Me reading this aloud, in case you can’t be bothered to read yet another thing off a screen today:
Email from my dad, who, while I’m away, is at my house looking after my cats Shipley, Ralph and Roscoe, and George, the stray cat I found in a bush in my garden and appear to have adopted: “WENT FOR A WALK AND FELL OF A WALL AND COULDN’T GET UP BECAUSE MY BACKPACK WAS TOO HEAVY. MISTOOK A SHEEP PATH FOR THE DEVON COASTAL PATH AND NEARLY WALKED OFF A CLIFF EDGE. WENT FOR ANOTHER WALK WHILE THEY WERE COOKING MY TAKEAWAY THEN COULDN’T FIND MY WAY BACK TO THE FUCKIN PLACE. ALSO SHIPLEY PISSED IN MY SHORTS WHILE I WAS ASLEEP* AND GEORGE TRIED TO NOB ROSCOE BUT I WAS BETWEEN THEM IN A FLASH. (* LUCKILY I WASN’T WEARING THEM AT THE TIME.)”
Everyone has their own individual sneeze and it’s vitally important to be comfortable with that. Never try to sneeze like somebody else. It will totally fuck you up.
It was spring and I walked in Somerset, for no particular reason other than it was a bit of Somerset I hadn’t walked in before and spring is the best time to not be indoors. I passed an eighteenth century manor house and two horses who looked a little embarrassed to have turned up to the same paddock in matching coats. I noticed the countryside was just like the countryside surrounding my house if you only took in the basics of what was in it – big hills and steep-banked rivers and crumbling stone barns and hump-backed bridges – but in fact was a much more well-mannered version of it. It was more like what the hills and fields and sheep and lanes where I live would be if they decided to quit swearing and injecting heroin. On a wide gravel path, a man in a Range Rover asked if I was lost. I told him I was fine, waving my walking guide at him to show him everything was very much under control. “When was that book published?” he asked. “2004,” I said. “Well, the footpath you’re heading towards is a quarry now,” he said. Later I passed two women who were heading in the direction of the horses. “She’s still having trouble with her baguettes,” I heard one of them say.
I have never understood the big deal about vampires needing to be “invited in” before they can enter a house. That’s not “being a vampire”. That’s just being polite.
Dogs are often very lovely but I don't trust their opinions. If a cat recommended me an album it had bought, I'd totally check it out. If a dog did the same, I'd promise to listen to the album, out of politeness, but with no intention of actually doing so. You can disagree, but ask yourself this: Who was it who first told you to listen to Indian Rope Man by Julie Driscoll or early Funkadelic or the second Buffalo Springfield LP? Was it dogs? Of course it wasn't. It was a cat you met under a dank bridge.
We were always quite casual about December 25th in my family. The adults have always gone to every effort they can to make it lovely for the kids but outside of that, we are largely not too fussed. So when people ask me what I am doing for Christmas, I begin to open my mouth to tell them that it will be probably a low key one this time, then stop to try to remember when it was last anything else, tracking back to a Christmas a long time ago when my mum and dad and I had a curry then all went off to separate rooms and did some work, or another Christmas also quite a long time ago when I stayed at home on my own and forgot to eat anything except a Marmite bagel because I was so engrossed in binge watching the first two seasons of Deadwood. But we have had our Christmas traditions in the family too, and it is sad when they die out. For example, now my dad no longer buys the bumper festive issue of the Radio Times, I find myself missing his habit of aggressively tearing the cover off it, as he points towards the celebrities gracing it and invites us to “LOOK AT THIS BUNCH OF FUCKING TWATS”.
I’ve had short hair for a while now. To my slight surprise, none of my long haired friends have yelled at me, I haven’t stopped liking any of the films or music I liked when I had longer hair, and the universe hasn’t turned into a fiery ball of nothing. “YOU LOOK BETTER THAN YOU DID EVEN THOUGH YOU’RE OLD NOW,” my dad said, when I saw him recently. He still insults my facial hair and clothes just as regularly and uninhibitedly as he always has, but peppers the insults with more compliments than he once did. “YOUR MUM’S BEAUTIFUL, YOU’RE HANDSOME AND I’M A MINGER,” he told me.
I met an extremely old lady who told me my tomato plants would grow more successfully if I tickled their leaves with a rabbit’s foot. I did give it a go but the rabbit, who I’d barely met at the time, asked me to stop.
