Copyright © 2005 Martin Newell Pepys 0.1 Blogware © Steve Dix
I collected my old geezer bus pass, last week. Highly chuffed with it, I was too. Yet now I'm informed that we baby-boomers are all living too long nowadays. Well it's not our fault, is it? Weird thing, a demographic bulge. The theory is that after you've had a war, there's a corresponding baby boom. It's almost as if we as a species, are driven by our collective subconscious to increase production in order to compensate for wartime losses. The scientists among you can debate that one if you wish but I believe it. Perhaps during wartime the constant danger heightens the human libido in some way. Or maybe it was just because the blackout afforded people more opportunities for regrettable instances of fearful beastliness?.
What I do know is that there were an awful lot of us born between 1943 and 1963. It was constantly drummed into us by the older generation how lucky we were that they'd fought for our freedom. As many of us reached adolescence and ran with this very freedom, they seemed less comfortable with the concept, often emphasising their disapproval by shouting at us or sometimes, having us arrested.
The generation which followed us, also seem to resent us, though. Indeed, now that they are in government and control the media, they never stop battering on about it Not only have our generation 'had it all' leaving none for them, now we're all living too long as well. Well, quel domage, Baby. Get over yourselves, why don't you? I fought in the generation wars for you. I grew long hair for your sort and selflessly risked my delicate psyche at pop festivals, while doing so.
Have you noticed lately how often you see a headline proclaiming smugly, that youngsters are turning away from booze and it's the 60 and 70-somethings who are now, wait for it, Drinking at Home? Meanwhile, BBC Radio Concerned is asking, as usual, "How worried should we be about the old age time-bomb?" Thanks for that, oh finger-wagging, news obsessed ones. But it's just SO unfair, isn't it?
So it's all our fault, that the country's short of pension money, because we're all living too long? Well listen:has it ever occurred to any government health watchdog that if you stop people smoking and drinking, a number of things will happen as a result? The chief one is that they'll live longer and be a burden to you. Almost as important, however, is the fact that you'll lose all that lovely revenue you once collected from them by taxing their fags and booze.
There's no easy way of saying this, either, but venues for such debauchery, this past few years, have gone severely downhill. Pubs, you see, once used to be full of old working chaps, contentedly smoking and drinking away their retirement. Many of the pubs which managed to survive the Blair-Brown Protectorate have become restaurants in all but name. Laughably, they sometimes feature, by way of a retro-concession, a small over-priced, beer-drinking area. At weekends many country pubs become crêches, with tetchy bored little souls running around squalling, whilst their parents choff down the Sunday roast. The hapless regulars who still venture into such places must now contend with flustered waitresses barging past them at speed, yelling, "Sorry!" every thirty seconds. This is because we old gaffers haven't quite grasped that you can no longer stand near the bar, as it's now the fast lane of a food service area. Is it any wonder that many of us prefer instead to stay at home for a gargle? That's still not good enough, for the health wonks, however. Nothing will now do but that they whip up a media-shower asking how we should convey the dangers of the 'time-bomb ticking away in our midst.' Perhaps the concerned classes could glance at themselves, as they ping-pong hysterically between digging their own graves with their knives and forks and.their guilt-driven gym sessions afterwards?
Why not just leave us all to get on with our own quiet degeneracy? Then we'lll shuffle off the coil at a reasonable time, and you can collect the taxes, while saving the pension pot, the care-home fees and the NHS. Job jobbed. When I was growing up people used to live until about 75 or so. Back then 75 would have been considered quite a good innings. Many had worked physically hard, been through a war or two, and only wanted a bit of peace and quiet. They weren't expecting in their eighties to be chivvied into learning holiday Serbo-Croat or attending Salsa Dancing workshops. They used to walk their old dogs, have a warm tin of beer from the sideboard, or else muck about in the garden shed, with a pencil-stub behind one ear and a doofah* behind the other. Any medication which they might have used to for their ailments, usually consisted of heart pills, stomach pills, or a drop of horse linament for aches and pains. They didn't have a special cupboard with half of the British National Formulary jammed into it. Nor did they wear a special timer on their wrist which went 'beep' every 15 minutes to remind them of what to ingest, inhale or insert in order to keep them chugging along. Let the Three Score Year+Ten campaign for a Reasonable Old Age commence here, therefore. And let our poster boy be the late great Lemmy Kilmister.
