They’re an old-fashioned couple that were probably hoping to see an English Rose endlessly morphing into their recently deceased poodle Bobby and back again, in their digital photo-frame. Well, that’s not going to happen now as shiny-new wife is called Anka, and as Larry was reeling off the list of her cultural differences I wondered if she realised what she’d done when she married the dote-smothered only child of fellow Europeans Larry and Bev. Is it word-association that leads Bev to dread that Anka will hold back her pride and joy’s clearly charted progress to a corporately stellar future? His actual rightful destiny I believe. Perhaps it’s the distrust of fractured language that confuses the nuances and insinuations that we like to read in every conversation and then woefully misinterpret, perhaps it’s most likely to be blind prejudice. But really, what do I know, I’m just a newly-reconstructed reconstituted ham-man.
In my next life I don’t want to be that. I want to be a fat-man in a shimmering England-shirt and sagging side-striped joggers. I want to strut wherever I go. All the time. I want to push trolleys of Heineken out of supermarkets shouting at my kids who are dressed just like me, to watch it. I want to puff a bit when I put the cans in my clean-me-daubed dusty Vectra and shout at my kids to get in. I want to hear them argue who gets to sit in the front only stopping when I shout. I want to light a cigarette as I drive away. I want not to care that diminished sevenths make Moonlight Sonata sound sad if it does. I really want to run my hand over my cropped-head in frustration and shout when it goes wide. I want to make fists of rage and light a cigarette. I want only to ever speak to people I like and only ever about what I like. I only want to see things I want to see. I want a short selective memory. I want to call women in shops and everywhere else love. I want to not have a past to miss but find now complete enough. I want to be well chuffed when I‘m not shouting. But above all things I most want to not want to want to light up a cigarette every day when I’ve given up smoking for thirteen months.
My sister-in-law occasionally lights up, more than just the world with her smile, and when we’re together I’m very passive about her smoking, I enjoy it in a way, so it really doesn’t come between us and even if I could, I wouldn’t change a thing, even in another life. Like Larry and Bev she lives in Chelmsford which means I was wrong earlier, it is actually the wannabe-city of at least one angel.
4 comments:
Well whats your excuse this time.
Dan, I’m glad to see you’re back as Dan, I hope it was you last time or I’ve insulted a completely innocent anonymous. Not that I attach any guilt to you of course.
I do have excuses Dan, all lame, all feeble. But I have been busy, too busy to root through the tool cupboard and take photos. Are you mouthing the words pointless waste of blog space now? Yes you are because you just read them. Well, what with golf and a few other demands on my diurnal hours they have just evaporated away, but I’m now more confident than ever that the next time I come here you’re going to be absolutely fulsome in your praise. Maybe embarrassingly so.
I went over the top with a neighbour once Dan, not the elderly Jesuits demanding verbal-jousting on an almost daily basis now, but good old Janet: artist, occasional smoker of over-sized roll-ups and the best auntie I never had. Not long after buying my first house and moving in, maybe an hour, she pushed the door-bell and after introducing herself handed me a painting. She looked so proud as she told me that she had painted it herself and Frank had framed it, I said ‘really’ in that surprised and impressed way. It was an awful study of a recumbent cat on a Windsor chair, her actual cat and her actual chair. As I looked from the painting to her I could see the expectant look in her eyes, being kind and I am quite kind in a way, I listed how she’d got the fur just right and the light playing on Casper’s face really captured his serenity and the stark spindles of the chair just accentuated so well his cuddliness, etc, etc.
Bear in mind Dan, I was standing holding this picture at arm’s length appraising it like Brian Sewell on the front door-step with a middle-aged lady wearing slippers and a lime-green and cerise tie-dyed kaftan. Janet and Frank, lovely people forever happily basking in their well-remembered summer of love. I’d so overdone the praise for Casper’s portrait that in the two years I was there she gave me at least another ten works of art, all terrible but also somehow all great, painted with a passion invoked by, amongst other things, The Doors who could be heard roll baby rolling across from her conservatory where, she assured me, she did her best work. From non-existent landscapes and lighthouses to Jim the rabbit I put them all up on walls, Janet probably spent more time in that house than I did, she did some cleaning and ironing things so I felt obliged to make it a permanent retrospective exhibition. I still have them all, but kept in the dark to preserve their astonishing radiance. I suppose what I’m saying is Dan, try not to overdo the compliments, it could just lead to more of the same.
Chelmsford a wannabe city? I thought it was a dump
It’s not entirely a dump, incidentally how dare you, and for as long as I can remember Chelmsford has ached longingly to become a grown-up city. It has a prison, a cricket ground, a river runs through it and it’s big, bigger than people realise, it should be a city, it even has a cathedral for God’s sake. The football team has long anticipated the promotion, they’ve been ‘city’ for years, but the last time the council made a lunge at city status during the millennium-fiasco they were rebuffed yet again. It’s going to happen eventually, it must, the town has seen the rise and fall of Marconi and there’s a fly-over, single-track and crumbling maybe, but it’s still on the sky-line if you’re in the right place peering between the blocks of flats.
If you get the chance Anonymous you should go there, live the dream a little. Chelmsford is a place of so many missed opportunities, when there was a thriving cattle-market, beasts would often escape and invariably make their way to the High Street whereupon they would immediately feel compelled to run amok. That was how the local paper described it every time, so that’s what they did. If only the council had shown some ambition and instead of having the unfortunate animals shot, arranged for more to ’escape’ en masse, Chelmsford could have been the new Pamplona. It wouldn’t be so casually over-looked then.
The next big chance is the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 2012, when the bureaucrats who hand out cities, like so many baubles to wide-eyed towns, will have to take a long hard look at the county-town of Essex, well, not too long and hard, more of a cursory glance hopefully. When the town does eventually get there after all the years of waiting, I hope it doesn’t rest on it’s laurels and just settle for the city of Chelmsford, it must strive to be known as the city of something, ‘light’ and ‘dreams’ and ‘lurve’ have all been taken and I think ‘culture’ is probably an unrealistic long-shot. Which only leaves, Chelmsford, city of about bloody time, too.
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