of this regurgitation of the eighties. It’s lazy. Nostalgia is nice when it is infrequent but not as a permanent mindset. And nostalgia certainly isn’t an art form worth spending money on.

But plainly I’m wrong.

Some TV money man somewhere obviously feels Knight Rider is good for a few bucks more. So they’re wheeling it back out of the scrap yard only this time without the Hoff.

Which surely is a bit like having The A-Team without Mr T?

Or Star Trek without Shatner?

Er...

OK.

That last point wasn’t argued so well but even so...

It’s just not going to be the same. It’s like – having mentioned Hawtrey above – trying to remake the Carry On films. It cannot be done. Sure you can emulate all the physical / visible ingredients. But what you can’t recreate is the original time frame. Nostalgia just cannot be contemporized.

Now, maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe they will inject a whole new ethos into it. New blood into old wine skins, etc, or whatever the saying is. But why bother when you can buy the originals of every bloody series from the eighties on Amazon?

I mean, can people not write anything new anymore?

What are they going to remake next?

Street Hawk (remember that anyone)?

Whizz Kids (anybody)?

CHiPs?

Geez. CHiPs. Please, please don’t get me started on Eric Estrada...

The Death Of Magic

When I was an impressionable teen I got into magic. Or rather the idea of magic. In fact this occult interest lasted well into my impressionable twenties.

At the time the occult section of Waterstones (now, I believe, respectably entitled “Health, Body and Spirit” or some such) was bursting at its magical seams with middle class grimoires from the likes of Laurie Cabot and other darker tomes from the late, great and dangerous-to-know Aleister Crowley, who is in fact a fellow Leamingtonian.

I have to say I was swept along more by the theory than the practice though I do recall once going into an “alternative” shop in York and buying a wand that looked like a Native American phallus. All dangly feathers and a ruddy great bulbous crystal sprouting from the end of it. It languished under my bed for years until I offloaded it onto a kooky ex back in 2003. I don’t miss it at all.

As for Crowley... well I was never tempted to try out any of his Magick™, beleaguered as it was with demons, drugs and downright moral depravity but I did purchase a lot of his books. I got about 2 thirds through his immense autohagiography (for those of you who don’t know an autohagiography is supposedly the biography of a saint) before getting bogged down in lengthy "he said / she said" transcripts of various conversations Aleister had enjoyed in various privileged gentleman’s clubs across Europe. It all got a bit stuffy. I just wanted the salacious bedroom exploits and the otherworldly descriptions of the Abyss not the scripts from an Open University staff meeting.

I still own the books and have a few rarities too including a copy of his very dirty poem “Leah Sublime” (which in the modern age is no worse than a 6th form Rugby song).

I keep them now not out or any respect for magical lore but as interesting historical documents. As a figure Aleister Crowley has, I think, stood the test of time. The magical theories, I’m afraid, I now view as complete bunkum. It’s plainly obvious that Crowley was doped to his eyeballs most of the time on heroin and cocaine and various other Victorian opiates and spent a great deal of his time reading esoteric texts and then hallucinating as a direct consequence.

One story from the autohag is a case in point:

Aleister recounts an occasion when he saved a man servant’s life by wrestling a demon to the ground. It’s one of the signature notes of his autohag and makes a great read. However, that same man servant later independently recounts Aleister taking various drugs and then suddenly attacking him. The man servant was lucky to get away with his life, his dignity and his virtue intact. Enough said.

But there was more to Aleister than the dodgy magic. There was philosophy, literature, appalling poetry and a rock and roll lifestyle a good 60 years before rock and roll was even invented. He’s a genuinely interesting character and I may write more about him in the future but don’t have the room or the time now.

Laurie Cabot – an American white witch – is another case entirely. Stephen Fry met her earlier this year during one of his televised road trips across the States and she came across as an aging nutter who spent her time living in a yurt for the tourists and touting feather-based love charms for the sad, lonely and financially incontinent.

I can’t believe I ever fell for any of that crap. It all seems utterly ridiculous now.

Me and magic have, alas, parted company. I’m no longer a believer.

Which isn’t to say I don’t keep an open mind on ghosts, UFOs, and other paranormal oddities.

But magic... magic I’d like to believe in but sadly just don’t anymore. I’ve grown out of it. It’s a young man’s dream, borne out of ignorance and wishful thinking; a desire to control the uncontrollable.

Nowadays I’m more accepting of the uncontrollable. In fact part of me is rather glad that there are some things beyond my control – I can take neither responsibility nor blame for them. It’s an immense relief.

And yet...

...and yet there is a tiny part of me that is sad that I have lost this wide eyed belief in magic. The world seems a little smaller, a little greyer as a consequence. It’s like figuring out the true identity of Father Christmas. You still get the presents. Nothing physically changes in the world.

But the magic has gone.

