Mary.

 FLOWERS! Whenever I wake up it’s usually cause there’s a nosegay for me. It’s nice to wake up for that. Is it from William?

This time, it’s a posy of purple flowers. They looks foreign. Who’d bring foreign flowers? Not William. He wouldn’t, not ever. He’d get some bluebells or some daffodils or something like that, probably from Wheeler’s farm or from outside Poppa’s barn, where the marigolds grow, and the primroses and all the hocks and stuff. Yeah, he’d just pick some from there, would William, not go to the trouble of getting foreign ones! Apart from anything else, how would he know when a boat was in and how would he get to the boat without a horse of his own? He might ask my Poppa but my Poppa would most likely get angry. And his Poppa hasn’t got a horse.

Waking up is easy cos I don’t get tired, so I don’t ache when I wake up any more. It’s funny, I don’t know what you’d say about it, but I just sort of wake up and that is that. It’s easy! And if I want to look around, I just look around like anyone looks around only now I can look around anywhere I want and I can look around two places at once.

Like now, I’m looking down on the purple foreign flowers, all laid down in a neat little row, and I’m looking down on Poppa’s barn at the same time. Except Poppa’s barn isn’t there any more, cos it hasn’t been there for a while now, and it’s all just a field and part of a hard grey lane, smooth as a window, with lines drawn on it. And Poppa isn’t around any more and I don’t think William is around any more and that’s also part of the reason why I don’t think William brought me the foreign flowers, cos I don’t think he would, and I don’t think he could get to the boat and I don’t think he’s around any more like I just said.

So yeah, there’s flowers in a row, and they woke me up. The stalks are long and green and I love getting flowers even though they wake me up and I probably should just be asleep all the time, even though I don’t have my cough any more. And sometimes I just wish I could pick them up and hold them, those flowers, like I was a May Queen or on my way to a wedding or to church or something. I can’t do that though. But I tell you what. It’s good that I haven’t got that cough any more, cause that cough was horrible, it was. It rattled the whole of me ribs. Poppa used to say no good would come of a cough like that.

So I can’t pick the flowers up, but I can get right up close to them and even smell them a bit, I fancy, but I just can’t hold them or pick them up or anything. Only just get down close to them. But when I get close to the flowers, it makes me tired again, most of the time it does anyway, and I sort of fall down between them without being able to pick them up. It’s nice to get flowers, even foreign purple ones, but once I’ve seen them there’s not much I can do apart from go back to sleep again. And that’s when I like fall down between them, and I go inbetween all the little bits of sand and mud and stones and the grass, and I slide under that big stone with all the writing on it except I can’t read the writing any more, not that I learned to read but William could and he would read it out for me probably.

I wish the flowers were from William, but I don’t think they are. I said that already. William used to bring more normal flowers like primroses and he’d lay them down all neat on the ground so I could see them and then go back to sleep again when I go down between the sand and the bits of stone and mud between the flowers. He used to bring me flowers all the time. First he came with his Momma when he was still 15 and I was 14, which was when I fell asleep. And he put the flowers down with his Momma and he cried and his Momma put her arm around his shoulders, and then he came when he was older and older and older and older and older and older and older and older and always at the same time, and he got bigger and older and he grew a beard and then he got so old he was like an old man. And he’d cry or say something about how I would always be his sweetheart and how he’d give anything to be able to give me the flowers in person and how he’d hold my hand and look after me and how one day he thought we’d get married and how he wished we could have gotten married but then I got that cough and I had to go sleep first time around so that was that.

And William just got older and then he turned into a proper man like my Poppa and then he got married, but not to me, but he still came to see me for a while with a posy. But then he stopped for a while, like he stopped coming with flowers, and then nobody came with any flowers and so I just stayed asleep, like you’re sposed to. But today I’ve got some flowers, nice foreign ones, so I woke up for them. But like I say, they ain’t from William and I don’t rightly know who they’re from. So I think I’ll just go sleep again.

Scott.

YEAH, THIS is a box, thought Scott, but it’s a box with a door. And the door isn’t locked, which is good. It’s a way out. I can leave any time I want. This...this I can handle.

And beyond the door is a box room with another door in the opposite corner. And that door leads to a larger space. And beyond that bigger space is another door which leads to a whole floor, and some stairs which go down to more doors within one big (well, big enough) house-shaped box. And outside of this house box is a garden and a fence, beyond which is a small town on a small island. There’s a lot of countryside and sea, like, everywhere, and because this is an island there is a land beyond. And there are loads of people out there, on the land over the sea. Absolutely millions upon millions of them, and they’re not ALL dicks.

All this and more had gone through Scott’s mind before the warm water cooled his head some. Now the spray was lightly tapping the sensitive skin on top of his head, 144 needle-thin streams of hot, pressurised chalky water, massaged his delicate scalp, neck and shoulders while he rocked forwards and back to modify the force of the stream. The raining phone box, the power shower, was where he did all his thinking.

There was a time he’d sketch out songs in here, sometimes entire albums. In his mind, he’d perform well-received gigs. He’d engage in world-class banter with his audience. He’d conceive great novels and ingenious business models; and speeches that would change the world.

Then, all fired up, he’d leave the shower, wrap up in a giant towel, and pick up his guitar from next to the bed – fingers still wet and warm from the water. But the notes emanating from his hands, still dripping onto the bed covers, would rarely compare to those which had been buzzing around his head while in the shower cubicle. And more often than not, that’s how the moment of inspiration would end. All his well-intended dreams would curl up and die behind the frosted glass.

This particular Friday, though, there was too much weighing on Scott’s mind. In the great rock/scissors/stone game of modern life, the bigger, pressing struggles tend to wrap, cut and blunt any creative diversions. So he rocked forwards and backwards a little and let his attention drift gently away from himself to a microcosmic threesome of water droplets that were snaking their way down the inside of the steamed-up glass panel of the shower door.

“This one means I make it, that one means I don’t, the other means I come out the other side but I’m a vegetable,” he almost said out loud. And, having placed his macabre fate in the custody of these innocent trickles, he added a palm full of shower gel to his hand, swept the froth across his shoulders and waited in a fragrant mist for the morbid race to begin.

To be sure, he could have chosen more sympathetic droplets. The “victory” drop started well, surging valiantly downwards towards the finish line – the rubber seal at the bottom edge of the glass panel - before coming to a dry halt three inches away from its final destination.  The middle trickle, the “death” one, was on a zigzag mission to wreck everything in Scott’s life. It didn’t care. “Ain’t that just like... something?” Scott mumbled weakly, blowing spray from his mouth into the waterfall that tumbled from his fringe. The fragility of his voice frightened him. He felt a twinge in his chest again behind his ribs, and all of a sudden his thoughts were back to the brutal reality of the upcoming operation. Strange hands would be pawing at his anaesthetised body, cracking open his ribs, slicing and stitching offal that he never, ever wanted exposed – ugh, he couldn’t bear these thought.

“Think” he thought to himself. “Think, man, think about the miracle of medical science! Think about the endgame. Think about your own brave dad! He laughed about it, didn’t he? He joked about the huge scar which ran like a meat-zip down the centre of his chest.” He died in the end.

Back to the water race. Heart beating uncomfortably. A taste of warm blood behind his teeth. Well, this is stressful, thought Scott. The “vegetable” droplet had stopped hard in its tracks, then shot at a 90 degree angle to the right. It hung to the glass like a limpet. The “survivor” halted in its tracks, where it grew incrementally in size and looked set to tumble down under the sheer weight of its glassy orb. Scott prayed for new momentum. But just as he leaned in closer, to squint hopefully at his microscopic reflection in the tiny “life” orb, the “death” droplet zigged its last zag and plummeted like a bagged grouse to the dreadful finish line.

“Thanks pal,” said Scott, spitting a little diluted blood to the ceramic floor.

That had been Friday, today is Tuesday. What of Saturday, Sunday and Monday?

These are lost days – and the least said of those, the better. Scott had lived for 56 years and would like to last out some more. He could and should have used the intervening hours between shower and hospital admission carefully and fruitfully, speaking to his girlfriend, Caroline, family, friends, that kind of thing. Instead, he’d spent it in a thick fog of despair, resentment and, yes, mortal terror. Heavy, heavy tranquilisers made it bearable.

He knew the risks, but the odds were stacked in his favour. Depending on who he asked, he had a 70 to 80 per cent chance of making it out the other side with a new heart, a new chance, a new life. All he had to do was fall asleep and let the medical team work their magic. Barring bad luck, he would wake up some hours later with a hangover from hell and a load of stitches down the centre of his chest.

