So... there you were... age thirteen fourteen...still age sixteen but by then had learned to avoid the boozy lot by running away with the other lot....
And their lil' bit of pot....
REAl 'fear' 's a real thing....
Forget them Sarajevo lot
at least they had some community, and solidarity,
on the same side, old Jenny Cideres..on it tearin their flesh for a stew
they knew, nothin of why they had to "alchemise" their society
into something else...
In the vile land of Military Industrial Complex, brokerage
at least by the newer agetimes, ninetine nineties they'd learned:
don't be the actual arms dealer Mark Thatcher
son, of the evil one
Nope be the middle man brokerin' them from your houseboat
on that Thames or even Gweek....
there no one will even take a peek
at what's below decks, that's for others to tweak
far away and long ago
Anyway ... saudade is, a moment.
More than a moment.
A story. Just tellin' real reality.
The nineteen seventies were less violent (The Luton babe agreed with me just a few weeks ago - her an actual schoolteacher there, my age, and her bloke
"so it it the immos has the Tommy stuff made it all febrile for a while?"
"nope its something else set in a decade or so ago...as you say dont believe the BBC the screwdrivers in the eyes down casualty... say something that was never said before" )
But more routinely 'violent' in a really rather cider headed way.
Take one lost boy floating around the local waters.
A rat of a brother and runt of a sister, not their fault, sent away to private boarding school
(ALL MONEY LOST SOME YEARS ON THANG GOD I'M NO FOOL - ALL INHERITED WEALTH FUCKS YOU UP MORE THAN 'MUM AND DAD' )
So even if one - me, age about eleven has a personal quiet revolution
(ohh ...she is my tutor too, " so was Rasputin a positive revolutionary of a negative one as we have been lead to believe...?" unflinchingly " a positive revolutionary" and she has a daughter she loves)
And refuses to go to school away rather staying around the local VERY 'umble yeomanry, mainstay Ralph the first a solid tree of a man taught me my scything the even more important lesson, AND to sharpen it AFTER the job awaiting the start of the next job..." you would get accused of OCD ADHD if that was your setting nowadays...
So your rat 'n runt are lost forever as you can take the girl out of the private school but not vice a versa...
And of course both become only shabby celebrity obsessed....
and any sane father wants to keep their child away from everything Olly wrote about so well in Affluenza... indeed them. Exactly.
Which is hard and requires endless kindly explanation, neutrally, with story, as one doesn't want to be thought ancient Marxist, but sometimes family can obviously be so guaranteed to fail, as both of them did, to ever even have their own...
As SO many of the very loose 'set' they partly inhabited of the very sparsely scattered 'set' around N Wales of other private school ed kids they knew.. - almost all who died young and all of whom were obviously as one occasionally saw them into ones later 20s, were really fucked up...and ,many died young.
Anyway good for me revolting.....
But there's one thing you couldn't avoid, in a small very working class ordinary comprehensive, in ones school 'community', age 14 that a few of the thuggish ones - not many but a few almost exclusively runaways from Liverpool 50km or more away (and no one ever went there in old unreliable motors days, nor thankfully did they come to our hidden valley and hills of paradise)
they.. the few school bullies, picked on the one who had a brother and sister at the posh schools..
One person alone in my schoolyear was often enough at the disco the one who would be not dancin' with some girl he fancied i still remeber perfectly age 15 and DAwn is there in front circling and she's smiling nicely at last....
And number 1 psycho-lite out of nowhere his knuckles are hard in my face....again....
That dawn had to be suspended... for a few months anyway
As you skulk away outside, frightened...
Anyway fast forward to yesterday early evening.... I don't go up to English blokes who have that bullneck rather full of steroids look, and say to them...
" mate... how old are you!? ..." " sisxty two..."
" well...ferk me i thought you were younger you look pretty young buck for that age..... but i never imagined it could be done, but you did it...you did it.....