Twitching The Nets

There’s been a double departure from out street this week.

Two sets of neighbours have vanished in the night leaving an assortment of detritus in their wake (an old mattress, a swivel chair and an assortment of mildewed shelving).

The first was the Polish family that lived in the counterpart to our semi and used to impinge upon our back garden privacy by staging volcanic barbecues every weekend and walk around in bollock revealing shorts whenever there was the slightest hint of sunshine.

I shall miss their loud arguments in Polish – the wife was particularly vocal – and their pigeon English as they tried to make small talk with us with the small change of their English vocab. But what I won’t miss is the door slamming, the stomping up the stairs, the late night hoovering or their eldest son who played the guitar so loud late one night that I was forced to go round and knock on his front door.

I didn’t get very far. His parents were out and with typical teenage nerve he tried to tell me that he didn’t even own a guitar and that the music was coming from a house about 20 yards away on the other side of the street... totally overlooking the fact that while he was stood at the door talking to me Mr Hendrix had mysteriously downed tools mid-lick. I wasn’t happy: after being on this planet for nearly 40 years, I’ve pretty much worked out how my hearing works and can divine where sounds are coming from and know when someone is trying to take the proverbial.

The damned temerity! I came away wishing I’d clipped him around the ear but the guitar playing didn’t start up again so I guess it was a victory of sorts. Young whippersnapper!

The other departure is even more welcome. The people whose Rottweiler has terrorized half the street for the last 2 years have finally gone taking with them Cujo (or whatever the dog’s name is), sundry ill fed rabbits and a particularly pernicious black and white cat that couldn’t deem a day done until it had shat on our lawn.

Our youngest, Tom, has (alas) inherited his father’s ability to wonder across an open field and step straight into the only instance of animal excrement for miles around and then carry it into the house in a compact little pat on the heel of his shoes. Suffice it to say, I shall not miss the cat at all.

The biggest relief though is the removal of the dog. Some of you will be aware of the worry and trouble that it has caused us and other neighbours by frequently escaping from its own garden and rampaging through ours and everybody else’s.

I am an animal lover but this dog was terrifying. Huge, bad tempered and slightly unhinged. Not what you want snarling around when you have young children who love nothing better than pottering about outside.

We last saw the dog last week. Again on the loose. Eyes wide with agitation. Bounding up and down the street and biting chunks out of the bumpers of passing vehicles.

The Poles (at a push) we shall miss. But as for the doggers...

Good riddance to ‘em.

Au Naturale

Whilst looking for some nice pics of Jasmine Harman for my previous post (a very pleasant way to spend ten minutes) I came across this on-line "news" item – forgive the inverted commas but it is the News Of The World Magazine after all.

It seems Jasmine was given the opportunity to have a Photoshop makeover.

She gave a body beautiful wish-list to some computer graphics geek and - hey presto - he airbrushed and pixel-tweaked a picture of Jasmine to her own vision of perfection. The result can be seen above.

What is interesting about this "experiment" (‘cos it’s not just an excuse to publish a picture of a pretty woman in a bikini, no sirree, absolutely not) is that Jasmine didn’t like the results. She didn't like the perfect version of herself at all but preferred herself as she really is.

How refreshing, because I have to say that so do I. And for the same reasons that Jasmine cites. The perfect version looks unreal. Unnatural.

Now maybe this is just because the graphic artist was piss-poor at his job and his eye for (so called) perfection was as canted as most teenagers who only get to see a woman’s naked body when it has a couple of staples running through the navel or when it’s badly pixellated on porntube.

Or maybe some of us more enlightened folk just prefer the real deal?

There is after all something adolescent and immature about what constitutes (in men’s eyes at least) the “perfect” female body. Pneumatic breasts with nipples that forever point upwards no matter where gravity is pulling them. Washboard stomach as taut as a drum-skin. Thighs as smooth as fleshly applied plaster (by a professional obviously).

Women with those attributes only exist in top shelf magazines and the fashion glossies.

Literally. We all know they’ve been as airbrushed as Jasmine’s picture above (just more insidiously).

They don’t actually exist in the real world.

Such injudicious tweaking gives people – men and women – false expectations of themselves and each other. Well, this is hardly news.

But sadly we now live in a world where even the most outlandish expectation can be met if you have enough wonga to pay for it.

Which got me thinking. How many people who have plastic surgery to marry themselves up to some flawed idea of perfection end up secretly hating the result once the surgery and the healing process is over? Or wishing they could revert back to how they were before?

It’s a very expensive mistake to make. I bet Jasmine is pleased she merely went under a virtual knife than a real one.

As am I. I moved away from the airbrushed woman (homo-airbrushus) in my late teens early twenties. A real woman is always far more attractive and far sexier in my opinion – and yes that includes cellulite and boob-droop and a wobbly belly.

