With Ink and a Surface to Write on

Give me pen and paper and I can use words to carve out new worlds or dig out narratives from the past trapped under traffic and tarmac. The potentially empty time of a bus journey becomes a chance to shape stories or engage in imaginary archaeological examination of London’s streets. The 436 heading towards Paddington an opportunity to capture the thrash of a new idea trying to break through or the instant when the 10,000 lights of Hyde Park’s temporary fairground glimpsed through the swirl of falling snow seems to be illuminated storm front of some alien invasion.

With the right tools to scratch, I can steal any part of the city for you. From malkuthian stabs of brutal neon in Little Lebananon to the troll dark of the Harrow Road Bridge when it acts as a portal to Machen’s Baghdad-on-the-Thames. With ink and a surface to write on, I can trap apple smoke genies as they escape from pavement shisha or record the boiling hiss as cold rain hits the glass of the lights embedded in the towpath.

No writer living in London should ever face a blank moment. Beyond the opportunities for the city to distract and entertain, it offers up a constant rush of stories and flashes for you to snatch like a Dickensian cartarista. As long as you avoid laziness, you can lift every word you need and find every gate into Sion whilst travelling from SE11 to W2.

Aerial Silk Showgirls and 10-foot Tall Porcelain Androids

This morning, dragon breath leaking from my lips, I walked hand-in-hand with my Lady Love along the canal. Wood smoke from our neighbours on the cut kissed the air, frost teased the cobbles. This might all sound somewhat chocolate box, but it qualifies as standard for this time of year in the Three Bridge Kingdom.

However, it has to be said that whist it is common to wend our rosey-cheeked way along the towpath as the city begins to wake, I do not usually do it wearing full black tie. The blame for such out of place ostentation lies in last night. Last night was an awards ceremony. This meant a Mayfair hotel, Dara Ó Briain, champagne, sea bass with a Pernod sauce, aerial silk showgirls and 10-foot tall porcelain androids wearing Venetian carnival masks.

Generally, I do not like award ceremonies. The constant forced mentions of corporate sponsors makes you ache for the blade, the table talk tends towards mind-crushingly dull and I never win. Yet surrounded by good Yorkshire company and with the Grosvenor House threatening to tumble into an episode of Doctor Who, enjoying myself was easy – despite the fact it looked as if the volto might have had laser weapons built into their black opal eye sockets.

An Ozymandias Moment

If some of my friends were members of the mafia rather than authors, I suspect I would end up playing the role of their consigliere. Of course it would be a consigliere in the Tom Hagen rather than the Silvio Dante mould. It has to be said, I am a lot better at wise counsel than executions.

While the prospect of a Collins crime family is thankfully remote, I often seem to end up handing out consilium to one of the big bosses of historical mystery. The twenty-two years I have known Andrew Collins have involved me following him into a serious of surreal scrapes and adventures. If I got an email from him tomorrow reading: ‘I have found the lost city of Irem and accidentally been heralded as Sheikh of the Tribe of a 1,000 Pillars. I seem to have kicked off an armed insurrection against Sultan of Oman's Armed Forces. Any thoughts on how to handle the press?’ I would not be surprised.

It was thanks to following the strange wake of Andy Collins and trying to provide advice that tonight, my Lady Love and I ended up enjoying Châteauneuf-du-Pape and crab mousse canapés in the Egyptian sculpture room of the British Museum. Trying hard not to spill wine or crumbs on the Statue Of Sacred Boat Of Mutemuia or lean too noticeably against Shabaka Stone, we were in the front line of the ambassadorial speeches and pomp put on for Dr. Zahi Hawass. However, it was not the speeches or notable guests that awed, but the ghosts of a culture existing outside of their time thanks to their possession of granite, gneiss and grandiorite

The weight of history in Egyptian sculpture room alone is immense. The temporal power of the pharaonic age relics forces you to confront the idea that any remains of 21st century England uncovered 30 centuries hence will cast much weaker shadows. It should be impossible for anyone to give a speech from below the colossal fragment of the bust Ramesses II without having an Ozymandias moment.

