epigram 22 [john taylor]

As gold is better that's in fire tride,

So is the Bankside Globe that late was burn'd:

For where before it had a thatched hide,

Now a stately Theator 'tis turn'd.

Which is an emblem that great things are won,

By those that dare through greatest dangers run. 

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There's something rather affecting about the idea of an unknown poet walking past the hulk of the Globe in 1614, soon to vanish for half a millenium and more and coming up with the following lines. Also might be worth noting that at that time, neither would the subsequent immortality of the Globe's star playwright have been suspected (the plays didn't even exist in print), nor the building's future fame and glory.

delight in disorder [robert herrick]

A sweet disorder in the dresse

Kindles in clothes a wantonnesse:

A lawne about the shoulders thrown 

Into a fine distraction:

An erring lace, which here and there 

Enthralls the crimson stomacher:

A cuffe neglectfull, and thereby 

Ribbands to flow confusedly:

A winning wave (deserving note)

In the tempestuous petticote:

A careless shoe-string, in whose tye 

I see a wilde civility:

Doe more bewitch me, than when art

Is too precise in every part.

Awakening [Robert Bly]

We are approaching sleep: the chestnut blossoms in the mind

Mingle with thoughts of pain

And the long roots of barley, bitterness

As of the oak roots staining the waters dark

In Louisiana, the wet streets soaked with rain

And sodden blossoms, out of this 

We have come, a tunnel softly hurtling into darkness.

The storm is coming. The small farmhouse in Minnesota 

Is hardly strong enough for the storm. 

Darkness, darkness in grass, darkness in trees.

Even the water in wells trembles. 

Bodies give off darkness, and chrysanthemums 

Are dark, and horses, who are bearing great loads of hay

To the deep barns where the dark air is moving from corners.

Lincoln's statue and the traffic. From the long past

Into the long present

A bird, forgotten in these pressures, warbling,

As the great wheel turns around, grinding 

The living in water. 

Washing, continual washing, in water now stained 

With blossoms and rotting logs,

Cries, half-muffled, from beneath the earth, the living awakened at last like the dead.

Mike Bartlett on the advantages of writing in verse

He discovered that one advantage of writing iambic pentameters, which may have been one of the attractions to Shakespeare, is that it's hard to cut or change because the removal of a single word disrupts the rhythm: "Yes, it's hard to rewrite and the actors can't come up with their own lines, which can happen with prose plays. These are all added bonuses of writing in verse that I've discovered."

mid air

It’s 10.30am Spanish time. Ten hours since we left Barajas airport, Madrid. It’s also 9.30m UK time. Which is 5.30am Uruguayan time.

I watched Villeneuve’s disconcerting film, Prisoners. After that I lay down and slept for a while. The plane is no more than a third full, unusually. It gives me room to stretch out.

In doing so, I became acutely aware of the absurdity of my position. Which is also the inherent absurdity of airline flight. The realisation, somewhat banal, came about because of my unusual posture. It’s rare that you get to stretch out and lie horizontally on a Transatlantic flight. I suddenly found myself imagining all that lay below me. 11600 metres of solid air. I am not normally a nervous flier, but the sensation of all that air pressing up towards me, holding me in suspension, made me queasy.

Luckily I slept. For maybe two hours. When I woke up I looked at the map, which shows the image of a white paper plane, as it glides around the globe. The last time I’d looked, before falling asleep, we had been close to the Azores. Pinpricks with Hispanic names in the middle of the Atlantic. Two hours later, the map still registered us as being mid-ocean. It seemed as though we had made little progress. I kept my eye on the screen, then fell asleep for a while longer. When I woke up I watched a 50 minute documentary about the Tuareg.

When the documentary finished I switched the map back on. We did not appear to have moved any further. We were still mid-ocean. Befuddled, I tried to make sense of the figures which flashed up on the screen at regular intervals. They informed that we were seven hours from destination. I didn’t know if it was my sleep-filled head or the jumble of time zones but the figures didn’t seem to add up. No one else seemed at all conscious of the fact the screen had to be wrong. It was the middle of the night. People slept. There was silence. Just the hum of the engines.

The week before a plane had gone missing. It had vanished without trace. People looked for it from the Indian Ocean to the Australian coast but it had disappeared. I couldn’t help but think about it. I thought that this is how it might have occurred. Without anyone realising what was happening. The hours drift by and no-one says anything. Time works differently in the air. We are free form its bonds. Until, all of a sudden too much timeless time had passed. The passengers realised, late in the day, late in the night, that the secure system in which they had placed their faith, had failed them.

I walked down the aisle. I wanted to know if anyone else was concerned. They were all sleeping. I put my head in the stewardess’s section and asked for a glass of water. I asked if she knew what time we were due to arrive. I said that the screens didn’t seem to be working. She said something about seven. Something I didn’t understand. She said: the screen’s been saying seven hours for ages. It was a relief to know she knew. Then I wondered if she too was in on the conspiracy.

