Businessman

Businessman

What are you doing business man,
So far away from home,
With your trouser legs all wrinkled,
As you sit there on your own?

Customers in Newcastle?
Board meeting in Slough?
Then four hours traffic hotel bound.
What are you doing now?

Fish and chips at Corley,
On the M6 motorway,
And a quick read of your paper,
At the ending of the day?

And is your paper comforting?
Somewhere to hide your eyes?
To keep your thoughts from straying,
From that corporate disguise?

Or are you really unconcerned,
And merely passing through,
Oblivious to the rest of us,
Who barely notice you?

Your wife, your kids, forgotten,
In some lost suburban place,
Her parting kisses fading fast,
Upon your weary face.

A ‘phone call from the hotel,
On the ten pence slot machine.
“Hi Hun. I’ll see you Friday.”
“Keep it hot – know what I mean?”

Or is it not like that at all?
No solace from the roar?
Just passion grabbed like fast-food,
With a wolf outside the door?

Meanwhile you sit there don’t you?
Indigestion on the run,
A headache from the red tail lights,
And the week barely begun.

Still four hours traffic hotel bound.
A nightmare in the rain.
With just an Aspirin in your pocket,
To soak away the pain.

 

Although written in 1992, the businessman is still a recognisable species from this flashback. Nowadays his head would more likely be stuck in his phone than his newspaper and the days of ten pence slot public phones in hallways are long gone. Sadly though, the grey twilight world of the lone businessman in near perpetual transit is not.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Looping

On the last Friday of February in 2014, I drove in the early morning sunshine to Glasson Marina. It’s an interesting place and a very beautiful part of the Lancashire coastline. I wrote about that day here. Today was the last Friday of February 2015, and I went again. I don’t know why exactly, other than the urge to get out, to feel the wind on my face and the soft earth under my feet, and I couldn’t think of anywhere else – and I remembered that walk so well. I had time owed me, just like last year; the forecast was fair, just like last year, and the snowdrops and the daffodils were starting to push through, just like last year. In the absence of any other motivation, I think we are easily suggestible creatures.

Last year, I shared the carpark with a middle aged guy in an old ragtop. Today I was the middle aged guy in the old ragtop – not a classic MGB like his, but a near classic MX5. Maybe he was the inspiration for my later impulse to buy the car – I don’t know. I recall he also wore an Irvin flying jacket, like a Spitfire Pilot. I thought that was a bit over the top, unless the heaters on those MG’s are rubbish. The Mazda has a heater like a small furnace, so you can easily drive with the top down in mid-winter – not that I tried because it was about 5 degrees. My ragtop is showing signs of wear and the colder it is, the more brittle, so the top stays up until the temperature nudges above 15 degrees.

She made the run easily, some thirty miles of motorway and narrow lane. It’s strange how when I first got her she felt like such a hard ride. Now any other ride feels too soft, and even if I’ve driven her a hundred miles, the first thing I want to do, still, is drive her some more.

But I was here to walk, not just to drive, and I followed much the same route as last year, about six and a half miles of salt marsh and coastal footway. Walking alone, and the conditions being so remarkably similar, both walks – this years and last – blurred into one avant guard production, and I had the impression of a replay layered over the real thing and my self not being able to tell the difference, if the thoughts I’d thought last year were the same as now, or was I walking last year, possessed of memories I did not have at the time, of the year still to come? And what if I come again, next year? So little had changed. I even encountered the same farm tractor spraying slurry in the same meadow, the same ruined tractor abandoned in the same ditch. Was I looping endlessly in time?

There were murmurations of dunlin out over the marsh, like last time, an eerie chorus of peewits calling for curtains on the winter in the meadows behind the long bank at Cockerham, like last time. My eyes scanned the same scenes, the same wayside curiosities, the odd blocks of stone, the tumbled farm buildings. Something must have been different!

