The Sort of Hot Water Bottle The Mighty Boosh Would Have

Given what happened to me last year, the fact that I have been passing blood over the last few weeks has worried both my doctors and me.

Today, after 36 hours of starving and emptying my insides with sodium dihydrogen phosphate, cameras were put in a place you really should not think about. Suspicious bits of were cut out for testing. Fool that I am, I opted to have all of this done without anaesthetic on the basis that I did not want to be in the grip of dopey nausea as well as sore afterwards.

I am now home. I feel rough. Waiting for test results can be as bad as today’s procedure. Even though I am convinced that this time there is nothing to worry about, the hell of the past still holds a lot of grim ghosts.

My comfort today is a rather splendid gift that arrived in the post. In an act of wonderful prescient sweetness, Surreal girl has sent me possibly the neatest hot water bottle of all time. It is the sort of hot water bottle The Mighty Boosh would have if they needed such things – small and black, knitted, managing to be funky, piratey and a little gothic all at once. Not only perfect for an arthritic left foot, it goes a long way to make my bed warmer. I am a lucky man.

Cold and Lonely

My bed is very cold and lonely.

Fuck It

Fuck it. Nothing is going to stop me from writing.

At 9:23pm Alexander Litvinenko Died

Today I though I would be writing a positive entry. I thought it would go a little like this…

'Global Gangland is being reprinted. It has been out for less than two months and it is already on a second run.

Obviously this is good news for my publisher. However, it is even better news for me. The reprint means some of the issues resulting in recent threats to ‘pour bullets down my neck’ can now hopefully be resolved.

In the week where one of my sources for Global Gangland lies dieing in a London hospital bed after being poisoned, I am more than little relieved at the prospect of being less of a target.'

I thought it would go on to describe last night’s fantastic outing, drinking Bellinis at The Heights whilst 100,000 lights shone below me transforming London into fairyland.

However, sometime before midnight I switched on the BBC News 24 to hear: ‘At 9:23pm Alexander Litvinenko died.’

Whilst the rest of the world now seems to know him as ‘the radioactive Russian spy’, to me he was a source of information for some of the material in Global Gangland dealing with the Organizatsia.

I had been shaken up for several days ever since I heard from one of the Frontline Club crew that Litvinenko had gone into hospital. Now I am a mess of empathy for his wife and son, anger towards his killers, a heightened sense of my own mortality and vacillation about whether I need to contact the police.

I do not think there will be any blog entries for the new couple of days. Sometimes reflection is not best done in public.

Totems of Paleozoic Sun

When the day comes I am allowed to drive, it will be a case of destination Dorset.

You can feel time in Dorset. Feel something of its size, something of its shape in the way land and people have pushed up against this invisible force. You can see contours in character and horizon; see exposed autopsy cuts in the landscape that reveal where chalk gives way to clay, clay gives way to stone. Put your hand on rock or tree here and you sense the flow of power that ancient builders tried to corral in Dorset’s collection of hill forts, mazes and burial chambers. Walk the right beach and you can find the former pulse of life frozen in stone – ammonite and trilobite totems of Paleozoic sun.

For me, Dorset is a place to not only touch the past, but dream of the future. I can feel it calling me. I want to lie back on the banks of Maiden Castle, gaze down from Bulbarrow Hill across the Blackmore Vale*, walk Chesil Bank to Abbotsbury – one foot in the Mesolithic, one foot in the now.

* Possibly the most beautiful view in all England.

Working Class Oik

I know many authors get somewhat offhand about seeing their name in the acknowledgements of other writers’ books. However, whatever form it takes, under no circumstances do I get blasé about seeing my name in print. Never.

Possibly this is because according to some of my teachers at school, the only thing I was going to do was spend my life on the dole. I find it hard to forget I am a working class oik who was too poor and too intimidated to take up a scholarship to Oxford. I might have been a clever bastard, but I did not fit in, did not play the game. I have always been too leftfield for my own good. Far too gauche. Yet despite the fact I am not much more than an Essex barrow boy, I have somehow managed to end up selling books on three continents and half a dozen languages. I cannot ever get nonchalant about that fact or the nods of other authors who kindly recognise me in their work.

Part of the reason I ended up being able to get into print was because as a teenager I discovered the spirit of punk. It gave me the idea that anyone could transcend their origins, break through the barriers of class and money that people like to pretend do not exist. Punk taught me that if you had ideas, had energy and were not lazy then there was a chance you could find an audience for what you had to say on your own terms.

