Dick Jones' Patteran Pages

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

A second draft.

(Magpie Tales 92)

FIRST LOVE

Paralysed
in the fast-congealing amber
of a dream:

I know only of your
sweet breath, your flesh
within the bright convulsion

of the moment.
I wake and your musk
charges the world.

I've posted this before, but I rediscovered it whilst clearing out some old folders and laughed anew. A friend of mine mailed this photocopy to me years ago, claiming it as absolutely authentic. There's a certain laconic dryness about it that suggests strongly a pre-war public school education and I'm inclined to believe that it's the real thing.

A second draft in time for 11.11.11.11.

The audio version music is Les Chansons des Roses no. 5 from Morten Laurisden's O Magnum Mysterium.

OFFLEY COPSE IN SPRING

(Aubers Ridge, May 9th 1915)

Your path leads you between great-headed trees –
the beeches, muscle-bound and wearing their may
like burly brides; the ash, rattling his blades;

horse chestnut burning stacked candles in the face
of day. The bright rain tricks the air into long
strings of light whose lattice tracks you up

to the treeline. Deeper in the copse blue smoke blows:
dim fumes in a bright season, a rush of bluebells
whispering, where you walk, ankle-high. Trodden down,

the early ferns, rise again behind you. Bramble gateways
tugged apart re-form, slow-motion twisting back
in toothy coils. And now, here, where midnight moss

made a bed for the two of you in May last year,
you lie alone and listen to the guns that boomed
a week ago somewhere north of Aubers Ridge.

:::

AUDIO VERSION :

OFFLEY COPSE IN SPRING [mixed]

One of the many neat little doodads that you'll find on an iMac is PhotoBooth. Short of that tiny curtain and the swivel stool it may be, but it does effects to rival Photoshop. Emma took these the other day.

accident
Seven dead and fifty-one injured in a 34-vehicle pile-up on the M5. Many of the deaths and injuries occurred in the massive fireball that resulted from the sequence of collisions.

Every time I drive along a motorway I reflect at some point on its potential for mechanical carnage on a grand scale. A burst tyre, a moment’s distraction from kids in the back of the car, a sudden burst of rain or an oil spillage. Or the insane antics of a driver for whom a car is principally an instrument for the expression of crippling personal inadequacy.

The other day I stood hard on the brake pedal as a white van careened out of a side turning. As it jerked to a halt in front of me I spread my hands in a Gallic gesture of incomprehension. No raised middle finger, no v-sign, just that mild invitation to the driver at fault to raise hands, palms forward in the universal acknowledgement of apology, to which the response would have been the same signal and a rueful we’ve-all-been-there smile.

Instead the driver leaned out of his open window as far as seatbelt and aperture would permit. Face twisted into a rictus of hair-trigger rage, he thrust up his middle finger. Through my own closed windows and over traffic noise I heard him shriek “fucking cunt” as he wrenched the van to the right and lurched off in the opposite direction. Fascinated, I watched him in my mirror. He’d driven no further than a few yards down the road when the van suddenly mounted the kerb, the driver door opened and he came barrelling out. Stumbling for a moment as he hit the ground, he started to run back up the pavement towards my car, now moving off at a leisurely rate.  As I drove away I caught a brief glimpse in my passenger-side mirror of a frantic figure at the road’s edge, pumping v-signs into the air with both arms either side of a bright red face still distorted in fury.

All of us can bring to mind instances of the same kind of feral wrath, many of them occurring on freeways and motorways. At the time of writing, it seems that yesterday’s tragedy was a combination of fog, rain and, maybe, smoke from a nearby bonfire and firework display.

But the appalling incident on the M5 could so easily have been instigated by some lone driver from whom, just for one fatal moment, all the integuments of civilisation, culture, rationality, capacity for other-identification and – maybe most significantly – sense of personal mortality lifted away to reveal the Neanderthal within.

:::

til death do us part
Some more examples of Christmas coming early for the compilers of the birth-marriage-death columns of various state and county newspapers across the US. Bless you, Americans all, for the international heterogeneity of your surnames!

:::

I’m borrowing – well, nicking – from The Sill of the World and using mini headers beneath which to reflect upon events large and small, far and near.

enough
I drop another 2p piece into the little cardboard box whose contents when close to overflow will be taken to Reuben’s school for the building fund. As the falling coin strikes the tiny trove within I reflect upon the notion of enough. We’re lucky: we’re not jobless, destitute, on the breadline, as are so many now and more every day. We are solvent. We have no debts, either to financial institutions or retail outlets. We can eat three meals a day. We can buy the kids clothes and comics. We can manage a modest holiday for five once a year, provided it doesn’t involve plane flights and a hotel.

So sufficient unto the day, really. We can’t afford to buy a new car, but we don’t need to so no time is wasted on confusing the desirable with the necessary. In fact, it’s difficult to see what it is that a substantially inflated income would make available to us that we really covet now.

So what is so lacking from the lives of the wealthy that a massive bonus above and beyond a six-figure salary will bring it into reach? We are informed by those who seek to excuse or explain away bonus frenzy that if our financiers are refused their fringe benefits they will simply pack their Louis Fuitton suitcases and flee. But whether we continue to cave in to their rapacious demands or we tell them to fuck off to Monaco, the question still hangs in the air: What are they going to spend the money on?  No, really – this is the issue: when you are rich beyond the dreams of avarice, what is there left that you can buy?

Capitalism doesn’t have a volume button. You start quiet, but you want loud. That’s the way it works. Our culture, locked as it is into the notion of conspicuous and accelerating consumption, simply doesn’t recognise the concept of enough. The closest we get to identifying enough is in stating firmly and conclusively that it’s just one level up from here. Rather like that brass sign behind the bar of the local that promises ‘free beer tomorrow’.

relief
I’ve never been one for the energetic pursuit of happiness as a principal existential goal. Happiness is a consequence, not a discrete quality burning away with its own flame. Arguably, wisdom is a better prize and worthier of the search, for all that the quest must involve pain and loss. But I guess that in the final analysis wisdom is also a consequence and so surely the best route to take is the unsigned one. More chance surely of stumbling on either happiness or wisdom if your concern is simply with finding your way step by step rather than following a babble of prescribed directions.

But when happiness is a consequence I will stand in its way and catch its light as it flits past. And relief, however momentary, from lachrymae rerum is as heady a kind of happiness as can be identified amongst the various genres so vigorously chased up. I had some small reason this month to suspect that my latest blood test would reveal an elevation in the PSA reading that indicates whether my prostate cancer has returned. However, it’s shown clear again and so, pro tem as ever, I can simply carry on regardless. Relief places us as close to some apprehension of pure freedom as any of the brief consequential emotional charges that crackle the air around us from time to time.  Sufficient unto the day…

music
A frustrating few months. I’ve been trying to find some musical outlet after a long time of not playing. The most recent (and very appealing) prospect came to nothing, which was a disappointment. But Emma and I have just located a new guitarist and we’re reconstituting the ceilidh/folk/roots band that we ran for many years until its demise last summer. Additionally, I’ve scared up a couple of gigs for the blues/rags/country-and-beyond trio that played up a storm last year. So, brighter prospects, I hope, for the New Year.