St Elmo's Fire

I.

I pulled over into a lay-by and wound down the window just after the Bedminster services. The forecourt had been doused orange from the light of sodium lamps, and a till attendent had muzzily counted out change from my purchases of twenty pounds worth of unleaded and a bottle of blackcurrent-flavoured mineral water that didn't really taste of blackcurrents. I switched the ignition off and breathed out exaggeratedly through the open window. Streamers of steam unwound from my mouth like a chameleon's tongue. Fieldfares churred in a thicket of hawthorn, and marsh frogs burped from a unseen pond. A bat - a Pipistrelle, from its size - curved round the moon.

I dimmed the headlights as a post-van sped past, then switched them off altogether. An arabesque of shadow flickered through the window, and the dark traceries of an elm bough shimmered on my lap. The patterns of shade looked like calligraphy. They wavered on my legs. I stared at them for a while, then leaned back and nuzzled into the skin-warmth of the leather seats.

I switched on the radio, and heard through the faraway static the murmur of moustache-stroking commentators in the West Indies, quietly contemplating England's off-swing - "Let's see what Wisden's has to say about that inswing". There was the clack of a cork ball off a willow bat, and then the hiss of applause dissolved into the sea-wash of interference altogther.

Dark blue light lit up the eastern sky. A few crickets simmered in the verges.

The moon was bronze-shod. Dust and pollen in the summer atmosphere blending with the diffuse light of the sun coming up, giving the moon the warm glow of newly-fired metal. As it began to fall towards the horizon, it deepened in colour and softened in outline, taking something of the tarnished copper of a carp under the water.

Frank used to swim in the Tavy River as a child, and in between sitting cross-legged on sand spits mid-river, leafing through John Buchan novels and fencing off Sticklebacks into limpid pools, and later, annotating Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders in a self-concious high romantic fashion, lying back in the current and watching cloud nebulas collide and seperate in the skies of August, he once told me that the algae that proliferated in the mid-august river used to turn his underwater limbs a rusty orange, so that while doing the breaststroke against the streaming current, his gold limbs resembled a giant frog.

The engine ticked itself cool.

II.

Frank’s funeral was on Tuesday. I had driven over from Bristol on Monday, to attend a wake with Frank’s oldest friends, his partner, and – written into his will – a case of vintage damson wine, which Frank had bottled on a balmy, narcotic summer night in 1983, and which was to be consumed by the congregation at the earliest suitable occasion following his death. Frank’s quick, flowing handwriting was etched in blue India ink on each fawn-coloured label, and both his writing on the labels and the explicit ordering of his will was classically Frank – robust, generous, and timeless.  Frank's neat copperplate was adorned with playful curlicues and baroque flourishes; a Alexandre Exquemelin pirate, a suave corsair. The end effect was that of an East India Company buccaneer struggling to reign himself in.

The ink smelt of juniper, and rose up from the pale label as we handed the bottle around.

Frank was aware of death, in a vague, puzzled way, but I don’t think he ever really expected to die. I don’t think anyone did. Frank was less a human being and more a force of nature on legs. At sixty-three, he woke up at 6am in the summer, 7am in the winter, happily splashed himself clean in a tin bath in June, amiably plunged his head into the freshly-broken ice of a water-butt in December. Two years ago, he told me how he woke up at 5am, shouldered a hatchet and flask of applejack, walked to Wiskit wood glugging the brandy contentedly, felled two yew saplings, and, packing the branches in the back seat of his Reliant Scimitar – a vehicular version of himself, powerful, dependable, noisy and increasingly with age, backfiring – drove towards Bristol.

I remember the confusion of that morning. I had been up since 6am, mostly sitting at the kitchen table, staring at the whorls and burls in the walnut grain, blearily superimposing pontillist drawings and paleolithic finger fluting onto the doodling in crayon of my daughter. In the cool light of the morning, the vivid Crayola weals turned into hematite and ochre daubings.

At 8am, after a pint of coffee, and several cigarettes, my stomach was distended and my thoughts scattered, and the nerves were still there. I went upstairs to shower and shave, prepare my suit, and check the calendar for my parents arrival (Multipy ringed in red marker), my father’s memory being what it was. As I rose from the cane chair, I saw a movement at the window.

