C.J. Stone's Blog, page 16

What’s in a name?

A friend of mine has just changed his name by . He changed it to the name he was known by anyway: Jon Eldude. All he was doing was making official what had been accepted amongst his friends for many years.

In case you don’t know, the name is a reference to a character in the Coen brothers movie, The Big Lebowski. The protagonist, played by Jeff Bridges, is known as “The Dude”. He’s a kind of laid-back slacker, more interested in drinking his White Russian than in dealing with the complexities of the world as it explodes around him.

There’s also a religion based upon this character. Known as “Dudeism” – official name The Church of the Latter-Day Dude – it states its purpose as correcting social tendencies towards aggression, and claims Lao Tsu, The Buddha, Heraclitus, Mark Twain and Kurt Vonnegut amongst its antecedents.

Jon is not the only person I know to have changed his name. At least four other people of my acquaintance have done the same, and there are many more who are known by names other than the one given to them at birth.

For some reason Jon wanted me to be the witness to his legal transformation. He said it would be an honour for him if I would be there as he officially changed his name.

So I went to his house and witnessed as he signed the document, and then counter-signed it to say that he was who he said he was. He then sealed the envelope and gave it to me to post.

That’s when I saw it, as he handed me the envelope. There was this fierce light burning in his eyes. It’s hard to say what it meant exactly. It was like the light of pure pleasure, of excitement, like the glint you see in a child’s eyes on Christmas morning.

But it occurred to me that it had something to do with identity. We don’t have much choice over the name we are given. It is imposed upon us by our parents and then reinforced by the world.

Taking a new name is like taking back your identity. It’s like saying, “look, this is who I really am. Accept me or go your own way!”

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From The Whitstable Gazette 09/11/17

The editor welcomes letters on any topical subject, but reserves the right to edit them. Letters must include your name and address even when emailed and a daytime telephone number.

Send letters to: The Editor, Room B119 Canterbury College, New Dover Road, Canterbury CT1 3AJ

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Sick people forced into crime by politicians

A friend of mine went to Parliament last month in order to break the law. He took cannabis on the lawn outside, watched over by police and security cameras.

He was not alone. Hundreds of people joined him in publicly eating, smoking and vaping cannabis.

They were there under the banner of the United Patients Alliance, at the specific invitation of Paul Flynn MP, who was raising a Ten-Minute Rule Bill for medical access to cannabis.

This was on Tuesday the 10th of October. No one was arrested.

Some years ago I was the election agent for the Legalise Cannabis Alliance. My friend was the candidate. At that time he was campaigning for the legalisation of cannabis for a broad range of reasons, not only for its medical use.

Since then the issue has become much more personal. He was diagnosed with leukaemia in 2014 and has been through a variety of painful and debilitating treatments, including a bone marrow transplant and chemotherapy.

He has fungal pneumonia, emphysema, osteoarthritis, osteopenia and hyperthyroidism, all of them as a direct consequence of his treatment. He is in constant pain and has to walk with sticks. Of all the things he has tried, or has been given, to alleviate the pain, only two have worked. One is morphine, the other is cannabis.

Anyone who has ever taken morphine will know what it is like. It is a very effective pain killer, but it leaves you in a poor mental state. “Monged out” as people say, dribbling incoherently on the settee, unable to lift your own foot, let alone tie your shoelaces.

Cannabis, on the other hand, keeps my friend alert and focused and able to function normally. What was once a recreational pass time has now become a medical necessity.

What a strange world it is we live in. A known symptomatic cure for a whole variety of illnesses, with a 5,000 year history, is made illegal, and sick people forced into crime, on the whim of a generation of politicians who really have no idea what they are talking about.

Meanwhile the rest of the world is waking up to the medicinal use of cannabis. Let’s hope we can make the change in Britain soon.

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From The Whitstable Gazette 26/10/17

The editor welcomes letters on any topical subject, but reserves the right to edit them. Letters must include your name and address even when emailed and a daytime telephone number.

Send letters to: The Editor, Room B119 Canterbury College, New Dover Road, Canterbury CT1 3AJ

fax: 01227 762415

email: kentishgazette@thekmgroup.co.uk

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CJ Stone’s columns for Mixmag Magazine 1996-1998

A series of random columns from Mixmag , a dance magazine, from the 90s, beginning with this one about Irvine Welsh:

Irvine Welsh at the Blue Note Club

I was in London for the Irvine Welsh gig at the Blue Note Club in Islington. I was the warm-up act. It’s a new concept: literary readings at clubs. I’d already done two or three, which were mostly resounding failures. It had begun to seem to me as if readings at clubs were a contradiction in terms. Most people had looked at me with bemused expressions wondering where all the repetitive beats had gone. I was hoping that this one would be different.

I arrived about 8.30 and there were already people queuing. I tried to get in. I was made to stand to one side while some TV crew were debating with the door-man. There were problems with the guest list. I waited and waited while the TV people were trying to get some more names onto the list. Eventually one of the organisers came out. “This is CJ Stone,” he said. “He’s reading tonight.” That’s the trouble with fame. No one recognises me.

I was meant to be meeting my editor and my publicist from Faber & Faber, and I tried to leave a message at the door. “Are they on the guest-list?” I was asked. “Dunno,” I replied. “Well they can’t come in unless they are on the guest-list.” This guest-list thing was beginning to get on my nerves. I just wanted to leave them a message to tell them that I was inside. The door-person looked down the list and discovered that their names were, in fact, there. So that was all right then. The guest-list is a little like a Confessional. Once you’re in it, all sins are forgiven.

