1: A farm in Denmark. A big-boned farmer finds a record nailed to a board on the shore near his house. He removes it then puts it on a record player. It’s good. He starts pogoing.
Scene 2: A few days later, in the farmer’s barn, a punk band is practising. The farmer is on lead vocals.
Scene 3: A tractor lies half-buried beneath long grass. There are cobwebs on the steering wheel.
Scene 4: A painting of the farmer and his wife in the style of Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews. The farmer has a mohican. The wife looks very, very angry.
Long before we were offering third-class punk records to the water spirits, rivers were worshipped as gods. Those red-haired party animals, the Celts, threw things they most valued – shields, swords, jewellery, and other anarcho-Celtpunk memorabilia – into them (a residue of this is our need to chuck loose change and crap jewellery into fountains). To different cultures across the globe, rivers have represented time, eternity, life and death. It is believed that our names for rivers are the oldest words in the language, some predating even the Celts. Many major settlements were located at healing springs sacred to the pre-Roman goddesses, and many rivers, such as the Danube, Boyne and Ganges, were named after goddesses. The Thames is one of these, its name apparently deriving from a pre-Indo-European tongue and referring to the Goddess Isis. Some posh Oxbridge rowing types still call it that. Well, we’ve got names for posh Oxbridge rowing types. Like ‘big-toothed aristo wanker’, etc.
London is beautiful. Samuel Johnson, in the only quote of his anyone can really remember, said, ‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.’ He may have been a fat mad-as-a-hatter manic depressive in a wig, but there is something in his thesis. London’s got its fair share of nice parks and museums, but I love its underbelly, in fact its belly in general – the girls in their first strappy dresses of the summer, the smell of chips, the liquid orange skies of early evening, high-rise glass office palaces, the lost-looking old men still eating at their regular caffs even after they’ve been turned into Le Café Trendy or Cyber Bacon, the old shop fronts, the rotting pubs, the cacophony of peeling and damp Victorian residential streets, neoclassical shopping centres, buses that never arrive on time, incessant white noise fizz of gossip, little shops, big shops, late-night kebab shops with slowly turning cylinders of khaki fat and gristle in the window, the bitter caramel of car exhaust fumes, drivers spitting abuse at each other through the safety of tinted electric windows, hot and tightly packed tubes in summer, the roar of the crowd from Highbury or White Hart Lane, dog shit on the pavements, psychopathic drunken hard men who sit outside at North London pub tables. London has got inside me. I’ve tried to leave. But I always come back. It’s love, y’see.
As you can probably tell, I’m a sentimental country boy. No real self-respecting Londoner would love their city the way I do (and before you ask, Dr J. was from the Black Country).
My love affair started early. The first trip was in the late sixties. We went to the Tower of London and some museums while the streets were ‘aflame’ with the lame English version of the ‘68 riots (‘What do we want? Cheap cigarettes and decent central heating! When do we want it? How about Wednesday? I’m visiting my Auntie for a long weekend!’). Years later I visited an old college mate in a little flat in Finsbury Park. I slept on the floor and spent three days sitting in pubs where we were the only people without overgrown moustaches and some obscure connection to the Brinks Matt robbery. A drunken fat bloke with a moustache the size of Rutland showed me how to drink Guinness properly. Throughout these years it seemed that London was a place full of record shops, shouty Irish blokes, pissed-up Jamaican grandads and stoners. I’ve found it hard to shake off these early impressions.
In January 1988 I hit cold evening air at Highgate tube, north London, a heavy-duty iron forties typewriter (a prerequisite for the aspiring writer) strapped to my body with a mustard and maroon dressing-gown cord, guitar on my back, clutching a bag with a spare pair of jeans, a couple of T-shirts and a change of underwear.
I had arrived, like Hemingway in Paris, in a grand European capital where I would soon become a famous novelist and songwriter. OK, not like Hemingway at all. Unless his music has been kept quiet all these years.1 I had a simple plan. Within six months I’d have clinched a record deal and would be starting my second novel. I was here to scrape the gold off the London pavements and cart it back to Lincolnshire, to be held aloft in procession through the streets of my old home town, before sharing my booty with all and sundry in the market place.
And so twelve years on I’m still here. Pushing a pram around for an hour or so every day and watching too much kids’ TV.
I love London in late summer/early autumn. Hot weather. Then it’s cold. Then it’s cold-but-hot cold. Cold days have warm miasmic breezes. Hot days have brittle, icy winds that hide behind hedges and garden walls. Then it’ll piss down. The weather’s going crazy. You always start your books with stuff about weather, said one (pedantic) mate. What do you mean always? I’ve only written one. Yeah but you started that with weather and now you’re starting this the same way.
But weather is important. People on these islands have always been obsessed with it. The Celtic people worshipped the weather gods. The seasons. Agriculture. Sacrifice. Dancing naked around standing stones. Burning Edward Woodward in The Wicker Man. Listening to ambient techno while off their faces on magic mushrooms. The British Isles can have wind, sun, rain and snow all in one day. My mate agreed and pointed out that he lived here too so also knew these things. But now it’s changing more and more, What With Global Warming And That. The east of England could be underwater in a few decades. I want to write a book about Lincolnshire some day. But Lincolnshire may not be around for much longer.2 London too. The climate will get wetter rather than hot and dry. It could also get colder in winter if the Gulf Stream gets clobbered by cold water from the melting ice caps flowing into the North Atlantic, pushing the warmer water further south. More importantly, my book about Lincolnshire will then be about an area that no longer exists. Or one of those Undersea-Lost-World-type things.
‘How do you know all this stuff?’ asked my mate.
‘I saw it on TV.’
Anyway after all the hotcoldrainsnowsuncoldhot stuff, it went cold again. Maybe we had gone straight from early summer to late winter. It became so consistently grey that my sensitivity to the London seasons became even more numbed than usual. As a kid, in rural Lincolnshire, every day held new smells and sensations. Cow parsley. Corn. Peas. Sugar beet. Rotting leaves. The perfume of a girl who’d just chucked me. Singed hairs on the back of a fat farmer’s neck as he gets his ‘winter cut’ at the local barber shop. Rotting roadkill. Cow shit. Blood.
And after a few days of cold, the sun suddenly came out and I guessed, from stuff in the newspaper, it must be some time in August. On the way back I walked along the little avenue of trees in Clissold Park. This is a sacred space where we sometimes sit in the evenings, surrounded by people doing tai chi, yoga, reading, skinning up or snogging, and we watch some of the crap football lower down in the park. Fat women jog tortuously around the little running track. Above, breadcrumb clouds scud across a perfect sky, and a leather football hits a nearby tree.
For someone who finds rivers fascinating (‘Yes, would you like to see my gold-embossed collection of nineteenth-century etchings of the tributaries of the Tyne?’) underground rivers give me an extra thrill. As well as all that energy and … water … there’s the fact that you can’t see them. They’re erotic, mysterious and magical because they’re hidden and therefore may or may not really exist. In the early nineties when I lived near Ladbroke Grove I frequented a little second-hand bookstore at the northern stretch of Portobello
