Dick Jones' Patteran Pages

Between 02.00 and 03.00. Arthritis wakes me up and has me downstairs awaiting the effects of the tablet. This, a second draft of the second of two insomnia poems.

INSOMNIA 2

Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care. The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath. Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course. Chief nourisher in life's feast.
MACBETH

Night falls. It bellies up to windows, crowds
the house. Da capo – dancing blind again:
stuck in a lift, trapped in a mineshaft,
premature burial. A hood, a mask, a carbon
lens across the eyes. A brush with oblivion,
I mutter, cotton-mouthed and bitter. Sleep
is a secret whispered to everyone else;
I’m kept in the dark.

Then cries from your cradle: birdsong,
catcalls – you have a menagerie in your throat.
I climb the stairs in twos and find you caught
between solstice and equinox with a pulse
beating behind your eyes. I hold you tight
and draw your dream in a heartbeat.
You smile and, turning in my arms once,
you spill sleep like a benediction. The cipher
cracks. Darkness has no name. I slide
between its sheets.

MUTES 1.

The droppings of the falcon are known as ‘mutes’. Since I’ve run out of poems and am producing prose posts at a much reduced rate, those ramblings such as this that do make it to screen shall be known as ‘mutes’ from hereon: small droppings after diligent scrutiny of the landscape below.

:::

Well, we shared our rag-bag of Americana tunes and songs with a capacity crowd in the tiny saloon bar of the Red Lion on Friday night. Reception was appreciative and we sparked the active interest of a blues promoter and a rep from the annual world music festival Rhythms of the World (which prestigious event is held in Hitchin every summer), both of whom had come to check us out. 

We were a little less enchanted. We’d been playing all afternoon and in the acoustic purity of my sitting room had put together a pleasing set comprising pre-war country blues, post-war Chicago blues, timeless mountain music, guitar rags and arrangements of No Woman, No Cry and I Heard It Through The Grapevine. But the old bugbears of dodgy sound on stage (actually, in inglenook fireplace) made it harder work than we’d anticipated and things only really picked up for us in the second half.

Whenever and wherever it all happens next, sound must be mixed externally and there must be fold-back – both pretty much unknown luxuries when we started out, both pretty much essential for the exacting on-stage standards nowadays.

:::

What is it about Iceland? A population of 320,000 and it manages to produce the most haunting music out of left-field in the whole multicultural polyglot expanse of Europe. This is Icelandic composer Skúli Sverrisson with his Vaktir Þú, featuring Ólöf Arnalds on vocals.

 

:::

I’m thinking of posting the entirety of The Famous Flower to the Pages, dividing it as best I can into episodes. The Rachels Fenton and Fox have provided very helpful feedback on the first draft, which has informed the second version that I’ve now completed.

:::

Word is that we’re aiming for the end of February for a publication date. for Ancient Lights, which is exciting and alarming in equal measure. I’m struggling for graphics for a cover motif that will reflect the book’s contents whilst satisfying the requirements of book design. As for locating a back cover pic of the author that doesn’t have him looking like a Breughel burgher just after lunch but radiates instead the lissome beauty that lies within, the task has barely started.

:::

SOME DAYS (AND NIGHTS) IN BITS

FRIDAY. Awake at 03.35. Smoky dark. Test my dodgy left eye: still these strange white flashes as I move my head from side to side. With my hair-trigger response to anything that tests my sense of vulnerability, a few moments of paranoia follow. Imminent blindness? I get up and creep downstairs. Wind buffets the house; rain pebbles the windowpanes. I fire up the computer and blue light illuminates the desk. Two-and-a-half hours later Reuben comes barreling down and the day begins to the sound of Manchester United winning 8 – 0 in the wonderful world of Wii.

::

SATURDAY. Listened to Tamsin Little playing The Lark Ascending and then heard her interviewed on Woman’s Hour. She was asked whether she was as moved in the playing as the audience was in the listening. She said how difficult she finds it during the last spiraling passage, which covers the harmonic spectrum of the instrument; how technically demanding is the control of volume and pitch against the emotional impetus of the whole piece. Fascinating, that balance between technical engagement and impassioned involvement. In acting and dance the performer is locked into the assumed role and emotional discharge must wait until after the event.  In music the greater likelihood must be that the performer is at least in part ‘present’ during the act. The greater the need, therefore, for some imposed discipline of detachment.