Many years ago, not long before they found the 19th Century house in Nottinghamshire where they live now, my mum and dad had wanted to buy a different, older house, not far away. A woman in late middle-age lived in the house with her teenage son, who stank of marijuana, and a very old man she called “Uncle Alexander”. When my mum and dad went to look in the bedroom, they were told “not to mind Uncle Alexander” who was asleep in there and “didn’t have his teeth in”. The bed was a single metal one, of the kind found in hospitals in the middle of the 20th Century, with a bare mattress, and they discovered Uncle Alexander on top of it, asleep, in a button-up onesie that appeared to come from a far earlier epoch. As they examined the room, Uncle Alexander showed no sign of waking up and they worried in a very real and frightened way that he was not asleep at all, but deceased. The toilet in the house, which was filthy, had brown walls and no seat, and the sewage worked via an open air cesspit. The third bedroom, where the teenage son was smoking a large spliff, smelled of all manner of the worst teenage smells, which blended with the odours from the toilet to create something that hemmed them in from all sides and toploaded the world with terror. Queen Elizabeth II lurked in almost every part of the house, either in painted, embroidered, or photographed form. Nonetheless, my parents, being romantic sorts, fell in love with the house, or at least the idea of what they could make it, and put in an offer. The owner told them she was was off to buy a house over 300 miles away in Cornwall and that, because she was strapped for cash, the estate agent had loaned her the money to get there from Nottinghamshire and spend a few days doing some viewings. She said my mum and dad could buy her house but only if they could feed her large ginger cat while she was in Cornwall, so my mum and dad drove several miles to the house from their rented one twice each day and fed the cat, half-expecting to find Uncle Alexander still in the bedroom and feeling an immense sense of relief when he wasn’t. But Cornwall turned out to be too expensive for the woman, her son and Uncle Alexander and the survey for their house shed a light on many, many structural failings. My mum and dad did not buy the house. On a recent walk in the area, they were surprised to find it still standing. In the intervening years, my mum had seen the owner one more time, in a local supermarket, with a very old man. But on closer inspection she realised it was another very old man, definitely not Uncle Alexander.
Coffee review: Tesco Finest Colombian Supremo. Overtones of fudge pantry. Notes of 1990s work desk. Lingering raspberry sadness. 6/10
There has been more trouble on the stretch of train line at Dawlish in Devon, which never quite manages a full winter without getting a thorough bashing courtesy of the sea. Still visually striking, and a charismatic force to be reckoned with despite its many romantic setbacks, it’s a sort of railway version of Elizabeth Taylor. They could divert the line inland but that would be far less fun, not least because you wouldn’t get such elaborate excuses for train delays, my favourite of which remains: ‘A wave has hit the train, which has knocked all the air out of it.’
Coffee review: Cafédirect Machu Picchu. Punchy hints of old sledge. Fruity top notes of damp trousers. Aftertaste of suburban ringroad let-down. 1/10
Isn’t it amazing the way life can seem too short, and intrinsically magical, yet at the same time feel like a long, uphill road, potholed with fuckwits?
To anyone reading the above note and getting ideas: please be advised that you can’t steal ‘Potholed With Fuckwits’ as an album title. I’m recording it as we speak, in a ruined barn in a remote part of Wales with two old buskers I found passed out in a hedge as I was cycling there.
At twenty it doesn’t matter how you sleep, you look the same. When you’re over thirty-five sleep has the power to make you look any age from twenty-three to eighty-six.
As I write these words, the rain has not stopped for days and the river directly outside my kitchen window is filling up again. I put my trust in what I know of the stone bridge just a little further up the hill. It’s been there for centuries, and remains in one piece. But late last week, after one particularly insane day of bucketing sky water, the river reached a new level of rage. It was hurling itself through the gap under that bridge, shrieking blue murder, as if the sea, 15 miles away, had killed its entire family and it could think of nothing but revenge. I went to sleep with its white noise all over me. At 2am, my cat Roscoe woke me up, asking to go out, but when I went downstairs and opened the back door, she reversed back into the house, terrified. She probably thought a monster was outside, and was, in a way, correct. I stood on the balcony above the water. The writhing white shapes below looked like livid swimming ghosts. In the even louder bar of howling sound, I could hear the boulders beneath the surface grinding, forced against one another, again and again, by the current. The water would need to have risen another three feet or more to reach the balcony, and I’m told it’s never got that high, but I have never felt more expendable. The force and fury of those ghosts could have obliterated anything in their path. I no longer thought Roscoe was being a wimp. I did not want her out here. It was a dark and special magic to stand above those ghosts, but very frightening. Next summer, when I sit out there with a book, with trickles and burbles and babbles below me, I will not be able to remember how it felt, just as we can never properly remember how we felt at any time in the past, how the vagaries of weather, seasons, landscapes, buildings, people, misfortunes, years, energies, shaped us at that exact moment, before the moment stretched out, blurred and was gone. All we can do is maybe write it down and try to get somewhere close.
Part one, in case you missed it. And some other notes I made about my dad.
I publish independently, via crowdfunding, so I can write the books I really need to write and not compromise or water anything about them down in an attempt to be more commercially palatable. My most recent ones are Villager, Notebook, Ring The Hill, Help The Witch And 21st-Century Yokel. My new book 1983 will be published in August. You can contribute to the funding of the follow-up to that, Everything Will Swallow You, by pre-ordering the hardback here.
You could write a whole BOOK ABOUT YOUR DAD. Like a kind of DAD's diary. I'd buy it. I love him.
“It was more like what the hills and fields and sheep and lanes where I live would be if they decided to quit swearing and injecting heroin.”
Brilliant and hilarious