Bowie In Heddon Street
In Heddon Street in January
The London drizzle falls the same
as softly as it did the night,
the camera caught in failing light
the famous phonebox, currant red
with Ziggy Stardust in the frame
A tinted showbiz biscuit tin
Which drew the viewer in
An atmosphere that seemed
to speak
Of basement studios,upstairs flats,
bell-push models, queenly spats
and rent collected once a week
from burned-out boys who'd known
Joe Meek
In Englan done with swinging now
its party-over, drab new nights
Of keg-beer pubs and candle stubs
the IRA and mid-week subs
Wildcat strikes at factory gates
an apathetic audience waits
The Sixties now are firmly dead
A man from Mars arrives instead
What was it in the water then
that forged a breed of pop messiahs
From underfed suburban lads
grown up by gas convector fires?
Skinny, pale, with poor dentition
Actor, clothes-horse, pop musician
In David's case, all three in one
An odyssey which he'd begun
in sixty-watts of Bromley sun
When Ziggy sang and played guitar
No one, yet, had gone that far
In Sutton Coldfield, Aylesbury, Bucks
and Sunderland they'd cheer
The brickies bellowed," 'Ello ducks!"
the dads asked, "Is 'e queer?
Gets harder now to tell the boys
from girls, with every year."
The critics too, blew cold and hot
But critics do.
Why would they not?
The Seventies then bedded in
in feather boa and satin flare
The suburbs sat like Hamelin
Awaiting anthems on the air
from some pied piper not yet heard
to woo them with a magic word:
the oddball kid, the bookish geek
the one their classmates labelled
'freak',
Sequestered in their rooms all week
They're captivated by his eyes
"You're not alone!" the Starman cries
Now of his band, what shall we say?
The Spiders, not from Mars but Hull
Were best of any of their day
If Kingston-upon-Hull, the name
did not roll off the tongue
the same,
The Spiders seemed to play guitars
as if they really came from Mars
Now all the teenage kooks
who went
To hear these boys from Hull
-- and Kent
Remember, late in middle-age
how Ziggy broke the gender cage
And when we dig his records out
from hard-drives, i-pods, racks
or shelves
And shed a tear,we find the truth
Is also, that we mourn our youth.
Immortal youth, its peerless light
that twinkles in the ageless night
until we find how frail we are
Crashing in the same old car
The phone-box now is gone
Where fans took pictures of
themselves
Once Ziggy had moved on
Where did they go, those slips
of boys?
Grown up with steam-trains
in their eyes
And rockets in the Dan Dare skies
Above the dingy terraced streets
of Britain after war?
America by any score, would seem
some kind of Shangri-la
Best slap some lippy on, then, kid
and bring your best guitar
America eats talent like a wolf
devours a lamb,
With tenderising powder which can
turn your mind to spam
That's when you have to wrestle
with your inner Peter Pan
Then, if the boy stops swinging
he may just become a man
But even politicians cough,
describing him as nice.
They missed him at the kick-off
now they're gagging for a slice
He helped bring down the Berlin Wall
it's said, young Bromley Dave
Fashion icon, futurist ...and genius.
Oh, behave!
The ones who'll really miss him,
are the girls then in their teens
Recalling that one weekday night
he burst onto their screens
Instantly monopolising all their
magazines
Promoting moral panic from
St Mawes to Milton Keynes
They won't remember mourning
any pop star in this way
And won't know why they're
weeping in the middle of the day
He was Youth and he was Beauty
he was talented and clever
So stunningly original and...
They thought he'd live forever.
The sun falls on a plaque
Like an actor taking encores
in a Mayfair cul-de-sac
And here beside the doorway
are his flowers in a stack
But Ziggy Stardust's never
coming back
And all the worldly traffic may
resume its migraine rumble
While all the Babylonian showbiz
rumour mills can crumble
Let legend be his epitaph
The lily needs no gilding
Ladies and gentlemen...
Mr. Bowie's left the building.