“I’ll be waiting for you love,” Caroline had said.

The drugs work, and right now, 10.14am, he’s full of them. Prone, on a government contraption that is less of a bed, more of a metal delivery tray, he lies sedated with toe tagged and chest tattooed with spots and Sharpie-penned dotted lines and the like. “Cut here,” the nurse had joked. Scott had laughed weakly. Caroline had gone to work. She’d be back that night, ready for when he came around.

A sphere of lights shone brightly into his face, he felt his numbed hand being lifted, and intricate plastic and metal workings attached. With faces looking down at him, with people constantly talking small talk behind pale blue surgical masks, he felt a glacier of grey metal course up the inside of his left arm. Somebody asked him to count from ten, but he was too tired to even contemplate the numbers. He fixed his eyes on the white plastic coverall of the nurse, then slipped away.

A sudden shock half-woke him. He tasted electricity, it was part of him. But his eyes wouldn’t open. He felt an enormous solitary heartbeat that shook his entire body, felt the blood pump fiercely into his brain and then out again.  He thought he felt hands all over him.

And then he slipped away again.

Another shock of electricity, indistinct voices now. He felt sudden motion, like he was being rocked from side to side.

Then he slipped away.

Requiem for Mary Barns

Being the Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of Mary Barns, Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, Jaz Coleman and Myself.

Life leads us down peculiar paths. When universal forces are in playful mood, the mystery and magic imparted can be utterly fascinating. The universe tells its own jokes, and they can be pretty funny ones. It favours synchronicities, puns and the processing of order in its adventures. It loves a parable, a metaphor, and a neat resolution to a complicated puzzle. If we're willing to let go, to allow it to navigate, life has a habit of steering us away from the mundane. All we need to do is take the punches with the prizes and live for the moment, no matter how momentous our doubts about such activities might seem.

Today, Remembrance Sunday, started with a classic subconscious pun when I visited my local secondhand emporium and came away with an LP by 'War' and an anarcho-punk compilation CD called 'Anti-War'. I bought a Killing Joke CD too.

I dropped the War LP on the passenger seat, popped Anti-War into the CD player of my car and drove into town, where I picked up a charity shop book called 'Dickens on an Island' for £1.99. I love Charles Dickens. I love the Isle of Wight. This book, a summary of the time those two great forces of English culture and history met, seemed to me to be sent from the heavens.

I went for lunch in the George Inn, an early 19th century pub in Newport. It's entirely possible that Dickens, too, could have dined here. I ordered roast pork, added lashings of apple sauce, opened the book, and started reading...

I quickly learned that a passage Dickens included in chapter two of David Copperfield was more than likely inspired by an island epitaph. Specifically, the words on the gravestone of Mary Barns in All Saints Church, Calbourne. I punched the church into Google Maps while I ate my roast spuds. 4.8 miles.

I finished my grub, walked back to my car, peeled a parking ticket from the windscreen and set off for Calbourne. I put the Killing Joke CD on and considered the requiem for Mary Barns while the song 'Requiem' played:

"Afflictions sore, long time I bore. Physicians were in vain.
"Till God did please to give me cure, and ease me of my pain."

I was on a mission - a mission made public by a Facebook live video. This is not something I would usually do. The inspiration came in the moment and for a spurious reason - Mary had died in 1779. It seemed right and proper, somehow, to speak about her using the technology of today. It's an acknowledgement of the centuries. A tribute.

I walked up to the church and first saw some graves from the 1970s. I turned left, found some dating back to the 1760s. Then, after just a minute of looking, she loomed in front of me. Her tombstone was worn but still legible. A winged cherub adorned the top edge of it. As an aside, the same cherub that I had used for the cover of a record I put out in 1994. At that moment, I was occupying the same space as Charles Dickens most likely had - physical space and mindspace. I was thrilled, and a little sad.

Mary died at age 14, it transpires. In two days it will be the 238th anniversary of her death. She will not know, of course, that Dickens almost certainly read her epitaph - a full 70 years after it was carved into stone - and immortalised it into one of the greatest novels ever written. Nor will she know that some idiot with a charity shop book and a smartphone would visit her grave two centuries after her death to tell the people of the internet about it.

There's a line in Alice In Wonderland where Lewis Carroll writes: "Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way." That's kind of how I feel about days like today.

That £1.99 charity shop purchase, that LP, that CD, today's date, the Georgian pub where I ate my dinner, the windy grasslands where I tried to make my Facebook video, the church, the grave: all these things conspire to form the impression that a true connection to the deep past or, sometimes, the unfathomable future is not only possible but is commonplace. It's a supernatural feeling that is wholly outside of our control yet available to all. Good times.

Timeline:

1765 - Mary Barns is born
1779 - Mary Barns dies
1800-ish - George Inn, Newport, is built
1812 - Charles Dickens is born
1848 - Charles Dickens visits Isle of Wight
1849 - David Copperfield is published
1870 - Charles Dickens dies
1964 - I am born
1980 - Requiem by Killing Joke is released
1994 - I Was A Teenage Gwent Boy LP is released
2002 - My motor car is manufactured
2016 - A pig is born
2017 - A pig is butchered and roast pork is served

Remembering John 'Bunny' Haire

Sometimes, to get a good grip on an unbearably huge topic it pays to focus on the small stuff. Living on an island is handy for that. A limited environment lends itself to an appreciation of the tinier details. It enables a microcosmic perspective to develop and flourish.

Last weekend I spent pennies on a little boot-sale whim of a book which has taken my breath away. "Battle in the Skies over the Isle of Wight" by H.J.T. Leal is an extraordinary WW2 dossier - a day-to-day account of life and death beneath just one tiny patch of aerial battleground.

In chronological order the known lives, deaths, injuries and heroic escapades of German, English and (notably) a large number of Polish airmen are diligently recorded. There are tales of great derring-do and cute old-fashioned attitudes in this modest volume: a captured Luftwaffe pilot is taken to the pub for a pint before being led away as a prisoner of war, for example. And a crash-landed Messerschmitt fighter plane is paraded through Newport town centre, where a 3d donation to the 'Spitfire Fund' will buy your turn in the cockpit.

But there's horror, too. Young pilots burning to death in their cockpits or crashing headfirst into one of our cliffs. And there's the ever present almost-daily daylight terror of 500-plus German killing machines crossing the island at rooftop height, droning their way over the Solent, intending to flatten Coventry or Exeter or Southampton.

The RAF would try to stop them. And the recounted tales of dogfights - those yarns that have made it to the pages of history, anyway - make for thrilling and chilling reading. Take the story of Hurricane pilot Sergeant John 'Bunny' Haire.

He crashed on the island twice. The first occasion, on the afternoon of Sunday October 27, 1940, saw his aircraft crippled by a German ME109 near Bembridge, during a fierce aerial dogfight. He managed to bank his stricken plane 20ft over a cliff to the sea, where it dropped in just six feet of water. Miraculously, he was unhurt. He clambered out onto the wing, then waded to shore. The local coastguard took him in, he was given dry shoes to replace his soaked boots, and after a bath and some food he was sent back to base.

After a few days' leave, he was back on airborne patrol. Then, a little over a week later, the 20-year-old Sergeant was shot out of the Isle of Wight skies for a second time.

Local ARP warden George Calloway said in a letter: "The Hurricane was on fire, having been attacked by Messerschmitts, and looked like it was going to crash on the houses of Arreton. Instead of baling out, the pilot stayed in the aircraft and steered it away into open fields. Only then did he attempt to bale out, standing on the wing before jumping. However, he had left it too late for his parachute to open fully and he fell to the ground.

"I rushed into the field with others including the Rev Edward Burbidge to try to help. Sadly, he died as the vicar was saying prayers over him. We used the farm gate to carry his body out of the field."

Local farmer George Moody wrote a letter to John Haire's parents:

"Several planes were fighting overhead and one came circling down out of a clear blue sky over the farm. Smoke seemed to be coming from one side of the machine and the pilot, after going round twice, turned into the wind as if to land. Almost at once, however, flames poured out from the front of the plane and it made a dive to earth, the pilot baling out at once. 

"I dashed in my car to the field, but unfortunately could do nothing. The plane was blazing and the ammunition going off, while a short distance away lay the pilot. I took his helmet off but could do nothing for him. 