::

SUNDAY. A thick white rime across the fields all day. A methane blue sky, melding into that unlikely compound of copper and pearl at dusk. Two red kites swinging low over the garden and then loping off across those crystalline fields.

::

MONDAY. Awake at 01.20 with agonisingly sharp arthritis in my right big toe. It returns every few months with (thus far) periods of complete remission in between. I’m not bad with pain usually, but this is something else. I swallow a dicloflex and get up, hoping for some relief within an hour or two. 03.18 and I’m still at the keyboard. Tired and fed up, but philosophical. I must go with Yeats:

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clasp its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress.

::

And so, at 03.30, to bed.

This is a re-formatted second draft of a poem from seven years ago. Its reference points are likely to be be familiar only to Brits over 50 or those with a keen interest in the socio-cultural scene in the UK during the immediate post-war decade. So for the rest of you...

Start-rite made shoes of devastatingly unfashionable practicality for kids. Like footwear with magical properties out of a fairy tale, donning them trapped one securely and inescapably within the anonymity of childhood. Becoming a credible pirate, cowboy or infantryman whilst wearing a pair of Start-rites demanded an imagination of transcendent power.

Similarly cursed were the corset-like liberty bodices and Chilprufe vests that all children wore against the un-centrally heated cold. In summer, the Aertex shirt provided a measure of ventilation - assuming that one's mother had decided that the weather was clement enough to permit the casting off of the winter lining. All three were the perfect (and almost literal) embodiment of the purely utilitarian garment.

As a child, clad in my livery of infancy, I would stare up at the huge Start-rite billboards with their tiny pilgrims stumping confidently towards the place where the clouds touch the land and I'd wonder what they might find there.



VANISHING POINT

Those Start-rite kids. A tam o’ shantered boy,
a bobble-hatted girl, both austerity booted
and utility wrapped against the winter of the world.

I used to wonder where they were bound. Somewhere
far away, so swaddled and determined. I bet they had
their gloves on long elastic through each sleeve.

I bet they had their Chilprufe vests, their Aertex shirts
buttoned up across their breakfasts. Bet they had
hope in their hearts, dreams unconsumed by fire or water,

as each set sensible foot on the long, straight highway,
fringed with bedtime story trees. So much is promised us
in a hurting world between here and the vanishing point.

Book those 'plane tickets now, my continental and transatlantic friends. Those of you in the UK, you'll have to dig even deeper to manage your train fares!

DJ IN PRINT!

I'm delighted to announce that Phoenicia Publishing of Montreal are to publish a book of my poems later this year. It will be called Ancient Lights and will feature some 65 poems. As you can see from the Phoenicia website, production values are very high, both in terms of the choice of material and the design and making of the books. I feel privileged to have had a manuscript accepted by Phoenicia. A very happy haven after so long!

When the practicalities are sorted out - cover design, publication date, marketing details and the like - I'll post again. However, whilst not short on ego and hubris, I've always found the bells and whistles approach to self-publicising difficult to manage. (Why become a bass player when everyone else wants to be a lead guitarist?) So I'll apologise in advance for the popping up in unexpected places and the subsequent sleeve-tugging that will go on around publication time.

:::

Here's an old poem that I wrote way back and have just re-discovered and re-jigged.



TELESCOPE

Space-crazy, we bought a telescope
and hugged it home.
Soon it was nosy,
probing a foam
of clouds, a splash of birds,
a watercolour sun.

That night we danced attendance
on the stars,
waited by the window
as the fading scars
of a bloody sunset
healed away.

We scoured the thicket darkness
of the sky,
breath on a tether.
Our elastic eye
scrutinised but
just found holes.

Then we caught a corner
of the moon.
Too bold and brazen,
a monochrome cartoon
for kids and madmen.
We withdrew, appalled.

Day broke clear, and, cautious,
set to run,
we scanned the heavens.
Buttery sun
clogged the treeline, gold
in sulphur blue.

Space-shy, we tipped the telescope,
swept a new prospect –
suburban hedges, geometric lawns.
Pioneers, we cross-checked
the garden constellations
with the galaxy next door.

OPEN SECRETS

2012 awaits. One thing seems certain here at the dawn of the year: whatever drafts of joy and fulfilment we might hope to sup during it are going to have to be home brewed.  Any reliance on the usual agencies and the conduits down which their benefices normally flow are likely to be scotched at source. In short, this is shaping up to be a crap year and then some.