All right, this time I called in the parish church, beautiful with the morning sunlight bursting cleanly through the stained glass. There, I bought another novel for my collection from the secondhand stalls at the back. It cost 50p and was serendipitoiusly titled “starting over”. There was such an overwhelming choice of titles in the church I guess reading is pretty big on the pastimes list for Glasson Parishioners. I read the opening paragraph and was hooked at once, carried the book in my pocket for six miles, determined to bin the ones I’m labouring through at the moment. No sense wasting one’s life on things that don’t connect. We must hold to the ones who love us, and let go the one’s who don’t, just as we cannot hold on to what we are not meant to keep, and cannot lose what is meant for us, even if we throw it away.

There was the same boat sunk in the dock, but different faces in the Lantern Oer Lune cafe. No all day breakfast this time either, but a more demure omelette with a side salad, even though I’d asked for chips. Still, I enjoyed it, and I’m not one to make a fuss. My sense of smell had even put in an unexpected return – not so much that I could smell anything, but that I could at least taste my lunch, and that coffee tasted very nice indeed after two hours of a stiff salted wind coming off the bay.

I drove home a different way to last year, picking up the A6 at Garstang, but not before crossing over the canal and having a flashback to 1972 or thereabouts, and a fishing trip with a friend and his father. How I hated fishing, but pretended I did not because it’s good to have friends. He was to die on a race-track, ten years later. He would have loved the MX5. I felt guilty I had not thought of him in a while. He was engaged to be married, and I wonder what kind of life he would have made for himself – if we’d still be friends or if by now we would have drifted apart as so many friends do.

I looked for us down on the canal bank, fishing. But we weren’t there. It must have been another day, another season.

Fancy a run to Glasson? Hop in.

 

 

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Stormy Dreambreakers

The weather has changed. The dead-heat has gone out of it and though we’re still enjoying startling blue late summer skies, those skies are now a broad canvas, at times full of storms, compact blooms of white, towering to a great height like the smoke-plumes of a sinister weapon. They drift ponderously across the land. I saw them first in a dream, at the weekend, but I misinterpreted them, turned them into apocalyptic mushroom clouds, out of which poured the ruin of mankind. Then, on Monday, I drove a long way, travelled south, through the Midlands,  the North Wessex Downs, and the Chilterns. And there, all along that two hundred mile roaring ribbon of the M6, the M42 and the M40, I saw them, those same towering storms, painted on the blue, like lotus flowers, or old English roses. They were remnants of a hurricane that’s blown clean across the Atlantic, and are still lending a richly animated energy to our days, breaking up the sluggish humidity that has lingered since mid July.

As I drove, marvelling at this beautiful spectacle, my dream broke, or rather the storms broke my dream, brought it back to me, fished it from the black waters of unconscious memory. I don’t know how the mind does this, how it sometimes works ahead of itself, lets its dreams be informed by imagery we have yet to encounter in our ordinary waking reality. I only know that when we do encounter it, it turns a key and we cannot doubt a part of us has passed this way before.

I’ve written about Dunne, the pioneer aircraft designer who first studied this phenomenon, and who published books on it, to very mixed reviews. Word of it still falls upon a largely sceptical audience, so I won’t labour it here, except to say that in the West we have forgotten how to dream, are no longer in awe of them, and consequently no longer open to their potential for revelation, or healing.

I puzzled for a long time over Dunne’s books, troubled, because to see the future implies our future is fixed, and I didn’t like to think of the world being that way. Unless we have a choice in the paths we take, unless we can choose our future, I felt the world had no meaning for me. But nowadays I think it’s more a case of seeing not the future but a future, that only on occasion do our waking lives coincide with one of the futures we have already seen.

I did not dream of that weary journey down the sluggish motorways. It was too tedious, I think, to make anything other than the most abstract impression upon the dreaming. But the images of those storms was so impressive, they could not help but be borrowed as background for an allegorical tale, one in which I was preoccupied with visions of a civilisation on the brink. The dream made no sense to me, just as my journey didn’t in the end. It was just ten hours in a new-smelling lease-car, a night in a worn-out hotel in a fold of the Chilterns, within earshot of the rumbly M40, and all for a one hour meeting. But like many things, purpose and, more, the direction of our lives is often only revealed in retrospect, and with the perspective of long years passed.