A bark-like face hoved into view like a new moon. Frank’s teeth, yellow, tomb-stone things, beamed impishily back at me. I opened the French windows.

I asked him patiently what he was was doing lurking in my garden at 7.30am on my wedding day. I was too tired to be surprised, and anyway, this was Frank.

‘Ah, well, I broke in. I was going to knock, but I thought you’d be asleep and I didn’t want to disturb you, so I vaulted the wall. Not as easy as you'd think, your brick-work is in terrible disrepair. I've got my trowel in the back of the car, I'll patch it up for you tomorrow.'

Frank scratched his chin with an audiable rasping sound and looked please with himself. 'Still, hopped over alright and landed on Jane’s begonias, which broke my fall nicely, although you want to have that blackthorn stump out, because’ – he peeled a few crushed petals off his jeans, in no way embarrassed by wholesale flower destruction, and grimaced - ‘I landed right on it. With my arse’ he said gravely. ‘Got any secateurs? I wouldn’t say no to an egg’.

I smiled despite myself, sighed like a prince, and asked him if he wanted anything else with it. Like champagne.

Frank looked blankly at me, like a cow that’s been shown a card trick.

‘Bit early for champagne. I'll have a cup of tea though, while I'm waiting'. His eyes shone, and a few laughter lines unfurled on his cheeks.

I asked him if he wanted it soft or hard boiled.

‘Neither. I’ll have it fried ‘til it clangs and slapped between white bread, thanks. Lots of ketchup’ said Frank, rubbing his calloused hands and peering interestedly around the kitchen.

He launched himself towards a sea-shell on the mantelpiece, one I had found near Derek Jarman’s driftwood garden, near Dungeness in Sussex, bleached white by the saline winds and deeply furrowed and punctured by boring worms.

‘Nice little piece. Jarman’s, of course. That’s theft, that is’. Frank’s face cracked into a wide grin. Early sunlight glowed off his tombstone teeth. My mouth may have begun to open in half-hearted protest, but was stopped by Frank, who was now draped artfully over a kitchen chair and looking thoughtful.

‘He always artificially bleaches them, y’see. Couple of bags of salt, boiling water' said Frank conversationally, leaning forward and turning the shell over and over in his hands. 'Change and replace three times, and Bob’s your proverbial uncle. Those grooves were made with a file, too. Look, he’s nicked a chip in it here, see?’.

I glanced down to see a tiny notch in the calcite, clearly made by tools, before he whisked it away, grabbed a pair of secateurs on the sideboard, snorted, and ambled out the door. A moment later, there was a knock at the window and a glimpse of a tuft of mad grey hair heading off down the path.

‘Coffee, Jake, and lots of it. Three teaspoons, same of sugar. Imagine you’re paving a road with tarmac. That sort of consistency. Think gravy, Jake, think gravy’. And he crashed off into the foliage.

III.

Frank Taylor was, in some ways a rural throwback. While other people in his adopted Suffolk village had installed central heating and double-glazing throughout, Frank cut chestnut logs, cleaving the green-wood into logs and drying them in sheaves for the winter, or sheared them into quarters for kindling, the axe squealing through the sappy heartwood.

When his friends conceded the battle to arthritis and cataracts and did away with the steering wheel, or bought new mild-mannered cars to pop down to the shops in, Frank tinkered away on the ancient Scimatar until the engine bellowed like a rutting stag and clouds of Castrol exhaust smoke swamped the lanes around his house like haunted mists.

Frank called his car either The Car or That Bastard Car, depending on cirumstance but his friends called it (with a faint grin and well out of earshot) The Colonel - partly because of its noble form, moustachio-like front grill and decisively military acceleration, but mainly because of its resemblance to a puce-faced, hard-of-hearing distinguished gent, roaring at everyone to speak up.

Dust Jacket.

Nobody loves a book just because of its dust jacket. Still, it's an incentive to pick up a book, leaf idly through it, scan the blurb, and then either trundle off to the counter with it, or shelve it if it turns out to sound naff or is by J.D Salinger.