"I was very struck by the peaceful and calm expression on the face of the gallant boy. He was untouched by fire and to my inexperienced eye seemed to be asleep. His parachute was ineffective because he was so low when he baled out. 

"I am a farmer and unused to letter writing but I would like to express my deepest sympathy to the parents of this very gallant gentleman, may God rest his brave soul. Happily this is not the end - it cannot be; such dauntless courage and bravery could never be finished. His spirit somewhere lives on and will never die."

John Haire's body was returned to his native Belfast. Meanwhile, the German pilot who shot him down this second and final time was himself shot down and killed - also over the Isle of Wight - three weeks later. And the RAF pilot who shot the German pilot who shot John Haire was also shot down and killed. And so it continued...

Hama Blags Da!

MAYBE IT’S the whiskey talking, but I really miss Chris Toma. I know that sounds stupid. I never even met the guy. But I feel like we connected, him and me, in some small way, over his data-packs. I spent 18 months going through them all for my book and when you do that, when you dig in and really root around inside ‘Toma-world’, well, you can’t help but appreciate what an immense character he truly was. A real astronaut’s astronaut, if that makes any sense.

Luckily for me, he’s also got a great way with words. So my role as his official biographer is an easy one. His data-packs (all 3,000+) make terrific reading. Understandably, it’s the so-called ‘Lazarus Log’ (LO 415 S) that most people want to hear about. That’s where he laid out his audacious plot to, as he put it so eloquently, “beat this damned death thing if it kills me”.

We all know he made it. Kind of. And it’s all in the book (which I’ve almost completed, by the way). You’ll have to buy it to get the full story, but my Eurasian publishers - Schoost and Hogg – have asked me to scribe a brief advance summary to send out to newspacks, e-mags, casts... stuff like that. So that’s what this is: a bit of a sketchy overview of Major Chris Toma’s pioneering GravWav outer-stellar and exo-planetary explorations, touching on his discoveries in the Cygna Delti system (and on the surface of XP.5 Orthen in particular). And, of course, his incredible antics as a space cuckoo.

Like I say, I’ve had a few whiskies. Last weekend, I attended his memorial service over on NASA Hill, overlooking the ruins of Canaveral. That was an emotional send off. Twelve years have passed since we last heard from him. He has been declared dead, finally.

Toma always hated 20^th Century music, so he would have loudly disapproved of the choice of song for his committal: ‘You Only Live Twice’ by Nancy Sinatra. But I thought it was an inspired selection. So inspired that I had a couple drinks to celebrate. Something I wouldn’t normally do. So, like I say, again, this might read a bit wonky. But bear with me. I’ll try.

OK, then. Ready? OK.

Major Toma was just 68 days (Earth time) into the surface exploration of Orthen when the data-pack containing his fateful LO 384 Y Log dropped onto the GW pad in Houston. As is still the case now, gravitational wave communications were a purely one-way entity. Just like GW partition travel, it’s a one-way ticket. We got our messages from the action man, but we just couldn’t send any back.  So NASA was unable to give Toma the bollocking he should have expected for veering so off-map with his language.

He revelled in this. He had fun with it. Even when he had bad news to share:

“Hello humans! Can you hear me thinking? I assume you’re seeing everything I’m thinking? Good. Well, Houston, it looks like we have an actual problem this time. How d’you like that?

“Look up here, man...” at which a bio-report flashed onto the reader in the form of a pale red overlay. “I’m in danger. I’m not quite right at all. Am I?”

Too true. These bio-readings were way, way off kilter. Radioactivity readings rested within the margins of safety, thanks to his Russian-made suit, but Toma’s cellular make-up had taken a massive, irreparable hammering. And it was getting worse. Skin cancer, of the most aggressive kin, was the bottom line. It was all over his bio-report, plain as day.

“So what happened is this. I gaffer-taped up the joints on my suit, because the helmet monitor wasn’t happy with what it was sensing. And it seems I might have been a teeny bit too late with all that, I’m sorry to say.

“To cut to the chase, my lovers,” he said, “I think I might have got some Orthen dust stuck in the ribbing under my left boot - well, both boots. And it’s worked its way through the perma-layers, like Orthen dust is wont to do, and it’s hit my skin. And we always knew that wouldn’t end well. The dust here, man, it’s not good. Not good at all.”

Toma went on to concede how, back in the Ranger with his suit removed and boiling in the de-rad tank, he found himself absentmindedly brushing dust from the bottom of his bare feet with an ungloved hand: “Like I was a kid at the fucking beach. Except this wasn’t sand. It was the horrible, grey dust of doom that kills anything that dares land on Orthen. Oh shit. I’m a goner...”

He was right. The Columbus VII Orbiter (which continues to return data signals from 220 miles above Orthen) had already sampled and scanned the surface material for us. And it’s totally toxic to any and all non-Orthens. Chris knew that risk and the decision to go ahead and land was entirely his call. Like I say, he was an astronaut’s astronaut. In his own mind, he had to go down there.

On landing, he reported to Orthen’s dominant species, as is accepted etiquette for galactic explorers these days, and received a timid but not-unfriendly reception from the host species. The locals were incredibly curious about his ‘smiley face’ suit patch. They spent hours and hours examining and measuring it, cross referencing the decal’s round, black eyes with his own.

But after a day of that, they let him go. He set up base in the Ranger, sortie-ing out for scientific forays once a day. The planet just carried on its business, as if he wasn’t there.

These Orthen natives, we have learned through Toma’s logs and the Orbiter’s observations, are Class V Humanids with moderate to mobile evolutionary markers. Broadly speaking, they’re at the stage we humans were at around the 15^th or 16^th centuries.

They present something of an anatomical anomaly. Biological analysis reveals artificial genetic modification (most likely Raphide), pointing towards extra-planetary occupation somewhere down the line. But in spite of that, their organic arrangement is unique among the 407 Humanid species recorded galaxy-wide to date. The brain tissue is split across three nodes within an enlarged chest cavity, while circulatory organs (heart, liver etc) occupy glandular cavities within four upper limbs. There is no heartbeat, just an irregular rotation of body tissue.

Toma described the mysterious nature of his alien hosts better than I ever could: “I can’t tell you why,” he wrote. “But I can show you how. They were born upside down. Born the wrong way round.”

They have nominal skulls which contain no vital organs – just an oversized optic nerve array which links stereo rhomboid oculars with the central brain node buried in the torso. Typically, the Orthen humanids enjoy a generous lifespan of 180-200 years (Earth equivalent). But as Toma revealed to huge excitement back here in 2084, it doesn’t necessarily end there...

“Holy crap, these guys get two bites of the apple!” he wrote in his LO 384 H log. “At least, some of them do. Some of them get to rise again, like Jesus or something, and have a for-real, real-deal afterlife. They each know from birth who will get it. Needless to say, the ones who don’t get to be born again are mightily pissed off about that.”

More facts were saved for the data-pack. Here’s Toma’s summary:

“The Orthen humanids fall into two very distinct camps. The Caprins live standard 200-year lives and then die. The Hamas are physically identical to the Caprins until the point of physical death, when they transfer to a meta-spiritual existence.

“At that time, all physical presence is lost, but memory and some character traits are transferred to a new out-of-body plane of conscious existence. Nobody seems to know if it’s any fun or not, but it’s as close to the human concept of an afterlife as you’re ever going to get. And these upside-downer people are totally nailing it.”

All attempts by Caprins to emulate the Hama rebirth have yielded nothing. Bitter wars have been fought as a result. Neither society is permitted to mix with the other. They’re pretty easy going, on the whole, but the afterlife situation has tethered undeniable tension to the surface of Orthen.

Toma: “Local mythology insists this spiritual second innings never lasts longer than 12 years (Earth equivalent), but the Caprins still want what they see as their fair share. They’re very jealous about it.”

Toma continued in his log: “Both Hamas and Caprins share a kind of cathedral, more like a Romanesque villa, I suppose, in the centre of Ormen, close to the coastline of the planet’s primary land mass. Interestingly, neither society knows who built the thing. It’s just accepted that it was always part of the planet. Like the death dust. The structure is divided into two wings, and neither party is permitted access to the other’s territory.

“Here, and only here, can the Hamas communicate with their departed family members. For several centuries, these messages from beyond the grave, so to speak, have also been broadcast live via primitive loudspeakers across the holy ground surrounding the villa. I think this might be so the Caprins aren’t encouraged to harbour any more resentment of their Hama neighbours than they have to. But it’s just as likely that the Hamas are showing off.