People began to wake up as sunlight peeked through the windows. I watched them as they registered the information on the screens and tried to make sense of it. No-one seemed concerned. Just confused. The old couple were baffled, but then they were baffled by everything. Two Italian women who were going to give a concert in the Zitarossa sang them a song as they woke up.

That was half an hour ago, just as I started to write. The display still insists that we are seven hours from our destination, located somewhere above the Atlantic. The plane keeps chugging on. It could be hours before we have any idea if we are on the right track or the wrong one. Our destiny is out of our hands.

on watching Way of the Morris in Microcine Goes

The audience is small. Disappointingly so, having contacted virtually every organisation with any connection to Britain in the city, including the man from the British Council. He doesn’t make an appearance, and it seems as though Morris might be too much of a niche market for this neck of the woods.

But we’re there, the four of us and a young couple turn up and so does Brian. Brian is a bearded, red-headed Uruguayan with an Irish surname. Brian once spent a year living in a lighthouse, making artwork about the weather. In the bar afterwards he tells me that he makes post-digital art, which involves selling antique laptops with unreadable scripts to museums around the world. Brian has that Borgesian, Rio Platense mind, which can take an idea and turn it into another idea which hints at another and looks like yet another. And might be none of the above.

Claudia has spent weeks labouring over the subtitles. Baldricks and pigs bladders. Shinbells and Hooky. All rendered into Spanish, all appearing at the precise moment of their inception within the script. Vejiga de cerdo and cascabeles. A labour of love.

The film screens. I’ve seen it before. I don’t know how many times. I’ve helped with the subtitling process. I know the ‘script’ inside out. I don’t know what to expect. I don’t know what the small but perfectly formed audience will make of it.

England appears, like magic. English light. English dreams. English tongue. English music. English memories. I am lost in it all, all that doth seem lost. Because it’s a long way away, this England of mine, which is not just the England of fields and beer. It’s also the England of my friends’ sensibilities, that thing we share, that way of looking at the world. A way that flies so far under the radar, at times, that the country fails to really see, or value it. Which may be why I am here, sitting in a remote cinema in Montevideo, now.

The film is also a paean to the maker’s roots. His father appears in the film, as does his uncle, and his gran. I feel a nostalgia for my own roots, processed through the filmmaker’s examination. I can trace the England that was lost in the first “great” war, the England of the seventies, an era that’s now, in the flicker-flicker of the super-8 footage, as remote as the Victorians, and the England of today, my England. I feel the loss of all these countries, all of them absent in different ways. The image of the filmmaker as a child feels almost as distant as the image of the filmmaker as the adult I know, the ties that bind stretching, taut, across an ocean. Flickering on the screen.

Behind his image, for he is the star of the show, I see other faces, all the friends and nights and places we have shared.

The film ends. That brief moment of nostalgia I experienced has passed. I’m in the present again.

The audience applauds. And to a man or a woman exclaims: Que bien pelicula! (What a wonderful film!)

We head to the bar and drink beer and eat chivitos and pizza and talk about England and Billy Bragg and poetry and playwriting and language and Berbers and Aztecs, who also wore shinbells. The sunlit film has entered into the steely Uruguayan winter and claimed its small share.

And for a moment everything makes a strange kind of post-digital sense. All the ley lines converge. My Montevideo has become another locus within time and space, where the Morris men can dance:

“A way of helping, in some small way, to keep steady the World, as it spins heavy on its axis.”

places of residence

Based on having lived in a place for at least a month. In brackets places available/ used as alternative residence for a fixed period of time.


1988 Priors Barton - Winchester
        Rayners Lane - Harrow, London
        Fulham Road, London
1989 Rayners Lane, Harrow London (2)
        [Wells St, London]
        Blackheath (H)
        Blackheath (A)
1990 Wandsworth, London
        Islington, London
        King's Avenue, Brixton, London
1991 St. John's Hill, London
1993 Bournemouth
1994 Priors Barton, Winchester (2)
        Ciudad Vieja, Montevideo
1995 Priors Barton, Winchester (3)
        Concannon Rd, Brixton, London
        Tulse Hill, London
        Gypsy Hill, London
        Trinity Square, Brixton, London
1996 Stockwell, London
1998 South Lambeth Road, London
1999 Vauxhall, London
2005 Holloway Road, London
2006 Peckham, London
        Baron's Court, London
        Priors Barton, Winchester (4)
2008 Royal Oak, London
2009 Calle San José, Montevideo
        Bartolome Mitre, Montevideo (2)
2010 Calle Paysandu, Montevideo
2012 Calle Rio Negro, Barrio Sur, Montevideo
2014