After that I spent about half an hour signing books. Someone was opening the books for me while I reeled off my signature. It was like a production-line. I was Signer-in-Chief at the literary factory. I might have been signing away my life, for all that I knew. Whoops, there goes another million dollars!

My friends from Faber & Faber arrived and we went to a pub. Julian is a shrewd, fey, polite man with a marked intelligence. Helen is apologetic. She says sorry a lot. I’m apologetic too. So conversations with Helen tend to go like this: “I’m sorry.” “I’m sorry too.” “I’m sorry that you’re sorry.” “And so am I sorry.”

We were supposed to be meeting someone from Radio 1 who was going to interview me. She wanted to ask me if I thought that Literature was the new Rock’n’Roll. Julian listed a few cross-over artists he thought I should mention. Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan. “But Bob Dylan’s crap,” I said. “I know,” said Julian, “but he did used to write poetry.”

Back at the club the same old shenanigans were going on at the door. The queue was even longer now. Someone else was trying to get in at the same time. I turned and recognised Irvine Welsh. “It’s Irvine Welsh,” I said, and everyone else turned to look at him. He had this look on his face, the one that famous people get when they know they are being recognised: vague, distant, far-away. It looked like he was in a bubble.

I went in and did the interview with Radio 1. I answered the first set of questions competently enough. The interviewer said, “when I ask a question, can you refer to the question in your answer? So when I ask ‘what audience are you addressing?’ you should say, ‘the audience I am addressing are…’ Like that, OK?” I did as I was told. Then she said, very pointedly, as if this was her secret weapon: “Is Literature the new Rock’n’Roll?” I reeled out the set of names I’d been given in my pep-talk. When I said “Leonard Cohen” she smiled knowingly. Obviously Leonard Cohen isn’t cool. But then I thought about it. Is Literature the new Rock’n’Roll? Well no. The process is so different. You need silence to write. It is a lonely occupation. I said, “there’s no music in Literature.” Afterwards I regretted the statement, because there is music in literature. It’s just that it is the music of silence, that’s all.

Later I was interviewed by Channel 1 TV. They asked the same question. “Is Literature the new Rock’n’Roll?” It’s obviously the new buzz-slogan in media circles. I was fed up with it. “Nope,” I said curtly. And that was the end of that interview.

I watched Hanif Kureishi do his bit. He read out a story about a lump of shit. It was full of graphic descriptions of the shape and smell of this monstrous turd that wouldn’t flush down the bog. The audience were going “ye-er” and “yeuch” at all of these pointedly precise observations. They loved it.

Later I met Irvine Welsh. I shook his hand and he asked who I was. “I’m CJ Stone,” I told him. He gave me a huge hug. “I’m just reading your book,” he said. “I love it.” On that basis, I love him too. And his Mom. And his dog, if he’s got one. Us writers are so vain. We do so love to be loved.

I’d been given some free drinks tickets and I was just debating whether to have another one and risk losing my license when I bumped into an old friend. He’s working class and Scottish. We used to call him Ronnie Rumbelow after the chain of electrical shops. That was his stage-name. He had a band, called Breakfast Oilrig. BO for short. I gave him my free drinks tickets and asked how he was enjoying the club. “It’s full of pretentious literary wankers,” he said. Ronnie’s an inverted snob. “Irvine Welsh is here,” I said, “he’s not a literary wanker.” “He’s the biggest wanker of the lot,” said Ronnie.

These Scots love slagging each other off. But if wanting to write books makes you a wanker, then so be it. I’m a wanker too.

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2. Castlemilk Writer’s Festival

It starts with a whiskey. Well it would do, wouldn’t it, this being Glasgow. And not a single whiskey: doubles at half the normal price.

There’s me and Kodan and Daniel interlocking arms and saying, “here’s to the Celts” and then chucking back these monstrous double-doubles (a Scottish single being an English double) and following these with lager chasers. Whoosh. Like fire in your belly, and then an eruption in your chest, and then a mini nuclear explosion in your brain, a kind of psychic mushroom cloud radiating with a hiss and a splutter through your brain cells. So I’m an honorary Celtic supporter for the night, and an honorary Scot too, being a poet and a revolutionary and a bum and an all-round bull-shitting philosopher like the rest of them. And after two or three or more of these nuclear brain-holocausts (I lose count) well we were just talking gibberish of course. I forget what. Revolutionary clap-trap, no doubt. Or maybe nuclear physics, cookery and transcendental meditation. Or macramé. Or knitting. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. By this time our brains had mutated into some kind of amoebic slime. They should make whiskey illegal. It’s too good.

I was up here for the Castlemilk Writer’s Festival. Castlemilk is a huge council estate somewhere in Glasgow. It consists of x thousand people, one shop, one pub and a library. I have no idea why they want to hold a writer’s festival here, especially as no one from Castlemilk actually turned up. There were the library staff, and the organisers of the festival, and my friends: Kodan, Danny, Carol-Anne and Woody. And that’s it.

I didn’t recognise Woody at first. I’d written about him in my book. I’d described him as “the very picture of the furtive pornography addict, with eyes that slopped round like wet oysters behind his thick glasses.” Danny told me: “Woody says he’s going to nut you one when he sees you.” Apparently everyone liked the “wet oysters” description so much they were now calling him “oyster eyes”. When I finally did recognise him I was worried. I was waiting for him to nut me one. But he didn’t. He said, “oh hi. I didn’t recognise you at first. It must be these oyster eyes of mine.”