But what interests me greatly as the sun rises on the wreckage is just how many of those long-term open secrets will finally be acknowledged as spurious truths, responsible at least in part for our rapid progress towards a self-prepared hell in a self-propelled handcart. Here are three. There are many more.

Let’s start at the top. Capitalism. Is there any serious possibility of a widespread recognition during 2012 that the rottenness at the core was in the seeds from the start? Might intelligent, discerning, observant folk across the world finally accept that capitalism wasn’t an ideology that lost its way? That the reckless vandalism of recent years and its unmediated aftermath of cynical exploitation and continuing injustice are driven by the feral greed that is its fundamental driving force? Could it be that there might be some acceptance on a significant scale that there is no taming the wild beast? Are we ready at last to begin to consider the need for alternative modes of socio-economic organisation?

 Education. The black farce of an examination system based on two sequences of two years-worth of force-fed data culminating in two hours of formalised regurgitation has been exposed once again with the recent scandal of subject information being leaked to schools by exam board officials. Year after year teachers and students step onto the floor for the same ungainly, undignified and fundamentally purposeless dance. The same old steps, the same old music, the same old pretence that this awkward, clumsy push-pull peregrination is anything other than a futile performance, devoid of intrinsic benefit and extrinsic purpose. During 2012 could we not, I wonder, accept that this systematised wastage of four crucial years of potential engagement in authentic learning needs fundamental reassessment?

And once the lid has been wrested from that particular Pandora’s box, maybe during 2012 we could invest some time and energy in a careful analysis of the oxymoronic principle of the large school as a crucible of educational endeavour. Another open secret, this: any community within which any members can’t reasonably learn each other’s names has turned into an institution. Its hierarchies will be pyramidal; its processes will be dictatorial; its operations will be dehumanised and mechanistic. No school should exceed 300 students in number and all should have full access to the determining of the predominant culture and day-to-day functioning. While everything’s up in the air and we’re all contemplating void where hitherto we had been perceiving substance, could we not during 2012 address ourselves to this elemental reassessment as well?

The prison system. If any pretence still prevails that the outcome of custodial sentencing within the current system either educates or punishes those imprisoned towards redemption, might we hope that during 2012 the last fumes of it evaporate? Surely we have to accept that prisons are simply places within which we stack high those who have contravened legal constraints beyond fiscal penalty. And can we not accept finally the incontrovertible fact that their deterrent value is minimal. ‘Prisons’, the great anarchist thinker Peter Kropotkin told us, ‘are the universities of crime’. ‘Twas ever thus, ‘twill ever be so. So either we have to shrug it off and build some more, or we have to begin to re-think from basic principles up our entire philosophy and practice of punitive internment. Is there any likelihood during 2012 – a year within which, surely, crime is likely to flourish – of that root and branch reconsideration?

This final paragraph should be the one within which I exhort us all to look ahead with optimism, embracing readily the bracing changes forced upon us by circumstances entirely outside our control down here at the grass-roots. But whilst our immediate crises are not the product of some shared communal malfunction in which somehow all of us share an equality of responsibility, we are at source the authors of our own misfortune. How so? Because our wants, our desires, our ambitions, our vanities, our assumptions have maintained a set of developing priorities and goals through two centuries or more. And through the process of consistently devolving responsibility to sort it all out on our behalf to those to whom we have, largely spuriously, accorded the status of the Great and the Good, we have ensured dereliction and collapse.

So maybe the very best we can hope for in 2012 is a rueful realisation that when the stakes are at the highest and the very best minds, bodies and souls are needed to see us through, we should never, but never, hand power to those who want it most. Indeed, we should always, but always, make room for the reluctant leaders - the humble, the philosophical, the compassionate. Maybe during 2012 we might just begin to turn towards those who, in a world stifling from the blind imperative of limitless growth and gigantism, hold as their enduring priority the welfare of the real person over the abstract notion of The People. 

:::

Meanwhile, a new business venture for me in 2012. All welcome! (Menu sent in plain brown envelope).

I've just finished a first draft of the long poem I've been writing on and off for nearly four years. The provisional title is The Famous Flower, a simple culling of the first three words of the title of the folk song The Famous Flower Of Serving Men on which the entire piece is based.