"Port is not for the very young, the vain and the active. It is the comfort of age and the companion of the scholar and the philosopher." Evelyn Waugh
It was my late mum who first drew my attention to port.Whenever she was cooking the Sunday dinner, she always had a little glass of it on the go. Her glass was a miniature tumbler decorated with a band of chintzy pink frosting around the top. She called it her 'noggin' glass. Nobody else in the household ever used it. It emerged from a kitchen cabinet each Sunday and sat within reach of the gas-stove, just next to her ashtray, her Kensitas cigarettes and the Zippo lighter which she'd had since her ATS days.
"What's this?" asked your boyish correspondent wandering into the kitchen. " Port." she'd declare. "It's my lunchtime noggin. Hands off. You wouldn't like it anyway."
Naturally, I'd sneak the odd sip of it, if she wasn't looking. What boy wouldn't? It always tasted a bit fierce to me though, and for years I never progressed to drinking any more than that one sip.
There is something about the English and their port and yet, nowadays, most of us only ever drink it at Christmas. Mum, however, always had a drop of port around the house, something which I don't think was quite usual in army quarters among NCO's wives. It was because of her fondness for port that I eventually began to learn something of it.
In the mid-1970s, when I worked part-time as a kitchen porter, I asked the restaurant owner, what might be a good port to buy her for Christmas. A kindly chap, he offered to help me find a rather better bottle of port for her than that which she usually drank. He showed me a catalogue and pointed me at Lay & Wheeler, Colchester's immortal wine merchants. At that time they still had a wonderful shop in Colchester's Culver Street. In winter, whenever you walked in, there'd be a coal fire glowing in the grate, a Dickensian touch which always made the place seem something of a cut above. It was around about this time, while still in my callow early twenties that I began to learn that there was rather more to port than my mum's Sandeman's tawny.
I once bought her a bottle of Taylor's 10 year-old, which I thought would be infinitely better than her usual 'working' port.
After Christmas that year, I asked her what she'd reckoned to it.
"Okay." she said, having considered the matter. So would she now be upgrading her lunchtime noggin? Not a bit of it. She was a Sandeman's girl to the end of her days.
By my late twenties, I too had developed a liking for port. Taylors and Grahams Late Bottled Vintage (LBVs) appealed to me more than the supermarkets' budget rubys. But if I ever had a bit of extra money at Christmas, I went up to 10 or even 20 year-old tawnys. I also learned to study the bottle to see who the shippers were. Smith Woodhouse were apparently a good name, if only by virtue of the fact that they'd been doing the job for two centuries or so and ought to have known it by now.
Perhaps the reason that we British like our port at Christmas is because in the deep midwinter, when our bones ache, when our taste buds and sinuses are clogged with cold, it's a good rich old bit of grog. It's cheery and strong, with perhaps, some of the warmth of the Portuguese sun bottled into it. Like cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and oranges, on a cold winter's day, port is a treat:
a heavy topcoat and roaring fire of drink -- not some thin little flute of a wine. It has, as we lads used to say, a bit more lead in it.
The more robust fellows of the old City banking firms once drank port by the pint at their jolly-ups. Perhaps a few still do.
I wouldn't recommend the practice myself, since port, being a fortified wine has a strength of 20% by volume. Used in such a cavalier fashion it can be the stuff of banging headaches, instant dismissal and long conversations on the Great White Telephone. Port is also associated with gout. In Queen Anne's day, port wine, regarded as an antidote to the dampness and fogs of England, was also errantly recommended by physicians for the relief of gout, a thing which possibly helped to speed her death at age 49.
Port, though, like a jumper, isn't just for Christmas. I'll have a drop anytime between Hallowe'en and my birthday in early March. Nor it just an after-dinner glass. It's a great drink, as my mum demonstrated, for pecking at, while cooking on a winter's day. Taylors, Cockburns and other purveyors also do a white port made from white grapes. This is a dry drink which more often than not is drunk chilled, as an aperitif. There are no rules though. I'll sometimes plonk two rough-cut slices of orange into my port glass, and suck the liquor through the steeped fruit, which, if it sounds inelegant, does taste rather nice. In the end, though, Christmas or not, I prefer those rich warm LBVs, sipped at room temperature, whilst getting the dinner on. Because I'm still my mum's son and a vintage would be wasted on me.