One thing I found myself in agreement with Dr. Hawass on during his speech was the untenable position of the Rosetta Stone. When the British ran wild, looting the world for their tawdry gratification, some of the globe’s most significant treasures ended up at the British Museum. The idea of wholesale repatriation by the Grand Dame of Great Russell Street of every iconic item from its collection remains unconvincing when it comes up against the primacy of ensuring such glorious survivors of the past remain safe and accessible. However, the Rosetta Stone should at the very least be time-shared between Egypt and the British Museum. The fact that it is not slurs not only Egypt’s ability to be a guardian of its past, but provides a violently stark reminder that Brits of Empire were amongst the worst thieving bastards ever seen.

Like a Dog with a Bad Case of Mange

I have quite a hairy chest. Normally this basic fact of my anatomy does not cause any problems. Quite the reverse.

However, when you are in hospital for electrocardiography, stress and echo tests, a thick rug is something of a disadvantage. To accommodate the multiple electrodes involved in today’s fun at St. Mary’s Hospital, my chest and ankles have been shaved. Patches of pale white skin have emerged from the forest of golden red hairs for the first time since puberty. There is no getting away from it, I look like a dog with a bad case of mange.

Any man should know better than to expect sympathy from the women in his life when it comes to the issue of shaving. Having once let a girlfriend wax one of my legs, I have some small sense of hair removal hell. Despite this, itching breasts seems like an unfair indignity to heap on a man who has already had to spend his morning running half-naked on a treadmill while several nurses look on.

The Shaping of Space

There are days that even the worst abuses of pain cannot spoil. Today is one of them. Beyond the charms of a strong September sun doing its best to pretend summer is not dead and the company of Tim Dedopulos, remarkable blessings flicker around me.

Time is spent gazing at Charles Robert Cockerell’s A Tribute To Christopher Wren. An assemblage of all the buildings once thought to have been designed by Wren. The imaginary skyline of the painting shimmers with light bouncing of the soft silver hue of Portland stone, giving it the quality of being a glimpse of an elseword. Even its foreground buildings of usually solid red brick and white stone seem to be gently phasing in from another reality. I lose myself in it, feel as if I am walking within its fictional streets. Feel as if I have become part of a dream the city is dreaming of itself.

Along the galleries and passages of the V&A, I float from Cockerell induced reverie to mind-expanding words of curator Charles Hind. His passionate scholarship walks me through an original architectural model of Easton Neston. He turns the purposeful lines of nearly 300 year-old plans into a greater appreciation of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s playing with gothic adaptation and distorted classical themes. Better understand what his sometimes imposing, bullying stone dramas were trying to achieve.

My fingers turn the pages of one of Hawksmoor’s early original sketchbooks. Attempts from the early 1680s to capture the topography of English towns, castles and churches. The seventeenth century paper is crisp but firm, the sharp confident lines of his labels at contrasting with a hesitation in the drawings that comes from someone still learning the skill of perspective. As I flick through the book, it changes from relic to temporal transport. Through its pages I glimpse not just Nottingham or Oxford as Hawksmoor saw them, but Hawksmoor himself. An ink ghost telling stories in line and hatching

Later, we meet Iain Sinclair at Christ Church, Spitalfields. He graciously signs my copy of Orbital, comments on how the book records this building as one of his gates into and out of the imaginary city. I am long beyond the age of having heroes, but that does not stop me being in absolute awe at Sinclair’s talent. He is not only my favourite writer, but the possibly the greatest living user of the English language. No-one creates more perfect and powerful sentences than him.

He talks to us of the barbarism of Thatcherite Britain. Of how the detonation of its brute logic in the City of London resulted in an explosive front radiating out, obliterating the old symbolic landscape that had surrounded the church. The disruption of London’s ancient patterns and the excavation of plague energies.

He talks of memories, the ghost buildings of Cheshire Street and tangible psychic boundaries marked by Hare Marsh. The fear of fire wardens stationed on the highest point of Christchurch during the Blitz. Abandoned temples of primitive Christians, the visual echoes between this building and Truman Brewery in Brick Lane where he used to work. Patterns seemingly encoded in the ether by Hawksmoor.

He talks of Hawksmoor’s buildings being plural in time. Of the dense codes of complex mysticism embodied within the structure of his elegant churches. Of the architect’s towers linking the forces of earthy commerce to the higher realms of the imagination. The church as a movement from Malkuth to Kether.

