A Moment Of Madness

I like really short fiction.

Many are the ways in which this tale will be written. I want to recall it perfectly, write it purely as I see it from the distance of the sole hour that has passed since the occurrence. For, despite the warnings, already I imagine the varying interpretations taking place, the calculated Chinese whisper passing from powerful ears to weaker ones.

      At three minutes past noon today I went to a cash machine a few yards from my office. In error, I asked for a receipt. There was a queue behind me but I waited till it was printed lest others discover the extent of my poverty.

     I bought a cheese and onion roll.

     Opposite the baker’s there is a pub that sells cheap beer all day and cheap beer all night. Outside it there were the usual crowd of refugees from the world of work. There’s a bench a few yards up from there where I like to sit with my lunch if the weather’s not too bad. I took a seat and opened up the bag.  A pigeon heard the tiny crackle of paper and landed close to my feet.

     The pigeon looked at me. I thought about shooing him.

     And then it happened.

I knew it wasn’t just happening in my head because of all the spilt cars around me, the stumbling beers and crashing women, the way that people clutched their heads to listen closer to the voice, to blot it out, to protect themselves from the sudden madness.

     A voice, a voice like none heard yet in the sane world, spoke in all the heads on Earth.

     I am the Creator.

     I made you and I can unmake you.  Abandon your churches, your mosques and temples. Destroy your banks, burn your things. Eden exists. It is all around you. Your beliefs are confirmed but do not become complacent for your rituals disappoint me. Put down your weapons and feed each other. Abandon your wealth as you would your worries for the two are one. The next time I speak will be the last.

     I heard the church on the hill at the top of the town smash, saw the smoke rise from here and turned again as the town’s mosques, temples and banks fell into dust. I felt the coins in my pocket burn through the lining, fall and melt into nothingness.

As I speak, the televisions are beginning to crackle back into life silent. I can hear sirens and gunfire. The sky has emptied of clouds and the streets are filled with wondrous, upturned heads. A man on the radio is crying. There is talk of rioting.

     A pigeon nibbles at the dropped roll by my feet.  I think about shooing him.

     And then it happens.

...and when did you first see your son?

I wanted to write something about being a dad. I'm stealing a title, of course, from the wonderful Blake Morrison.

And when did you first see your son?

I won’t mention the first time I saw you physically because in truth all I remember about that day was the crushing realisation that all of this was really happening after all. A little black and white monitor and some bizarre computer game being played upon it. And the nurse pointing out this beating heart.  I couldn’t see it myself. I just nodded, not wanting to look stupid. I remember your mum looking at me and the pair of us realising we would be seeing this game through to the end. 

            So that wasn’t the first time I saw you.

            Four minutes after you were born, sometime after two in the morning, I held you for the first time. I remember the surprising warmth and weight of the bundle. I remember the smell of the efforts of labour and the sight of your mother angry with exhaustion. A father can feel like a fraud at such moments, I did. The only thing I saw was the next sixteen years of my life spread out like a dull, sufocating blanket. I knew I loved you but I loved myself more.  That wasn’t the first time I saw you.

            Taxi home from the hospital; you in the Moses basket on my lap. In the thirty-six hours since you were born I have sterilised the house or near as dammit. I have vacuumed, polished, scrubbed, aired, fumigated, cleansed. It is a museum not a home. My parents are there to greet us all, excited at the new generation of our family getting under way. They coo and they aah at the appropriate junctures. My dad’s brought flowers and champagne. I coo and I aah at the appropriate junctures.

            Over the next 18 months your eyes opened more, you crawled, took your first steps. Our days were adventures in growing up for the pair of us. Nappies and inoculations for you; responsibility and domesticity for me. However, my evenings were mine. I couldn’t wait to say goodnight. I could have read to you. I rarely did.

            A few days before your first birthday you were rushed to hospital with suspected meningitis in an ambulance with a police escort. Meningitis is big news round here right now. Some tiny lad round the corner died only the week before. And now we’re in a hospital drama, being wheeled at high speed to some special room where I have to bend you and somehow ignore your screams whilst they drain fluid from your tiny spine.

            Anxiously we wait for some guy in a lab upstairs to call down. No news is bad news. You didn’t have meningitis. You would live.