Whilst the ethos of punk might not throw up heroes as such, it has provided me with various teachers and role models across the years. John Lydon, T.V. Smith, Jello Biafra, Henry Rollins and even Malcolm McLaren have produced work that has given me hints on everything from self-reliance to spin-doctoring.

One of my unsung punk teachers has been Andrew Collins. When I was 18, this eccentric writer and former lead singer of The Disease - who had knocked around with Tony Parsons, Shane McGowan and other scenesters on from the early days of Sex Pistols - showed me you really could apply punk principals to publishing. Here was a totally leftfield Essex boy who had not gone to university and was selling 10,000 copies of his self-published work The Black Alchemist.

These days Mr. Collins is writing books on astroarchaeology and our Neolithic ancestors for mainstream publishers, being lauded by the likes of Jeremy Narby and still reminding me that an Essex boy can beat the odds and get published. Therefore, when I find my name in the acknowledgements of his latest work – The Cygnus Mystery – being thanked for ‘inspirational insights’, I promise you, I am not blasé.

Off My Rocker At The Art School Bop

Today marks my first play of Off My Rocker At The Art School Bop – the new Luke Haines album.

My instant reaction? The worst thing is that a couple of the tracks are almost boring. If anyone else had produced them, they would be shocking, but for Haines they seem predictable, almost safe. Given my own peculiar tastes, I will lap up any repetition of his old themes such as pointing out the brutal underside of England, the divisions of class and the faux romance of crime, but lyrically scant new ground is broken. It is the same musically. Aside from some ill-advised nods to English music hall tradition, it is the expected mix of guitars, sly seventies’ references, retro synth, the odd bit of cello, delicate, entrancing pop sensibilities and one dance-orientated track.

However, typical Haines also means a display of genius and bravery. No one else around has the guts/ill taste (strike as you feel appropriate) to tackle subjects such as the Yorkshire Ripper and the abusive, grooming potential of pop stardom. No other songwriter is honest enough to deal with the grim nature of growing up in England in the Ford Cortina decade; to remind us it was dominated by a poverty of perspective and a wilful, tacky glossing over of its moments of utter darkness.

There are songs on Off My Rocker At The Art School Bop I know I will grow to love. I already adore the frightening mix of crashing guitar, terrace stomp and tinkling piano of Leeds United with its final chilling refrain of: ‘The North, the North/Where we do what we want’. The mordant autopsies of deceased Englishness in All The English Devils and Here’s To Old England have me semi-seduced. How can you not feel affection for a song with the lines: 'Here’s to old England/Sliced white bread and milky tea/Sarcasm, a well-developed sense of irony’? The anti-New Age hymn Secret Yoga is achingly beautiful, its razor-blade lyric almost hidden amongst its pop glamour.

The whole album drips with Haines’ sneering, caustic vocal style, bringing out the full menace and irony of each song. If the price to pay for yet another scathing, anti-nostalgia masterpiece from Haines is a sense of familiarity with his previously established gift, then it is a price worth paying.

An Approaching Author Headache

First the German publisher wanted an expanded biography; next they wanted photographs of me and full co-operation on publicity matters. Now they require more proof.

It seems that whilst my English publisher is happy to accept that the Cosa Nostra were involved in US electoral fraud and the CIA backed General Noriega, the Germans require a much higher level of proof than that already in the public domain. They also insist that Bugsy Siegel never met Hermann Göring and Joseph Goebbels. I feel several arguments and an approaching author headache.

Still, any document that starts: ‘Für Stephen Grasso, einen der besten Komplize, die man sich wünschen kann, und einen echten sizilianischen Ehrenmann’ cannot be totally bad. At least I can report back to the German lawyers that one of their worries is unfounded. Mr. Grasso has no problems with being described as 'Sicilian'.

The Best £3.50 Worth of Fear

I have trouble with heights. Panic attack, going tharn, vomiting with fear trouble with heights.

I think the problem began with a fall down the stairs at home before I was two and solidified into real terror after a trip on the escalators at Waterloo when I was four. I remember my father pulling and shouting at me, the stinging graze on my knees and hands from tumbling down a dozen steps, the people streaming passed looking at me as I began to cry and was spanked for it. Unfortunately, this is one of the few sharp memories I have of my father. It and the fear of heights have always stayed with me.

Therefore attempting to climb the 234 feet high Lantern Tower of York Minster was something of a mad idea. If I known getting to the top not only included climbing 250 steps in two spiral staircases, but also crossing a rooftop walkway mid-way up whilst 50mph winds were slapping me, I might have had the sense to not even try. The ascent was an ordeal. Any joyful idea I had of looking at the Minster’s gargoyles close-up was soon lost to dread.

