My Innate, Old School Grasp of Romance

A burst of sodium orange signals the return to England. My iPod celebrates with a version of Cradle’s Second Nature sung in French – its usual irony clearly intact. Within seconds it is hard to distinguish between the blackness of the Chunnel and the darkened Kent countryside.

I did not achieve frites or a decent croissant while in Brussels. However, as the Eurostar rolls across South East England with the speed of a getaway driver hyped to the gills on dexedrine, the amount of chocolate I was importing made my trip feel like a partial success. The fact it was even bought at the shop previously specified reassured me that Surreal Girl would be pleased to see me when I arrived at St. Pancras.

Of course, as I had promised to buy her a glass of fizz at the station’s champagne bar she already had a good reason to be happy to see me safely return from the continent. Surreal Girl might be my best friend, but if the finest Belgian chocolates and a drink at the world’s longest champagne bar does not demonstrate my innate, old school grasp of romance, I am not sure what does. Not that it takes something similar to woo me. I am wowed by a crème brûlée gelatai or a poke of chips to be shared on the beach at Leigh-on-Sea.

A Very Brussels Breakfast

I had a very Brussels breakfast today, Irish tea, English baked beans, French omelet and Belgian spiced meatballs. If I had been so inclined, the mish-mash on my plate could have been expanded to take in a breakfast item representative from every country in the European Union.

With a good’s night sleep, I might have been able to turn the symbolism in the clash of food cultures in the Crowne Plaza restaurant into a witty, coherent point about the EU itself. However, witty and coherent is nigh on impossible on less than 90 minutes worth of zzzs. The symbolic meaning of German cheese and Polish Szinki will just have to wait for a day less fuelled by rocket launch grade coffee.

Twenty-three Miles with Knowledge the Sea is Above

The last time I took the train to the continent, it left from my old patch of London around Waterloo. The incongruity of The Cut being linked to central Paris always helped counter any special sense of occasion when travelling. That the Eurostar terminal itself seemed a minor afterthought, a last minute amendment to the daily bustle of the station, only heightened the feeling of it being nothing other than a standard commute.

A decade on, the train departs from St. Pancras. Everything is different. St. Pancras is glorious. Somewhat unfinished, ridiculously vulnerable to terrorism, but glorious. Albionic soil sanctified by the myth of Boudica’s blood provides the perfect site for one of the land’s most amazing Victorian architectural temples. With its gigantic bronze lovers and the statue of Betjeman, it even has its own embracing gods and English saint. Just being there feels momentous. You cannot help but be awed by the manipulation of glass, steel and stone to create practical beauty.

In the old days the train rolled lazily through London and Kent with little sense of urgency. Now we push out of St. Pancras, pause for a second to glimpse the canal beside us and then sprint. Accelerate through tunnels and wide concrete valleys with disorientating speed. When we emerge to recognisable landmarks, we are already hurtling passed the back of Fords and the A13. Moments later the train powers under the QE2 bridge having shed both London and Essex for Kent in less than eight minutes.

The garden if England becomes a dull grey smudge of daylight experienced before entering the Channel tunnel darkness. I travel for twenty-two miles with knowledge the sea is above me and nothing to see from the window except my own reflection staring back. At this point, I recognise the most altered thing about this trip is me. From the cellular level up, I am a changed man from the last time I passed through this analogue of the underworld. Weigh my soul, forgive all hurts. Let me leave the night and set my face to the ecstasy of the sun.

Shooting out of the other end, at first France looks little different to Kent. A countryside of concrete scars, dull brown ploughed fields and bleached vegetation – withered and ragged in its obvious retreat from winter – offers an exercise in Northern European commonality. We move too fast to see any signage where the world is rerendered by the French language. The only early, obvious visual clue of being outside England comes from the over elaborate latticework of electricity transmission towers.

Compared to the standard English tower with its iconic, elegant simplicity, the horned, broad-shouldered French versions look like metal devils. Angled demons emanating the hum of 110 kV. An altered design for something so standard my brain usually tunes it out, serves to reignite my awareness of the intricate power line network spanning the land. Electricity as the thin crust modern civilization is built on.