In the end Danny tottered off. I mean: he stumbled off. He was rolling like an ocean liner in a tumbling gale, the sea-sick captain. The Earth itself had turned to liquid. He couldn’t even see straight any more. I have no idea what happened to Woody. He probably transmuted into an oyster. And me and Kodan and Carol-Anne – who’s been far more intelligent than the rest of us, drinking normal sized drinks at a normal pace – well we were heading off for the clubs. They’ve got this curfew in Glasgow, so we’d got barely ten minutes to make it indoors before we were nicked. And the bouncer at the first club took exception to Kodan. “You’re drunk,” he said.

“Of course we’re drunk. What do you expect? We’ve been drinking. Which is why we want to come in here.”

“No, sorry. You’re not allowed in if you’re drunk.”

So that was that. The only half-decent club within a five-mile radius, and they wouldn’t let us in because Kodan looked drunk. On top of that, we were a motley crew. Me with my Harris Tweed jacket and grey hair, looking like an anthropologist (which is what I am really). Carol-Anne looking like a Librarian. And Kodan with his hip-hop hat with “No Fear” written across the front, and his trousers around his hips showing his boxer shorts, looking like Nothing on Earth. It’s no wonder they wouldn’t let us in really. I wouldn’t have let us in either.

So we jumped into another taxi and headed off for another club, the seconds ticking by, that terrible curfew bearing down on us relentlessly like some dark fate, like a Divine Punishment inflicted upon us by an unmerciful God for the sin, merely, of being in Scotland. I’m not used to this. I’m not used to the idea of having to be somewhere at a certain time, especially when I’m drunk. I mean: what if we didn’t make it? What would happen to us then? Would it be like Cinderella at the Ball? Were we all going to turn into pumpkins?

But we made it to the next club anyway, with barely seconds to spare. And Kodan tripped over getting out of the taxi. Carol-Anne and I were about to go in, when the door man said to Kodan, “you can’t come in here, you’re drunk.”

Oh no, not again! Just what was going on here? It made no sense. What else are Friday night’s for, if not to get drunk and go to clubs? And anyway, everyone else was drunk, or off their heads on some concoction or another. So what was it about us lot? What did we have to do to gain entry to these places?

Well we did what he had to do. Shamelessly casting our dignity to the wind, we begged, we pleaded, we implored, we beseeched, we entreated.

“Please let us in, please please. Look, he’s not really drunk. He tripped falling out of the taxi, that’s all. He just looks drunk. He always looks like that. It’s genetic. Show him Kodan, walk up and down. There, see, he’s dead sober. Tell him Kodan, you’re sober aren’t you?”

“Yeah man, honest, ah’m s-s-soberrr,” said Kodan, straining every fibre not to slur his words.

And under this torrent of disgraceful sycophancy, the bouncer relented. “Oh go on then,” he said, waving us in wearily: “anything to shut you up.”

It wasn’t worth all the bother. It was a handbag club: by which I mean the women all danced around their handbags, and all the men pretended to be handbags so they could look up the women’s skirts. And the music was all this chinzy pop stuff, vapid, slushy top-twenty tunes that all sounded the same. Hair-net music. Doily music. Music to put your tea cup on. We had one drink and left.

So that’s Glasgae fer ye. Me and Kodan caught a taxi back to his Mom’s. As for Carol-Anne, I’m not sure. I think she turned into a pumpkin.

"For revels, dances, masks, and merry hours,

Forerun fair Love, strewing her way with flowers."

Shakespeare: Love's Labour's Lost.



[image error]3. Disco of my Mind

An earlier column had me stuck in the crummy 1970s disco-of-my-mind. This column finds me stuck in an actual 1970s disco. It was the Starsky and Hutch night at the Bunker bar in Bagleys near Kings Cross.

Well it was a puzzle for me. I mean: the 1970s was my era. I was 18 in 1971 – 27 in 1980 – so the whole era is so entangled for me with my own sense of confused growing up that I have difficulty in getting a focus on it. Not that I remember very much about Starsky and Hutch. I was a cool, dope-smoking geek at the time, immersed in my own sense of self-importance. I never watched TV. The only things I vaguely remember are as follows:-

1. That David Soul was blonde, and that the other one – Paul Michael Glaser (I think: I had to ring someone up to find his name) – had dark, curly hair.

2. The dark curly-haired one used to wear these chunky big cardigans with toggles instead of buttons.

3. That they drove round in an unmarked police car, but that when they were chasing villains one of them would get a red flashing light from under the dashboard and stick it on the roof.

4. That David Soul was a heart-throb at the time, and had some single in the charts, though I have no idea what it was called.

5. That they made being cops a sexy young thing to be.

And that’s it. I don’t even remember which one was Starsky and which one was Hutch. But I do remember one Xmas being round Tom and Elaine’s place. They were cool dope-smoking friends of mine. Elaine had bought Tom a brand-new chunky big cardigan with toggles instead of buttons. She said, “for heaven’s sake don’t mention Starsky and Hutch when you see Tom.”

“Hi Tom,” I said, when he came in, wearing this hairy-ape thing with a floppy collar. “I like the cardigan,” I said. “It’s just like the ones that Starsky and Hutch wear.”

He gave me this terrible dark look as if I’d just wounded his soul.

So how did it happen? How did I step out of the crummy 1970s disco-of-the-mind into this actual 1970s disco taking place right here in 1997?