However, with some calming influence, encouragement and typical Southwell bloody-mindedness, I made it to the top. The view out across the city and of the Vale of York from the battlements was stunning and felt like victory. If I applied the Mark Lester face-your-fear-repeatedly principle I might just be able to conquer sheer horror that made the Tower at York Minster the best £3.50 worth of fear I have ever been treated to.

Making Memories in the Now

I love London with a passion that is never spent, but there is another English city I could happily live in – York.

The crashing waves of Brythonic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Viking and Norman occupation and the accompanying shifts in temporal and spiritual influence are all easily felt in York. Even without the heritagisation of the city, you can feel a concentration of history here. It is as if the medieval walls have not only kept back some aspects of modernity, but also retained some of the psychic flotsam of the past as the tide of power has ebbed and flowed through this former capital.

It is a beautiful city for anyone phobic to steel, concrete and glass. No building challenges the height and dominating presence of the Minster. Nowhere in England has a greater mass of medieval masonry. The Ouse rolls through its centre with its beautiful menace kept in check by thought none of its floods has managed to wash away the stone permanency of the place.

If its beauty and sense of history were not enough reasons to adore York, I have always been taken by the facts it is a city where walking is the only real way to navigate it and the more you interrogate it, the more wonder it reveals. Drifting in York can bring you face-to-face with the fifteen signs that mark the end of the world in a single stained glass window, the final resting place of the most notorious 18th Century Essex boy or explain the ancient association of cutlers and conspiracy. Its alleyways are not just shortcuts, but trips traversing the topography of spirit lore and mystery.

The place is home to my own good and bad ghosts, but York teaches you that what you cannot exorcise, you build around. Accept the past as the foundation for now, practice alchemy of soul and transmute bitter tears into aqua vitae. I can choose to dwell on the laughter days of living above the doll shop or the trauma screams. Feel possessed by the wraiths of Clifford’s Tower or recall the glow of smiles induced by feeding geese on banks of the river. All my history of York exists in same physical space, but it up to me what I revisit, it is up to me what I add to it.

So, I raise an Evil Eye Smoothie to the joy of making memories in the now and writing new personal history in a place where the past is always be present.

This is a Good Time

The hard times are easy to chronicle. It is easy to fill books with blood and tears. The good times are harder to catch. They tend to dance away when you try to pin them down with needles made of words.

But this is a good time.

Evil Eye Lounge. Rolling Stones and Sinatra pumping from the speakers. Knocking back Evil Smoothies. Seat facing the door, allowing me to see the people walking down Stonegate. Night and rain turning the cobblestones outside in dark mirrors, reflecting Christmas lights in vivid liqueur colour spills. The Best Smiling Company devouring The Guardian whilst I scratch away on any available scrap of paper. For no discernible reason, I am wearing an orang-utan sticker on my hand, sparking a trend that spreads throughout the bar with staff and punters soon adorned with bears and penguins. For a few minutes no thought is more pressing than whether we try the Evil Eye Thai Nasi Goreng or head out to watch The Prestige.

This is a good time.

Britannia Inferior

Forgive the lack of service for the next few days. I am away for a while in the former capital of Britannia Inferior and the place I consider a contender for England’s spiritual capital. When I am back, I hope to post some private journal entries from my sojourn and there may even be photographs, (though I know that did not happen for my trip to the Highlands and Islands).

Bigger than David Blunkett

There are few occasions when I can feel satisfied with my book sales and gloat over my performance in comparison with ‘personality’ authors who have been paid massive six-figure advances, receive huge serialisation fees from national newspapers and are ‘book of the week’ on BBC Radio 4 such as former Home Secretary David Blunkett. However, this is one of those times.

Blunkett’s biography The Blunkett Tapes: My life InThe Bear Pit was published by Bloomsbury last month, serialised in The Guardian, hyped on Radio 4 and turned into a two-part Dispatches documentary on Channel 4. So far his book has sold a grand total of 1,196 copies, significantly less than Global Gangland has managed to sell in an equivalent period with no publicity. Looked at it in terms of sales figures, it is official, I am bigger than David Blunkett.

Of course I am jealous that no publisher is paying me almost £1 million to write the story of my life, but I am feeling somewhat pleased that the sale figures for Global Gangland urinate from a great height on those of the tome produced the mendacious, liberty attacking ex-Minister. Global Gangland is also a more accurate work on criminality than the one produced by a man who was once responsible for the United Kingdom’s police and prison services. For a start, I have avoided making the glaring omissions of fact and failures of memory which pepper The Blunkett Tapes.

