Through The Looking glass Oct. 3, 2009

And just like that, you Jane get in touch. Your web-page displays a successful childrens illustrator with more than 30 books to her name. Not the name of your youth. You have married!

I sit here at the very table I showed you and pal Sam on a slide-projector the very photos you refer to (as well as others) (it was a summer’s day – it was 1987); i am in what was and is and will always be the house of my youth. Where my mother is still. Siblings not so far away. Berkhamsted and Tring.

And it’s my Mum’s birthday (today).

I have put away my being-Stuart-Clarke/Lake-District-artist intensity for a weekend, to try and do some simple things well with my Mum, around her birthday. By the way I’ve been to see Mott The Hoople at the Hammersmith Apollo last night with me bruvver – THE band of my youth, reformed in original line-up format on this October night 37 years on from when they last played. 5 lads from a west country border town. There was always a connection with them – I collected Mott The Hoople from aged 11 when glam rock Bolan and Bowie were about…but Mott were mine. I bought the pink and white (like coconut ice) “Mott” album 12 incher from PRP record-shop and marched it home preciously (checking in the bag it was still in there, undamaged, mine) – Mott and me over the blue bridge and under and through the tunnel. And through that invisible LOOKING-glass wall that led you and led me from there.

Mott-in-hand my life changed forever as the needle accustomed to Andy Williams Mooooon River bounced and scratched along on My Mum’s old record-player positioned on the back dining-room floor out of the way, at the feet of where i am sitting now.

I was borne in this house in so many ways.

Today I walk past your old door, in Dudswell.

Ever ready to reconnect, not only with old Berko area but with why I began the football odyssey in the first place, i am revisiting over time the grass roots of the football game that so obsesses me. This can be in Hyde Park (you had a job/flat near there last time i pursued your memory and got the lowdown not from you but your Dad, more a cricket man) and these grass roots can be at Dudswell old rec, Butts Meadow, Velvet Lawn. Jane can you bring these memory places to life in a series of bright naive-art postcards (love that picture of yours “in the town where i was borne”) – i will pay for their production.

I walk on near the Grand Union Canal, past Berko Town’s ground and Graham Aiton is sat out the front and being me I recognise him but he calls me Kev (my bruvvers name). (Always fancied his tall gorgeous Scottish-looking sister Heather but it would not have worked).

I look for football near the Castle grounds, near Sam’s olden house, at Cooper’s grounds which was Kitchener’s Fields where everyone tobogganed. My grandfather whom I never knew was chief accountant for Cooper’s pharmaceuticals and agricultural supplies and built/opened many things in the town such as the town swimming-pool (the Deer-Leap also), the town’s football grounds, the Rex cinema (recently reborne). I search for and find his grave slumped up against a wall that looks as if its about to come down in that cemetery on Three Close Lane, above the Rex, almost in Ashlyns Estate – dangerous territory. (Indeed if I see Ashlyns bully Mick Duggan today, although my not being a man of violence, I shall pin him up against that dangerously leaning wall. He will have doubtless withered. And I have not).

The phone vibrates. It’s a text image of my daughter. Only offspring. And boy does she look sprung – punching the air Travolta-style about to party somewhere up there near Cleethorpes, she is dressed in red shoes, leggings and the black bolero I bought her. Another vibration and with it another image : she dancing and clutching a trumpet with a group of girls (The Band) in what looks like a Cuban balmy evening. My Ava is 4 next month.

Today I am sat on the old Woolworths spot now Waterstones and Costa Coffee, on Berkhamsted High Street, buying arty books for Ava (she is arty) (and sporty) and she phones my Mum and sings her “Happy Birthday” through several verses, quite beautifully.

We surrounded by books… which you yourself might have designed.

Made me feel proud to be... Oct. 23, 2009

Occasionally you see something that electrifies you and in this case makes you realise the power of television and in particular terrestial television – the event-like nature of everyone watching something at the same time and then discussing it. X Factor and Come Dancing get people going but BBC QUESTION TIME with its accent on the people-politic was on another plain.
Being the pluralistic BBC, owned by the people, it attempts to let everyone have their say and last night it included Nick Griffin of the BNP, who amassed quite a vote only recently. All the politicians assembled, bar Nick Griffin, who was crushed on this occasion, excelled, and showed why they are politicians. The Deputy chief of the British Museum, an American, showed why she has her position.

Debate must be brought out into the open. Nick Griffin is less of a mystery to me now after Question Time – but it’s still a mystery to me why so many of my brothers voted BNP. Isolated these brothers surely were when they were asked to ut an x in the box back in the Springtime.

This BNP thing needs to be argued down, charged down – if like Nick Griffin it deserves charging down, lest in 5 years we could be faced with the first Civil War of our recent ‘indigenous’ history.

Before that programme broadcast Oct. 24, 2009

I look back to what i was doing before that historic programme. A programme to change everything. To change public life and to change personal opinion.

Having been up at 4 in the morning, I was having an evening sleep on the sofa in front of the fire. Telling myself to awake for 10.30pm. I was awoken in fact at 10.15 by a text (beep) from someone i hadn’t heard from for some while. A person who conjures up immediate warmth by what she says and what she does not say. Text in its brevity can leave a lot to the imagination. I read every one of the few words, many times. Read the sentences quickly, then slowly, possibly rearranging the words.

A person who conjures up immediate warmth when she is looked at. I reached for the photographs that i had of her. And a bigger shiver still ran down my back, and along my limbs, to my ends. And pumped around that inner place we just call the heart. A desperation also took over me. How I wanted her here. In the fire’s warmth glow her hair would be flame-coloured.

I traced her shape on the surface of the photographs: she leaning down, she sideways on, she with her back turned – I tapped her on the shoulder. I tapped her on the shoulder… expecting her to turn around, that I could grasp her hand and feel her close.

People are so very very special. The thought of having to live without loved ones is almost unbearable but bear it we do. This feeling of love (or whatever it is) can go beyond – for complete strangers – even foreigners. Most of the time we keep at least an arms distance from one another. Or we even come to turn away in hate.

Then ‘that’ programme begun.