I was due to meet Gilly and her friends at the Cross bar in Kings Cross. Well I was imagining all sorts of things about the Cross Bar before I got there. I thought it must be a pub with a bicycle theme. I pictured a “Pannier-room”, maybe, with bicycle panniers from around the world all over the walls; and a “Saddle-lounge”, where all the seats were bicycle saddles (Ouch!) I thought perhaps you’d get your drinks in those plastic containers like baby’s bottles that Tour-de-France cyclists use. But I was wrong. It was this stark, metallic, high-roofed bar with gloomy corners selling Guinness at £2.50 a pint. It’s only called the Cross Bar because it’s in Kings Cross.

I was wearing my police trench-coat with the collar up. I looked exactly like an undercover cop from a Starsky and Hutch episode. I was sidling round the bar looking into the dark corners to find my friends. They weren’t there. People were giving me funny looks. Obviously my “street-bum” image wasn’t working. They could see I was on a case. I left. After that I was wandering around Kings Cross trying to find Bagleys. There was a guy outside the station shouting about Jesus through a megaphone. The megaphone was so distorted (and his voice was so harsh from all of that shouting) that I didn’t understand a word he said. All I managed to pick up was the oft-repeated name “Je-sus” (like that, in broken syllables) like the mangled cry of some desolate marsh-creature. In the distance I could hear the wail of a police siren. You could imagine Starsky and Hutch themselves coming screeching round the corner any second and then leaping out to engage in some lethal fire-fight. Kings Cross is like that. It’s permanently stuck in a 1970s gothic cop-movie.

Well I never found Bagleys. Not till later, that is. I went in a pub. It said “Dancers” in big letters outside. Now what did that mean? When I got in I found out. The place was full of half-naked women. “Dancers” means “strippers”. But the guy behind the bar was so engrossed with something else (I can’t imagine what) that he forgot to charge me for my pint, so I was quite happy really. After that I went back to the Cross Bar and met Gilly and her friends.

Gilly said, “We’ll go early to avoid the queue. I know it’s not the cool thing to do, but I hate queuing up. Anyway, we might even get a table.”

But when we got there there was already a queue. Gilly said, “it’s the new thing, this queuing policy. They create a queue so it looks like this is the place to be. You have to ring clubs up beforehand to find out what their queuing policy is.”

Well I hate queuing too. I’d rather go to the place not to be, than be bothered with hanging round in a line just for the appearance of it. I mean: I don’t mind queuing if it’s necessary (in the Post Office, for instance, to collect my Family Allowance) but when the management create a false queue on purpose, holding people up and only letting them in four at a time, just as a promotional technique, then this simply seems rude and unnecessary. I decided to blag my way in on the back of Mixmag. I spoke to the bouncers and they introduced me to one of the organisers, and he agreed to let me and Gilly in. “VIPs,” the bouncers called out as they let us through the gate.

“VIPs! Did you hear that Gilly? They called us VIPs!” It was the first time I’d ever been called a VIP in my life. I still haven’t got over it. I’m thinking of changing my name. No more CJ Stone. You can call me VIP Stone from now on.

Once I was inside I started thinking about this queuing policy thing. You see, it’s in the nature of capitalism to turn wants into needs. We didn’t need cars and washing machines and CD players at first; we wanted them, that’s all. But if you create a lack, then wants do turn into needs. These days the world is all covered in motorways, so we do need our cars to get out into the country. And we need our washing machines to give us time and our CD players, maybe, to give us mental space. But who on earth could ever have imagined that we’d one day need Starsky and Hutch theme nights? I sometimes wonder if it’s me who’s going mad, or if it’s just the whole damn world.

Anyway – whether I actually needed it or not – I have to say that I had a bloody good time in there. For once I actually recognised all of the songs. And the atmosphere was so tacky it was almost sublime. Guys with wigs and stick-on side-burns. Women with wibbly-wobbly bubbly patterns all over their jeans, with feather boas around their necks (that was Gilly). Nobody gave a damn. There were latter-day Starskys and late twentieth century Hutches running in little conga-lines all over the place.

I tried to chat someone up. I said, “I’ve seen you in my dreams.”

Arrrggghhh! It came out just like that, the cheesiest chat up line you can imagine. I was running away before she had time to answer.

So I was definitely stuck in a Starsky and Hutch script now. There were Starsky and Hutch lines coming out of my mouth, Starsky and Hutch thoughts bubbling about my mind, a Starsky and Hutch look of charismatic charm straddled across my face. I looked down and I was wearing this chunky big cardigan with toggles instead of buttons. I’d stepped into the TV time-vortex and now there was no way out…. The disco-of-the-mind goes on forever!

4. Broad Oak Valley
[image error]“the People’s Free Festival, unfortunate offspring of the earlier Windsor festivals, now banned”

Broad Oak Valley, near Canterbury in Kent. Anne and I arrived just as the setting Sun was breaking from behind a cloud, spangling the sky in a wild burst of reds and golds: the greatest light show on Earth. Anne is 39, the mother of three kids. She’d got a baby-sitter in for the night. Right now she was wearing a little velvet number and a pair of shiny patent leather Docs. Dressed up to party. She had the window open as we puttered through the quiet Kent countryside: listening for Nightingales. But it’s typical of her optimism. She didn’t hear a Nightingale. Instead she said, “that means that they’ve all found mates.” The most beautiful songs come from the loneliest birds she told me.

We’re on our way to a free party, put on by tVC of Kent and Rogue of Lincoln. The tVC/Rogue Mutual Admiration Society. The usual things happen. I miss the turning and get lost down some dusty lane. I turn around and I’m just about to give up when another car comes roaring in. And luckily they know where the party is. We clatter over a bank of rubble and into the garden of a boarded-up house. Everyone’s busy, setting up the marquee, hanging from the canvas to pull the guy-ropes tight. Someone is lighting a fire. Piles of equipment lie scattered around in disarray. Everyone’s running about, having a laugh, giddily anticipating the Night’s promise.