In case anyone thinks I am being overly harsh, I would point out that amongst Blunkett’s book blunders is one neglecting to mention he told a prison governor dealing with a riot to: ‘Call in the Army and machine-gun the prisoners’, remembering instead only that the governor ‘dithered’. If you cannot even recall suggesting people be shot, you really should not be putting pen to paper.

My England Stolen by Fascists

I promised a while back to post my thoughts on Children of Men, so here goes.

Bad things first. The film has lost some of the strongest elements from the original P.D. James book. Gone is Xan Lyppiat and with him the concept of Warden of England, the clever depiction of loss of separation of powers and even the forced ‘Quietus’ culls of the elderly. The entirely logical depiction in the book of ‘Sojourners’ has vanished to be replaced by the illogical ‘Gees’ (short for refugees). For the film to work you have to accept the nonsense that with all the problems an aging population and no new generation coming through brings, a nation would focus all of its political energy on tackling the problem of illegal immigrants who are actually capable and willing to work.

However, the reason why Alfonso Cuarón has gone for such a flawed, irrational plot device soon becomes clear. Whilst Children of Men is a film dealing with the idea of a world where humanity can no longer procreate, Cuarón has used this sci-fi future as a means of looking at current Western attitudes to immigration. This is not a film to watch if you are the type of prick who believes the answer to everything is to: ‘Send them back where they came from’.

Children of Men had a powerful effect on me. It put me into shock. Part of this was the way Emmanuel Lubezki captured the battle scenes. The small details of tragedy, the chaos of collapse, chickens on the stairs, the way dust billows from a wall when hit by a bullet – every element made me feel as if I was in Drniš during the Yugoslav Wars of Disintegration.

Part of the impact was emotional. The pervading sense of loss and the absence of hope brought tears to my eyes at times. On top of this, seeing such a grimly realistic portrayal of my England stolen by fascists – Bexhill remade as a ghetto, South London under martial law – hit some of my major future fear clusters. England decayed, rotting and convulsing with the frightening spasms of approaching death is not easy to watch if you love your homeland.

As a thriller it works. It has twists, it has shocks. As an action movie it works. The chases, fights and battle scenes are coldly convincing. As an exercise in cinematography and direction it is taut, bleakly beautiful and ludicrously atmospheric. Yet the thing that really makes the film is the acting. Almost everyone brings the emotional core of their character to life. Clive Owen should be an Oscar contender for his portrayal of the journey Theo makes from a man without hope to a man fighting for the future. The support from Michael Caine, (a wonderful turn as mentor and hippy Jasper), Julianne Moore, Pam Ferris, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Claire-Hope Ashitey is superb.

The soundtrack is also excellent. Anything that mixes John Taverner with Jarvis Cocker and the Rolling Stones’ Ruby Tuesday scores big points in my book, but the elegiac, powerfully spiritual sound so typical of Taverner brings a cathartic quality to the score I considered truly amazing.

In the nutshell – one of few excellent films I have seen this year, even if it did make me shake, cry and have the odd flashback nightmare.

Psychogeography in Song

Two records I have been looking forward to came out last Monday: Luke Haines’s latest opus – which I shall refrain from ranting about at this time – and Herculean by The Good, The Bad & The Queen.

I had been looking forward to hearing something from Damon Albarn’s latest project since July when he announced who he was working with and that they would be appearing at the Electric Proms as well putting out a song cycle about London. With the band’s personnel and track record, it would either be premier over-hyped nonsense or something special. If nothing else the band’s name was clever, being a description of all the people who shelter under London’s amazing but tattered umbrella.

As a rule, any single taken from an album termed a ‘song cycle’ should be horrible and poncey, but Herculean is not. From the moment Albarn sings: ‘Standing on the dark canal by the gasworks’ you get it. This is psychogeography in song.

From his weak, nasal, Essex la-di-da meets South London suss voice to Paul Simonon’s inner city inspired dub bass, Tong’s suburban white boy guitar to the Nigerian Afrobeat of Tony Allen – this is London as hub and hoodoo, the capital as cultural crossroads. What comes across in this four-minutes of contemplative, hymn-like music are artists with a real feel of the spirits London.

Tony Simonon is right when he says in interview ‘London is a kingdom in itself’ and this is music that could only have ever come from there.

