The City is Just Layers of Story

When you walk London, you walk across someone’s story as you make your own narrative trail. Any journey across it a collision with thousand temporal echoes. You cannot help it. You brush up against the imagery that has escaped from the novel of another’s life and has colonised the streets. The city is just layers of story.

Some of the stories maintain their narrative cohesion long after their writer’s death. Become shades, become spirits. Anecdotes with an afterlife. Stories that will not be lost in the static of stuttering traffic. Stories strong enough to walk the streets and clatter into us.

I traffic with these spirits. Walk to engage with the mythic life of the city. Venture on their territory. Drift in the sodium hours, feeling the ghost texture of midnight London. Words my way of mapping it, giving it a form I can export from the liminal territories of the night and into the day.

As you map, you discover there are parts of the city where the stories are so dense they develop gravity pulling other narratives into their orbit. Stories collapsing down like the event horizons of broken stars. Places that act as candle spirit traps, drawing the moths that burn themselves on its flame. Terrain that demands words to let you cross it. You either write these places or they possess you.

Tonight I am full of the ghosts of Soho. Drunk on history. My city living in me, living through me. Writing is exorcism, but tonight I do not want this possession to end. 

A Blessing for my Goddaughter

My child, you are the creation of love. In you is everything that is good. Every moment of history that brought your parents together and every smile they have shared, is in you. You are the delight and hope of all your family. You are the future dancing with us all.

You have a long way to travel. The road into 30,000 tomorrows belongs to you. You will travel it prepared by a heritage of laughter, imagination and determination. You will never want for family and friends to hold your hand along the way.

You will travel far as you grow, as you journey, but however far you go, you will never leave the love of your parents. You will never leave the pride and happiness that reside in their hearts because of you. You will never leave behind every lesson that they taught, every story they have read and every time they made the world a better place by holding you and telling you it would be OK. All that they have learned, all that your grandparents have learned, is in you. You will be amazing.

You life is an adventure begun in love. A story you will write with action, daring and a mischievous grin. You will burn so bright you will cast shadows on all of us who stand behind you - today and every day.

Man Ray

London bombards you with exhibitions. Every Tube journey is a pinball rush where your gaze cannot avoid colliding with posters pimping art or history. Curated cultural consumerism at its worst. See some pictures, buy the souvenir. Feel improved by your collection of Renaissance-themed fridge magnets.

However, within that constant, overwhelming push to sell you time in museums as product, some posters punch so hard they beat the attention out of you. Even with your anti-sell firewall on its highest setting, the image used overwhelms the eyes. A red waterfall of Pre-Raphaelite hair. Camille Silvy’s nitrate alchemy, blasting 1859 Bayswater more than 150 years into the future. David Bowie in archer pose, all the cocaine madness and genius of the Station To Station tour compressed into one moment of carved light.

In London at the moment, your vision is haunted by a National Portrait Gallery poster. Man Ray manipulating halogen ions to solarise Lee Miller. A love story told in the liminal space between Mackie lines.

Man Ray’s portraits are maps of lives. All the contours of character, all the plot twists that propelled them to the studio filtered through his vision. To see these, to see the intimacy of his crop marks, I did not need to be snared by poster, by the latent legend glowing in the image. This was an exhibition we were going to see even if meant Surreal Girl was going to careen me through the overfilled gallery in the wheelchair.

Most times the posters cheat. A hollow sell on selected brilliance. The art produced by your friends, the uncurated wonder of the city, will always equal the myth of gallery and museum quality. Man Ray does not cheat.

Lad Scape

Train journeys provide the best movies. Landscape captured in carriage window ratio. Hours of new space to fill with narrative.

Leaving London in reverse shots. Emirates Stadium as a temple of broken prayers. Gasometer bones. Walls sigilised with graffiti. Pulled backwards through a mesmerising blur of industrial estates and haunted concrete. City losing cohesion at its ragged borders. The hinterland of story.

Then the rush of everyday England. A parade of uncurated copses. Flooded farmland holding a mirror to a migraine sky. Homesteads stalked by pylons.

This is a film of place adrift in time. I could be moving through any decade of my own past. England has always looked this way to me. It has always been failed Quatermass futures glimpsed in cooling towers. Ice-choked ditches failing to drain fields sodden with history of seed and plough. Hedges running with glee to the crowns of stuttering hills. Car graveyards. Playgrounds of abandoned mud.

This is the immortal landscape of my childhood. My lad scape. Place colonises us. The train is showing me a biopic of my life.

Releasing Jon Pertwee's Ghost

We often talk about the soundtracks of our lives. Those clouds of music we journey through and which cling to us. Droplets of song soaked into the jackets of our memory. There is less celebration of the stories that shape us. The fictional backdrop bleeding into our sense of how the world works and the role we want to play within it.