Well, Broad Oak has a history. It was compulsorily purchased some thirty years ago to make way for a reservoir. Only they never did build the reservoir. And since the late ’60s it’s been the scene of countless parties. How many of you remember Kevin Ayres or the Soft Machine? These were the hippest people back then. Kevin Ayres dyed his hair purple. He had a deep, sonorous voice, and his lyrics sounded dead cool when you were tripping. They were responsible for a number of the parties. Later – in 1976 – someone else tried to hold a free festival here. It was the People’s Free Festival, unfortunate offspring of the earlier Windsor festivals, now banned. The police did what they usually do: they fenced off great swathes of the countryside and mounted a 24-hour cordon for several days. Local people said that they’d rather have put up with the hippies. The festival ended up on the muddy wastes of Seasalter marsh about seven miles away. Lots of people took their clothes off to protest at harassment by the drug squad. They made the front page of the local paper. Some of my friends still talk about the event. It was the most memorable thing in their lives.

Well nothing changes does it? We still try to hold parties, the police still try to stop us, and we still move on when we have to.

Unfortunately this is precisely what I had to do right now as I’d agreed to take Anne to another party in sleepy old Faversham. As we were passing through Canterbury the car broke down. It’s a 1963 Morris Minor. I was fuming with frustration. Anne said, “go with the flow,” but that only pissed me off even more. I have a pathological aversion to clichés. We ended up sitting in some posh hotel waiting for the AA to turn up, listening to two old men trying to chat up the waitresses. Luckily it wasn’t too long before the AA man arrived. I drank up my pint and went out to meet him.

I love AA men. I love AA men because they all love Morris Minors. They go into a sort of ecstatic trance every time they are called out to fix one. What it is: they look under the bonnet and see a real engine ticking away under there. They can read the engine like a newspaper. So this AA man clucks and gurgles his appreciation and fixes the car in 30 seconds flat.

“Thank you,” I say.

“No, thank you!”

After that we headed off to the other party. This one was indoors. It was a “fetish party”, which only seemed to mean that the women got the chance to show off their legs, and there were X-rated movies in the basement. I got bored. I went for a walk. I walked along Stone Street, merely because of the name. It’s not often that I see my name on a plaque on a wall. Eventually I ended up at the Catholic Shrine of St. Jude’s, which is set in a quiet garden. Well, it was time for me to contemplate my place in the Universe wasn’t it? What am I? According to some scriptures, I am an eternal jewel of consciousness in a Universe of constant change. Instead of which I just felt like a bobble on the cardigan of the Lord. It’s about time He changed His brand of washing powder, that’s all I can say.

I went back to the party to look for Anne. The party had swallowed her up. She was gone. Sucked into a fuming void. She was probably holed up in some room by now giggling her way through a spliff. Well I was chemical-free this evening – barring the occasional, crafty lager – so I decided once more to move on. And it was back to Broad Oak.

By the time I arrived there the party was in full swing. I could hear the bass-line thudding for miles, like the distant boom of artillery in some vast psychic war, and the lights shattering the still sky. It looked like a scene from Apocalypse Now! I parked the car and Nikki from tVC came up to me.

“Chris!” she exclaimed enthusiastically. “You’ve come back!” She gave me a hug. This meant she was on E. She never hugs me otherwise. “I was going to write to Mixmag,” she told me. “I was going to tell them that you’re not really a free party person, cos you never come to any of our parties.”

Well I agreed with her. I’m not really a free party person, I just write about them. But then again, as I thought later, no one expects Ruth Rendell to be a murderer just because she writes about murder all the time, do they?

Well do they?

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CJ Stone’s columns for Mixmag Magazine 1996-1998 I

A series of random columns from Mixmag , a dance magazine, from the 90s, beginning with this one about Irvine Welsh:

Irvine Welsh at the Blue Note Club

I was in London for the Irvine Welsh gig at the Blue Note Club in Islington. I was the warm-up act. It’s a new concept: literary readings at clubs. I’d already done two or three, which were mostly resounding failures. It had begun to seem to me as if readings at clubs were a contradiction in terms. Most people had looked at me with bemused expressions wondering where all the repetitive beats had gone. I was hoping that this one would be different.

I arrived about 8.30 and there were already people queuing. I tried to get in. I was made to stand to one side while some TV crew were debating with the door-man. There were problems with the guest list. I waited and waited while the TV people were trying to get some more names onto the list. Eventually one of the organisers came out. “This is CJ Stone,” he said. “He’s reading tonight.” That’s the trouble with fame. No one recognises me.

I was meant to be meeting my editor and my publicist from Faber & Faber, and I tried to leave a message at the door. “Are they on the guest-list?” I was asked. “Dunno,” I replied. “Well they can’t come in unless they are on the guest-list.” This guest-list thing was beginning to get on my nerves. I just wanted to leave them a message to tell them that I was inside. The door-person looked down the list and discovered that their names were, in fact, there. So that was all right then. The guest-list is a little like a Confessional. Once you’re in it, all sins are forgiven.

After that I spent about half an hour signing books. Someone was opening the books for me while I reeled off my signature. It was like a production-line. I was Signer-in-Chief at the literary factory. I might have been signing away my life, for all that I knew. Whoops, there goes another million dollars!

