THE DEEP POOL - NOVEMBER 2004

'Bobby Shaftoe's gone to sea - silver buckles on his knee - when he comes back he'll marry me - Bonnie Bobby Shaftoe'...

I sang these words today at the funeral of my mother who died some days ago - she loved this old song which i sing at the end of my song 'A Litttle Voice In Space'. Many was the silver day we sat together in the Osborne View pub overlooking the Solent waters to the Isle Of Wight. This sea vista reminded her of her childhood in the Northumbrian town of Blyth - the wooden-clogged Dutch sailors who berthed there, and i feel inside me the broad brushstrokes of Geordie personality which she carried with her all her life like a proud painting glimpsed from another room.

Her long slow decline wrapped itself round me like an anchor, pulling me down to frightening depths in which ghostly waving images of my dead father could be seen on a great lonely seabed - close enough to hurt, but so far away you couldn't even cry - i thank god that she's out of her final miseries - in her last days, she had the look of a noble old American Indian chief contemplating the plain for one last time as an owl called in the darkening wood beyond and before.

Clearing her small belongings from her nursing home was a pitiful task - deciding not to take her shoes, nor indeed any of her clothes, being given her wedding ring by the truly upset staff, and taking away the postcards i had written to her from faraway lands, promising to see her soon, and return to the pub with her for a glass of Gale's Stawberry Wine - i was at the end of one long form of grieving and hoping to enter a better world of more certainty - the certainty of her death, but also the certainty of no longer having to wave goodbye to her frail anguished figure so that i could return to the world of soundchecks, schedules and my own fear of growing old alone and unloved.

As her coffin entered the chapel, Chet Baker sang 'Time After Time' and he sounded more like an angel than any other man who ever lived - don't bother reading or thinking about this man's private life - just listen to a purity of performance of which only the very few are capable - Nat King Cole, Judee Sill, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan...
I should say, before i forget, that i shall not be playing our annual Christmas bash at Milford Social Club if you were planning to attend; when my father died, i hurt myself by working too hard for too long and i still have not recovered from that - i can't do it twice so i'm taking everything out of my schedule that i can, so that i can work out who i am now that i am alone in the world in this most powerful sense that is common to all people.
The other day i played 2 shows in the German city of Munster: it's a town i love and which i had not played for some years. Thanks to those people who came to listen and those who took me there - for me it was most healing -- sitting alone in Munster airport on an early Sunday morning listening to crap young Londoners bullshit each other about marketing, as crows hopped around in a ploughed field beyond the runway.

I was glad to be alive as i thought of my mother's noble Indian face, lying at rest finally, with the relentless and beloved sea crashing sideways along the shingle beach to the west of the great English city of Portsmouth.
Now i must sleep before taking a flight to Amsterdam, to return to Den Haag, and Crossing Border Festival. Last time i was here, David Thomas and Ian Rankin were regaling each other in the bar of the Mercure Hotel whilst Ciaran Carson played a funny wooden flute. This time i shall be alone - an overweight middle-aged Scottish dreamer whose mother always insisted had the sexual dash of Rudolf Valentino - a forgotten star of the silent screen.


jl