            I cried that night because I was angry at you for making me cry.

            The rest of that time is textbook. Parents too young. Unplanned child. Thwarted dreams. Poverty and rows. The inevitable split. Your mother getting custody.

            Before that, not long before that, maybe a week or two earlier, I saw you for the first time.

            A miniature village green that acted as an excuse for the cul-de-sac we lived in. A February morning, short on sunshine. What light there is is watered down from months of winter, the birch trees stripped and thin against it like angry veins, tired fingers. The pair of us padded up in thick coats on the wet grass. An impossibly red football in front of your little fat corduroy legs. You are running towards the ball, running, properly running for the first time in your life. You kick at the ball and pleasingly, it shoots away from you a few yards. You chase it. We chase it together. Kicking and running and chasing the rest of the morning. These are the greatest minutes of my life and I don’t yet know it. This is the first time I see you.

Digging

It's a story. I never knew quite where I was going with this. The idea, or at least what passed for an idea back then, was to write about the idea of family trees, roots etc.  But it's still better than Dan Brown, right? Right?

Digging

My dad’s been digging all day. And not just today, he’s been at it for weeks now apparently. A huge hole at the bottom of the garden with the discarded earth behind him rising, becoming quite the little mountain. My mum just takes him out tea and sandwiches. She walks out with the tray and the torch and hollers down into the deep that there is refreshment. Then she starts with the pulley.

            All hours he’s out there, digging.

            When she called me over for lunch I knew that there was something wrong. My parents don’t phone me; apparently it’s my job to phone them. If I don’t call at least once a week then I can expect to be on the receiving end of several doses of low-level emotional blackmail.

            “Just ring her up once or twice a week, mate. It’s not hard.”

            “Well, I know you’re busy but I worry. Five minutes is all.”

            I didn’t know about the hole till today.

My brothers are both there when I arrive. I’m the youngest of three and I’m thirty five in a month. This, I sometimes joke, is better than being the youngest of thirty five and being three in a month. Ben’s a year older than me, runs a garage about ten miles from here. It’s called Ben’s Garage. There’s a huge neon B in the kind of font they have on American vaudeville posters. A big B hanging out above the road off the roof of the garage. A little part of me dies each time I see it.

            My older brother is called William and I have no idea what he does but it earns him enough money to live out by the sea and drive a car that will cost more money to insure than I’ll ever see in my bank account.

            I am an obituarist. I write obituaries to order for national papers. Someone famous dies, the phone rings. That’s how I make a living.

            Ben and William, of course, ring my mother every day. They seem oblivious to the great crater our dad is making at the end of the garden. They sit there and drink their coffee and read the sports pages.

            “How long has he been doing this?”

            “Couple of months,” says William without looking up.

            “Why? What is he doing?”

            “He’s just digging a hole, he’s happy enough.”

            Ben starts humming La Cucaracha. My mum joins in whilst she peels potatoes at the sink.

            I leave the three of them to it and make my way into the garden.

I hear the echo of my own voice before I see how deep the hole is. One syllable, the second I ever learnt, dropping deep beneath the earth and repeating itself. At the lip of the hole there is the first of what appears to be several improvised ladders. I turn my gaze to the flanks of the garden and notice that the trees are all stumps, amputated limbs from the garden war.

            I start to climb down the first ladder.

            “Dad,” I call again.

It was around the time of the third or fourth ladder that I started to really worry. Christmas lights stretched down from the extension lead from the shed. Rather than getting thinner, the tunnel started to widen the further I descended. The ladders became stronger, the lights brighter. Further and further down I climbed, calling my Dad’s name all the time until I reached a well-lit platform.

            A few yards in front of me there was a door. Behind I could hear voices, one of them my father’s clearly. Several male voices, all familiar to me somehow. A lot of laughter and the clinking of glasses, somewhere beneath those voices I could hear distinctly strains of music.

            Swallowing hard and trying to keep my breath at a polite volume, I knocked the door.

            It was a wonderful few hours we spent sitting round that table. My great-grandfather was a hoot; he had us in stitches about his time at sea. His own father was also present; several generations of my family were there. Just the fathers mind. We talked about raising children, politics and women. One of my really old ancestors told us about the time he slept with one of the Brontes. I can’t remember which one now but it was a good story.  My dad just sat there laughing, turning to me and smiling occasionally as he poured another round of drinks. Every now and then I would feel myself starting to panic; my dad would reassure me with a hand on my shoulder.