My friends from Faber & Faber arrived and we went to a pub. Julian is a shrewd, fey, polite man with a marked intelligence. Helen is apologetic. She says sorry a lot. I’m apologetic too. So conversations with Helen tend to go like this: “I’m sorry.” “I’m sorry too.” “I’m sorry that you’re sorry.” “And so am I sorry.”

We were supposed to be meeting someone from Radio 1 who was going to interview me. She wanted to ask me if I thought that Literature was the new Rock’n’Roll. Julian listed a few cross-over artists he thought I should mention. Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan. “But Bob Dylan’s crap,” I said. “I know,” said Julian, “but he did used to write poetry.”

Back at the club the same old shenanigans were going on at the door. The queue was even longer now. Someone else was trying to get in at the same time. I turned and recognised Irvine Welsh. “It’s Irvine Welsh,” I said, and everyone else turned to look at him. He had this look on his face, the one that famous people get when they know they are being recognised: vague, distant, far-away. It looked like he was in a bubble.

I went in and did the interview with Radio 1. I answered the first set of questions competently enough. The interviewer said, “when I ask a question, can you refer to the question in your answer? So when I ask ‘what audience are you addressing?’ you should say, ‘the audience I am addressing are…’ Like that, OK?” I did as I was told. Then she said, very pointedly, as if this was her secret weapon: “Is Literature the new Rock’n’Roll?” I reeled out the set of names I’d been given in my pep-talk. When I said “Leonard Cohen” she smiled knowingly. Obviously Leonard Cohen isn’t cool. But then I thought about it. Is Literature the new Rock’n’Roll? Well no. The process is so different. You need silence to write. It is a lonely occupation. I said, “there’s no music in Literature.” Afterwards I regretted the statement, because there is music in literature. It’s just that it is the music of silence, that’s all.

Later I was interviewed by Channel 1 TV. They asked the same question. “Is Literature the new Rock’n’Roll?” It’s obviously the new buzz-slogan in media circles. I was fed up with it. “Nope,” I said curtly. And that was the end of that interview.

I watched Hanif Kureishi do his bit. He read out a story about a lump of shit. It was full of graphic descriptions of the shape and smell of this monstrous turd that wouldn’t flush down the bog. The audience were going “ye-er” and “yeuch” at all of these pointedly precise observations. They loved it.

Later I met Irvine Welsh. I shook his hand and he asked who I was. “I’m CJ Stone,” I told him. He gave me a huge hug. “I’m just reading your book,” he said. “I love it.” On that basis, I love him too. And his Mom. And his dog, if he’s got one. Us writers are so vain. We do so love to be loved.

I’d been given some free drinks tickets and I was just debating whether to have another one and risk losing my license when I bumped into an old friend. He’s working class and Scottish. We used to call him Ronnie Rumbelow after the chain of electrical shops. That was his stage-name. He had a band, called Breakfast Oilrig. BO for short. I gave him my free drinks tickets and asked how he was enjoying the club. “It’s full of pretentious literary wankers,” he said. Ronnie’s an inverted snob. “Irvine Welsh is here,” I said, “he’s not a literary wanker.” “He’s the biggest wanker of the lot,” said Ronnie.

These Scots love slagging each other off. But if wanting to write books makes you a wanker, then so be it. I’m a wanker too.

Continue reading…

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Whitstable Gazette: Is Cannabis a Gateway Drug? and other stories

From CJ Stone’s Whitstable Gazette column, Written in Stone.



1. Is Cannabis a Gateway drug?

You may have heard the term “gateway drug” with reference to cannabis. It is the idea that cannabis use opens the door to other drugs.

The basis of this is that it can be shown that most people who end up using hard drugs like heroin have, at some earlier point in their lives, also taken cannabis.

This is an absurd argument, of course, since it can also be shown that most heroin users have also previously drunk tea, gone shopping or watched Deal Or No Deal on daytime TV.

Should we make Noel Edmonds illegal then? Does daytime TV drive you to heroin? I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

Of course the only real similarity between cannabis and heroin is the fact that they are both illegal and therefore available from the same source.

In other words it is precisely the status of the two drugs as illegal substances that is most likely to cause an escalation from one to the other. Heroin addicts often fund their addiction by dealing in other drugs.

Plus when people find out that they are not instantly and irrecoverably addicted to cannabis after a few smokes, they begin to disbelieve the official line on drugs as a whole, and to imagine that they can handle heroin in the same way.

This is where they are mistaken. No one can handle heroin. It’s the second most addictive drug on the planet. Unfortunately the most addictive drug is freely available to sixteen year-olds over the counter in almost every corner shop or newsagents in the world.

It is nicotine, more addictive, more dangerous, and far more harmful than heroin.

Ask any heroin addict. Cigarettes are more difficult to kick than heroin. And you’ll notice this too: heroin addicts generally stop taking other drugs. They don’t drink alcohol, and they rarely smoke cannabis. But they all smoke cigarettes.

It’s as if, in having become addicted to cigarettes – something we all consider quite normal – it gives them permission to become heroin addicts too.

So you have to ask yourself, which is the real gateway drug?

2. Where was God?

There was an odd little programme on the TV a few years back, called Tsunami: Where Was God ?

It involved the presenter going to a number of places in South East Asia where the Tsunami was most devastating, and asking people about God.

This seemed a very strange thing to do and it brought up some quite peculiar responses. One extremist Muslim said that it was a punishment for tight clothing, while the most profound statement came from a Hindu woman whose son had been swept away in the Tsunami. She was grief stricken but resigned. “God has returned to God,” she said.

