The Wildman of Wivenhoe
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Recent Entries Fame v Celebrity
A Songwriter recalls...
Colcehster's Ancient Chapel
St Mary at the Walls
EU In out in out Oooh, suits you Sir. etc etc
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A source for the goose...
A House In England
Forgive Us Our Bus Passes

Copyright © 2005 Martin Newell
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30.01.2016 17:19 - Forgive Us Our Bus Passes

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.




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17.01.2016 11:22 - Bowie Poem
  

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


In Heddon Street in January

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.


In Heddon Street in January

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.



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17.12.2015 21:59 - Back into Port

"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.



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