“You’ll often hear the Hama song of the reborn outside the great villa doors, broadcasting to the great outdoors. The ‘Hama Blag Sda’, as it’s called. I think that means something like ‘Hama, returning for duty.’”

With anxiety descending, Toma must have felt like those Caprins. Nursing his own decaying body, thanks to the deadly dust of Orthen, Major Toma would have been contemplating his own mortality. Caprins died – Hamas lived again. It seemed so unfair. And now he knew he was dying, he wanted ‘in’, too. But if the Caprins, who at least shared the Hama biology, couldn’t grab a slice of immortality for themselves, then, really, what chance did he – a human, from Earth - stand?

This weighed heavily on his mind in log LO 415 T:

“Well, I’m dying too, Houston. I can’t get around that. And just like those Caprins, I’m going to have to lump it I guess. What’s frustrating is I think I’m pretty close to understanding how it might work. You’ve seen how Columbus VII reports elevated GravWav signals from the Orthen surface at the point of a Hama physical death? I don’t know how that works into the situation. But it must mean something.

“If I had a little more time, then I might turn that understanding into a plan. And maybe, just maybe, I could then work out a way of jumping into a Hama corpse, or something, and buying another 12 years for myself. If I could only get a dying Hama spirit to raise a metre then stand aside for me...”

“But. Damn it. My bio-data reckons I’ve got no more than a few days left. And I don’t know how much of that time I’ll be fully conscious. So I’m going to go and do some deep thinking. And if I get any bright ideas, I’ll make sure you hear about it. And if I don’t, well, I guess this is goodbye. So, goodbye. And thanks for all the fish.”

That was the last coherent log we got from Major Toma. There were other short missives, spanning a couple days, but none of them made too much sense. There was more rambling about GravWav manipulation, some religious thinking-out-loud and much complaining about the moondust which was about to cover him. But most of the time, the web of pain wrapped tightly around his skin kept him silent.

As NASA waited for Major Toma’s sad and inevitable death, Orthen’s radio silence, so to speak, was deafening. Until that fateful moment when his bio-data finally flatlined.

At that instant, Columbus VII picked up some unusual chaos 220 miles below. There was a commotion breaking out on the planet’s surface. Caprins were going crazy, dancing some kind of alien jig, a strange non-circular, non-linear fiesta involving all four upper limbs. They were hammering violently on the gates of the Villa of Ormen. The Hamas panicked and tried to slam the gates shut. Barricades were erected and fires were sparked. Pandemonium.

The Orbiter’s intuitive instruments honed in on the melee. The villa loudspeakers were blaring out across the holy ground, as always. But, this time, the voice sounded distinctly non-Hama:

“HAMA BLAG SDA! HAMA BLAG SDA!”

Then this:

“I’M NOT A GANGSTER! HAMA BLAG SDA! I’M NOT A FILM STAR! HAMA BLAG SDA!

"I’M NOT A PORN STAR! HAMA BLAG SDA! I’M NOT A POP STAR! HAMA BLAG SDA!

“I’M NOT A WANDERIN’ STAR! HAMA BLAG SDA! HAMA BLAG SDA!”

“HAMA BLAG SDA!”

Originally published in "47-16: Short Fiction and Poetry Inspired by David Bowie" (Penny Dreadful Publications, 2016).

V.9221. Or CPDR.33318. Just for the record.

I like David Bowie. And I like records. Once upon a time, in a happy land far, far away, I combined both these interests to become that most peculiar of creatures: The David Bowie Collector.

I don't collect any more, though I still have a LOT of records. Economic necessity, coupled with a phenomenon you could call the "Diminishing Return of the South American 7" single" (the Mexican pressing of Blue Jean in its joyless EMI paper sleeve is barely discernible from the Brazilian one - but the collector needs to own both and they're going to cost twenty quid a pop), knocked the expensive collecting game on its head for me.

But while deep in the throes of my obsession, hoovering up rarities from friends, record fairs, mail order companies and Record Collector private ads, I was like a cat in a Whiskas warehouse. I had hundreds of Bowie LPs and hundreds of 7" singles. And hundreds of eight-tracks, too. Catalogue numbers on labels, matrix run-out information on the dead wax, tiny print on the corners of picture sleeves... these were my manna. I was sitting on a pretty decent collection, right up there with the more serious of my collector peers. Clearly, we were obsessed.

I've held onto one copy of each UK album release, from the 1967 Deram debut onwards, and have shifted the rest. That's right: my Yugoslavian Never Let Me Down is no longer in the house.

So it goes. But I have my memories. And here are ten of my favourites to be going on with:

1) Station To Station (France RCA 7", 1976). Who'd be mad enough to try to make a single edit out of the epic, wandering Station to Station title track? Those gaga cuckoos at RCA France, that's who. This carved-up edit was withdrawn (probably at the behest of David himself, I should think) and only a handful of jukebox promo copies escaped the pressing plant. I found a copy for £2.50 at Brighton Record Fair, where the dealer had it labeled as 'France TVC 15 (the song on the b-side), picture sleeve missing'. Bargain.

2) Ziggy Stardust LP (UK first pressing, 1972). The very first pressing, with matrixes ending in -1E on each side. This is the one with the slightly different mix of Starman. The 'Wichita Lineman' bit is quieter than later pressings. This one sticks in my mind because of where I found it: at Woolworth's in Exeter, around 1979. It had clearly been sitting in the racks, unlooked at, for all those seven years, so immaculate was its condition when I bought it.

3) Knock On Wood (France RCA 7", 1974). Snapped up from a record shop in Brussels, this one stands out for its unique and very attractive picture sleeve: a live shot from the Diamond Dogs tour, David looking moody and mean in a Shakespearean cape.

4) The Prettiest Star (Germany Mercury 7", 1970). The original version, with Marc Bolan on lead guitar. The Germans released this in an aesthetically wonderful picture sleeve - a live action shot of our David, curly-haired and shiny-suited, clutching a 12-string guitar. Lovely stuff.

5) David Bowie Special (Japan double LP, 1976). A compilation album with a unique full-face cover snatched from a scene in The Man Who Fell To Earth. Japanese lyric inserts are always great entertainment, especially when the words are transcribed from guesswork, and Japanese pressings are always king. For such a determinedly throwaway society, our Japanese friends sure know how to build a record to last.

6) The Konrads - I Didn't Know How Much (Canada Decca 7", 1965). OK, so this is not a David Bowie record. He's not on it. But the record is interesting because it was uncatalogued until I managed to unearth a copy. This I did by searching for Konrads on eBay every bloody week. When this title, and the also-unheard of 'I Thought Of You Last Night' on the flip, turned up on a Canadian single and then an American promo, I really thought I had struck gold. Twice. Not quite, it turned out, but this post-Bowie Konrads single, seemingly rushed out without the band's knowledge all those years ago, was an interesting find nonetheless.

7) Drive-In Saturday (UK RCA 7", 1973). Nothing madly rare about this one... but the b-side, Bowie and the Spiders rocking through Chuck Berry's Round and Round? Spectacular! Mick Ronson's guitar solo is peerless on this.

8) Memory of a Free Festival (UK Mercury 7", 1970). Fantastic, hippy-free reworking of the fantastic and epic song on David's second album. This organ and guitar-heavy release was helpfully split into two parts. That's a very sixties thing to do (just about hanging on into the seventies).

9) Low (UK RCA LP, 1977). Just look at that sleeve. It's like... how more orange could it be? This delicious-looking record, with the song titles and credits confined to a tiny sticker on the back, is so bright and so seventies it can be seen from space. Almost. And, my God, it's a fantastic album.

10) Davie Jones and the King Bees - Liza Jane (Vocalion UK 7", 1964). In actual fact, I never owned one of these. It's always slipped through my fingers. It's David's official debut on record, and it resonates with me because it's my official debut too: I was born and the record was released on the same day, Friday June 5, 1964. Thanks mum. You done good!

Naturally, Liza Jane on Vocalion has always been a top dollar record. And I've always been too skint to buy one. But one day I might just bring my collector self back into play, and snap one up. One day. One day.

Life is a Circus Krone

Yesterday, I boasted of the ingenuity and bravery of the long-distance David Bowie fan. Getting into the smaller, more convincingly sold-out shows could take a great deal of imaginative effort. So I claimed. But it was all talk, no trousers. I should have offered an example, but I didn't.

Here's one...