When we hit Lille-Europe, I jump cut the watch forward an hour. My iPod providing coincidence with The Diodes’ Time Damage. ‘I lost three hours when I blinked today …’

Not Everyone's Idea of Fun

Tomorrow – if I can find my passport – I am leaving England for a few days. It is strictly business. Having dinner with members of the European Parliament and chairing discussions with officials from the European Commission is not everyone's idea of fun. In fact, many people would rather drink their own urine than have to go to Belgium and engage with the politicos of Brussels.

When glancing through a city with an agenda not of your own making, your relationship to it changes. I will be unable to navigate by my usual personal landmarks. There will be no dizzying, childlike glee from a visit to Brüsel, a comic book shop whose range and unstuffy attitude shames the likes of Forbidden Planet. There will be no supping in the history of four generation of the Vossen family along with a beer and the Art Nouveau décor at À la Mort Subite (which I think translates as 'Instant Death'). No half-en-half with Belle Époque temporal refugees at Cirio.

Dislocated from my map of the city, I will look for moments of personal pleasure in the simplest of things. A decent croissant and coffee, successfully finding the shop Surreal Girl wants chocolates from and maybe if I am really lucky, getting some perfect street frites.

Living a Lifetime in a Few Minutes of REM

Sometimes my nights are haunted by the fall of Vukovar. Other nights the distress is due to my dreaming brain remixing memories of Anne-Marie Forker. Yet my last sleep saw me crying out not from events in my history, but due to the tragedy of an imagined life that was not my own.

In my sleep I sometimes become other people. Living a lifetime in a few minutes of REM. Dreams so detailed I wake unsure of who I am until I can shake of this dreamself's memories of families I have never had, schools I never attended and jobs I never worked. Once I dreamed I was dying a lonely death in Harlem. Lying in cold room, it walls swollen with damp, my skin as thin as paper and tight across my crumbling bones. I remembered everything. The pneumatic sound of a binding machine in the cardboard factory I had spent 20 years toiling in, the claustrophobia of sitting in a ticket booth, the heat of the 1973 summer, a childhood fight with bullies on West 118th Street and the shame of not being able to read. When I checked on maps later, I was shocked to see that I really could have navigated around South Harlem on the basis of what I brought back into the waking world from this dreamed life.

Last night I became Tom, became all his small joys, victories and losses. His flaws and his strengths. Even his addiction to the pleasure of vinyl in a digital age. The moment this other life lurched into nightmare was when Tom's employer and best friend – who just happened to be his brother – had a total psychotic mental breakdown. At this point I lived Tom's shock and loss as the person he had known for 19 years disappeared from view. Lived his anger at the ridiculous stigma visited on those suffering from mental health issues. Lived his guilt at not spotting the signs earlier, lived the way his chest tightened every time he visited his brother in hospital. I lived Tom’s relief when his brother was allowed home and most of all, I lived in his devastated emotional landscape after his brother committed suicide.

I woke with tears. They stopped only when Tom began to recede, the coherence of, his memories evaporating as I struggled back to full consciousness. Where ever he is, returned to dreamland or hiding out in the synaptic shadows of my mind, I hope Tom is doing better.

Instants of Poetry Written in Memory

The brilliant psychedelic pyramid that recently sprang up overnight near Speakers Corner in Hyde Park was being dismantled today. The glorious incongruity of its blazing pop colour panels quickly gave way to metal skeleton. I watched as cranes and workmen did the work of vultures. Its flesh, reminiscent of Roy Lichenstein high on ayahuasca, directing graffiti gang to honour Akhenaten, was stripped with carrion
efficiency.

As this glorious creature was excarnated before a largely uncaring London, I felt like I was losing a friend. It has been magnificent glimpsing it through the trees each morning. Some days it has stood to like a defiant alien edifice, beamed down from above, not meant for England's cold grey gloom. On others it has focussed its sharp lines towards the blessing of autumnal sun, an Atenism temple that has bled through from some parallel dimension.

It is only because I live in a culture so dedicated to preserving the ephemeral, that my natural reaction is to feel sad about the pyramid disappearing. Romero Britto's 45-foot structure has been a temporary wonder, a magnificent artistic explosion as a dream is manifested in the real. Life itself is a temporary wonder, its best moments – from orgasm to the first taste of a Crème brûlée – instants of poetry written in memory. Maybe there times when we need to go beyond the desire to capture everything in a digital format to rediscover that some stabs of beauty are enhanced by their inherent mortality.