" i skulked away in my bedroom as a teenager.. fuckhard wildman of the hills bigger than these underwhelming ones up there.... actually gallopin' em to shepherd my sheeps...no helmet.... even once foot went down a bunny hole when i was alone, full tilt...near broke my neck when the nag rolled OVER me it still rings in my head.....
but that's animals they are easy... other blokes fuck......hard
i spent most evenings raising myself almost exclusively on the likes of ....
" and down the pub Richard Jones or some of his mates would hunt me like a dog they would kick for fun.....
" but one learns to divert to the nicer ones who dont drink so much,....
" anyway... you get down eventually to London or even erics in Liverpool.....
" and you walk in to some dirty....always dirty... pub which hasnt had a lick of paint for years... the smoke tar is the walls.... and there's a noisy vibe to use todays rediculous word...an UNvibe.... everyone there is sort of well they arent quite sure why they are there there's nothing else to do....
" and then he... at first mainly a him, until the girls got rightly into the act too.... he would get up on stage.... no flash gear.... probably cheap guitars cheap drums cheap aftershave even if real men back then knew that only cheap men use that poison....
" you could still see the shaving cuts on his face even if he had only just come of age so as to have a fluff to cut....
" and he would stand there all swiveleye.... almost enraged.... pure rage... pure
" well its as simple as this he had NOTHING.. he had nowhere else to be or nobody else to be as they hadnt been told by anyone even mum n dad about some of the earlier good stuff.... mum n dad eckerslike down the pub singin Brotherhood of MAn songs ....
" he would stand there welded AT his lip, to the microphone singing ...scvreaming..... about how he couldnt even get a job as apprentice welder in Maggie's evil towns twinned with America, now...
"but he wasn't really complaining or moaning.... he just had nothing else to do.... nothing.....
" and in that moment...of rage... pure spittin' and spatterin' with his welded lip so he couldn't even spittlespatter that elegantly unless he spat even stronger and more visciously....
" you just knew even me a bit scared of tough guy blokes....
" that you could go up to him aftershow and in fact pet him on his head... ' you just did it....you found the answer to what is elsewhere... and he wouldn't glass you even in darkest deepest NAtional Front regions of town..
" he would shake your hand....."
" and that was what real art was for....
" but it was gone... there is no way that moment could be recreated... especially here.... its impossible.....
" but ... when you played it... when you screamed it...and the whole pub screamed
"AND A KICK IN THE BALLS.....
and that Tom Cat....
" i ...well there arent words for the feeling of total paradise ...never mind being reminded London could once do poetry perfection.....
" but you did summit even better.... you also were all the rest of them spotty lads who knew they would never get on the telly...or even one day become even he blotted his copybook to say the least with his support of 'Deaf to the ID deathsqauds..... '
"you somehow were all of them rolled into one..... the unseen lads who all they had was that microphone...and turned it into a white flag, pasted onto Siouxsi's perfect gusset, too.....
" there's no way anyone could ever have taken me back into that Camden pub in 1978 or nine ...... not even promoted... him - the violent thug, at the mic... maybe Polly Styrene queued up for her turn next as pure equal.... and even she knew she wanted to take him home to meet her moggies... and purr at him....
because..... he had found his purpose.... and all his rage and hurt went into what really was the greatest art...ever.... even if i prefered my Queen Joan....
(three chats rolled up into one for artsistic intent)
" bugger me though... just as you had finished these birds walked in and unlike nowadays i just made a friendly quip....
" and this perfect one as if one was back in that pub in Camden in 1978 ... as i to allay the death cult hall of mirrors everyone else is stuck ion i gave her my real version of Britalin..... and ferk me she didnt do THE POGO at me slanted into me with razor blades in herr fringe they all do..... she said twice, she agreed....with me.....lovely smiley agreement just simple old saudade style....
" what am i doin' chattin' with you ... a man can't live on us old geezers knowing what was once good..... i gotta go and find her.... "