It's October 12, 1991. Tin Machine are a week into their tour through the rain and snow of Europe. I'm part of a small travelling army of fans gearing up to enjoy gig #6 in Munich. Except we're running very, very late. A day off in Venice ended with our car being towed while we sight-saw, putting us way behind schedule and a considerable chunk of Lire lighter. By the time me and my two travelling compadres, Ali and Pete, pulled up outside the rotund Circus Krone it was pretty much curtain-up time.

We had no advance tickets. A glance up and down the strasse confirmed our fears: there were no touts. A hand-drawn sign on the door screamed that the show was "SOLD OUT. GUESTLIST ONLY".

We were in trouble. We stared at the sign. GUESTLIST ONLY. Hmm. GUESTLIST ONLY...Hmm...

"Hi, I'm on David's guestlist!" I heard myself blurting out to the man on the door, my English accent more pronounced than it had ever been. I was hoping for a little extra British-flavoured gravitas.

"OK, name?"

"Yes, it's Andy, er Alan, um Thomas, I mean Hughes..."

Teutonic head tilted, eyed the list, then me. Then shook. Nope.

Pete took over: "We're probably under a different name, can I see the list?"

CHRIST NO.

"OK, he might know me as Richard. William, Willie, Bill..." oh God.

By this time, Pete had curled around my side to flank the bouncer. I could see his furtive eyes darting surreptitiously down the list, much of which had already been struck through.

"I think he said he'd leave it in the name Pop Rocky," said Pete.

EXCUSE ME?

"Oh yes, Pop Rocky. I'm Pop Rocky. And so are they." I nodded at Ali and Pete. This could get serious. We'd surely been caught out. This was ridiculous. We'd pushed this envelope a little too far.

The bouncer's steely gaze fixed mine, a little angrily. Then shifted to his clipboard, where fingers were detaching an envelope and pushing it into my quivering hand. The words 'Pop Rocky' were handwritten on the front.

"Enjoy the show," he said. We rushed forward to the ticket booth, tore the envelope open and - bless my fuckin' stars - THREE tickets. AND an all-areas photo pass. Which meant, ladies and gentlemen, that we all got in for free, and Pete was able to take his video camera with him. He got a good film out of it. I'll put a clip on Facebook.

Just don't tell Pop Rocky about this. Right?

David Live

Lucky me - I was born at the right time. I got to see David Bowie perform live. I got to see David Bowie perform live an awful lot, actually.

Pretty much all my young man's money went towards it. Europe and beyond was my playground from my late teens onwards. Newcastle, New York, Newport or Berlin Neueweld... if David Bowie was booked to play, I'd get myself there and get myself in. Somehow.

I made a lot of friends along the way, many of whom remain close to this day. We got to know each other somewhat intimately through sleeping on floors, in airport lounges, railway stations, shop doorways and the like. Once I slept with three other people in the frozen back of a mini-van. My friend John slept in a Victoria Station luggage locker, his feet sticking out the open end so he wouldn't get locked in by mistake...

We hitched, we drove, we stowed away on ferries - we did whatever it took to get to the gig. Ticket buying, trading and upgrading became akin to a full-time job on the bigger tours. And as for those rare private shows, secret gigs and closed-shop TV performances? We got into most of those too, by fair means and foul, and by employing bravado and ingenuity that would, I think, astound.

How many Bowie gigs did I chalk up over the years? I stopped counting a tour or two ago for the sake of my sanity. It's well into three figures though. And, to misquote Gigi: "Ah yes. I remember them well."

I'm genuinely sad that nobody will ever get to enjoy the sights and sounds of a Bowie gig again. I used to feel jealous of those slightly older, slightly more switched-on types who saw the Ziggy, Aladdin, Diamond Dogs, Soul and Thin White Duke shows. Alright, so I still am. But I am also truly happy and blessed with the lot that I got - and I only wish there could be more.

David Bowie was a performer like no other. He really was. To bone up on the history of the man, as laboriously documented in a mountain of books as well as in cuttings and titbits garnered through my own reasonably fastidious research, is to discover just what an intensely focused young man he was.

He worked hard, ridiculously hard, to hone his gallery of talents. It's fair, I think, to say that unlike some lucky bastards David Robert Jones was not born talented as such. He had to earn his stripes. He taught himself to read music from a self-help book. I have no idea how he learned to play guitar... probably the same way. Then he found a piano, learned the hard and long way how to play it, and had the balls to bash out a classic piano-driven album ('Hunky Dory') almost straight away.

Balls were in abundance, too, at the creation of Ziggy Stardust. It takes some front to step onto the streets of Finsbury Park, Epsom or Newcastle dressed in a rainbow suit, wrestling boots and more lippy than is befitting of a lady. In conservative old 1972.

It was such an immensely creative time for David. He was inventing and reinventing himself, diligently chiseling away at the character he wanted to present to the world in the basement rehearsal space of what is now a corner chemist's shop in Greenwich. But I digress...

To see David Bowie live is, or was, to see all these incredible disciplines set out in order. What a performer! I remember the gig following my 19th birthday (I was given the bumps outside the concert hall the previous night), seeing the man perform 'Fame' from my envious position right up front against the Birmingham NEC stage. David was miming, pretending to sign autographs and hand them out. As he shuffled along the stage, eventually meeting me square-on, eye-to-eye, his make believe pen scribbled on make believe paper and the make believe autograph was proffered to me in mime fashion. I did the decent thing: I reached out and took it, folded it in half and stuck it in my pocket. Where it magically disappeared.

It was a daft but captivating moment. One of many, for me. Mighty is the craic of seeing David perform a secret rehearsal gig with Tin Machine, as nominal support act to a local band in a Dublin pub, in front of no more than 100 people. I was upfront, my chest clashing with his micstand. It was punk as fuck.

 Transfixing it was, too, to watch David belt out 'Something In The Air' in New York, his giant voice expelling so much air it turned to a visible cone of steam in front of him.

I could, and undoubtedly will, go on (and on). But not today. Today, I'm just happy to reflect on some of the fun I had earning those caps for Bowie fandom. The last time I saw him play was his last UK gig at the Isle of Wight festival. Funny, the Isle of Wight is where he made his very first public performance, too. At Scout camp, aged 11. And it's where I live now.

David last toured in 2004, which means in practical terms that nobody in their mid-twenties or younger would have stood much chance to see him, even once. So I mean it when I say I am truly grateful for the times I did get to share with this brilliant man and his often brilliant bands.

You might be wondering what David made of us lot? He was asked about this in interview once. I can't find it right now, but the quote went a lot like this:

"I recognise a lot of the people who come to my shows. I consider them friends. We're like old friends."

Rest in peace, old friend.

"And red mutant eyes gaze down on Hunger City..."

... is a line from Future Legend, the opening track of David Bowie's 1974 album 'Diamond Dogs'. It's all very dystopian, Burroughsian and Orwellian. In 1979, we all thought: "Wow! David Bowie predicted 'The Warriors'!" But it's 2015 now, and I'm thinking this: "Oh dear. David Bowie went and predicted London."

The capital nightscape used to strike me with awe and excitement. The view up and down the river from Tower Bridge, with riverside lights twinkling and cars and people rushing up and down its banks, was always a beautiful and inspiring one. The balance of old architecture and new buildings, even as recently as ten years ago, was pretty much acceptable. Heritage and culture seemed assured and ingrained in London's fabric, as did the notion of growth and wide-open possibilities. There was a sort of mutual respect between the old town and the new.

Just look at it now. Nowhere on or near Tower Bridge can you look downriver without being assaulted by the monstrous vision of the Walkie Talkie building. A ghastly carbuncle which burns pavements, blots horizons and serves no great purpose. (Have you been to its rooftop garden? Of course you haven't.) That's all you see behind the drawbridge, now. It's horrible.

Then there's the cheese grater. The gherkin. The Shard. OK, I guess I can live with The Shard. But taken as a gang, these gargantuan buildings are clearly not a good thing. Either London wants to look like a Martian colony under a giant dome, as visualised in '60s sci-fi, or it wants to look like London, complete with the Monument and St Paul's and Big bastard Ben. The mix of the two - just like those arty photographs of the moon poking out between skyscrapers - doesn't work. Again, it's horrible.

And, of course, there's more of this wanton destruction to come. An unwanted underground railway called Crossrail appears to be giving developers carte blanche to take a wrecking ball to any old landmark that gets in the way of something sterile, new and under-occupied. There's money, it seems, in stark and empty new property. Not in Victorian factories and tanning yards.