Why this Blog is Named English Dreaming, English Rain

This morning the rain was cold and hard. A winter baptism. Shop awnings channelled the downpour, creating waterfalls. Buses surged through pools of water, throwing up blasts of spray. Little Lebanon reimagined as an H2O obstacle course.

There are several reasons why this blog is named English Dreaming, English Rain. Beyond both the obvious and obscures references, one reason for the title is intensely internal and personal. I know that one day, when I live elsewhere, I will miss this country's rain.

Enigmatic Buggering Around

Google Analytics is a wonderful little bit of software. Not only does it tell me that on November 5th nine searches were made for the "David Southwell vs. David Icke" while only one person was looking for "David Southwell's Coal Hole Club", it continues to provide fascinating insights. Beyond letting me know which ex girlfriends bother to check English Dreaming, English Rain and that I have two regular readers in Peru, it is so versatile some souls have begun to use it for sending me cryptic messages.

Of theses analytic messengers, only Dickon bothers to sign his keyword trails (though it is not too hard to work out where the message “David Southwell Black Star salutes you” might originate from). Reading these messages, there is only one big mystery: why bother? It is beyond me why the person writing: "David Southwell Big Secret Dorchester", "David Southwell Dorchester Can Supply Co-ordinates" and "David Southwell Investigate Dorchester" cannot just use an old school cypherpunk remailer like everyone else. It is probably age related, but I have no patience with enigmatic buggering around these days.

The Worst of Ghosts

Surreal Girl dragged me to the theatre tonight. Given it was All About My Mother at the Old Vic, there was not too much dragging. Diana Rigg and Mark Gatiss trying to reinvent Almódovar’s movie as theatre was always going to attract my interest.

Due to circumstances beyond my control – including a rush hour without suicides and London Underground deciding to run without a hitch for once – I arrived on The Cut nearly 40 minutes before we were due to eat at Livebait. This bit of London used to be my patch. As a child it used to qualify as the most common escape from Essex. As a teenage ligger, the Church of England estate my maternal family had lived in since the 1930s was my home.

It was round this way that I first learned the meaning of South London suss and urban hoodoo. First learned to talk my way out of attempted mugging, got a grounding in street savvy that has helped me get along everywhere from Southwark to Split. England made me and area around The Cut was one its classrooms.

Tonight I did not want to revisit my history. I had no wish to glimpse myself at 19, all fearless optimism and unfocused hunger. I wanted to be off the street, away from even the rumour of temporal shades. Besides, it was too cold for waiting on corners or crossroads.

This left me with the Englishman’s traditional final refuge – the pub. The drinking dens of my youth have gone, eradicated by a wave of gentrification. Some like The Mitre have been demolished, others had their names taken, victims of identity theft that leaves a traditional rough boozer an acclaimed gastro pub easily able to blag its way into The Observer.

I nursed a half pint of the dark stuff in The Anchor and Hope, thinking back to a time before it became a haven for gaggling yuppies. The night a chair was thrown across the room, the mirror behind exploding like an eighties pop video effect as the missile arrived. Remembering when its only concession to food was cheese and piccalilli sarnies.

Come six, I met Surreal Girl outside Livebait, opening the door to another memory. The last time I had eaten there it had been with a journalist friend and the famous actor he was interviewing. Whenever I see someone eating crab, I get an image of Ray Winstone.

Maybe it was the crab cakes or the bread and butter pudding, but I left the restaurant in a better mood. I even felt like showing Surreal Girl where I had lived on Greet Street. If the 19-year-old me had looked down and into the future, he would have seen us laughing. I was no longer worried about what had once been.

Hubris. Pure hubris. As soon as we entered the foyer, I saw the worst of my past, the worst of ghosts floating up the stairwell. I could have turned and left, but I will be damned if I let any duppy get in the way of a good night out.

The past hold lessons as well as pain. One I learnt long ago is you can banish with laughter. Even before Dame Rigg brought the house down with the line: “I haven’t sucked cock in 30 years,” I was smiling. By the time we headed back into the night, I was only thinking of a future featuring a nice cup of tea.