I am a Book Junkie

When you are not at your best, trawling the bookshops of Charing Cross Road on a quest to find some special tomes slips from being a pleasure to a feat of endurance. However, I am a book junkie. If I could, I would probably mainline words from my favourite authors.

There it was no surprise that even though I felt like three-day old leftovers, I braved the bump-and-shunt crowds in search of new works by Sinclair, Self and Bragg.

Five-storeys of Waterstones, a circuit of Foyles and a visit to the magnificent Blackwells saw me score signed copies of The Book of Dave and The Progressive Patriot. I was in book addict heaven. Literature is the ultimate mind-altering substance and I had 600-plus new pages to feed my head.

The shop assistant who served me in Blackwells was full of orgasmic descriptive energy and praise for The Book of Dave. Given how politely disdainful or dismively uninterested the Blackwells’ team usually are about their customer purchases, this counts as high praise for the latest work by Self.

Beyond the Air

Nigel Kneale died this week after a series of small strokes

In my small pantheon of writing heroes, Kneale has always had a place. His impact on television drama and English speculative fiction since the early 1950s should have made him one of the most revered scriptwriters in the country. It can only be the facts he was Manx, not part of the traditional establishment nor a regional literary mafia and used science-fiction as a vehicle for his dramas that prevented him from being lauded as one of England’s most visionary dramatists. He should have been bigger than Dennis bloody Potter. I do not use the phrase often, but Kneale was a literary genius.

Everything Kneale wrote married big ideas with believable human drama. His stories reflected some of the most frightening aspects of the second half of the 20th century through the eyes of characters in which we could see the best and worst parts of ourselves. None of his stories were cliché. He thrived on creating paradox, inverting forms, turning the conflict between science and superstition into the most gripping narrative. Few could hope to match his eloquence when expressing the fears and hopes of the times he lived in.

Given he often wrote about dystopian futures, it is a shame he got so much right. To see his 1968 work The Year of the Sex Olympics is to understand in the purest, most startling way, the concept of literary prescience. Yet he was also capable of creating the iconic hero of Professor Quatermass – a figure who at some levels represented the noblest qualities of the human spirit.

Kneale was the godfather of so much. Without him there would have been no Doctor Who and his The Quatermass Memoirs played a part in inspiring a book I am currently trying to develop. Generously, Mr. Kneale had agreed to let me interview him when his health allowed. Unfortunately, it never did.

‘One morning, two hours after dawn, the first manned rocket in the history of the world takes off from the Tarooma Range, Australia. The three occupants see on their scanning screens a quickly receding Earth. The rocket is guided from the ground by remote control as they rise through the ozone layer, the stratosphere, the ionosphere, beyond the air. They are to reach a height of fifteen hundred miles above the Earth and there learn what is to be learnt. For an experiment is an operation designed to discover some unknown truth. It is also ... a risk.’
– Opening narration from The Quatermass Experiment (1953)

Dream Maps of Ghost London

Now the HTML Fairy has sprinkled ‘pixie dust’ and brought the blog back to life, I am trying to resume normal service. Please be patient with me. I have been somewhat unwell during the last few days and I am still not at full strength.

When the several day-old headache lifts, expect posts on dream maps of ghost London, the sad death of Nigel Kneale and The Good, The Bad & The Queen.

Three Cheers for the HTML Fairy

The blog has been rescued from potential cyberspace oblivion. Normal service is being resumed. It is at time like this I need a Test Card F with a MANDI-like/Life On Mars-ish Carole Hersee and Bubbles. However, even without that type of help English Dreaming, English Rain has been saved.

Three cheers for the HTML Fairy.

Hip-hip hooray. Hip-hip hooray. Hip-hip hooray.

As ever, I owe Mary a huge debt of thanks.

Any idea I had that after more than a year of English Dreaming, English Rain it was time to call it quits has been completely quashed for the time being. It seems people would miss it.

As an aside, please do not tire your fingers by clicking on davidsouthwell.com. Through a combination of my laziness and total lack of knowledge about website construction, it is not worth visiting at the moment. However, I suspect with the HTML Fairy’s help it might be at some point. When it is, I will let you know.

The HTML Fairy Speaks

Goodness knows why the blog had downtime. But it was down. I threw some pixie dust on it and now it seems to be loading just fine. While I was at, I tossed in a little extra and you can now get to this blog from www.davidsouthwell.com as well. I did that without consulting the actual owner and author of this blog, so, um, that might change back soon.

Thanks for your patience.

-- The HTML Fairy