What struck me was that the question itself is absurd. God just doesn’t come into it. It takes a peculiar form of human vanity to think that God listens to individual human prayers, or that he has a particular preference for one religion over another. The fact is that Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, believers and non-believers, were all carried away in the Tsunami, which made no distinction whatsoever between people or their religious beliefs.

This took place on the second anniversary of the Tsunami, but the first anniversary of the Gaza massacre in which 1,400 Palestinians were trapped in their cage and killed, a large percentage of them children.

It seems odd that the second anniversary of one tragic event was so extensively covered, but that the first anniversary of another was so completely ignored.

The difference being, of course, that the first was a natural occurrence over which human beings had no control, while the second was entirely man-made.

Even more notable is that while the rebuilding of the coastline of South East Asia continued, the people of Gaza still labour under an economic blockade which stops building materials from crossing the border, and so are unable to even begin the process of rebuilding their devastated country.

A saner anniversary programme might have been called Gaza: Where Is Our Humanity ?

3. Believe it or not

My Mum told me this story.

She said went into a shop and bought some items and paid for them with a £10 note, but the woman behind the counter gave her change for £20.

There were several people lined up at the counter waiting to be served, and, not wanting to embarrass the shop assistant, Mum waited till the queue had cleared.

“Excuse me,” she said eventually, “I think you’ve made a mistake. You’ve given me the wrong change.”

“No I haven’t.,” said the woman behind the counter, very curtly.

“Yes you have,” said my Mum, getting ready to hand the extra £10 back.

“No I haven’t,” said the woman, raising her voice, obviously annoyed that anyone was questioning her point of view.

My Mum tried a few more times, each time being interrupted by an increasingly angry shop-assistant before she had even completed her sentence.

“OK if you say so,” she said finally, and put the extra £10 note into her purse. Later her and my sister went out and had lunch on the money.

People believe a lot of things that aren’t necessarily true. In the case of that shop-assistant, she had obviously rung the wrong figure into the till, and when offered a choice between what the till was saying and the word of a customer, preferred to believe the till.

Machines don’t lie, of course. But when provided with faulty information they will give you faulty answers.

The problem with human beings is that once we get a belief stuck into our head it’s very difficult to dislodge it.

Sometimes some of our beliefs make some sort of sense. But often they don’t. Some of our beliefs have been inculcated into us since early childhood. They’ve been repeated so often we take them for the truth. Our whole world is built around received belief-systems such as this.

Personally I always retain a healthy scepticism about anyone’s beliefs… and that includes my own.

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LSD Refugees

Psychedelic cathedral

I’m in the toilet, sitting on the closed lid. It’s dark, though not completely. The orange glow of the street light outside is making a bubble-effect pattern through the frosted glass, and there’s a splash of light under the door from the hall. And there’s my own internal light too, of course, those geometric flashes of colour that tend to dance before your eyes whenever external light is dimmed or diminished.

I’m in the toilet because I’ve just had an anxiety attack. There’s a knot of tension in my stomach. It’s like that feeling you have when they’ve finished cranking you up to the top of the roller coaster and you look down at the sheer drop in front. A lurching sensation, a real physical pang which, if it were to be verbalised, would come out something like: “Oh my God! Oh Jesus! Oh Lord! What the hell am I doing here?”

Except that a roller coaster ride is over in a minute or two, and the ride I’m about to embark on will last all night.

I’ve just taken LSD. For the first time in 25 years. That little brown drop of liquid, placed on the end of my finger and ingested some 30 minutes ago, is about to play havoc with my sense of self.

Suddenly there’s a kind of humming noise. This low-down, deep-bass growl sound, like the boom of an organ in an empty Cathedral, like the lowest, low-down bass note on a massive pipe-organ going in and out of phase. Reverberating. In and out. Hum. In and out. Hum. Like that. Slowly and deliberately. With a sort of rhythmic insistence.

It’s hard to say where, exactly, the sound is coming from. It’s not in the room, as such. It’s not in my head. It’s just there, at some deep level. It’s like I’m hearing the sub-atomic pulse of the Universe in the very fabric of matter, so low it’s thrumming in my guts. And then it’s as if an invisible pair of hands had taken space itself and was squeezing it like a concertina. In and out. In and out. The Universe is pulsing to a living heart beat.

Now the colours in front of my eyes are circling, shifting, swirling, weaving, shaping, changing to make an endlessly morphing, moving mandala, the colours coming in from all sides now, streaming at me, taking on dimension and form, creating a sort of tunnel down which my all too mortal eyes are staring in fear and awe and wonder.

In and out. In and out.

That’s my breathing.

Where am I?

Oh yes, I’m in the toilet.

That’s when I decide I have to leave. Not just the toilet. This house.

Continue reading…

Borderlands: Bird Watching in Dobrogea, Romania

“In Wildness is the preservation of the world.”

— Henry David Thoreau – Walking



1. Across the River

We crossed the Danube at Braila on a flat-pack ferry like something you might find in the shelving section at Ikea. It had an embossed steel deck, shiny from years of being buffed up by the wheels of the vehicles as they loaded on and off.

Szabi waited in line with the van while Kinga and I waited on the jetty.

The deck was about seven or eight inches above the level of the jetty at first and the ferry would reel and judder as the cars and lorries lurched on board, dipping to take the load and then bouncing back once they passed over onto the deck. One of the crew was bent over on the jetty and watching as the wheels came in contact with the edge of the deck, making circling motions with his arms to show the driver when it was time to pull forward. He loaded the lorries on first and then the cars. Later, as more vehicles piled on, the level sank lower till in the end the ferry was seven or eight inches below the jetty, jerking about in the flapping waters like an animal on a leash waiting to escape.