Sinclair talks of the inspiration of his own early works when he was a council gardener in the shadow of Christ Church. I ask him if the kabbalistic drama of the building and the energies spread throughout the surrounding landscape of the area had almost ridden him Vodou-style, kicked his arse and forced him to start writing. Surprisingly he agrees. Speaking of Moon card dreams and power of place to possess a writer.

The day ends in the last of Hawksmoor’s London churches. We arrive at St. George’s, Bloomsbury as the last burst of afternoon sun paints the interior columns with all the colours of the stained glass. The essential magic of the building is not in keystone carved with the Tetragrammaton, the alchemical pelican nor the echoing of Baalbek. It is in the shaping of space, reclaiming and revealing a glimpse of some sacred mystery despite the boiling rush of the city beyond its walls.

Within our own Haunted Internal Darks

If you define a phobia as an irrational terror of a simple thing, my extreme dread at having to set foot in a hospital is not phobic. The terror is not irrational. Hospitals are cemented in my mind as places of death and unquiet ghosts. The arena in which monsters called heart failure; leukaemia and age pummel those you love with unrestrained cruelty.

My fear began young. Dragged behind Aunt Vilma for a visit as her mother’s body imploded under the terrible gravity of cancer. We saw her lying in bed, loosened flesh folded over fragile bones, skin tainted by the chemical smell I will forever associate with chemotherapy. Even at the five, I knew she would not get better, would never leave hospital.

The next year, unable to breath, I was pulled on a trolley through the midnight corridors of Southend General. Held down on my back, I saw a new disorientating landscape of white ceilings and bright lights rush above me. Plastic sheets and doors parted with emergency crash, punctuating the journey. My mother let go of my hand, unable either to keep up with the dash or to follow where I was going. The panic grew.

I was not scared because I was ill, because each breath was weaker, the oxygen consumed by the fire in my lungs. I was scared because I was in hospital and this was where bad things happened. Where despite whatever promises were made, you might never get to go home. Even the outside of Southend General engendered alarm in my brain. If the building was a good place why was it painted with a multi-storey mural of snake or dragon? It was obviously a site of monstrous happenings.

Life of course has a way of providing evidence for your inner fears. The thermoplastic of the universe will flow into shapes manifested from within our own haunted internal darks. The expected, dreaded outcome too often becomes reality.

This has meant my relationship with hospitals retains the same dynamics of fear it had in childhood. They induce terror. Bad things happen there. This is why, as pain cracks across my chest denying me all hope of sleep, I will not do the sensible thing and go to the hospital.

“I am Actually Quite a Good Writer”

Admission is often hard. Before the actual words involved have a chance to scratch and scrape the throat as they make their escape run, the mind will go to extraordinary measures to prevent their release. Diversion. Distraction. Entire fabricated histories to convince you that the truth has no validity are all common tactics.

For years I have labelled myself a simple hack. Accepted my own lack of talent. Dodged all those compliments paid to my writing. Yet last week, sitting in Mr. Dedopolus’s Life On Mars Towers living room, the words finally broke out. “I am actually quite a good writer.”

The statement probably sounds like rampant self-importance. Public preening. A shameful example of a writer’s bloated sense of his own value. Yet it is not. It is a shocking and painful revelation to me that on occasion I am quite good. A lot of people have been right for years and I have been wrong. I am repeating it on the blog as both apology and communal declaration so that there can be no backsliding from me.

The words said destroy my excuse for not attempting several projects. They corrode the sense that I fall so short of the genius of certain writer friends that I would embarrass myself to even attempt a novel. The admission obliterates my capacity to take on a commission to turn out crap just to pay the bills.

For an alcoholic, honesty is the first stage in an ending denial and putting down the bottle. For me, honesty means turning down £3,500 advance against royalties to write what would be an appalling 1001 book. Yes I could knock out 80,000 words on financial ruination in less than three months, but I now know I should not.

Flesh is finite. The meat cage is the ultimate prison. If I aimed to write a book per year for the rest of my life I would at best only produce 30 titles. Admitting that on a good day, I can actually write means it would be an appalling waste of me, as well as trees, to write anymore bad gear. I will now have to find some other way to finance Syrian adventures.