I just hope that all the women that sigh over chesty pin-ups like Daniel Craig and George Clooney secretly feel the same way about us men. Because believe you me, none of us are physically perfect either.

The airbrush doesn’t give a damn about gender… it just wants to sell a little more copy.

The Cock Tree

This newest of Leamington landmarks appeared, proud and ready erect, sometime in the run-up to Christmas.

One morning the tree was inoffensively asexual and passive and the next it was unmistakably male and “up for it”.

The worst thing about this most unimaginative bit of graffito is that it lies (stands?) smack bang in the middle of my route home from work and is absolutely unavoidable unless I take a detour of several hundred miles (a bit of an exaggeration) in order to avoid the accusing stare of it’s malicious helmet.

When you are on foot after an exhausting day at work such a detour is, quite frankly, unpalatable and so I inevitably run the gamut of the helmet and find myself tutting at it every single time.

Lord knows I’ve tried to see the funny side. I mean graffiti can be entertaining. Even educational when it’s produced by someone with a brain cell that can rub its shoulder up against another one.

Maybe there is some hidden pagan quality about this site that I am in complete ignorance of? Maybe it is a site of extraordinary virility like The Long Man of Wilmington? Scores of barren women come to this tree by night, drop their camisoles and sit praying meditatively for a patient and cold buttocked half hour on its gnarled and horny roots (steady!) in the hope that the old gods of the forest will make their wombs fruitful and overflowingly productive?

Maybe this graffito is an emblem of an all male secret society that I have patently not been invited to join that celebrates the leaping vitality of the male member in various (inevitably) homo-erotic rites that would, to quote Morrissey, make Caligula blush? They meet by night, swigging bottles of Diamond White and cans of Special Brew, and there by the light of the full moon they sing carousing songs of maleness, pledge allegiance to Old One Eye and prove their devotion to the cause by dropping their hoodies to reveal their... er... hoodies...

Sadly I suspect not.

Sadly I suspect the real story is that a rival gang from one of Leamington’s neighbouring towns – Warwick or Kenilworth perhaps – decided to make a foray into enemy territory late one night and tarnish the reputation of us resident Leamingtonians by implying, pictorially, that we are all great big nobs. Let’s face it, it could even be the handiwork of a disenchanted and disenfranchised local boy who, tired with his lot, tired with the fact that his own town refuses to see his celebrity potential and burgeoning star quality decided to hurl his overlooked artistry into the cold, uncaring faces of all those who lived and worked around him before hurling himself, aerosol can in hand, onto the train tracks at the back of Flavel’s factory, there to be squished under the locomotive wheels of the 9.25 to Dorridge.

This penis could be his final testament. His last will and willy to the world.

Oh who am I kidding?

It’s just no-good, scruffy, bored kids isn’t it? They’ve disfigured what was a very beautiful tree just for the sheer hell of it and I have to look at the damned thing every time I go home from here to sodding eternity and there is nothing that can be done about it – no cleaning agents that can remove it without damaging the tree, no way of eradicating the graffiti short of felling it’s living host. Curse them. Curse them and their amoral can of plebeian aerosol paint!

They’re great big cocks the lot of them.

Anger Management

Anger is a funny thing. Or at least Griff Rhys Jones had always assumed it was until he discovered differently during “Losing It” last night, a BBC documentary and personal exploration into his own and the world’s anger.

Jones has always struck me as “a decent bloke to work with”. I don’t know why I formed that opinion because I’ve never ever met the man, I guess, like everybody else you get pulled in and gulled by the TV persona. Now, after watching this astonishingly honest programme I’d have to say that, while I still think he’s an eminently decent bloke, he’d be absolute hell to work with. And worse to live with.

By his own admission he is a grumpy old git. And at first he staunchly defended his right to be so. Everybody gets angry, he said. Everybody feels anger. Even a psychologist friend confirmed that if he ever met someone who was calm and serene all the time he would be deeply suspicious of them. It is not natural to not get angry. Anger is a natural response to stress and let’s face it the modern world goes out of its way to create stress for all of us.

But as Jones interviewed friends, family and work associates a picture soon formed that he was something beyond the modest proportions of just “a grumpy old git”.

One of his agents recalled the first time she met Griff. He’d burst into the office in a foul mood about something and promptly kicked a hole in the office door in his rage.

“I did what?” Griff’s iron-heavy jaw dropped. “I don’t remember doing that!”

This became a pattern. People recalling some of Griff’s more flamboyant expressions of anger and Griff having no recollection of them whatsoever. For Griff, you see, once the anger was out it was dealt with and forgotten about. For Griff, looking back, circumstances weren’t as bad as maybe his anger portrayed it. For Griff there was even a chance to giggle at his mad antics whilst mad once he was calm again.

Unfortunately nobody else had this luxury. As his agent pointed out, having to constantly mop up these spillages of anger was a “heavy burden for anyone”.