When Jo Moore Held the DTI in her Thrall Like a Narnian Snow Queen

Recent events have allowed me to conduct an informal and anecdotal survey of the differences between biscuits offered by various branches of government. While the Cabinet Office proffers high end chocolate-coated delights, the Home Office prefers to extend culinary temptation with a seventies nostalgia twist in the form of Bourbons. When visiting BERR – formerly known as the Department of Trade and Industry – it has become clear you should not expect anything more exotic than a Shrewsbury.

While a getting a Shrewsbury biscuit at the taxpayers’ expense probably does not seem exciting to most people, I regard it as something of a personal triumph. Given that when Jo Moore held the DTI in her thrall like a Narnian Snow Queen, I was banned from press conferences at One Victoria Street, to be back there for biscuits and coffee served in decent china counts as definite progress. With the vile creature defeated, there is also less fear I will ever again be held there against my will, locked in a basement long after others have been allowed to leave.

As the Sci-Fi Lullabies Start to Build

8am. Suede and I are walking down Little Lebanon. Brett Anderson is introducing the band and I am wishing I had enough money in my pocket to investigate the Lebanese sausages and scrambled eggs at Beirut Express.

The hard winter sun hits the freshly watered pavement, transforms it to a blinding strip of light all the way down to Marble Arch. The golden glare so strong that all the people walking towards me are no more than Hiroshima shadows. For the next few minutes the rumour becomes truth, London's streets are paved with gold. Little Lebanon transformed into a Hollywood special effect, Tinsel Town shorthand for heaven or the interior of a Spielberg mothership.

I walk on gilded concrete, dissolving in the light. It is like entering the lobby of Hotel MANDI. As the sci-fi lullabies start to build, superhero powers return. My mind crunches vectors, first one, then eight, then 30. As the numbers accelerate, I keep up with the fractal edge of the snowflake. Everything becomes data. In the information topology that is time, I touch past, present and future.

English Dreaming, English Rain 2005-2007

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Existence on the Net is transitory. Pages disappear; whole sites get taken down for legal reasons or knocked off by low level cyber-attacks. There is no promise English Dreaming, English Rain will be here the next time you look

Post recent problems where English Dreaming, English Rain was cybered, I have been dwelling on its mortality. Created at the lowest point of my life, it been the base load of my creative existence for more than two years.

As Dave Sims once pointed out, every author has write a certain number of pages to flush the crap out of their system and find their own style. I think English Dreaming, English Rain has not only helped me to do that, it has evolved my writing to a level where I can at least produce the odd killer sentence. I cannot be Self or Sinclair, Moore or MacLeod, but I hope that being me, the words occasionally work. If for no other reason than that, I am inordinately fond of it.

Given I would miss it terribly if it were to vanish into binary oblivion, I am going to do something incredibly vain and publish my favourite extracts from it as a book. This will hopefully preserve some of my better output for a little longer than the Net can. At least unlike some of my other books, the smallest of print runs for English Dreaming, English Rain 2005-2007 will at least mean I do not have to spend a fortune on tree planting in Borneo and Scotland to make it carbon neutral.

Chocolate Biscuits at the Tax Payers' Expense

It has been a while since I enjoyed the hospitality of the Cabinet Office. Yet this morning, as part of being back on the farm, I found myself drinking coffee and munching pan au chocolat down in The Cellar. However, I resisted the temptation to indulge in the chocolate biscuits at the tax payers' expense before 10am.

Being escorted down the staircases, security codes deftly inputted at each level reached, I felt as if I was being walked back in time and taste. The Victorian grandeur of the building at street level slipped away the deeper we went. The initial interior decoration of chrome, glass and standard corporate minimalism spluttered out, replaced by a garish sand yellow and jade colour scheme.

Three flights seemed to equal three decades. The modern matchbox-sized security cameras of the ground floor became steroid bulked seventies briefcases. Lethargic Dalek eyes housed in unapologetic black boxes. The reception desk existed in 2007; the corridor I found myself in was clearly located in 1977. Maybe this is the ultimate in government security; place the entrance to a building in one time zone, the interior in another.

It was weird being back amongst this stratum of government. Catching possible glimpses of intelligence shades, the type of men who specialise in being powerfully invisible . Looking through doors and seeing PowerPoint files projected onto scientists, making them seem like inadvertent members of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. The surreal and somewhat terrifying nature of this sight heightened by the fact those slides had titles such as 'Human Flu Panic'. Given this, as lunch rolled into afternoon tea, I felt had earned at least a few chocolate biscuits to calm my nerves.