Meanwhile the storms continue to drift across the land, darkening skies of a sudden, and sending down great wetting rages of rain to paint the roads black and slick and splashy. Mazzy and I slipped out last night, in a pause between the squalls, but I kept the hood up. My rational excuse for the impulsive jaunt was that I’d run out of bush tea, so made a circuitous 10 mile twisty-road tour, finally swinging back by the Sainsbury’s store in the neighbouring village for my Rooibos. I didn’t really need the tea. It was more that I’d been away for a long time in the south, and had missed her.

While we were out we clipped the northern lash of a slow moving cyclone, a vast thing, slow circling across the plain, raising columns of dirty white against a blue grey, dusky sky. Cars were coming out of its shadow with their headlights on, looking drenched and startled. We turned north and outran it. Mazzy and I were both safe under cover before it staggered sideways a little and tipped its buckets over us, to no effect.

Clear skies again this morning, but a tuggy wind and more rain forecast.

I dreamed of trees, and butterflies, and I was among a gentle, brown skinned people; we fished clear, shallow waters with long spears for rainbow-coloured fish.

And we were happy.

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Topless – in Wharfedale, (apres le Tour)

I wanted to give the car a decent run this weekend, so drove the little road from Bolton Abbey all the way up Wharfedale, then on to Leyburn for the night. It was the weekend after the hugely successful Grand Depart, when the opening stage of Le Tour De France set off from Yorkshire. The aftermath had left all the dales villages still trimmed up and looking very festive with their bunting and yellow bicycles. It had also left the roads in various places scrawled with some very distracting graffiti.

I’d set myself the challenge of completing my own little tour de Yorkshire with the top down. I’m doing well so far, only having had the top up on a couple of journeys, and one of those was because I preferred the imagined security, and a bit of soundproofing, when I took to the motorway. On this occasion though I braved a bit of the M6 from Bamber Bridge to Tickled Trout and then the long stretch of the A59 from Tickled Trout to Bolton Abbey – all of it topless, so to speak – but it was an unnerving experience. I think if we all had to drive this way, we’d be driving a lot slower, and much more carefully.

First stop was the Abbey Tea rooms for coffee and to gather my addled wits. Sixty miles an hour in an old MX5 feels like ninety, and there’s always someone tailgating you. White vans were a particular hazard on that stretch of the A59, having taken over from the usual Beamers and Audis and flourescent Ford Focuses, familiar from the back lanes around home. One had bullied me from the Cross Keys, all the way past Skipton seemingly intent on bulldozing me into the ditch. It may be that I’m used to a quieter, smoother car, but sixty in Mazzy is my limit for now, and plenty fast enough for even the faster sections of the A59. Not fast enough for white van man though. I had fitted a dashcam for the journey but quickly realised it was pointing the wrong way. Instead of pointing out the front, recording potential head-ons, it would have been better pointing backwards. I’m not sure if there’s a You Tube channel called Mad Tailgaters, but I’m thinking of starting one.

Bolton Abbey marks the beginning of the run up the Wharfe, and it’s a great place to refresh yourself. I was too early for scones, so made do with a stiff Americano and some deep breaths. But already the day was shaping up for the better. There were old English roadsters on the car park here – Morris, Alvis, MG – all from the thirties and the forties, a much more civilised era for motoring, an era when the brakes were rubbish, there were no airbags and petrol was sixpence a gallon. I wondered how they’d managed the A59, and the tailgaters. The owners, rather well groomed, silver haired gentlemen – tweed jacket and cap types with clipped accents – looked calm and unruffled as they took their refreshment. Maybe I just don’t have the Spitfire spirit, and needed to buck up a bit.

Bolton Abbey is a popular tourist destination, but not the sort of place to visit if you’re touring. Part of a private estate, the entrance fee is now over £8 per person. That said, there are a lot of grounds to enjoy, a beautiful section of the river, and then there’s the Strid, where the Wharfe is squished down to a narrow passage between crags that you can (almost) leap, and most likely drown when you miss. But you need a full day to do justice to the visit, and the admission fee. On this occasion, I was not tempted. This trip was all about the drive – and a bit of walking. The price of a cup coffee was the only thing Bolton Abbey got out of me.