Soho? Denmark Street? Who needs them? Why keep the late Ken Colyer's smokey jazz clubs alive when you can just as quickly level them and build a block of posh flats in their place? You could name it The Colyer Mews (or something). You could stick a plaque up. That would be nice. No need to keep history - get rid of it, stick a plaque on the new thing. Shall we talk about Battersea Power Station? Let's not. It makes me too angry and sad.

So, you see. London's heritage, history and culture is being erased for the short-sighted financial gain of the greedy few. Private rents and house prices today are actually, certifiably, obscene. Those people who are happy to live on rice if it means they get to paint a picture or write a book or make a record can't afford to do even that any more. So off they go, the artists, out to the sticks. It's all part of London's rapid sterilisation.

I love London, so all of this hurts. And however hard I try to get on with my life and let other people get on with theirs, and just hope for the best for the future, I just can't. And do you know why?

It's those red mutant eyes that gaze down on Hunger City. It's the red lights of the cranes at night, dotted up and down the river, zig-zagging the once bustling and exciting West End, scattering through the South London suburbs and beyond. Blood red lights which are supposed to stop helicopters from smashing into them (something they're not entirely successful at) and which denote major construction going on underneath. London is plastered with the things. They're demonic, like a glowing red pox pointing towards a disease that is spreading fast and becoming terminal.

London is not in safe hands. And for that reason. I'm out.

Go Dayglo

London is being comprehensively dismantled to make way for Dubai 2.0. This is a city in tatters.

Pubs, music venues, Victorian streets and social housing are being kicked to pieces to make space for this season's must-have investment: a box-shaped posh flat with a box-shaped posh balcony offering a panoramic view of all the other box-shaped balconies in the vicinity. Who'd live in a flat like this? Nobody, of course. The people who invest in them are perfectly comfortable in their much nicer homes in Russia and Egypt. While they sleep the empty chrome, glass and brick boxes swell in value for them. Good old England. Good old London town.

This is how things stand in this, surely, worst ever time for London under the worst kind of bumbling fool Mayor imaginable - and all overseen by the snivelling, dribbling, vile little shits that pass for Government these days. Fuck off, Cameron. Just FUCK OFF.

So London's landmarks are being sucked up the tube into the Hooverbag of 'progress'. But thankfully there's still character galore in the shape of London's fantastically mental street people. I love Gilbert and George, but they're not always easy to find. But there are one or two excellent second division eccentrics.

One of my favourites is the guy who directs traffic on Tower Bridge. Actually, these days, he's more likely to be found on Commercial Road near Spitalfields.

Here is a fantastic fellow. A giant of a man, upright rectangular-shaped with a shock of shocking ginger hair and wild eyes. He's in his late forties, maybe, or fifties. And he likes to spend his days waving through cars and vans and trucks that are merrily going about their business without his help, thankyouverymuch. He directs them anyway.

Yes, there are sandwiches missing from his particular picnic hamper. Marbles are lost. But he's got something to do with his time, and he's not hurting anyone. He's actually pretty big fun. The way he affects a point and a headshake at a phantom flat tyre or some other fictitious hazard which he has imagined up for himself is rather endearing. I like to acknowledge his waving through with my own salute of thanks - and he loves that. His face never drops its serious and professional veneer, of course - he's got an important job to do, right? - but something in his eyes confirms that he really enjoys motorists joining in with his little roleplay.

Mr Traffic Director has worn the same grubby and torn hi-vis jacket for years. Until now. Just the other day I noticed he was wearing a brand new yellow dayglo jacket. This can mean one of two things:

Either he is taking his fantasy vocation ever more seriously and he has invested in new equipment for himself.

Or some kindly soul has gone way beyond duty and handed our friend a brand new jacket.

I would love to believe that this is what has happened. How nice. How heart-warming that, when all around is being smashed to rubble to feed an insatiable, hideously short-sighted development greed, someone would do such a thing for a harmless nut job who, when you get right down to the nuts and bolts of it, is now one of London's last remaining landmarks.

Remembering Evelyn Parr

If you want to do something nice for your seven or eight year old kid, take him or her on a fantastic voyage. It's just about the most exciting family activity going.

As a little squirt I lived for the hours I journeyed with mum and dad in our white Austin 1100, orange Morris 1300 or maroon Morris Marina (dad got through a lot of cars back then). The back was my exclusive domain and sweaty legs would stick to sun-scorched seats while my chin would press up against the back of the vinyl passenger seat, my position of choice, behind my mum's head. From there I would soak up all the stories my dad could offer about his tenure in the RAF. Or I would make my mum squeal with pretend delight at my parrot-like recreation of Monty Python sketches learned from BBC comedy LPs.

A favourite destination would be my Auntie Evelyn and Uncle Trevor's house in Pontllanfraith, a tiny town very much locked into the South Wales Valleys. Collieries were still a thing then (this was pre-Thatcher) and the landscape was scarred but very much alive with black sinews and huge shaft wheels.

From Exeter, this was always an epic slog. There was no M5 yet: we let the A38 lead us slowly through Tiverton, Taunton and around Bristol to the amazing Severn Bridge. There, we would break. Egg and chips and some kind of chemical fizzy pop would be all mine at the devastatingly modern Aust Motorport (my mum continued to call motorway service stations 'motorports' all her life). And then the tunnels at Newport would appear, and the short last leg through tiny Valleys villages, coal mines and fields full of sheep would finish us off.

Uncle Trevor was a kind but slightly intimidating man - to this young mind, at least. He was a fantastic and fun, big-hearted soul, but his deep voice and strong frame were less attractive to the mollycoddled junior school version of me than my incredible Auntie Evelyn.

Of all my Welsh relations, I loved her the most (my darling cousin Linnet comes a very close second). This was down to purely mercenary reasons. Every time we visited she would magic up a present for her nephew... whether it was close to a birthday or Christmas or not. Amazing!

Best of all, she had a knack for picking presents that were way outside the box. She was imaginative and considerate with her gift buying. A brush and comb set was an early nod to manhood for me. There was a small telescope one time – which doubtless launched my enduring fascination with the stars and planets. Books – really good books – were gifted to me too. And so on.

The only gift I didn't accept from her, offered when I was a little older, was a genuine Nazi tie-pin that she had acquired from God knows where. To show off and act mature, I pretended it gave me the creeps. Stupid me: I was actually quite fascinated. I should have just shut up and gratefully accepted it.

Fast forward to the adult version of me. In the 1990s, I found myself working and living in Newport, not far at all from my Aunt, Uncle and cousins. I would see a little of Evelyn, from time to time, in her new granny flat down the hill from her old house, and when she grew ill I visited her at the Royal Gwent Hospital.

At a pensioner's club she was encouraged to undertake a gentle writing project. This was intended as a bit of fun for the old folk, but Auntie Evelyn took this task to a completely unexpected level. Scribbling like a demon, she sealed all of her early memories onto paper – from following her dad (a cattle drover) through the streets of Exeter (on the back of a dog with a saddle attached!), to a sad life in a children's home, to entering servitude as a young teenager, through the (alleged) murder of her half-brother Joe, to the time she was wooed by one of the Welsh blokes in the travelling fair which rolled into town one summer. Guess what? She ended up marrying and spending her life with him. It's all in there, and it's a fantastic read.

My dad always had a very special place in his heart for Evelyn, his youngest sister. When she died, I think in a way my dad started to die as well. Spiritually, if not physically.

Today marks the date Auntie Evelyn left us. I still have some of the presents she gave me. And some photographs of her as a young girl. And, of course, her incredible essay – which, whenever I happen upon it and re-read it, comes as an efficient reminder that I have been lucky in life. I grew up with both parents in a family home and I have always had food to eat, clothes to wear, a sense of security and the freedom to grow ambition.

Auntie Evelyn, though she would never let it show, was unable to take any of those things for granted. The generation of Bardings that came before me had a very hard time of it. Evelyn had to fight, really hard, for everything in her life. But she made it. She was a star.

God bless you, Ev.

Good Grief

Depending on which self-help book or website you choose, there are five or seven stages of grief that we all must go through. That puts me on the sixth or eighth with regard to my mum.

My mother's death in January of this year was a harrowing and horrifying thing. I don't like to think about it - but I do. It was an inevitable thing to happen, and something that I and my siblings had been expecting for some time. She had been ill for more than a year.

In a way, a good part of our mourning had already taken place by the time she finally slipped away. It was an inoperable brain tumour that took her from us in the form of a cruel instalment plan, piece by piece. In the months before she was bedridden, she spoke and heard nonsense. Her brain played tricks on her. But she seemed happy enough.

