Drowning in Episodes

It is probably a writer thing, but I find narrative a defining word. To me, it is narrative that stops life from just being an incoming tide of events and information that overwhelms anyone without a story to tell themselves. If you lose your place within your own plot, it can all soon stop making sense.

One of the ways this blog works for me is as opportunity to reflect on the direction of my own narrative. When I stop working on it for as long as I have recently, you can take it as a sure sign I am drowning in episodes and facts that have derailed any attempt for me to be the author of my own story.

February has been a tough month. To use colloquial Essex, it has in fact been seventy-fucking shades of hell. However, when I get the chance to edit all the strands together into a semi-coherent narrative, I know certain themes will emerge. One of those will be gratitude. Amongst accounts of death; loss; living in 1973; the everyday grind of having to wash a 98-year-old women after she has wet herself; dealing with the possession like state of a relative with dementia; my own failing health; bouts of sleeplessness strung out across night after night on cold floor; struggling to finance a funeral and fighting against bureaucracy to try and look after those left behind, there is actually still a lot to be thankful for.

The single thing that I am most grateful about is that I actually had a 95-year-old grandfather to mourn. Despite everything, that single fact blazes stellar in universe made mostly of dark matter.

Whatever else has happened, they have been a few precious moments of light, love and laughter that made it through the oppressive miasma of the last few weeks. At some point, this blog may feature tales of Luke Haines’ live comedy act, hugs, orange cars, my first birthday in years, travelling back to London to find a bowl of spicy food waiting for me, talking new books with old friends and Granddad singing My Funny Valentine live from the gimmer ward.

There have also been acts and words of support I am very grateful for. Trust me, these things are not forgotten. I will be directly thanking all the individuals concerned during the coming weeks.

I also want to thank anyone who is reading this ramble. All authors – even minor cult authors – ought to have the commonsense and good grace to be bloody appreciative of readers. Especially when those readers stick with them even when they do loose the plot slightly for a few pages.

I hope to regain my grip on the narrative and return to this blog soon. However, it will not be until after the funeral on Tuesday and when the health of both my Nanna and myself is more stable.

Dead

My grandfather is dead. He died yesterday afternoon as I held his hand.

I doubt there will be any blog entries until after the funeral.

Return to Essex

Blog entries are going to be sparse for the next few days.

On Monday night I got the call to immediately return to Essex. My 95-year-old grandfather had been rushed into hospital. He remains seriously ill.

This has meant that I am now looking after my grandmother. She is 97 and requires a fair degree of care. Between providing that care and visiting my grandfather in hospital there is not much time for anything else at the moment.

There is also a technology issue. As I am making dinner on a cooker from 1965 and watching the news on a black and white TV from 1973, it is not surprising there is no Internet access.

Given the décor of my Nanna’s flat, it would have been easy to believe when I woke up in an armchair at 2:50 this morning, I had fallen into an episode of Life On Mars. I am just thankful Thank there was no MANDI-esque, girl from Test Card F. I have enough stress going on right now and I get my daily dose of fear from walking past the chemotherapy unit in Southend General six times per day.

‘Wanking for Coins’

I probably should not be allowed to read Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn in public. I laughed so hard by the third paragraph of his column today that there was a very real risk of being banned from Carluccio’s. The phrase that did it was ‘wanking for coins’, though there was also much abusive description of Jeffrey Archer – something that always raises a smile.

I do not particularly want to get banned from Carluccio’s in St. John’s Wood. The walk into Knights Hospitaller territory is a good one for a Saturday morning and the breakfast there is fab. It is the sort of place where other patrons ask to borrow your Guardian because there is a feature on them in it. I probably would not have been too interested in ‘the battle for Elijah’s foreskin’, but given that his dad borrowed my paper to read a report on his circumcision choices, I felt obliged to read the piece. This was probably an error. I would normally never get past a first paragraph that contained the line: ‘I was doing something very important on my computer when my wife, Regina, entered my office.’

The Grand Dame of Great Russell Street

It is a myth that authors between books spend all of their time drinking. Yet yesterday afternoon was spent drinking 12-year-old malt with a gay priest called David. Today, long before four pm, I found myself downing pints of the dark stuff in The Social, scratching sentences into the Moleskine. If I carry on spending my days like this I risk becoming a cliché.