The road up the Wharfe was a delight, the car coming alive once more on the tight bends and through the rises and hollows. An overcast start to the day dissolved here into blue skies and sunburn, and by the time I reached Burnsall Bridge, both the car and my heart were singing with the joy of it.

You can’t go fast here – too many cyclists and horses, but thirty feels like fifty in Mazzy so you don’t need to be racing to feel like you’re flying. Burnsall is another popular tourist destination, a pretty village and a fine old bridge spanning the river, also partly the setting for my timeslip short story, Katie’s Rescue. It’s a good spot for picnics or for commencing a walk, but I was heading up to Buckden, at the top of the dale, so passed on without haemorrhaging shrapnel on the carpark.

The price of tourist parking tends to discourage touring. You can see most of these places in an hour before moving on to the next, but at the prices charged you want to settle in and make the most of them, which is perhaps not a bad thing. The National Trust finally got me at Buckden, charging me £4.20 to leave my car while I had a walk up the Pike. As an illustrative aside, a few hours later I was in Aysgarth, wondering about visiting the falls, but I didn’t because it hardly seemed worth the price of parking the car again, for what would have amounted to no more than an hour’s visit. It would have been good to see the falls, but I’ve seen them before, and you don’t need to pay money to experience the sublime. If you’ve not been to Aysgarth, ignore my tight-wad example here and pay up – the falls are spectacular and worth every penny. But remember the sublime is in you. You can find it anywhere, not just where the National Trust or English Heritage set up camp and tell you to.

There’s a beautiful little waterfall in Buckden that’s not even marked on the map. It was by the side of the footpath that descends the Pike and must be known to many a walker, to say nothing of Buckden’s few residents. As I came upon it, the sun was hitting it just right and the colours exploding as if were something not quite real. My photograph here doesn’t do it justice at all. It may not be Aysgarth falls, but has its own water sprites who’s siren call lured me over to spend a grateful break with them.

Buckden was also decked out for the Tour de France, and takes my personal award for the most festive effort. I met a lady the following day who was looking for a supermarket, as she’d taken a cottage in Buckden for the week. We laughed, agreeing that there wasn’t a lot in Buckden, and it’s true, you’ll struggle to find a supermarket there, but there’s a whole lot more besides and, apart from that carpark, it won’t cost you anything. Buckden without doubt is my favourite Dales village – apart from all the others of course.

Finally it was on to Wensleydale, to Leyburn and a homely B+B for the night. It was my first time in Leyburn, a small, historic market town. I’d made a reconnaissance trip on Google Streetview the night before, and thought the place looked a bit dour, but nothing could have been further from the truth. They had the bunting up here as well – the Tour de France seems to have visited every town and village in Yorkshire! Leyburn’s a good stopping off place for a tour, with plenty of pubs and restaurants around the main square.

One’s always a bit self conscious, travelling alone and walking on spec into the first pub that takes your fancy, but I was at my ease in minutes, the landlady calling me “My Love” like I was a regular and settling me down to a fine, flavoursome Steak and Ale pie. I’ve visited many a UK town where the lone traveller’s self consciousness was not assuaged, and where the locals proved to be standoffish and downright queer. Leyburn is definitely not one of them. Both Mazzy and I received a warm welcome, and we’ll be coming again.

It was altogether the best day of the Summer thus far, to be bettered only by the day that followed it.

If there’s a heaven, I’d like it to be the Yorkshire Dales, and an old blue car to explore it in.

Topless, of course.

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Lessness and Nowness on the Conveyor of the Living Dead.

I recently heard about this thing called Generation X. They are basically people born between 1961 and 1981 and, unlike the baby boomers who preceded them, and  knew at least a decade or so of optimism, Generation X has known only a long period of  decline, which after a brief blip of money grabbing madness in the mid 1980’s has been accelerating into economic oblivion  ever since. For Generation X, there is less of everything than there was yesterday, less opportunity, less work, less money, less confidence, less hope. I’m not a sociologist and I don’t know if this is true – I trust it’s not, but Wednesday’s news didn’t exactly offer any hope.

France is currently crippled by strikes, has run out of fuel, and is about to run out of electricity. Ordinary people have taken to the streets to protest at the austerity measures which seem targeted at them rather than the high flying cocktail-swilling idiots who brought the global economy to its knees. The last I heard they were about to send in “specialist” police teams to break the blockades. Vive La France!