Griff looked pole-axed. For the first time taking on board that maybe his tantrums weren’t as lightweight and inconsequential and natural as he’d at first thought. They affected people. They hurt people. They were not nice to deal with. As he said of his agent: “I kept waiting for her to add that ‘despite all this we had a great laugh and a good time’ but... she never said it. Not even when I fished for it.”

Sober barely covered it.

Next week Griff will be looking at various ways in which he can deal with and manage his anger and I shall certainly be tuning in because – admission time, folks – I have noticed that over the past couple of years I too have been experiencing anger. More than is usual for me.

During my teens I just didn’t have the confidence to be angry. I was small, weedy, under developed, shy and awkward socially. Expressing anger – no matter how justified – was just not permissible for me. I wanted people to like me. I was desperate for it. So I suppressed my anger. I was too small and weak to be angry. Showing anger when you’re a teen – and perhaps also when you’re an adult – seems to be tied into physical strength. You need to be able to back up and defend your anger. I mean what would I have done if someone had got angry back? Run away very quickly I suspect and then apologise profusely.

In time I forgot how to be angry.

But weirdly, with a 7 year old in the house who is showing classic signs of having an angry personality rather like Griff (i.e. gets furious whenever things happen that are outside of his control) I am finding that I am rediscovering my own anger. For the first time since I myself was a child I shout. I bang about. I swear under my breath. I walk around with my teeth clenched (ah – Dr Hassan, I think I’ve discovered the cause of my worn down teeth). I seethe below the surface.

Is this good? Is this bad? Do I have a right to express this anger? I guess it all depends on how I go about it. Certainly I have a right to own it. Certainly it proves to be useful occasionally when it stops me being pushed around at work or in the street. But do I want to be angry with my family? Is that right? Griff’s (I’m not going to say long suffering because I don’t think she is) wife admitted that when Griff is “off on one” she tends to walk away and let him get it out of his system. Do I really want Karen to react like that with me? Not, I hasten to add, that I’m in anywhere near Griff’s league... but the worrying this is, Griff didn’t think he was in that league either until he scratched below the surface...

Now that I’m holding my hands up and owning my anger... is it time for me to start managing it?

Timeslide

A chance encounter this lunchtime has set me off reminiscing...

In-between bouts of heavy rain I decided to kick-start the old MP3 player and take a mooch along one of the many river walks that perforate my home town of Leamington Spa. As luck would have it, this particular route took me by the college where I completed my art foundation course back in 1988 and where I met Dave who, for many years was my closest friend. My best friend, in fact.

Now Dave is still a good friend but life being life we now rarely see each other and hanging out never extends further these days than a rare 20 minute rushed conversation on the street corner, usually in the morning when he’s on the way to his job and I’m on my way to mine. He has a family, I have a family... What can I say? Our commitments and drives seemed to slowly separate over the years until the bond that once held us close as brothers disintegrated without either of us ever quite being aware of it.

It’s something that occasionally causes me a twinge of regret and pain but never for very long – there just isn’t room or time in my life at the moment to dwell on it. And I guess that says it all. As for Dave, well, I’m probably being unfair but I don’t think my absence from the great scheme of things particularly impinges on him at all... but that’s possibly the subject of another post.

Anyway, this lunchtime, as I wandered passed the college where Dave and I first met who should I run into? Dave Jr. Dave’s eldest son who bears an uncanny resemblance to his father when he was 18. It was odd to see him goofing around with his mates the same way Dave and I did exactly 20 years ago and in the same place. Just for a second I honestly wondered if I’d walked through a hole in time or life was inexplicably repeating itself in some kind of temporal ox-bow. Some weird loop serving no other purpose than to endlessly repeat itself.

For the briefest of moments I was 18 again with no other worries than the thought of bunking off from lessons for the afternoon, my head full of stupid ambitions and dreams which now, 20 years on, seem wasteful, ill conceived and ill chosen. Looking back at myself I was lumbered with a profound lack of direction and a hopeless lack of motivation. Not a great combo.

But when you’re 18 it’s fine. There’s plenty of time to do things, loads of time... too much time in fact. So much time you fritter it away on silly pranks and things that don’t really matter and things that are of no consequence.

And I envy Dave Jr that.

But despite the pleasurable regret, the slight sugary tinge of melancholy that is tinting my spectacles this afternoon I’m glad that I’m here and not back there. It’s good to have passed through that period and to be standing on a hillside looking back at it through a pair of wizened binoculars... because as someone clever once said: the past is a great place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there. Besides which the sexual desert that characterized my twenties is not something I’d ever care to revisit no matter how young it might make me appear.

Today then, for the first time ever, the small grey hairs in my beard and hair are most welcome. They’ve been hard won by trial and experience.

And when I was 18 I certainly would have envied myself that...