The last days and weeks, though, were miserable and scary. There were lots of tears and a lot of confusion and anguish. One of the cruellest twists was thrown at us just a few days before she finally died. A change in her medication brought her a sudden burst of lucidity. After days of motionless and inactivity, we found her sat up in her bed, chatting, even taking sips of tea. One of my happiest memories of my mum, strangely, is of her as the dying woman - nodding and smiling, looking around and chatting to us all from her bed. Her brain had given up on allowing her to form words. But we let her have her say anyway.

It gave us false hope, which was ultimately and inevitably dashed. Her decline was swift from there. It was so sad. In the end, as is often the way, her death came as a release for all of us... and a mercy to her.

Now, with my mum's passing an entire generation has gone. I have no uncles or aunts: all dead. My father died 11 years ago. Suddenly, at 51, I'm the grown up.

Since January, I have had a few tearful episodes. But nowhere near enough. This is something I'm mindful of. I've kept myself occupied since then, in positive and not so positive ways, and have kind of bricked away the crushing magnitude of it all. The losing of my mum has become, to my mind, the most recent in a series of disasters beginning with the death of my dad and continuing through the death of two very, very important friends, leading up to Jean Mary Barding (nee Newton). The grief from those three predecessors was well-defined, reasonably well-handled and, I'm sad to say, cumulative. The grief I feel from losing my mum is aggravated no end by the compounding factor of the other three deaths. If I'm going to feel sad about my mum, I will feel sad about my dad, about Ali and about Jon too. So oppressing is this feeling that I have not yet been able to properly handle it.

My parents' house has just (today) sold and contracts have been exchanged. This is an important thing for me, since I needed that finality to allow me to draw a line under that part of my life. No house, no mum - so I can get on with my life.

That life, now, is me and Rhoda against the world. It's been on pause since January. I couldn't help that, it's just something I had to stash away. I am a little worried that it has festered for too long, that I won't now be able to go back and work through grief processes 1-5 or 1-7 depending on your chosen book or website. But it's what I'm left with.

I'm looking forward to being able to remember my mum properly, and to celebrating her in whatever way I am able to. That's all to come. Right now, though, with the closing of the sale of her house - the house I grew up in - and the closing of a very important chapter in my life, I feel I am able at last, and at least, to have a really good, productive cry.

E = FWF

Fat White Family gigs are always good. I've not seen a duffer yet. Certainly the one I witnessed last night - in a hipster-occupied former factory space in East London - scored highly on all the usual requisites... acrobatics, drama, bad psychedelia, noise, disturbance, damage. All in abundance.

Of course, I loved it. And my friends hated it.

I was hanging with a different crowd. A gang of visiting Californians. They'd seen 'it all' before. They'd already seen 'it all' done so much better. That's what they thought. That's what they told me. Of course, they're completely wrong.

Decades ago, they might have had a point. The MC5 were probably the most malevolent miscreants to ever stand on (and fall off) a Grande stage. They had haters, just like Fat White Family have today - although the MC5's opponents operated on an institutional and international level.


Rooted at the side of the concrete, hessian and brickdust stage of The Laundry in Hackney, my senses clobbered by 'Raining In Your Mouth' and 'Touch The Leather', I couldn't help but fall into flashback after flashback to some old MC5 live footage from 1968 or '69 that I have cause to have seen. In that clip, shot at a political rally in Boston (I think), the 'stage' area is defined by handheld rope. It's as anarchic and undefined as Fat White Family's makeshift platform in E8.

In both (footage and real life), tattooed and hairy boys and girls run a rampage, scattering over the boards, getting in the way, diving on and off, wrestling with mics and leads. In the old film, Rob Tyner is up and down on his knees, screaming wild oblivion. In 2015, Lias and his hair are blurred and flying, in and out of outstretched hands. In both, pretty much the whole band are smoking and playing simultaneously - the latterday lot, of course, in clear contravention of the great smoking laws of our fine country.

An intern photographer stood next to me stops shooting for a second to lift a one-finger salute to each and every person before him, unwittingly apeing Brother JC's actions as seen in that old, old clip.

A cowboy hat (a very wrong cowboy hat, I'm informed by my American friends) is worn in 2015. As it is in 1968 or '69. So is a redneck baseball cap. The band look so shockingly untogether and sound so shockingly close to falling apart. It's real as can be, in other words, and about as rough-around-the-edges and therefore captivating as The MC5 must have been at the height of their powers. You'd be a wise person not to give any of Fat White Family (or The MC5) your home address. That's what I think, sometimes.

The set over, one of my American friends shouted: "Boo, you suck!" just quietly enough so that the band wouldn't actually hear. Later he talked about having had tomatoes in his pocket and having thought about throwing them. He didn't do that, though. Because, he announced several times, "they would probably like that!"

Funny. I don't think they would have given a flying fuck.

* "I am a stranger on the earth..."

All of Vincent Van Gogh's paintings are important but 'Landscape in the Rain at Auvers' means the most to me.

It's a striking double canvas, slightly larger than an opened-out gatefold LP sleeve, depicting a broad country panorama being pummelled and pelted under a particularly brutal summer downpour.

Diagonal streaks of rain stripe the painting from top to bottom and much of the French wheat fields' colour has been sapped by the storm. Vincent's other late-period works glow with characteristic yellow-golds and rich greens, but this scene has surrendered to cold silvers and greys, dark blues and depressed ochres.

To stand face to face with the painting, now in peaceful retirement at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, is to square up to the artist's own tantrums. A knife has been used to slash the canvas. Thick paint has been pasted on, as if spitefully. Where some of Vincent's earlier, happier work comes bundled with concession and compromise and a nod to contemporary taste, this one does not. It's a last hurrah. It's immense. No filter.

It was hanging on the wall of Vincent's room at Café Ravoux in Auvers-sur-Oise, just north of Paris, as he lay dying from his self-inflicted gunshot wound. It was most likely completed on or slightly before 27 July 1890. Vincent died two days later aged 37, the poor, poor man.

'Landscape in the Rain at Auvers' continued to stand guard over its creator's corpse until the funeral but for unknown reasons it never went on to enter the possession of the Van Gogh family. Maybe it was squirreled away? Canvas impressions on the thick paint splashes suggest, to my untrained eye at least, that it was rolled up while still drying.

One day in the late 19th Century it came up for sale in Paris. The Davies sisters bought it, and later bequeathed it to their local gallery. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, probably scared by the broken provenance, has always distanced itself from this one. But they're fools.

This is Vincent laid bare. Forget crows. FUCK crows. What the fuck have crows got to do with anything? This is Vincent's full stop. And it's the saddest thing ever.

* The first words from Vincent's first Sunday sermon. Turnham Green, London. 29 October 1876.

Music Is Lethal

Sometimes I think to myself, yeah, this could be the day. The day that I finally plot out my on-off, up-down, love-hate relationship with music and see how it looks laid out as a graph or in a Venn diagram.

I'd have rows marking out the years from 1964 to now, and I would have columns representing the intensity of the music heard each year. The higher the column, the more intense the listening experience. With a different colour, perhaps, to denote good or bad. With a great deal of luck, the statistics I input would reveal a curve of some kind - a wave or fluctuating frequency that demonstrates a pattern. That would be a real breakthrough. That would be brilliant science.

But I haven't tried the graph thing yet and I'm not at all sure that it would work out, anyway. Besides. My memory is terrible. Too sketchy to even attempt it. So here are some highlights instead - presented as an overview of periods in my life when music and I did or did not see eye to eye. These lasted weeks, months, years. They're not presented in any particular order.

1) The One-ness with Raw Power. This is when I was happiest. Luckily, this coincided with Rocket From The Crypt being active and touring. Throughout this time of my life I felt the gutteral, primal power of the rhythm and force of music. I was able to absorb, devour and surf its relentless movement. Music was like a life-force to me - I felt like it controlled my muscles and senses completely. My eyesight seemed brighter. Life was a breeze. More than this, it seemed to vitalise me, physically. I was hungry and thirsty for it. The opening bars to 'Pigeon Eater' were more important to me than anything.

2) Music as Passive Therapist. The 'teen in his bedroom' syndrome. I used music to reinforce or rebutt my voice in the world. This was a helpful phase. Music was unobtrusive and helpful.