The evening was saved by the arrival of Surreal Girl. I was allowed one more pint before we headed for the British Museum via the gaudy whirl of colours at Dorothy Perkins. I am not sure if I am now officially a cross-dresser, but I came out of the shop owning a pair of DP socks. They are very Vince Noir, but also very me.

Socks bought, we moved onto The Past from Above: Through the lens of Georg Gerster hosted by the grand dame of Great Russell Street. Every time I walk up to the frontage of the British Museum, I am reminded of the John Constantine line: “Treasure house of the Empire, where all the loot is stashed.” Just before I walk through the main entrance, I always feel dirty. I can never fully dismiss the sense of the place as the fetishistic trophy collection of a serial rapist. Even those imposing columns act as a permanent reminder of the brutal force of the British monster. I tell myself that it is doing a good job; that its treasures would be in the hands of private hoarders or destroyed Taliban style. However, that sense of participating in a crime by being there is only ever displaced once I am inside. At that point, I am too lost in wonder to care as much as I should.

As a child and even as a teenager, I could spend days knocking around in the British Museum (the only museum I loved more was the Museum of Mankind). Unfortunately it is not a patch on the place it was 30 years ago. Then you could touch some of the mummies; connect with Anubis via wrapping your fingers around black basalt. Those pleasures are now denied. When I visit now, I notice lots of my favourite objects are no longer displayed, long since relegated to the oblivion of ‘storage’. Cabinets are barer and marvels and mysteries are spread much thinner. Despite this, I still have a cathedral awe sensation of being in the building, being amongst so many glorious artifacts of ancient art, belief and life.

The sense of cathedral awe when you first walk onto the Great Court has been increased since the museum’s architectural revamp – especially at night. The vault of the ceiling caresses the darkness of sky, focusing all the power of the heavens onto the illuminated sanctum of the reading room. Everything in universe above seems to orbit around the concentrated gravity of books and knowledge. Even someone with the weakest imagination could easily believe they were in an undeclared temple of Thoth. My first reaction on Friday was to want to lie on the polished floor and just soak in the beauty of the building, savour the atmosphere of learning.
I had been looking forward to seeing The Past from Above for a couple of months. Despite any impression the opening paragraph of this entry may have created, it was pure coincidence I rolled up on the night its curators were holding a ‘Beers of the world evening’ with its promise of sampling beer from across the globe. I was there only for the photographs and the chance to hear curators Lesley Fitton and Sam Moorhead talk us punters through the exhibition.

Collecting 40 years of Gerster’s amazing aerial work, The Past from Above is the British Museum’s first attempt at a major photographic exhibition. It is not an unqualified success. The images are simply stunning, full of intoxicating beauty and power. However, they are not left to speak for themselves. They are cluttered with unnecessary objects from the museum’s collection, crowded in too small a space and not blown up large enough. Although the shots of the White Horse of Uffington, Uluru, Great Serpent Mount and the Monolithic Church at Lalibela are wonderous, they deserved and needed to be viewed as much larger prints for both sake of detail and impact. Any new revelations I could have gained over locations such as Church Henge or Tara were not aided by labeling that seemed short on orientation and date.

Fitton spent a lot of the evening calling Moorhead a "prophet of doom and gloom" because with almost every photograph he offered a warning about how climate change and the relentless march of mankind was eradicating the planet’s archeological heritage. There is no doubt that Gerster’s photographs have become precious historical artifacts in their own right, showing a past already lost to us: remains of ancient cities swamped by dams, temples claimed by rising water levels and urban sprawl swallowing the ghost traces of burial mounds. Yet Moorhead offered much more. It was he who had chosen one of the few objects that added anything to the photographs – a Dreamtime painting that made explicit the concept of mythic space and the living continuum that happens through our interaction with the landscape.

When The Past From Above debuted in Essen, it had nearly 50 additional photographs and some of the prints were at least twice the size, making me feel as if I was seeing an abridged, impoverished version of Gerster’s 40-year aerial odyssey. Even though I loved it, the exhibition ironically appeared a victim of history itself. The heritage of the British Museum means it is so used to sticking things in cases it lacks the expertise to know how to properly display such a radically different form of artifact.