            A guy with exactly the same jaw as my dad was halfway through a story about hiding from Oliver Cromwell when my dad looked at his watch and said it was time for us to go.

            “Nice to meet you all,” I said.

            They all smiled politely, raised glasses, and wished me the best.

My dad held out a hand as I negotiated the last few rungs to the surface. I brushed a little dirt off myself and made my way into the kitchen. Will and Ben were sat there eating sandwiches. I made my excuses, kissed my mum goodbye and got into my car.

Tomorrow I will plant a tree in my garden. Maybe after that, as long as nobody I’ve heard of dies, I’ll phone home.

Stickers

So this is the first of a bunch of bits of writing I did at some point in the past, I'm not going to get it together to do anything else with it. This is a piece of semi-autobiographical writing. I was seven when I discovered death was real and actually happened to ones you loved. I've patched together that and a few random memories from the same time to try and make something bigger than is probably there. But feel free to tell me it's shit and you hate my guts or you loved it and now want to build shrines to my memory.

Stickers

We were on the back seat of my uncle’s Ford Cortina. Outside there was a storm and my Dad had run inside the hospital to see if Nanny Cuckoo was awake. It was a strange hospital, very quiet. No flashing ambulances, no orderlies running about like they did on the telly.  Nanny Cuckoo had been awake when we’d seen her the week before and I’d sat on her bed and asked about her eye and when she was coming home and we talked about school. We ate loads of grapes and my Granddad insisted on driving us back. It was a quiet journey.

Now I was telling my Mum about my day at school. She’d asked me but she was worried about something else. I could tell that much. 

“Here’s your Dad”.

I glanced outside and saw my Dad and his brother running towards us. They clambered breathlessly into the front of the car.

“Nana’s not up to visitors today mate. We’re just, you know, going to drive home and we’ll sort something out. Ok?”

My Dad was turned towards us from the front seat and trying to address each of us at the same time. I was upset; I wanted to see my nana. We drove home, the windscreen wipers struggling all the way with the weather. 

Dad was gone all the next day. He’d left pretty early even though he didn’t work Saturdays. Mum didn’t seem to know where he was, just out. But he’d left a present for me and one for my sister. My sister had a doll and I had a sticker book.

I didn’t know anything about football except it was what my friends now did at playtime. We didn’t play superheroes or Top Trumps anymore, all my mates played with a bright orange ball initialled GB that belonged to Graham Broad who hated losing. I used to read comics in the corner instead. I liked Hulk and The Fantastic Four best because they were on telly and I could read the speech bubbles in the voices I knew they had.

Occasionally the ball would ping its way towards me and I’d try to join in but I was rubbish.

If it was raining and we had to stay inside then football still dominated proceedings – all the boys bar me had a sticker book and spoke dementedly of swapsies and gots and needs.

Now I had a sticker book with loads of teams in it and ten packets of stickers to start me off. When I’d finished putting all the stickers in, my Mum sat us down on the sofa and said she had something to tell us. I knew what she was going to say because she was crying. It was the first time I’d ever seen her upset. People only cried on telly when people died.

It was my first dead person and it was Nanny Cuckoo. She was called Alice really and had gained this nickname because of a ritual conducted between us when I was a toddler. We'd visit her flat and I'd knock on the door and she'd call out Cuckoo. I'd call Cuckoo back before being let in.  My Nan who looked after me at weekends and gave me 10p to spend on sweets every time she came to visit. My Nan who said “Presently” instead of “In a minute” and who had a plastic chair in her bath. I cried for as long as it takes a seven year old to cry themselves to sleep.

We didn’t see my Dad till the next day and we didn’t get the chance to say goodbye. We had a couple of days after the weekend off school and then when we went to school on the Wednesday my mum spoke to my teacher, Miss Hope.

I’d been quiet, quieter than normal. I could see the teacher and my mum looking at me in that way that parents sometimes look at children when they’re ill.