I've enjoyed writing it enormously, having been completely absorbed in its dark, mysterious narrative throughout. In consequence, I have little clear notion as to whether it actually works as the detailed dramatic extrapolation from the matter of the formalistic original. Unfortunately it's much too long to post to the blog since it runs to just over 4,500 words! So I'd be enormously grateful to anyone who might find the time to read through it and make some initial observations. I would email it as an attached folder containing the draft accompanied by some contextual material. Either let me have your email address in a comment or email me at: patteran @ mac . com (closing up the gaps, of course). I can't offer a consultation fee, I'm afraid, but there's a beer for anyone who can make it down to the Red Lion some time!

Down in Worthing at Emma's parents for Christmas and using the old PowerBook, which, like me, is now a somewhat rickety organism.

All the very best to friends one and all for a happy and abundant day and a peaceful, purposeful and creative 2012!

Enough about ageing. Well, okay, just a word or two more, then. Health. All my life I have benefitted from my parents’ good bones, robust organs and hardy blood. I had appendicitis in my early twenties and I spent a few baffled post-appendectomic days in hospital and then carried on being flagrantly healthy in front of my sometime sneezing, coughing and limping peers.

But the recent combined blitzkrieg of attrition from sarcoidosis (thus far, mild), and prostate cancer (thus far, cured) has wrought more change in my life than any other single cause ever. All that calm confidence in my physical unassailability has dissolved. Within a four-year period I have stopped being a careless, ditch-jumping boy, fired by his unthinking assumptions of immortality and I have become instead a neurotically vigilant, febrile, shadow-dodging man racing through his sixties at head-spinning speed.

Worst of it all has been the onset of the anxiety condition that culminated in near car-crash anguish in the late summer. Only the radical (and entirely counter-intuitive) interposition of three long and intensive sessions of Psychoanalytic Energy Psychotherapy (an extrapolation of Thought Field Therapy developed by Dr. Phil Mollon) enabled me to get out from under.

I have written at length about the anxiety and have nothing to add to what has already been posted. I shall write at some point about my experience of PEP, but now is not that time. Suffice it to say that here and now I’m in a state of relative equilibrium. The latest challenge to whatever might remain in place of my immortality assumptions has been the rapid appearance and summary removal of what was probably an SCC from my nose. This time the assurances from my specialist that it wasn’t a melanoma and that it’s not going to carry me off seem to have adhered. The basic response mechanisms of my anxiety neurosis keep firing up and the catastrophising narratives begin to play out with hologrammatic vividness. But then they simply evaporate, starved through the therapy, it would seem, of their substance and form. At present all I have as evidence of this latest compromising of my one-time health and beauty is two sutures and some low-level pain.

All of which has me wobbling towards Christmas Day and a further annual incursion into my sixties. As things stand, I’m hoping for a quiet mind and no more demand on my physical resources than some lowering into and – much later on - leverage out of deep armchairs, whilst in between there will be close at hand books, a laptop and a glass that’s never entirely empty.

:::

I’ve only ever written one Christmas poem. I’ve posted it unrevised several times. Here it is again.

STILLE NACHT

On the night
that I was born,
the bells rang out
across the world.

In Coventry, in Dresden,
the cathedral bones sheltered
worshippers with candles,
witnessing the ruins.

In Auschwitz-Birkenau,
the story goes,
the death’s-head guards
sang, “Stille nacht,

heilige nacht”.  Their voices
slid across the Polish snow.
The sweetest tenor was Ukrainian,
the man they called Peter the Silent. 

He never spoke and he killed
with a lead-filled stick.
In the Union Factory, packing shells,
they dreamed of Moses.

**

In Horton Kirby, fields froze
and ice deadlocked the lanes.
My father rose in the cold
blue-before-dawn light

and cycled sideways,
wreathed in silver mist,
to the hospital.  Each turn
of the track betrayed him 

and scarred by thorns and gravel,
he bled by our bedside.
My mother laughed, she remembers,
as the nurse administered.

“Been in the wars?” she asked.
Outside, across the Weald,
from out of a cloudless dawn
the buzz bombs crumpled London.

**
Outside a town in the Ardennes
Private Taunitz hung
like a crippled kite
high in a tree.

A cruciform against the sky,
he seemed to run forever
through the branches,
running home for the new year.

Outside Budapest three men
diced for roubles
in the shelter of a tank.
Fitful rain, a moonless night.

Sasha struck a match
across the red star
on his helmet, the red star
that led them to this place.

Extra vodka, extra cigarettes,
a rabbit stewed,
the tolling of artillery
to celebrate the day.

**

The blackouts drawn,
December light invaded.
We awoke, slapped hard
by the early world.

Our siren voices
climbed into the morning,
a choir of outrage,
insect-thin but passionate.