As a writer, I wear the formative narratives and characters of my life with childlike glee. I am a fan. Occasionally I come worryingly close to proselytiser – whether for George Gissing or Edge of Darkness. Story matters. Fictions count.

I have never been shy of admitting the impact the fictional universe of Doctor Who had on my childhood. However, next month, in the world's best-selling science fiction magazine, an exceptionally intense recollection of how important it was to me will be shared with nigh on 500,000 readers. Showing scar tissue to so many feels odd.

My own personal revelation will be lost because it is just a detail in the process of a much bigger act of exposure. An interview that Matt Adams and I did with Jon Pertwee more than 17 years ago is currently being published in Doctor Who Magazine. Some 10,000 words in the current issue and about the same again next month. At the time of conducting it, neither of us realised what exceptional material we were gathering. We knew the few hundred words we could use in our regional newspapers did not do the time we shared with Pertwee justice, but in the pre-Net age, reaching an audience beyond our day-job readership was difficult.

Now, after loft archaeology to retrieve C-90 cassettes and releasing his ghost from shorthand notebooks, we realise the import of what he shared with us. He offered a cicatrix map of his past – the impact of war, lost love and abandonment. He let us see a contour line guide to how who he was helped make him a fictional hero. I have conducted hundreds of interviews in my career, few have come close to matching the moving disclosures wrapped in anecdotes Jon Pertwee chose to share.

Across the years, I had developed an irrational dread of revisiting old interviews I had failed to do justice to. The guilt I held, especially when the interviewees were deceased and I had not managed to get even limited publication, kept me away from the box of black books filled with Teeline scratchings. I feared the condemnation of the dead voices they contained.

Releasing Jon Pertwee's ghost to move through people who loved his work as an actor has also been an act of personal exorcism. The elastic-bound spectre traps filled with the words of Bill Hicks, David Rapaport, Ike Altgens and Robert Anton Wilson no longer scare me. It is time for me to move beyond self-reproach for laziness and free their voices, let their spirits be made visible by their own words.

Whenever someone shares a story with you in an interview it is a gift of themselves. Maybe you do not get it at the time, but that is exactly what it is. We are nothing more than narrative. They all had stories they kindly shared and their stories matter. I have work to do. There are tales to tell and words to set free.

Essex Man

I hate nostalgia. Its warping gravity distorts the now. Pulls you from mindfulness. Has you orbiting ghost nexuses. The cognitive shortcuts of nostalgia divorce you from history, walk you into a opium fog.

Until recently I used to feel that the yearnings for place were too close to nostalgia for comfort. I tried to ignore them. However, we are products of landscape, our stories so entwined with their narratives that to think of them as separate is a form of mental illness.

I have stopped fighting Essex. Its tax on my memory. Its call to flow down the Thames to where mud, carved by tide, holds abandoned boats in necrotic embrace. Where a mile lets you walk from spiv diaspora and vision punching neon to salt marsh and the temporal echoes of Roman jetties. It is time to let my mind drift through its failed Quatermass futures, sunken time bombs and into the forgotten corners of the Dengie Hundred.

The maligned county of my birth, county of most of my childhood, may be the most misrepresented region of England. If I miss voices that point out the flames of Canvey refineries burn like memorial candles for those who died in the flood of 1953, that Cunning Essex is a foot scuff away from those walking its corpse lanes, then I need to listen more closely to its landscape. I need to give words to the stories I glimpse when my feet trace contours set down by the retreat of the ice. Listen to the tales read in the braille of puddingstone church wall. There are times when I need to let myself be an Essex man again.

London Songlines

We wake to a Sunday morning of gold on the towpath, neighbours boats carrying woodsmoke incense up to a gin-bottle blue sky. Even before we step outside we know our exhalation will be dragon mist. The city calls us to walk it.

In courting days, the route between the Three Bridge Kingdom and Camden felt our feet on many weekends. As hands grew together, every bridge, tunnel and twist of the canal became mapped onto to our hearts. Mrs. S., an Australian with the unwitting soul of a poet, refers to it as one of the songlines we have made in London.

Our feet feel the pull of this track today. Sometimes the gravity of your past cannot be denied. You have to give in, let it direct you through the present. The city is so dense with story that every walk scuffs history, kicks up tales that demand attention. Yet this drift east is so filled with moments of our shared heritage, when we tread it we rarely see beyond our own memories.

I want to let my fingers read the stone, trace the stories in smooth scars made by decades of rub of rope from boats working the cut, but I cannot. My wife holds my hand and my attention. The only temporal ghosts I need to nod to are a couple walking the opposite way on their difficult second date.

Mrs. S. is right. We make our own lines, our own leys on the landscape. We walk narrative into paths, the woods and streets. We are the living map of the land.