3) Music as Aggressive Therapist. This was a powerful and unpredictable one. Instead of helping me through turmoil, the music would underline what was wrong with everything in my world. Innocuous songs, pop songs, would mock, jeer and condemn me. But I listened to them anyway. I would cling desperately to their messages, convinced that it would do me good in the long run. I went to a lot of gigs in this state - and hated them. Moreover, I hated the people around me at those gigs. I couldn't understand how they could look like they were enjoying themselves when the message coming from the stage was so utterly, utterly bleak. I was very unhappy at this time.

4) The Shredded Nerves. For a while, I found myself connecting super-strongly with what I perceived to be an emotional depth to the music I was listening to. This is the polar opposite of the 'One-ness with Raw Power', in that I would be drawn to music which affected me strongly, only to have such a terrible time coming to terms with it. British Sea Power and Arcade Fire songs made me weep, easily and freely. It was a type of mourning, I think.

5) Distrust In Music. This was a kind of purge on my part. Unable to pick out anything emotionally, spiritually or educationally worthy in the music I was listening to, I would consign the whole lot to the bin. I wouldn't listen to any records or attend any gigs. I would never put the radio on in the car. It was all bullshit, all of little or no use. In this state, I would have no recollection of any of the four scenarios listed above.

6) Music as a Welcome Distraction. Enjoyable tunes, enjoyed. Merry bopping about. Able to enjoy it for what it is.

7) Music as an Unwelcome Distraction. My mind would be twisted up in knots, confused as to how people could be letting this music stuff go on when it was mischievously clouding and shrouding something far more important - some perilous coming event, or something that urgently needed attention.

Written in a van with the door shut, backstage at a summer festival.

The Rodney Hallworth Preservation Society

Never say never and all that, but I can't picture myself ever going back to news journalism. I'm fairly certain those days are over for me.

Still, I look back on the 20 or so years that I gave to the Fourth Estate very fondly. I had great colleagues and quite a lot of fun. There would always be some drama lurking somewhere, poised and primed to punctuate the mundanity of council meetings, court proceedings and no end of sad-faced suburbanite families with potholes to point at. So I was happy in my work, by and large, if not the most voracious careerist.

My only dream as a young hack was to someday scribe a front page splash for The Daily Mirror. This I eventually did: only to conclude mournfully that I had been kidding myself. This had not been a burning personal goal after all, I decided, just a random professional benchmark to work towards. The much younger version of me always imagined having that first front page framed and hanging forever in a hallway or study. Next to the Pullitzer which followed it, maybe. When it came to the crunch, I didn't even keep a copy of the paper.

What I did hold onto, though, is an arsenal of handy life skills which I acquired and sharpened over years on the reporter beat. I still draw from these today (even the shorthand). And, to toot my own trumpet, I got pretty damn good at journalism. If a story was there to be found, I would find it. And I would report it clearly and accurately. I became a very good newshound.

I owe most of this to an irascible old bastard called Rodney Hallworth. I was in my late teens or early twenties when I first encountered this formidable fellow with thick-rimmed glasses and an even thicker Stockport accent. I was finding my journalistic feet on the Teignmouth News, a sleepy weekly paper for a sleepy South Devon seaside town. Rodney was my boss... kind of. His was a nominal kind of role as overseeing eye, by which I mean I already had a news editor and editor to report to in the paper's sister office up the road in Dawlish. Rodney just needed to be kept in the loop. Which I did through daily phone calls, visits to his quaint little cottage in the neighbouring harbour town of Shaldon, and lengthy sessions at his local pub.

Rodney was in his fifties and veering ever closer to retirement by then, having already lived out the most incredible journalistic life. He had earned his stripes decades earlier as crime reporter for the Daily Mail and Daily Express. Over multiple afternoon pints, he would roll out anecdote after anecdote for me – I heard about his reporting of the Great Train Robbery, about his relationship with Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged for murder in Britain (he accompanied her to the gallows), about the Scotland Yard pepper-pot collection which he had a hand in curating, and most notoriously about his key involvement in the Donald Crowhurst round-the-world sailing scandal. But let's come back to that...

Rodney and I warmed to each other very quickly. I was full of youth and enthusiasm for my fresh new career, and Rodney was, I think, delighted to have a keen cub reporter to tell his stories to. He called me his protege quite often, and occasionally he would introduce me to his friends and acquaintances as that. He was full of advice, guidance and tricks of the trade for me. It was Rodney who taught me, time and time again, to write as if 'for the bloke in the pub'. To write news stories as if they were for my mates to hear. Or, even better, for some dumb drunk asshole who needs every stupid detail to be laid out in simple language.

Rodney's speech was always colourful and kindly. He'd talk in terms of 'Christmas-ing up', of being careful to measure out the right level of personality for each story – and of sticking the boot in when it needed to be done. And each and every week, when I would ride my moped (he called it my 'put-put') over the bridge to the pub to deliver that week's freshly-printed paper, he would go through its pages with me, pointing out what was good and, invariably, what was bad too.

He had a temper, and no end of times I would be on the receiving end of it. I remember Rodney screwing our paper into a ball and throwing it to the floor, bellowing his disapproval over the use of some headline or other. Tourists in the lounge bar fled. And once, when I turned up to one of our boozy editorial meetings without a penny to my name, he chose to really let rip.

“You do not – and let me make this absolutely clear, boy – you do not EVER come into a pub without any fucking money! Is that understood?”

Rodney suffered from angina and complained about it regularly. When he died in 1985, aged 56 (I think) it came as no real surprise but it hit me very hard. Rodney had become a huge part of my life.

His funeral, choreographed in advance by the man himself, was memorable. The service concluded with a solo trumpeter, in bowler hat and jazz colours, playing 'Bye Bye Blackbird' at the church door. Back at the pub, we discovered he had secretly put a significant amount of money behind the bar for the purpose of his wake. I got smashed on whiskey and was soon in floods of tears in the corner. The Mayor of Teignmouth, Cllr Peter Winterbottom, put a comforting arm around me, saying: “We'll just say you've got the flu.”

Of course, the many little lessons I learned back then went on to serve me very well at work. And they still do. Many years after he died, I tried to pay tribute to him in my not-very-good speech on leaving the South Wales Echo.

But there's more. There's a reprise. Rodney re-entered my life.

One night in 2006 I was asleep in front of my TV in Kentish Town, London. The words coming out of the box drifted in and out of my dream state, as they often do. But then something incredible happened. I heard Rodney's voice. Clear as day. It was unmistakably him.

It was enough to shock me awake. Good God! And there, indeed, he was – in full colour – talking on my television. It was the documentary 'Deep Water'. Rodney, filmed in 1968, was speaking about his role as Crowhurst's press guru. This was staggering. It was surreal. Rodney in moving image form. Talking. The closest to being alive again that you can get.

A handful of further little coincidences followed. A friend of mine turned out to be a friend of the fellow who made 'Deep Water'. Some months before that, I happened across a copy of Rodney's book about serial killer Dr John Bodkin Adams in a stall on the South Bank. A couple days later, I found a second copy. More recently, I came across the Jonathan Coe novel 'The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim'. Rodney is mentioned in that, rather a lot.

And now a film, a feature film, is being made about the whole Crowhurst affair. Colin Farrell stars in it. Rodney's role has been taken by David Thewlis. I decided I should do something to try to preserve something of Rodney's legacy. So I wrote to Mr Thewlis's agent. I wrote to the producers of the film too. This is part of what I wrote:

“Rodney was an incredible character. Working under him as a junior reporter on a Teignmouth newspaper, right up to his death in 1985, was a life-shaping experience for me. He used to call me his 'protege' (as well as some more colourful names when things weren't going well).

“His role in the Crowhurst saga was incredibly dark, no doubt about that. And he spoke about it a fair bit, even decades after the event. But there was a warmth and simplicity to him as well. If Mr Thewlis has five minutes to spare and thinks it might help to hear a few Rodney anecdotes, I would be delighted to share them. Please let me know if this is do-able. I feel I sort of owe it to Rodney to try to fly his flag in some small way.”

I haven't had a reply. I'm sure whoever read the email consigned me to the 'nutter' bin. I look forward to the film, of course. And I hope something of the Rodney I knew will shine through it. But, as I heard somebody say the other day, the movie is going to need a villain and Rodney – who went on to sell Crowhurst's log books for a small fortune - doubtlessly fills that requirement perfectly.

Like I said in my email to the film people. I feel I owe it to Rodney to fly his flag somehow. Maybe this 'Letter from Claptonia' will just have to do. Whatever happens, I'll never forget good old Rodney.