Who Knows Where The Time Goes.

I collect useless facts, inconsequential snippets of information. Books, magazines and TV were full of these facts; my Dad was full of them and he would spout information rather like an ornamental fountain sitting at the sitting room’s apex.

Sometimes I would get them from school friends and teachers; from the barber in idle conversation with another boy’s mother. The barber shop was of the old fashion sort and the barber (like lots of adults I knew) from the same parish. I remember he was quite robust and full of life at that moment in time. He was discussing a TV series called Manhunt, so that makes the year 1969 (thank you wikipedia). It was a wartime drama, about an airman on the run in Nazi occupied France.

He was discussing a specific scene, where a Gestapo man is inspecting a line of prisoners. In the line up there is a naked woman, and his eyes are shown to linger over her body; and in particular her pubic mound. My young mind may have augmented the scene, adding in some nakedness when it was not there.

Forty One years later, and the scene still occupies a portion of memory, already overloaded with useless facts. Rather like in Citizen Kane where an old Banker recalls a girl on the Staten Island Ferry, who he had glimpsed briefly as a young man; and never forgotten.

But I don’t think the memory comes from the TV show. Rather it’s because of the conversation in the barbershop. I remember the barber saying “You’d think he’d never seen a naked woman before.” The woman laughed, one of those saucy sea-side postcard laughs. In an instant I saw the barber and the woman as sexual beings, not just adults. I could see them having sex, and appreciating nakedness.

I stopped going to mass as a teenager, and switched to having my hair cut by a hairdresser. I moved away to Manchester, and visited home during the holidays. Over Christmas 1979 I worked as a waiter in a Men only Social Club. It was quite usual (up north) to have women excluded from Social Club bars, or the club itself. I served a lot of men who are now ghosts, alive only in memory. But back in ’79, they were animated and alive; drinking too much and leaving me massive tips.

Most of the customers I recognised from the parish. They had remained unchanged for many years, solid square shouldered men, who always wore a suit and tie. And they knew me, because my Uncle was on the clubs committee, and it was he who got me the job. My incompetence (serving a pint of Scotch beer, when the customer had ordered Scotch Whisky) was overlooked, and I spent an unusual festive period watching square shouldered men get drunk.

On Christmas Eve a thin shrivelled man, dressed in an overcoat too large for his small frame, approached me at the bar. He said “You don’t recognise me, don’t you” . And I lied and said my memory was bad. He introduced himself with the barber’s name, and I had to put aside that 1969 memory to see it was the same man.

The frail old man bought me a drink, then shuffled off to his seat. I remember asking my mother what was wrong with the man, but she had no explanation except he was getting older. The nudge-nudge wink-wink barber was now reduced to a sexless husk, the spark had left his body and he had joined the walking dead. That’s how I saw him on Christmas Eve 1979. But I expect he was still the robust man from 1969 inside.

It’s my birthday today, I’ve turned Fifty. Apparently the weather is the same as the day I was born. And essentially I’m still the same, unchanged by time. I’m not cynical, bitter or unduly nostalgic. And I still feel like going out, raging into the night. And I do miss those people I once knew, who have shuffled from this mortal coil. And in the scheme of things I’m just a microscopic dot on the landscape. But I still can’t help wondering: where did all that time go.

That’s all

It’s Friday, the final election results are coming in. My body is buzzing from exhaustion. I am dressed in a French Connection, TK Max, Dublin. There’s a days worth of stubble on my face. Krakow, or is it Kent is crumbling. And some sub-Raymond Chandler has hijacked my brain. But I’ve had a late night; and an early morning; and the new day that was dawning (just could not resist that rhyme), is punctuated with exhaustion.

I’ve been entertained by the Election. And in many ways the result has entertained me more, than any scripted comedy or drama. I was adsorbed by the nuances of all the election pundits rolled out; from the Political Professor to Bruce Forsyth. And I started to like Peter Mandelson, which made me feel used; but he was pulling out all the stops. And in the end, that’s what’s lacking about the new boys (and that’s a cross-party thing), they lack personality.


That’s all.

Heroes

Its election morning, and if this were America I’d be wondering who out of Brown, Clegg or Cameron would make the best President. And I suppose I’d be thinking the same if I were in France or Italy. And I’m not going to place my vote based on some remote figures personality. Because if I were, it would be Brown I would pin the tail on. The one eyed donkey, who’s failed a course in how to smile on TV, and who really dislikes ignorant street opinion. The man who can never look smart or slick. The PR man’s nightmare.

Clegg, Cameron the names are as interchangeable as their personas. I’m reminded of Breakfast TV presenters, who invariably trigger a gag reflex when their smug faces appear on screen. I’d rather give my vote to a tramp outside a tube station, than to the PR man’s wet dream.

This Hobson’s choice makes you hanker after real heroes, but as the Stranglers succinctly listed in their song (No More Heroes), most of them die or are assassinated. And most of them were megalomaniacs, who outstay their welcome.


As Mark Antony (the Shakespearian version) said:

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him;
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones.

I concede Brown being the most Charles Laughton like would make a good Roman Senator, and I’m certain Clegg and Cameron raided the dressing-up box during their privileged upbringings. But a Caesar, they are not; and I’m glad they’re not. And I’m glad the attempts at American style Presidential debates were a failure. And I’m glad that no matter how hard the Broadcast/Print Media try to present the Election as a pin-the-tail on a donkey contest, they fail.


For me the Election is not about Heroes; but what the next government can do for me. So for this reason, and this reason alone I’m voting Labour (faults n’ all).