David Hadley's Blog, page 195

On Tour

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Well, there you go… have a nice time. It would be… er… helpful however, if this time you did not take the ukulele. Admittedly, your knowledge of obscure East European 'nose' music is probably second to none and many of us who have had the chance to be subjected to your… erm… rather novel interpretations of it – accompanied by the ukulele – do feel it is something of an acquired taste, as the judge at your last deportation hearing suggested.

Not everyone shares the same taste in music, after all, even if what you produce, aided by your rather idiosyncratic approach to the use of the ukulele as a more interpretative device than is usually the case. When you think about it, if you must, you last extended ukulele solo could have been regarded as less of an attempt to extend the boundaries of tired musical genre stereotypes and - as the lady hurriedly dispatched from the RSPCA said – more like the cry of some domestic animal in severe emotional distress.

Still, there is a rather commonly accepted view that all great art is produced from suffering, and your art does make sure that, indeed, we all do suffer for it.

It must therefore count as very great art indeed, and I – for one – would not be in the least bit surprised if you do eventually receive some generous support from the Arts Council, if only to ensure that you spend as much time as possible touring abroad.

Lift a Day Out of the Ordinary

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What begins?

We can take days like this and make them into something that goes beyond the ordinary. We can make them into times that matter, days that will live on in memory.

It doesn't take all that much to lift a day out of the ordinary, even a smile or a gentle touch can be enough to begin the day with.

Even the way the sun shines down through the red and gold and brown leaves of an autumn tree can be enough, or the sight of a fox or badger making their way back home as the dawn packs away the reluctant night in the mists of an autumnal morning.

Once a day like that gets underway there is little than go wrong with it, even though capricious chance can always take the perfect moment and rip it to pieces. Accident and happenstance can befall us all, taking the perfect day and trample it into the muddy ground.

The world is never going to be perfect, and to expect a perfect life is to spend a lifetime in disappointment and regret. The small moments in an otherwise humdrum day can lift the spirits; make the world seem not quite so bad after all. The smile from a stranger on a cold winter morning street can do far more for us than all the gadgets we own and give us everything the adverts promise us, all for a fraction of the cost.

Monday Poem: A World Grown Strange

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A World Grown Strange

It is like the aftermath of illness;
a slow recovering of how to live.
The artful secrets of breathing,
the possibility of movement.

A return to a world grown strange,
just beyond the reach of feeble fingers,
which takes time and twists it through visions
that haunt the dreams of waking.

And the awoken world seems les than a dream
almost there and almost gone.
Evading the grasp and losing sense
of what comes before and what comes after.

As though it is making it all up
and telling tales to the one that lies
watching for life to begin again.

Victimless Crimes

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Well, obviously, if you put it like that, who am I to argue, let alone arrange a undertaking for your 'special' wallaby to take its final accountancy exams. Still, as they say, you can't count your chickens without at least some rudimentary form of counting system.

Anyway, there she was standing there stark naked, but with her nudity cunningly hidden under her clothing, so that no-one would suspect her, or her motives. However, having said that, though, the tin of emulsion paint was a bit of a giveaway, especially considering the court order banning her from getting within a hundred yards of any trainee assistant supermarket manager with a tin of paint (emulsion or gloss) with intent to cause a non-consensual first coating was still in force.

It was not so much the fact that having freshly-painted shop assistants was somewhat detrimental to the retail experience of the shop's customers, it was more that the freshly-painted staff did tend to leave sticky daubs of paint over everything they touched. Thus, leaving it difficult for shoppers to discern the list of ingredients on, say, a tin of peach slices with anything approaching confidence and – as I'm sure you know only too well, a paint-streaked till receipt is next to useless when checking to make sure that one was not overcharged.

Therefore, let us have no more talk of such so-called 'victimless crimes' and leave the wallaby in peace to get on with its revision.

Some of the Naughtiest Daubings in the Erotic Arts

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Despite being a deft exponent of full-length underarm weasel charming, Herbaceous Ptarmigan, is not as well-known to the general public as she ought to be. Her talent as a leading exponent of some of the naughtiest daubings in the erotic arts made her infamous in her day - during the inter-war years - as she made the town of Grimsby almost synonymous with a decadent hedonism that made Paris, Berlin and Tewkesbury pale in comparison.

Ptarmigan left school at the age of 13 to become an apprentice mackerel bucket carrier down at the Grimsby docks. Soon it became apparent that she was growing into a strikingly good-looking woman, with the mackerel-filled bucket she almost constantly had in her hands at the time adding to her sultry sexuality.

