THE DEEP POOL - September 2005

i go across the road to the Brewery Bar on Bank Holiday Monday at about 12 30 in the afternoon. I buy a non-alcoholic ginger beer and stand there alone. A horrible video for a John Legend track is on the screen to my left. The song is about 'ordinary people' and in the video two black actors are pretending to have an argument. It's the most plastic argument in the history of the world. but very depressing nonetheless: the song, a ballad, is also awful, just voice and piano with a million vocal notes where one would have done. The black man actor is now doing a disturbing thing where he holds out his arms in the style of Anthony Gormley's beautiful 'Angel Of The North' sculpture, but there is nothing beautiful in this piece of 'acting' - the guy seems to be barring the woman from leaving the room and the argument, and just keeps shouting his point of view as she pretends to be oppressed by his actions. It's a terrible piece of direction for a start: i think of all the arguments i've seen and started or had to endure, and i've never seen anything like what this geezer is doing - it's something a video director has suggested to add drama, but the woman is equally hopeless, flapping her arms and shouting about how 'it's over' and sheltering a cowering child as the man comes towards them in a  'threatening' manner. They're just 'ordinary people'. I then remember how a friend of mine recently told me that John Legend is the next in a line of 'greats' from Ray Charles through to Bill Withers, Stevie Wonder and, why, even Gill Scott Heron. I'm depressed -i've just been in Wales recording some choral work and guitar on a new album by my friend Michael Weston King, and every song and every twist and turn within those songs was worth more than this bollocks, but, as i well know, that's the Music Biz...   

i look away from the screen and round the bar from left to right - there is a huge brown jar of pickled eggs, then a chewed-up red plastic fire engine and a moth-eaten lifeboat, both of which are cash collection boxes for their respective charities. Through the ancient walkway that divides this bar from the other one, which is bigger and more 'comfortable' i can see Del having a pint. Del is a lovely intelligent take-no-prisoners brown-bullet-headed ex-bouncer kind of guy whose company i really enjoy, but something makes us both nod a warm hello to each other, but not join up for one of our usual blethers. I'm morose and i think Del's enjoying being alone.  

It's very warm - the John Legend video has finished and now Madonna is murmuring about something or other as a huge shadowy black dog lolls slowly across the screen. I'm slowly sinking. An old lad comes in - this a man i really like - we've never had a conversation beyond an exchange of hellos, but there is good feeling between us. He orders a pint of beer and he and the barmaid have a quick laugh about something. The simple good nature of this laugh cheers me up, and at that moment, in another doorway a nipper appears, maybe 6 years old, and gives me a thumbs-up sign with one hand. I return the thumbs-up and he gives me a big big smile. I suddenly break out of my decline, finish my ginger beer and walk half a mile to Pinkmead farm shop where i buy lemons, cucumber, asparagus, beetroot, grapefruit and yellow peppers. There's a pony show about to start over the road, and in the shop a very young blonde girl in riding boots is sniffing a peach with great care before she decides to buy.   

On to more pleasant matters: there's a Bacon Sandwich War taking place in the UK - 3 of the big national bacon providers are slugging it out in newspaper/magazine adverts to win our hearts as to whose cheap bacon we will decide on. Walls has a particularly lurid advert, although i've noticed that it's impossible to photograph bacon in a way that is appealing or sexy, you just think 'yachhh' when you see the greasy red stripes of pig between thick slices of white bread - still, these fuckers know what they're doing, so presumably a load of London taxi drivers are currently thinking 'whooaar, lookathat - i know what I'M having for dinner tonight!'. The Walls one says - 'Less shrinkage, less white stuff, great taste'. Note that they're not saying NO white stuff, just less of it, whatever it may be - well, you don't care what it is do you, as long as there is 'less' of it...   

It's been a strange month, but i enjoyed a lonely time at the Leicester Holiday Inn. I stayed there when i played a festival called Summer Sundae on Sunday 14th August. It was good to see many old friends at this compact but highly atmospheric festival in the middle of the city. For my performance i got a good crowd and only played 30 minutes like everyone else on my stage, but the sound was great, i played and sang well and there was a warming cheer when i finished. I sat with old pals afterwards enjoying the summer afternoon sunshine, but decided to take my guitar back to the hotel as there was nowhere secure for it to live while i ambled around listening to other acts. When i got back to the hotel, i sat down for a minute and the next thing i knew it was dark and the festival was coming to a close. I had agreed to meet up with ma pals, but there was no point in going back to the festival site so late, so i stumbled around a part of Leicester that i did not know where very bad tempered folk were swearing at each other. I tried not to look at these scenes as it was none of my business, but also i dread the 'who're you fuckin lookin at?' thing that can happen in these moments. Eventually i got back to the hotel and only just got to the bed before i fell into a very very deep coma which nevertheless included a dream about my mother in which she showed me a rickety treasure chest full of dented silver stars and bangles that apparently i would need if Dutch sailors ever tried to rip me off when i was attempting to buy wooden shoes, clogs, from them - yellow ones with red scribbly lines - at the quayside in the northern town of Blyth. My mother demonstrated how to hold up a particular silver star when i felt a price for the clogs was too high, and how the offending Dutch sailor would flinch and agree to a lesser price. It was an exhausting dream, and in the morning i had a long slow swim the hotel pool whilst, in warm early morning sunshine, the traffic raged round the concrete island on which the hotel was built.   

In the middle of the month i went swimming in the sea at Eype, which is a hamlet just outside of the Dorset market town of Bridport. I love Bridport and would like to live there - the cadences of speech there include none of the 'estuary' and Cockney/London speech patterns that now pervade the country. Standing in a bar like the Lord Nelson or the Bull Hotel in Bridport, you are listening to an informational flow that owes nothing to televison soap operas - ideas and opinions are delivered  in a cooled stream that springs from two hundred years of consideration and the people sharing them have a look which makes you feel privileged to be a fleeting part of the great big sea....The sea by the way, was cold but not bitterly so, with a special seriously briny smell that is an integral part of the UK swimming experience.    And looking along the shingle beach as i trod water in the mid-morning heat, i saw seagulls glide slowly around Golden Cap - a massive cliff in the middle of the south coast of England, and i yearned to be a living part of the little villages in the Hardy Country hinterland - villages with names like Powerstock, Nettlecombe, Loders, Askerswell -  and to be buried under an apple tree in the especially mysterious hamlet of Tollard Porcorum, not far from Eggardon Hill, where the sea fogs do not reach, and a man could ride with all due care on a coloured horse to Maiden Newton for no other reason than to view the moorland alone in silence.

jl