After that, with a shout from the crew-member on the jetty as he unleashed the rusted steel cable and jumped on board, followed by a burst of smoke and a roar from the engine, the ferry broke free from the tangle of waters by the shore-line and was out into the open river, heaving its way through the dark heavy waves, making great sucking and slapping noises as the water hit the square-cut prow.

The river was a deep sea-green and the air smelt of ozone mixed with diesel-fuel. We stood on the prow to feel the welcome coolness of the wind on our faces as it scurried and raced along the Danube, chasing its tail down to the mysterious sea.

It had been a long, hot journey so far, and it was certain to get even hotter. We’d driven down from Transylvania in the heart of Romania, to Dobrogea, near the border with Bulgaria, between the Danube and the Black Sea, a journey of some six or seven hours.

I’d met Kinga for the first time at 4am that morning when they’d come to pick me up from the Pensiune in the Transylvanian mountains. She’s Szabi’s girlfriend, a very pretty Hungarian girl with shining eyes and a small stud in her lip. She spoke no English and I spoke no Hungarian, so hardly a word passed between us. But when I climbed into the van – which had two seats in the front and none in the back – she insisted that I take the passenger seat, while she sat on a little camping chair which she unfolded and set low down on the floor between the two fixed seats. Later on I had a go. It was very insecure. Every time the van veered one way or the other the little seat would lurch and you would have to catch hold of the chairs in front to stop yourself from collapsing in a heap. She spent four days in that seat – as a gesture to my extreme age I guess – and I am grateful to her for that.

Szabi is tall and dark with a hooked nose like a bird of prey. There’s something of the wild about him, something watchful and alert like a hunter. He would be our guide.

So – now – we were over the river, bouncing up a dusty road from the ferry-stop, and into Dobrogea, heading for the Macin Mountains. It was an expedition to scout out the birding in the area so that Szabi could take one of his groups there next week. He wanted to find out where the best sites were and had invited Kinga and I along for the ride.

As a consequence of this he was constantly stopping the van and leaping out with his binoculars to catch sight of some bird or another, which he would then name for me, while handing me a the binoculars. It didn’t take him long to realise that I was entirely ignorant when it came to birds.

“I think you not know what I am say,” he said, in that weirdly upside-down version of English of his. “But it not matter. I tell you anyway.”

So that was it: me Szabi and Kinga on a birding expedition in which at least two of us knew nothing about birds. But Szabi was right: it didn’t matter. Szabi’s enthusiasm made up for our ignorance, and there were plenty of other things to see and do while we were here….

Continue reading.

How to be Invisible

The following story was written as a column for Prediction magazine, but never published. One of the Editors was on holiday at the time and had sent around a circular saying that, unless you knew the secret of invisibility, you shouldn’t contact her. I wrote back to say that I did.

To be honest, the story originates with Idries Shah, the Sufi writer from the 70s, from his book The Sufis. His version wasn’t as succinct as mine. Also I’ve changed the central figure from a Sufi to a Magician.

The reason Prediction magazine rejected the story is that they felt it was negative “Is that all there is to it?” they asked. What do you think? I think it is rather sweet and touching, and it shows that anyone can leant the secret of invisibility if they apply themselves with diligence and grace. It also describes my attitude to life.

Read the story here.

Money Burning

From Kindred Spirit Issue 152 Summer 2017: Sacrificial ritual is liberating and probably the oldest religion on the planet, says recent money-burning convert Christopher J Stone.

Look at the ancient texts – the Old and New Testaments, the I Ching, the Vedas – they are all shot through with the idea of sacrificial ritual. Usually it is blood sacrifice: the sacrifice of an animal. Occasionally it is something more dark and sinister: a human sacrifice. But whatever the form, the basic idea is there, universally proclaimed. You sacrifice something of value to you, in order to propitiate the gods – the powers of nature – in order to influence future events.

But that was in the past, wasn’t it? We’ve grown beyond all that now. We’re much too sophisticated to take any of that stuff seriously any more.

And yet… and yet…. Don’t you still feel something stirring inside of you? Doesn’t something still beckon from the depths? Not the gods any more: something else, something deeply subsumed into the very flesh of your heart?

A human being is a complex creature. We are made up of many parts. And while we strut about in our urban haunts thinking we have everything under control, it’s clear from the state of the world that there are unseen forces at work, and that the human race as a whole is completely out of control.

In other words, there are still gods to propitiate. Not external powers, internal ones. The powers of the hidden drives and instincts, beautiful and monstrous at the same time, that are even now pushing the world to the edge of extinction.

How to harness and control those forces? How to propitiate the gods of our own internal being: that is the question that lies at the crux of our time, at this decisive moment, when our very survival as a species is at stake.

Continue reading here.

Whitstable People: Ritchie Harnett

 

 

Whitstable Views

House prices are driving people away.

People on Island Wall, Nelson Road and the adjoining streets, will have noticed that they have a new postman.

This is because their old postman, Ritchie Harnett, has moved to Grimsby.

There’s been a lot of talk about house prices in the paper recently. Ritchie’s move is the perfect illustration of that.

He has a growing family to care for and needed more space. He simply couldn’t afford to get a bigger house in the town on his income.

His family have lived in Whitstable for generations. He was born and brought up here. He went to school here. His relatives are here. His roots are here. Everything he has ever known is in this town.

On the other hand, most of his contemporaries have long since moved away. They too, like him, couldn’t afford to live in Whitstable any longer.

It’s…

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