Here in the UK we can’t be bothered. Even though we’ve just been hit with the most draconian cuts in public spending since the 1940’s, and the futures of even the most hard working and hard saving citizens are now well and truly screwed (well perhaps theirs in particular) we somehow feel in our bones that resistance is useless – not that we can’t admire the sheer Gallic ire of our brothers and sisters across the channel – we are apathetic, so the richest in our society continue to get richer. It’s a simple fact that the moral standing of any nation can be judged by the standard of living and the life expectancy of the poorest of its citizens, not its richest. In the grimmest of regimes the rich will always be comfortable, yet as Blake taught us: the dog starved at its masters gate, predicts the ruin of the state.

Anyway,… I had all this on the hourly BBC news bulletins,  on my way to Coventry last Wednesday. It was a grim commentary for a grim run down a grim stretch of motorway. I’d hired a car, and the day-job had let me out to visit a conference and exhibition at the impressive Ricoh Arena. It’s a journey of about a hundred miles down the M6 which, even at a sedate speed should have taken me no more than a couple of hours. It actually took me four, locked into a convoy of  heavy goods vehicles that spent more time in park mode than actually moving anywhere.

Richard Hunter, the hero in my novel “Durleston Wood” calls the M6 the conveyor of the living dead, a dreary motorway, the most congested in the UK, along which has shuttled generations of business travelers.

Anyway, sitting in park mode around Cannock, my ETA nudging ever further away from me, I had another first hand glimpse of Eckhart Tolle’s insight – namely his power of now. At one time a journey like that would have left me so screwed up at the end of it I’d’ve been fit for nothing, let alone traipsing around an industrial exhibition for a couple of hours and making some intelligent analysis of current trends, before driving home again. Anxiety, tension, frustration,… all of these things make you want to grip the steering wheel and scream. But that’s only because your mind’s running ahead and asking all those what if’s. What if I don’t make it in time? What if I can’t find my way at the end of this nightmare? What if? What if? What if?

But then I heard that wise old voice asking me: “what’s wrong with the present moment?” and I had to say, well, nothing master. I was sitting in the plush interior of a brand new (hired) Peugeot 308, new car scent, delivery mileage, and when I had the sense to turn the radio off,  I was able to listen to a podcast from Frisky Radio, sexy rhythm, lovely vocals. There was nothing I could do to change my situation, so I had to be accepting of it. Anything else was simply illogical. Pulling myself back into the now, the anxiety disappeared, and I actually arrived at Coventry after four hours in decent frame of mind.

That said, after 30 years of cruising the M6, I have to agree with Richard Hunter, it really is the Conveyor of the Living Dead – especially that bleak old stretch through the midlands.

Anyway, a little poem of mine from way back when:

Businessman

What are you doing business man,
So far away from home,
With trouser legs all wrinkled,
As you sit there on your own?

Customers in Newcastle?
Board meeting in Slough?
Then four hours traffic hotel bound.
What are you doing now?

Fish and chips at Corley,
On the M6 motorway,
And a quick read of your paper,
At the ending of the day?

And is your paper comforting?
Somewhere to hide your eyes?
To keep your thoughts from straying,
From that corporate disguise?

Or are you really unconcerned,
And merely passing through,
Oblivious to the rest of us,
Who barely notice you?

Your wife, your kids, forgotten,
In some bland suburban place,
Her parting kisses fading fast,
Upon your weary face.

A ‘phone call from the hotel,
On the ten pence slot machine.
“Hi Hun. I’ll see you Friday.”
“Keep it hot – know what I mean?”

Or is it not like that at all?
No solace from the roar?
Just passion grabbed like fast-food,
With a wolf outside the door?

Meanwhile you sit there don’t you?
Indigestion on the run,
A headache from the red tail lights,
And the week barely begun.

Still four hours traffic hotel bound.
A nightmare in the rain.
With just an Aspirin in your pocket,
To soak away the pain.

……
Parbold
October 1992

Good night all, and keep safe.

 

 

 

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