I had my sticker book and my swapsies in my little Gola bag ready for playtime. Graham Broad had forgotten to bring his football and so the two of us and some other boys formed a circle like Chinese gamblers did in films. The names being read in solemn incantation as the swapsies were announced.

Joe Jordan. Ray Wilkins. Bristol City. John Wile.

A mumbling chorus of declarations from the marketplace. 

Got. Got. Need. Need.

My eyes stung as I looked down at my stickers and realised I was speaking the mantra too.

Got. Got. Need. Need. Need.

A Truly Bad Film Is A Thing of Wonder

A few years ago the late, lamented John Candy starred in a film about the real life shenanigans of the least likely Olympians of all time, namely the Jamaican bobsled team of 1988. Although Candy slid out of medal contention some time ago, should the makers of Cool Runnings ever fancy reprising the comedy of escaping national stereotypes, they'd find plenty of source material in Fatal Deviation.

Fatal Deviation is a martial arts film from the hotbed of roundhouse that is rural Ireland. Made in 1998 with a budget of about 89p. It's the creation of one Jimmy Bennett, a man who funded, wrote, starred in and directed this cliched tale of a son venging the murder of his father in the vain hope of becoming Ireland's answer to Van Damme.

Except it isnt a tale. It's a staggeringly inept set of scenes stapled together in the hope that the viewer might himself stumble upon a narrative. A young man leaves a strangely deserted reform school and takes shelter in an abandoned hovel in the country. He makes the place halfway presentable and, in flashback, we learn this is where he grew up with his kung fu loving dad. Black and white scenes of happier times, Dad showing his son, fresh from a day's being picked on at school, how to become a killing machine.

In a nearby town the love interest is introduced, being harassed in a supermarket by a pair of extremely old hooligans in the least convincing portrayal of devil may care behaviour ever captured on cheap VHS. Our gallant hero, fresh from making his childhood home halfway presentable, is out for the staples of any high kicking Irishman, milk and eggs. By the foolproof means of leaving a thrust toe inches from a bully's chin in the frozen food section, the gauntlet is thrown down. Bennett's back in town. Scores need to be settled. The harassed girl is instantly intrigued by this display of shopping knowhow and silent deadliness and so the plot, or at least the vaguest hint of one, is set in motion.

Complication time. The girl's already seeing someone! Ah fuck Joe, say it aint so. She's only seeing a local gangster, Mikey out of the rock group Boyzone. Mikey provides muscle for a local criminal overlord with an empire that stretches as far as some caravans in an abandoned quarry. There's talk of deals with Hong Kong. Men stand guard with guns. These men smoke, they swear and they don't like their girls bringing home made cakes to kung fu loners.

All kung fu films need an element of Oriental mysticism to show the zen discipline necessary to kicking a man's ribs in whilst wearing a garish dressing gown. Fatal Deviation provides this in the form of a monk who, whilst looking like a homeless Karl Marx, is here to advertise the town's annual ultimate fighting competition, and to coach Jimmy so he can win the title from one of the local gangsters and shame them out of town. Jimmy needs motivation though, so the monk lets slip the men who killed his father, stand to gain from one of their number coming up trumps.

It's a fairly odd religious order that encourages regulation-free fighting to the death but this is the least of Fatal Deviation's problems. Our hero, Jimmy gets into fights everywhere, without any kind of provocation. Turned away from a pub by bouncers who dont like the look of this Darren Gough on steroids, he kicks their heads in and then wonders why a gun is pulled on him by the landlord. Although we are then afforded the greatest line in the film in the inevitable dust-up. On the most painfully unerotic picnic you will ever see, he assumes the motorcyclists riding nearby are out to get him so he kills them. Needing a montage to join the ranks of Rocky and Karate Kid, we're treated to two. The love that must surely blossom between a monosyllabic psychopathic potato and a dumb blonde is depicted in a tapestry of horse rides, fruit-heavy picnics and a visit to what appears to be the Craggy Island Funfair. The transformation from potential killing machine to all out vengeful kung fu master is shown in a preposterous tableau of woodland based training as Karl Marx decides that sleep deprivation and being forced to wear sawn off white denim shorts is the only route to winning the tournament and the love of a good woman. Which it might well be.

Some sample dialogue. 