Which isn't to say that cover art should be neglected despite the book it shields. David Pelham - designer of the cover of A Clockwork Orange - is vaunted as the godhead of dust jacket artists, and probably rightly so. Paul Rand has more sway over modern writing than some publishing dons, and authors clamour to get his off-hand signature scrawled on the inside cover. Elaine Ramos's covers are a slanty netherworld of colour blocks and monotone fissures; she rakes in a fortune each year designing book covers and, not co-incidentally,architectural designs for art galleries, including The Tate Modern.

Sometimes the writer or photographer who complements the book becomes iconic, sometimes not. Sometimes the author creates their own mock-up; sometimes not. Sometimes the dust jacket is connected explicitly with the book; sometimes, merely obliquely. As a general - very general - concept, the cover echoes the feel of the contents, binds theme and form, and refines literary technique into a image.

All of this doesn't mean you actually have to like the book itself though. Everyone knows a Famous Five cover (By that I mean an original, slightly foxed tatty version in a second-hand bookshop), but I'd rather blind myself with carbolic acid and fire ants than read a single word of the racist old bint's writing. I felt that way when I was five, I see no reason to change now.

Regardless, I like dust jackets very much. Even if nobody else does. Which may be the case. With that in mind, here are some good ones - some scanned in, some pinched off the internet. Permission has not been sought; as such, lawsuits from the illustrator or author are expected.I would say in my defence, however, that this is technically a form of advertising, and as a corollary to this, any publishers, authors, or cover artists who wish to send me a cheque, please message me when convenient and we can discuss figures. Thanks.

Seamus Heaney; Toolbox.

I've had, for about as long as I can remember (And I can pin-point when, come to think of it; I'd just tottered in out of the rain on a fog-bound October day, where I'd been lurking in my den (A mossy alcove behind the log-pile my Dad built, clumping about in his work boots with a liberated - and lethally sharp - hatchet, clomping about like the wild man of the woods in size twelves) and was soaked through, covered in bark shreds, mulch, churned mud, lichen-dew, livid weals of crayola etc, when I found a green cloth-bound book, which turned out to be a Seamus Heaney anthology. I went to my secondary den place (behind a heavy velvet curtain; crushed, red, mothy), something of an obsession with Seamus Heaney's poetry. The first time I read this strange, bog poetry, which felt oddly as if the outside had been transmogrified into words (all the caked mud and leaf rot and squashed wood-worm on my boots and mackintosh, condensed, raw and cold and damp, into words), it was uncomfortably visceral. You could feel the hoar frost misting on your skin and flaking off in shards of rime; feel the spring and hear the hiss of air bubbles trapped in the springy lichen. Being behind a curtain with a glass of overproof Ribena and a monstorous, blue-furred spider of a hot water bottle didn't help much; it was still like being on the red moors and wracked dunes with a salt atlantic wind grazing your cheeks.

Anyway, it left me with a slightly uncomfortable shiver, hooked in and around my spinal cord; I kept getting petrified bog-men and slanted silver rain and deathly famines in my dreams. I carried on reading naturalist writing for the rest of my life; Roger Deakin, Ted Hughes, Gerard Manley Hopkins, E.M Forster, Thomas Hardy, John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, Adam Nicholson, Robert MacFarlane, and so on (I will write this up at some point, promise). Regardless, if the unthinkable has happened and you're not aware of Seamus Heaney, here's some of my personal favourites, bar the whole work of District & Circle, which I couldn't find illictly on-line and quaked a bit at the thought of typing up from scratch.

Seamus Heaney is, as far as I've discovered at any rate, the most sensitive, even-handed, elegant, languid, calm, and above all - this is what makes it work, I think - the least showy/understated poet I know of; adjectives are a killer sometimes. However, here they are, in no order that I'm aware of.

Lovers On Aran

The timeless waves, bright, sifting, broken glass,
Came dazzling around, into the rocks,
Came glinting, sifting from the Americas

To posess Aran. Or did Aran rush
to throw wide arms of rock around a tide
That yielded with an ebb, with a soft crash?

Did sea define the land or land the sea?
Each drew new meaning from the waves' collision.
Sea broke on land to full identity.

Strange Fruit

Here is the girl's head like an exhumed gourd.
Oval-faced, prune-skinned, prune-stones for teeth.