Through tears our parents
smiled: within the song
of our despair they heard
a different tune.

And as our voices
sucked the air, swallowing
the grumble of the bombs,
only the bells survived.

I picked up a long-neglected favourite book the other day – Alan Watts’ The Book On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. So much of what he counsels concerning perceiving things as they really are rather than as we would have them be involves a sense of wonder. It occurred to me later that it’s not enough to retain the capacity for astonishment at the unexpected. To be fully engaged we have to be able to experience astonishment in the face of the known, even the familiar.

:::

1. Life is uncertain, surprises are likely.
2. If you are alive, that’s good; lower the bar.
3. In a dark place, you still have what really counts.
4. If you are in a predicament, there will be a gate.
5. What you need might be given to you.
6. The true life is in between winning and losing.
7. If you have nothing - give it away.

John Tarrant (Via Fiona Robyn, via Whisky River)

:::

CLOCKS

Clocks tyrannise. Faces implacable,
long tongues lick away the hours.
Time is all they know. Obsessed,
they talk of nothing else.

But here at the turnpike – short
on breath, but long on passion –
I watch the sun bounce like a dropped
ball between solstice and equinox.

CARPE DIEM QUAM MINIMUM CREDULA POSTERO

I wish I could: seize the time and place no trust in tomorrow, that is. Difficult, though, when that stubborn illusion of personal immortality that gets one through childhood and youth finally yields to a sense of timespan and fragility.

And yet, between the jumping-at-shadows bouts of vulnerability when a sudden awareness of the body’s incapacities against the vitality of the consciousness bring gloom, I do take heart. Yes, I keep forgetting names (and I read that this is where the dereliction begins), but I can think and feel as passionately as ever. Age appears not to have significantly diminished what my headmaster described in the 17-year-old me as ‘an overbalanced sense of justice’. And a powerful sense of a spiritual dimension remains firmly in place alongside a quiet certainty that there is no God. I take great pleasure in the company of my friends; I laugh a lot; I read constantly; I’m writing steadily again; music continues to excite and move me in equal measure; and I celebrate daily that I have much loved family immediately about me or close enough to see and/or hear whose years cover the spectrum from the horizon right up to a shoreline not so far away from where I stand.

:::

I am old enough to see how little I have done in so much time, and how much I have to do in so little.
Sheila Kaye-Smith, one of my mother’s favourite novelists.
 
[We] get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.
Paul Bowles, one of my favourite novelists.

:::

TWO HAIKUS

Clocks running backwards.
Moon and stars swallow the sun.
Words falling like leaves

::

Though my bones
bind me in the years,
still I rise.

 

FAIR ELEANOR…

Poetry-wise, I’ve managed only revisions and bits of the Short Songs since summer. But now the flywheel is spinning again and I’ve returned to what I guess would have to count as an epic poem under the working title of Fair Eleanor and Sweet William. It’s a detailed extrapolation from the traditional ballad, The Famous Flower of Serving Men, itself a piece of fragmentary origin and subsequent embellishment that extends and develops the narrative. I started the poem three years ago and posted the opening section (now revised) a couple of years back.

Famous Flower seems to have emerged first in the form of a few powerful verses sent to Sir Walter Scott by an anonymous parson. Scott claimed that the song has its provenance in the early 16th century and concerns events arising from James V’s attempts to quell the activities of the Border reivers, the freebooting raiders that operated along the border between Scotland and England.

But the song is best known in its version as an example of the ballad of the wronged or desperate woman who disguises herself as a man. This motif of female disguise is one that drives many folk songs. The protagonist may put on the uniform of a sailor or a soldier so as to seek out or stay by the side of her sweetheart. Or she may adopt male identity to escape persecution or conceal shame.

It is in Martin Carthy’s majestic rendering of the song (above) that the latter theme is explored so powerfully. Taking the five Walter Scott verses and then extending the song with other fragments and self-written material, Carthy’s tale of murder and revenge is full of human interest set within a context of magic revelation.

With my poem Fair Eleanor and Sweet William, I’ve followed the same compositional route that I took with my re-working of the well-known folksong of lovers parted and reunited, The Dark-Eyed Sailor. But where my Dark-Eyed Sailor was a fairly straightforward paraphrasing of the narrative line of the song, FE & SW is a significant expansion of the more complex storyline. So far it runs to 10 pages and it’s probably only about two-thirds of the way through. Where in Dark-Eyed Sailor the dominant voice was that of the storyteller, FE & SW alternates the narrative voice between the two protagonists, Eleanor, who dons man’s apparel and becomes ‘the famous flower of serving-men’ to the king, and the king himself. So the switching between external and internal commentary within the overall frame of the tale being told is producing a much denser account. 