The last twenty minutes is a crazed mix of badly edited fight scenes, hamfisted attempts at Arnie-like gags and the most pointless bath scene in movie history. It's wonderful. Rarely has a film entertained so much whilst achieving so little. From its Windows 95 era screensaver title sequence through to it's neck snapping finale, this is amongst the greatest things you might waste an hour of your life on, you little bollocks.

Fuck The Olympics

When Trenton Oldfield launched his protest against the elite by disrupting the Boat Race this weekend, he would almost certainly have been aware of the likely repercussions for him personally and the British sporting summer to come. Whatever you may think of Oldfield's sabotage, in disrupting a major establishment jolly, he will have reminded the government of the likely embarassment it could face if protesters decide to use sporting occasions as suitable opportunities to make themselves heard.

Not that they will need much reminding. Make no mistake, the Coalition are leaving nothing to chance. Forget missing out on the World Cup, the Olympics is still the big one. It's the perfect stage for nations of all political ideologies to strut their stuff, to display their cojones to a global audience and, in maintaining a united front of Corinthian valour, sporting nobility and heroic deeds, validate itself in the eyes of its home crowd and the watching world beyond.

Last summer the riots in London effectively gave the greenlight for the biggest mobilisation of our armed forces since 1945. Tens of thousands of troops will provide security for the Olympics. There is no doubt that the Games provide a high profile window for the would-be terrorist but the troops aren't just there for counter-terrorism purposes.

Colin Moynihan, chairman of the British Olympic Association and a former Sports Minister, spoke over the weekend of "idiots" ruining the Games with protests. This is almost certainly a first shot across the bows before the all out attack on civil liberties can properly begin. The Government's vision for 2012 is a fortnight of British triumph being beamed to the world. There will be zero tolerance for voices of dissent.

The BBC, neutered since the election via a frozen license fee, promise an unprecedented digital stream of every event at the games. The Royal Mail, themselves under the threat of further privatisation (job cuts), will be issuing a commemorative stamp for each gold medal that Team GB wins within 48 hours of them standing on the rostrum. This would appear to be not so much a case of capturing the public mood as dictating it.

Many sporting fans feel that politics has no place in sport. Tell that to South Africa, to Jesse Owens, to Tommie Smith. Karl Hudspith, the president of the Oxford University Boat Club, said of Oldfield's protest that "my team went through seven months of hell, this was the culmination of our careers and you took it from us." There's nothing quite like an ideologically minded disruption to ruin a lifetime's professional dedication - just ask the teachers, nurses, firemen about to have their own race disrupted.

So, I'll be avoiding the Olympics this summer. As much as I can. For the press are already keen to play their part in dictating the mood, the Sun counting down the days to this event with each edition. Soon the shops will be awash with Union Jacks and "official" 2012 merchandise, the one eyed mascot Wenlock will be ubiquitous, and the talk down the pubs will be of medal chances, drug tests and dropped batons

This is a government already well practised in deceit and deflection, the illegal NHS reforms swept under the carpet, the Prime Minister's connections to a corrupt and criminal media ignored in favour of convenient rows over taxing hot food. Whilst your Bolts and Ennises seek to wow the crowd, the Coalition will be silently ushering in the next phase of dismantling the few remaining public institutions for private profiteering.

With that in mind, I'll be hoping for a summer of British sporting failings, for each gold medal won will be an excuse for Cameron and the gang to bask in the reflected golden glory of athletic valour.

The Olympic flame initially symbolised the theft of fire from Zeus by Prometheus, a triumph for human inventiveness and pluck in defiance of overwhelming odds and seemingly unopposable forces. It's modern day descendant will not have been alone in its journey from Beijing. It will have been accompanied with a Beijing-inspired distaste for dissent, for oppostion, for the human spirit.

How Kenny Got It Wrong

Last night Liverpool became the first team to make it into the 4^th round of the FA Cup by beating Oldham Athletic 5-1 but there will be surely little celebrating amongst the club’s players and management this morning. The alleged racist abuse by Liverpool supporters of Oldham player Tom Adeyemi means that the club will have to take a long hard look at itself and, in particular, its conduct in the aftermath of the Luis Suarez affair.