They unswaddled the wet fern of her hair
And made an exhibition of its coil,
Let the air at her leathery beauty.
Pash of tallow, perishable treasure:
Her broken nose is dark as a turf clod,
Her eyeholes blank as pools in the old workings.
Diodorus Siculus confessed
His gradual ease with the likes of this:
Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible
Beheaded girl, outstaring axe
And beatification, outstaring
What had begun to feel like reverence.

Death Of A Naturalist

All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
Specks to range on window-sills at home,
On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst into nimble-
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.
Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

The Docker

There, in the corner, staring at his drink.
The cap juts like a gantry's crossbeam,
Cowling plated forehead and sledgehead jaw.
Speech is clamped in the lips' vice.

That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic-
Oh yes, that kind of thing could start again;
The only Roman collar he tolerates
Smiles all round his sleek pint of porter.

Mosaic imperatives bang home like rivets;
God is a foreman with certain definite views
Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure.
A factory horn will blare the Resurrection.

He sits, strong and blunt as a Celtic cross,
Clearly used to silence and an armchair:
Tonight the wife and children will be quiet
At slammed door and smoker's cough in the hall.

Pasadena diner, 9.42am, Tuesday twelfth, '78.

Hello chaps.

Today's playlist is a mixed bag of:

* Dustbowl folk.
* Early 60's surf and proto-garage.
* Appalachia blues, Virginian bluegrass, Chicago Jazz.
* Californian drinking songs.
* Sunburnt alt-country.
* Spoken word Beat.
* Deep southern gospel.
* Scratchy come-down punk.

So, here it is: http://open.spotify.com/user/trade_winds/playlist/7lLv67hCLBSyN1SFDybPla

Enjoy!

Love,

Nick.

Blotting Paper

I used to have a bizarre recurrent dream where I was in a completely white landscape, a three-dimensional sheet of paper, empty except for a crudely drawn, child's idea of a house – a wooden cube, slatted in unblemished logs that never came from a living tree, yellow-lit, steamy windows, amiably puffing chimney like an old man's pipe, all under a brilliant white sky that was somehow bright without being distinct. There was no division in colour and perspective between the sky and the land. Clumped around the house in a geometrical spinney were four trees; arrow-straight brown trunks, with five cantilevered branches projecting from the crown, then a fuzz of scribbled green lines for the leaves.

The house stood at the bottom of a hill – there were gradients in this landscape, although because of the radiance of the sky, there were no shadows, so you couldn’t see an angle until you started walking up (or down) it. I used to be at the top of this steep hill, this ghost hill, and for some reason or other, I had to run down to the bottom, racing against (I have no idea why) the White Queen in the Narnia books. I always used to get off the mark with a comfortable lead, and my feet became winged and the air parted like a curtain as I sped downhill at an appreciable fraction of lightspeed, but she gained on me step by step as I began to slow, and instead of breaking the barrier and winning, she always drew level with me. Then, glancing left, she stretched and warped and fused, like burning photographs or smeared oil-paintings, and then I did too.

I used to be able to think I could feel my component cells, then atoms stretching like elastic to the invisible horizons – not painful, but excruciatingly uncomfortable and alien. The space between my molecules became an empty ocean, then a gulf filled with wheeling points of light, then a void so vast and incalcuble and touched with faint stars at distances so massive as to be functionally infinite that my mind, even within the dream, shut down entirely.

Well, around about this point, I assume my brain used to mentally hiccup, as happens when you encounter something that is just too big and strange (Thinking about what was there before God, and before that, and before thatargharghargh) and triped over the quantum door-step into confused awakening.

There’s probably some deep Freudian pulse to all this, but I don’t know what it is and I won’t linger on it.

"Later that day in gym class, she ate a mouthful of anthrax, go to sleep".

Here is the first of a string of stuff that I quite like to listen to. Today's humble offering is titled 'Wooze Patrol', and is a mixed bag of 1940's jazz, 1960's doo-wop, C86 indie-pop, Americana folk pre and post dustbowl, mid-60's psychedelia, and orchestral contemporary folk. Make of that what you will.

spotify:user:trade_winds:playlist:4XLtsVj3L3v4962VpUkfLn

Enjoy!

Nick x.

NB - This is a Spotify playlist, so you will need Spotify to play it. Fairly obviously.