A few years later, as she bloomed into full womanhood, Ptarmigan received an offer of work on the stage as an erotic dancer, where her risqué routines wowed the sophisticated Grimsby night-life audiences as Ptarmigan, naked under shifting chiffon scarves, danced languidly around her mackerel bucket. Ptarmigan's act soon became the talk of first Grimsby, then the rest of the country.

Not long after, Ptarmigan was headlining bills at all the music halls up and down the country... and Wales.

However, the early fame awakened some latent desire in Ptarmigan to achieve something else in her life. Therefore, in a special headline performance at the Grimsby Empire she performed her last naked dance around the mackerel bucket and packed away the chiffon scarves for the last time.

As war with a resurgent Germany under the Nazis threatened to break out at any time, Ptarmigan fell under the spell of Churchill, then in the political wilderness, and his warnings about the dangers of German re-armament. So, feeling it was her duty to her country, Ptarmigan immediately began taking lessons in underarm weasel charming, instantly recognising how valuable people with such skills would become once war eventually broke out.

During the war, it was the vital work carried out by the underarm weasel charmers that first produced Britain's revolutionary radar defences and then led to the setting-up of the code-breaking facility at Bletchley Park, where Ptarmigan was one of the vital weasel programmers that did so much to win the Allied victory.

It was during this time, during the long nighttime watches, while waiting for the valves in the nascent computerised weasel charmer to reach operating temperature, Ptarmigan began the sketches of underdressed young ladies languidly stroking their weasels that would bring her yet more fame.

The heavy post-war censorship of the arts however, prevented Ptarmigan from showing her work in the UK until after the Lady Chatterley trial made it possible to show erotica freely to the viewing public. Even then, though, Ptarmigan's sketches and paintings of naked men and women engaged in fully-consensual underarm weasel charming as well as her now-famous Nude with Mackerel Bucket No. 7, Nude with Mackerel Bucket Descending a Staircase and many others, still had the power to shock.

However, when she unveiled her sculpture, made out of used and discarded mackerel buckets, of a naked man and woman engaged in explicit underarm weasel charming, called: Bert and Doris do the Naughty Thing, the art world itself reacted with shock, awe and a fair amount of furtive underwear readjustment. Disappointed with the reaction of her fellow artists to what she regarded as her masterpiece, Ptarmigan gave up on the art world and underarm weasel charming too. In a fit of pique Ptarmigan returned to her first love, and could be seen every day, right up until she retired at the age of 97, down on the Grimsby docks with a bucket full of freshly-caught mackerel in her arms.

Ptarmigan died at the age of 103, living in a home for retired underarm weasel charmers in Droitwich, just six months before the National Gallery put on a retrospective exhibition of Ptarmigan's most erotic artworks. This exhibition went some way to restoring her reputation in the art world, and brought the delights of both underarm weasel charming and a bucket brimming with fresh mackerel to an entirely new generation.

Ripped Dreams

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We could hold this secret in our hands, keep it wrapped tight against the cold harsh deprecations of this world. A world that will rip your dreams from you and toss them on the storm winds until they are blown far away and out of reach. This world will tear your dreams from you and send them tumbling down the swollen torrents of its days until those dreams are lost on the sea of forever, while you stand on the shore mourning what might have been, if only you could have held on until rescue came.

We have all seen those dreams of some new life blown away on the wind, torn up and shredded, or washed away by the heavy-swollen flooded rivers of days that pour past our doors. We have seen the earth rip itself apart and swallow all we longed for in one greedy gulp to be lost below the ground forever. We have seen that slow molten lava bury what might have been under a new hardening rock as it cooled over the lands where we let our hopes walk free.

We have lost our dreams, our hopes and our desires… but yet… but yet we wake each morning to look out on a world that still contains much more than we expected, and slowly we learn to keep these dreams wrapped tight and close in our sheltering hands.

Thursday Poem: Each Season Brings its Own Days

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Each Season Brings its Own Days

Each season brings its own days,
the small dark days of cold winter,
the growing young days of spring promise,
the mature long days of confident summer
and the ripe colourful days of aging autumn.

These are the days we walk through
watching the bare trees grow buds
that leaf and then there are the flowers
and the call of eager birdsong
as summer thinks it can last forever.

Until its mornings stumble into darkness
and the cold nips at those full leaves
as the flowers close their eyes in defeat
before we are walking over dead leaves

and hard frostbitten ground, when the summer
seems to be little more than a dream
distant and half-forgotten like some land
we know we can never return to see.

The Edges

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Sometimes, out there, there is movement, as though some other kind of world may exist beyond the Edges. The Edges, though, are always dark, shadowed places. It is not easy to see if there is anything beyond them. Occasionally, though, when hurrying past the Edges there is sometimes a sound, a feeling of not being alone any more. We here, this side of the Edges are not used to being alone, so this feeling that there is someone... something... else out there should reassure, but it does not.