Remember Remember the Fifth of November

Yesterday, Jonathan Evans, the current head of MI5, spoke to the Society of Editors. No doubt he enjoyed the delicious irony of speaking about the threat of terrorism on the anniversary of one of England most infamous conspiracies. This was his V moment. Looking at his speech I am surprised he did not work in the rhyme ‘Remember remember the fifth of November. Gunpowder, treason and plot. I see no reason why gunpowder, treason should ever be forgot...’

When a head of Five makes a speech, you can expect polished pebbles of truth to be hidden amongst the shingle. The double-speak of spooks means that even when lying, they often cannot help but hint at what is really going on. The sales patter may all be about ramping up the culture of fear, but the genuine fact built into the spiel is always instructive.

Evans spoke of the violence directed against Britain as 'the product of a much wider extremist ideology, whose basic tenets were inimical to tolerance and liberty, the basis of Britain's democracy'. He was of course entirely accurate. Yet the truth I took from his words was that when we find ourselves caught in the crossfire of the manufactured war against Islam, we should remember all those scared of freedom and acceptant of difference are to blame. By Evan's definition, one of the most dangerous extremist ideologies we face – one that has proven time and time again to be inimical to tolerance and liberty – comes from both the Bush administration in the United States and the British government itself.

Shadow Play – the Hidden Hands of History

I am having so much fun dealing with my Korean publishers, editors, translators and fans that I wonder if I should not just be done with it and move to Seoul. The translator who is currently turning Global Gangland into Korean, Miran, sends me lovely positive emails alongside queries asking me to detail if a certain gangster's sister-in-law is his cousin, younger sister or older sister due to the exacting nature of a language that values familial positioning. The translator of Secrets & Lies, Ahn So Yeon, has been keeping me updated on the television interviews been done on the book. It gave me a warm glow to know that it was one station's book of the day last week.

Today I was honored to receive an email from DooSeung Lee, the chief director at IMAGO, my Korean publisher. I have never received such a pleasant and praising email from anyone actually involved in the dirty work of publishing my books. Beyond the fact that I have been offered the chance to write a new and territory specific preface for latest Korean edition of Conspiracy Files, there is the intriguing possibility I could decide to write a book purely for the Korean market. I am not sure how Shadow Play – the Hidden Hands of History translates into Korean, but it just might allow me to say all those things lawyers prevent me from saying in English.

Walking Between Worlds

I seem to have been spending a fair bit of time on Cleveland Street this week. Its glorious curry houses and MI5 safe houses have given me the chance to catch up with old friends and old contacts. Leaving Ragam late at night, you cannot help but be held under the multicoloured glow coming from the Post Office Tower. Amongst the faded bohemian glamour of Fitzrovia, the tower and its pulsing light appears incredibly alien. It is like a landmark stranded after a dimensional crisis has collapsed down all of the parallels where Wilson's white heat of technology did not fail.

If you shut out the drunken, hormonal noise of the young media things from the BBC and CNN drinking in the George and Dragon, you can glimpse the area's temporal shades. Alan Green, his breath still ragged from winning the inaugural annual race up the stairs to the top of the tower. Tony Benn and Billy Butlin opening the rotating restaurant, the Angry Brigade closing it. William Hartnell battling the self-aware WOTAN long before Skynet was part of Cameron's fever dream.

As I weave home, the semi-dark streets work their magic. Stories fall around me. Prince Monolulu exchanging tips with Crowley at a crossroad corner, Dylan Thomas stumbling from The Wheatsheaf while holding a conversation with characters he would later place in Llareggub. By the time I cross Old Marylebone Road, I am fully walking between worlds. Fact and fiction; past and present; land of the living and land of the dead.

Hitting canalside, I remember there are many ways to celebrate Season. Earlier that night, I had passed some witches who had hired a barge to conduct the theatrics of their religiosity upon the water. Now all that remained of their elaborate rituals were dozens of votive candles, representing the souls of the dead, balanced on the water. I climbed onto the roof the nearest empty boat and watched the polished blackness of the canal broken by floating fire. I sat and waited on the spirits as one by one, the lights failed or drifted beyond sight.