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1966 West Drayton, London
1967 Headstone Avenue, London
1971 Overijse, Belgium
1974 Cheltenham
1975 Nicholas Way, Northwood, London
1979 Winchester
1980 (Essen, Germany)
1981 (Priors Barton, Winchester)
1985 (Adelaide Hills, South Australia)
1985 York Uni, campus
1986 Dunnington, York
        (Dusseldorf, Germany)

reilly ace of spies

The other night we watched Possession. Not a film for the faint-hearted. Andrzej Zulawski takes the kitchen sink and throws it at a marital breakdown. There’s everything from a sexualised monster (created by the man who would later go on to create ET) to a three minute subway sequence of Isabelle Adjani having one of the most severe breakdowns ever seen on film. (She won best actress at Cannes for it.) Adjani co-stars with a young Sam Neill. The acting is frankly bizarre. The director clearly told his stars to go for it and that they did. There are not just moments but whole sequences that are so over-the-top they give the impression of two fish thrashing around out of water, gasping for breath. At the same time, there’s a degree of commitment to the work, of zero compromise, which is impressive. If you want no-holds-barred acting, for better or for worse, Possession is a good place to go. A coherent script might have helped, but clearly there was something out of control about Zulawski’s movie, which is filmed in a divided Berlin and includes shots of East German border guards looking on from the other side of the omnipresent Wall.

The film was released in 1981. Quite how Sam Neill, then in his early 30s, ended up acting in it is something of a mystery. IMDB reveals he was also in Omen 3 around this time, but otherwise his previous work seems to have been predominantly in Australia. Two years later he would go on to become the protagonist in the British TV series, Reilly Ace of Spies, which cemented his reputation.

Watching Neill lock horns with Adjani; threaten to cut his arm off; have a demented fit in a hotel room, turned out to be a Proustian moment. It took me back over twenty years to an Australian I knew in London, called Bruce. I cannot remember his surname. We worked together for a while in the Natural Shoe Store. The Natural Shoe Store purported to be a hippy-vibe place, in keeping with an emerging New London glamour. The first place to sell Birkenstocks, it was frequented by stars like Pavarotti, Annie Lennox, Sade etc. The hippie exterior, like the emerging New London vibe, was deceptive. The Shoe Store was then, and still is, an astutely marketed company, run by a craven American capitalist. Located in Covent Garden, it had a high staff turnover, many of them over-educated foreigners looking to earn a crust during their stay in London.

Bruce was one of these. A tall man, clean-cut, with what might be described as old-school Australian values. Australian men can be split into two camps. The roisterers and the old-school. The latter is a long way from standard UK perceptions of drunken Antipodeans. There’s something upstanding and almost Victorian about old-school Aussies. More likely to savour a good wine than down a tinny. Bruce wore brogues and spoke softly. He was not shy, but always measured his words carefully. We got on fine.

At the end of my stint at the Shoe Store, I decided to go on a small tour of Europe, whilst I could still buy an inter-rail pass, the magic ticket which allowed you to travel anywhere on European rail for a month if you were under 26. Before the days of discount air travel or the Channel Tunnel, cities like Madrid retained an alien, exotic feel. You arrived at dawn after an endless train journey. The cafés were full of chain-smokers who looked like they might once have played a prominent role in a Fascist regime. I hung out with an American artist who claimed to have sold his work to Dennis Hopper. He tried desperately to chat up girls who couldn’t understand a word he was saying, showing them postcards of his paintings, which looked like rip-offs of Douanier Rousseau.

After Madrid, the artist headed off to visit the caves at Altamira. I went on to Granada and the Alhambra. Then Gerona, the Pyrenees, Zurich, Naples. And finally Venice, where Bruce and I had arranged to meet. In the days before email or mobiles, we had nothing more concrete than a date, a time, and a place, the place being the Rialto bridge. He was several hours late, but I never doubted the old-school Australian would show up.

We spent a couple of days together. Neither of us were excited about seeing the tourist spots. Instead we took boats to far-flung islands and explored the margins. One of these islands was nothing more than rickety housing blocks with raw sewage in the ‘street’ and angry dogs. Bruce took black and white photographs. Later he gave me a couple of large prints which accompanied me for several years, on walls in Bournemouth, Winchester and London, before fading away. As did Bruce, who I presume ended up back in Australia.

I don’t know if it was on this trip or back in the UK that Bruce opened up. About his former girlfriend, with whom he had lived and hoped to marry. I may have imagined this, but I understood that he’d chosen to go traveling in Europe as a result of their break-up. Which occurred, he explained, when she met the actor, Sam Neill. Then in his post- Reilly phase, when he must have been something of a superstar in Australia. Neill had a fling with Bruce’s partner and she had left Bruce for him. It was hard to imagine the upright Bruce and the Hollywood star with the same woman. As Bruce himself put it. It was a choice of: “Me… or ‘Reilly Ace of Spies’”. Meaning, he seemed to suggest, ruefully, there wasn’t really any choice at all.