Down by the Edges there is this feeling of... of... menace, a possibility of the world somehow going wrong. Things do sometimes go wrong, even in this the perfect society, the best that has ever existed. After all, we are still imperfect humans, despite all the advances that humanity has made since we came inside here and our world thus made safe by the power of The Edges to keep all of us and all we could ever want or need within these lands bounded by The Edges.

The Edges have bought us all safety and security. We live long happy lives, here, now. Now there is no longer danger and The Edges keep us safe from unruly possibility.

The Adventures of Perambulator Helicobacter, Gentleman Detective

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"Furthermore, should you attempt to describe these lupins, or to inform anyone else, not trained as a semi-professional tadpole disconcerter about them, or the part they played in the rescue of the pomegranate from the bucket, then your life will be forfeit." Everyone who watched it will be unable to forget this, the final words of one of the most impressive feats of TV drama to come out of these islands since the Party Political Broadcasts on behalf of the Quite Interested in Cheese party during the 1970s.

The hero of All Our Stoats are Ticklish, Perambulator Helicobacter – played with rare understatement, finesse - and with a telltale smoked mackerel fillet in the breast pocket of his formal donkey jacket - by Shakespearian legend Prole Flabbergast. He utters these final and deeply resonant words as the villain Plankton Formica - excellently played by Hypotenuse Tolpuddle - is about to fall to his death into a pit of slavering local government five-a-day fruit and vegetable co-ordinators. This climactic scene, after a fight that has taken place across the rooftops and scenic guttering of one of the greatest country houses in Grimsby, received wide acclaim by TV critics, several of whom stayed awake long enough to see most of it.

Of course, it must be said that The Adventurers Perambulator Helicobacter, Gentleman, detective and Intimate Confidant of Dorothy was one of the most famous of Victorian detectives. Up until now, there have been seven TV versions and twenty-three feature films featuring Helicobacter. Yet, this version, which brings Helicobacter into the 21st Century, updated to a contemporary private detective, has completely re-invented and re-imagined the great detective in a way that ensures all royalties from the series remain with its contemporary creators.

While helicobacter's original 19th adventures took place in the great continental cities of Paris, Hamburg, Vienna, Venice and Cleethorpes, the new series replaced them with the more glamorous post-industrial northern British towns of Doncaster, Hull, Grimsby and Bradford to bring a gritty urban authenticity to the production costs.

It will be interesting to see how the character of Helicobacter develops in the next series where - the writers have promised – he faces his most famous adversary in The hamsters of Boxhouse Hall, with its most famous of helicobacter quotes, saying : 'The curious incident of the hamster wheel squeaking in the night-time.' Whichdaughter replies: 'The hamster wheel did not squeak in the night-time.' To which Helicobacter responds: 'That was the curious incident. Come, let us tandem ourselves to Ilfracombe without delay!'

Where the Ground ought to Be

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When you wonder if there is any reason why the sky is always there, remember that sometimes it is far too easy to forget where the ground ought to be."

We were standing up on the headland when she turned and said this to me. She turned, holding her headscarf on her head as the wind whipped around us. I could see her curls, blonde, where they escaped the headscarf, dancing in the wind.

I don't know how old I was, but my mother seemed young, youthful, as she turned and spoke to me, twisting towards and down to me easily from the waist and her hair seemed golden in the bright sunlight. She reached out and grabbed my hand as we stood there, as she spoke to me. She spoke with some urgency, looking into my eyes as she said each word slowly and clearly as though imparting some great instruction to me like, "Don't talk to strangers," "Don't play near the road" and "Stop messing with it" and many other such rules for how to live my life.

I suppose, at the time, I took it to mean for me to pay attention to where I was walking, up there high on that headland with its sudden sheer cliff that tumbled down into the sea, and sometimes it did tumble down to the sea, quite literally. There were many places, you could see from the beach, where that cliff had tumbled into the sea as though some giant monster of the sea had reared up against that cliff and taken a huge bite out of the land.

I think I may have also taken my mother's words to mean that I should always keep an eye out for this monster too. I was at that age where monsters lurked around every corner, hid in every bush and shadow, slept under my bed and made nests in my wardrobe. So, that too would not have been much of a surprise to me and my mother's warning about such a monster would have been reassuring to me, just one more monster to be scared of in a world filled with such creatures.

Although, I don't think I ever did find out what she really meant, or why she felt it was so important to say such a thing to a small boy. I never got the chance to ask her either, not long after that she was dead and I never did get that chance to ask her what she meant.