It’s unclear at this stage (as ever it is at any point within the gestation and growth of a poem) whether current momentum will carry me through to a first draft conclusion. That’s the aim and to that end I’ve bought a pocket-sized Moleskine containing only this project and it’s with me all the time.

Long after the stories had faded from screen and newspaper, many parents remained haunted by the unexplained disappearance of Madeleine McCann from her family’s holiday accommodation in Portugal in May 2007.

Now, as part of the sickening body of evidence that has emerged of widespread and indiscriminate 'phone tapping on the part of journalists chasing stories, her parents' ongoing agony is exposed to public scrutiny once again as they appear before the Leveson Enquiry into the News International hacking scandal.

And, once again, the face of three-year-old Madeleine returns to haunt us.

MADELEINE AND MINE

When in public places the blood-bright stories
flap like order papers, like petitions in the hands
of the opportunists; when home movie zoetropes
stutter out one hot, bright thirty-second span
of a kid and a garden summer long ago, strung
between some bleak financial forecast and
another war; when a tiny CCTV phantom stumps
into her past forever (and no pixel fog’s too thick
to blur her sweet familiar peg-leg roll), I want to
gather you all into my infinite embrace and sink
like a tangled anchor down into the good dark,
we denizens five, down where the dream began.

2nd draft

RED BIRD DANCING ON IVORY

When I was 16 and the proud possessor of a vast black turtleneck jumper, a pair of 15”-bottom black jeans and army boots with blood-red laces, I went to a jazz-and-poetry concert in Leeds. I can’t remember now how we swung it. Our boarding school, 13 miles from the city streets, set amongst the wind-swept fields around Wetherby, was of liberal persuasion. But the Head, a muscular Quaker committed to bracing rambles across the moors, preferably in driving horizontal rain, believed jazz to be decadent and sybaritic. He would have never had granted us late night leave for anything less uplifting than an organ recital or an evening of Beethoven’s later string quartets. So presumably our lie was rock solid and backed up by the cultural events columns of the Yorkshire Post.  

The venue was the Esquire Club, a strip joint by day and a gorgeously seedy jazz club after 7.30. We sat at a small round table and lit our licorice paper ciggies from the burning candle stuck in a wax-embellished Chianti bottle. Decadent sybarites, we had arrived and for an ecstatic two-and-a-half hours we were as cool as a polar bear’s pyjamas (as one of us – Andy B, I think – put it).

In actual fact, as became apparent to me much later on, we were lucky enough to catch four of the seminal figures in what passed for the British poetic and musical avant garde of the time. The two poets were Mike Horovitz and Pete Brown and the musicians were the composer Cornelius Cardew and the sax-player Dick Heckstall-Smith. I was entranced from the start. Already in thrall to bebop and the then emergent cool school sounds and passionately in love with the Beats, this was the perfect synthesis. And I can identify that glorious evening's offerings as the inspiration point from which sprung the notebooks, folders and ring-binders of derivative and uncomprehending drivel that comprised my early oeuvre.

A vital component of the Beat ephemera that I gathered around me at that time was a six-track extended play record, a poetry-and-jazz E.P. called Red Bird. It featured the poet Christopher Logue reading loose translations of Pablo Neruda’s 15 Love Poems to a jazz backing by the Tony Kinsey Quartet. The auspicious combination of Logue’s sinewy voice, the surreal romanticism of the verse and the lithe, lyrical jazz settings (which featured some of Britain’s top jazz players) seduced me instantly. I played it to vinyl extinction, each session transporting me away from the bucolic surroundings of my West Riding boarding school to les bas fonds of the Soho that I explored (by safe daylight) every holiday.

Sadly, the all-but-unplayable original disc vanished during my student years and I spent the next three decades trying to find a replacement copy. Eventually, eBay coughed it up and I dodged the heavy bidders and secured it with a massive ‘Buy Now’ excess.

Here it is, for better or worse, complete with nostalgic surface noise.  I cannot judge it: it’s one of my embedded cultural milestones and within a bar and a stanza I’m back in my Yorkshire dormitory, gazing out of the sash window onto a Soho street scene.

RED BIRD:1

RED BIRD:2