The game was Luis Suarez’s second of an eight match ban imposed upon him after being found guilty of using racist language against Manchester United defender Patrice Evra in a match earlier this season. Despite compelling evidence and a 115-page legal document outlining the reasons the FA felt confident in imposing such a sanction, Liverpool continued to complain that their player was a scapegoat.

Shortly after the original verdict was handed down, Liverpool’s players made a misguided show of unity by wearing t-shirts depicting their apparently martyred colleague’s face in the warm-up at Wigan Athletic. These t-shirts have become quite a sensation on Merseyside and, initial witness accounts report, were prevalent in the section of Anfield that Adeyemi was abused by last night.

The end result is that a once great football club now finds its reputation absolutely ruined this morning. Their manager, Kenny Dalglish, a man whose compelling dignity and compassion in the months and years after Hillsborough elevated him to an almost godlike status in the city, now finds himself besieged within a fortress partly of his own making.

The club’s refusal to accept the independent commission’s report into the Suarez affair and Dalglish’s apparent approval of his players wearing what, for some people, amounted to t-shirts depicting the image of a proven racist cannot wholly be responsible for the idiotic behaviour of a small number of supporters last night. But there can be no doubting that, for many people, by refusing to accept the punishment quietly, by publicly questioning the commission’s judgements, that the club has done itself a massive disservice.

The commission made it quite clear that they did not believe Luis Suarez to be a racist. By punishing the player with an eight-match ban, they effectively endorsed that opinion, it is a mistake rather than a prejudice, let us move on. Liverpool’s misjudged reaction to the commission’s findings mean that Suarez is now wrongly vilified by some as a racist, and furthermore, means that some scumbags now feel they can identify with this player as someone they wrongly believe to share their hateful views.

The FA Cup will come around again. Banning Liverpool from this season’s competition as punishment won’t mean anything. A multi-million pound business empire will comfortably survive such an arbitrary sanction. Liverpool’s own punishment should be the uncomfortable silence one hopes Dalglish et al find themselves sat in this morning. The efforts of several Liverpool players to comfort Adeyemi last night should be applauded, but their own conduct helped inflame this situation in the first place.

The reputation of Liverpool’s supporters has withstood many dark hours in the last thirty years. Many of them will have understood at some level that the chanting of Suarez’s name will have been a provocative gesture. On internet message boards this morning, there is still a great deal of denial and conspiracy theorising going on, a feeling that the club and its supporters are themselves the victim.

The only way forward now is for the players and manager to publicly condemn, not via some PR-managed press release, the abhorrent nature of racist behaviour, racist language, and racism full stop. Furthermore, they should also apologise for their reaction to the commission’s findings and draw a line under the matter. If the FA fine or punish the club in any way, it will only add fuel to the fire. The Suarez situation has been handled, to my mind, perfectly. The player made a mistake and has, admittedly belatedly, apologised.

In the last twenty years we have allowed ourselves to be seduced by the image that football, with its safe family-friendly stadia, has cured itself of it’s former ills. The Premiership era of multi-cultural football teams with worldwide support was kindly supposed to have kicked racism, if not quite out of football altogether, then at least into some small corner where it could not quite be seen or heard. Compared to other countries, particularly those in eastern Europe, we have come an especially long way. Campaigns such as Let’s Kick Racism out of Football have been seen to have had a massive positive effect. The days when a Liverpool legend such as John Barnes would be pelted with bananas seemed to have been banished forever.

I know many Liverpool fans. Not one of them, to my knowledge, is racist. I imagine them to be entirely representative of the vast majority of the club’s supporters. It’s important that this isn’t seen as a one-club issue. The Suarez incident was a situation the FA could not be seen to get wrong, it is tempting for some Liverpool fans to see that his guilty verdict was inevitable, but it’s the wrong reaction. If the legal investigation was flawed, we’d have heard about it by now, the club’s refusal to appeal against the 115-page findings would certainly seem to say as much.

England captain John Terry will soon be facing criminal proceedings for alleged racist outbursts. The powers of this particular inquiry far exceed those of the FA. How Chelsea, and their supporters, conduct themselves during this investigation will be of great significance to the ongoing rehabilitation of football’s reputation. How all of us, as individuals, as fans, conduct ourselves in future, will be of greater significance still.