Freebird / Paradise Lost

Freebird

Leamington – Lewes train, just out of Leamers. 4.59pm. It has been a wonderful day. Beautiful weather, pleasant work, good company.

I even enjoyed the cycle rides to and from work today. I am writing this with the green acres and wheat fields of Warwickshire passing me by like 360 degree movies on each side.

Here’s how the rest of the week has gone:

This is what I wrote on the way to work on Monday morning (10 July)

Lewes – London Bridge train, Plumpton. 6.12am Beautiful morning, a warm early light bathing the racecourse; blue sky peeping through puffy white cloud above.

The train is packed, comprising only three or four carriages. So, I am sat in First Class and could soon be arguing my case with the ticket fascist.

Feeling good today. I was lying awake in bed last night beside my Beloved, tired but happy, thinking life could be a lot worse. Can’t remember my dreams but, for once, they were positive.

My cousin Laura (Hi, Laura!) told me about an extraordinary dream she had had. It is nice when the good ones leave you with an early morning glow.

The weekend was fairly pleasant. A chance to catch up on all the things I have not been able to do. I managed to get the Stage pieces finished by bedtime on Friday, having worked most of the evening (indeed all the evenings of that week).

It was a relief. It was hard doing them last week in the evenings after a full day’s work.

Some more coaches were added at Haywards Heath and I deftly moved into a seat in (bog) Standard Class, just as well as the ticket gestapo has just visited.

I spent much of the weekend doing a complex calculation pertaining to bills for the London Garret. God, it took me hours and hours to work it all out, and email the women involved.

In the good old days, when one of them decided to leave I would buy her a card and a present and take her out for dinner. Now all I get is the grief of pointless disputes and endless mathematics. How life changes!

I am absolutely skint as well. This weekend I did not spend a penny in a pub or going out (apart from three quid for swimming to help my backache). Admittedly I bought a little stash of booze on Friday night which saw us through the weekend.

My Beloved and I watched the World Cup Final last night. An enthralling match! What was wrong with Zidane? Frankly I found his headbutt on the Italian quite inexplicable. Are great players such as Zidane all bonkers?

Zid Vicious won France the World Cup last time and has lost it for them this time round. All over being called a terrorist (or so it says in the Guardian). I wonder what his fellow French-Algerian Albert Camus would make of it all.

I had been sort of supporting France until that moment of mindless violence, at which point, I suspect like the neutral members of the crowd, I switched to Italy. As a Catholic, I should look to Rome!

In the final analysis, though, it seemed to me like one bunch of cheats against another. Sportsmanship has so deserted professional football that (England excepted), why should I care who wins?

I find myself backing the team which – at that tiny moment in time – is cheating least. Does anyone else do this?

Leamington Garret. 8.27pm by Big Ken, the Leamington Clock Tower. This is probably the last time I will be telling the time by this glorious clocktower, my faithful friend. I will also miss the crane (pictured)

Tomorrow my flatmate and I are due to swap rooms, so he gets the view of the rooftops, old Kenny boy and our neighbour (if she ever appears again), and I overlook the park and river.

I like this room and love the view, but it is time for a change. I am looking forward to it. . . but I will miss Big Ken!

Today has been a typical, grim Monday. Tonight I could barely drag my booty down to Costcutter’s to buy some cheap food and cider. Christ, I am brassic lint.

The Rolling Stones’s Wild Horses is on the stereo downstairs – the only good thing I can see about today at this precise second.

Leamington Garret. 12.15am. Wednesday, 12 July, although I guess Big Ken would say 12.13am It has been an extraordinary night in the Garret.

My flatmate and I have swapped rooms, which took a couple of hours, and then we decided to celebrate by lying on the roof, outside my new room, drinking beers and chatting and inspecting the people passing by far, far below.

The manner in which we swapped rooms was an absolute delight. I know John will love my room. He will enjoy the brilliant views over the rooftops of Leamington, the constantly changing landscape, the chats with our attractive balcony neighbour.

For my part, I will enjoy the views of the park and the river, a bit more space, and the change (as good as a rest).

I feel really happy at this moment. The sunset that I am enjoying is pictured left taken with 50p, no-settings camera.

The evening ended with the fifth “Freebird”. The first three were during the long, dry winter in the Warwick Garret – crazy dancing to the full-volume sound of the classic by Lennard Skynard (pictured at the top of this page).

The most memorable was when we quaffed a bottle of good Champagne to that one song.

The fourth – in our early days in Leamington Garret - was also remarkable. We turned up the volume so high that people outside, four floors below, stopped and started digging the sound, dancing in the street. One guy even juggled with some juggling balls he just happened to have about his person!

Tonight's Freebird was as good. I had thought we would never do another Freebird. But after eight jars of Stella, there we were: windows open, volume pumped up to the max, free as a bird again.

I did a bit of bouncing off the settees and some of the curtain rail cover came off!

Great night! The nights in seem the best.

P.S. I take it all back. Zidane is a hero for headbutting that Italian scumbag for calling him a ‘son of a terrorist whore’ (when ZZ’s mother had just been taken seriously ill).

Italy’s World Cup victory is sullied with shame. It is morally invalid. In God’s eyes they are not world champions.

Leamington Garret. 11.47pm. (Kenneth the Great would have it as 11.45pm) I shall start by typing out a new poem I have drafted tonight and then return to this script.

It is just before midnight now, trains trundling in the distance, and I have typed out my new poem, Smoke in the Night.

I was pretty knackered by the time I reached the Garret at around 8pm.

Strangely, I felt full of beans – really happy about the vastly, amazingly improved relations I have with my flatmate.

He was out but I was in tremendously good humour and, after making myself a humble tuna and cucumber salad, my mind turned for once to poetry.

I was determined to write about seeing our high-rise neighbour smoking in the drizzle the other night. Just as I was looking around to find piece of scrap paper on which to compose this poem, there she was again, directly across from me in the kitchen, on the balcony, her raven hair glistening in the sunset.

She looked over at me and I said hello. We had a very pleasant chat. She is a lawyer working for the Law Society in Leamington. She seems like a really decent person.

I don’t know what she made of me. I think she was taken aback that I remembered her name, but perhaps I should not have told her about the Last Word being crushed and my ongoing dispute with Warwickshire Police.

Worse, I confessed I had seen her the other night. This was probably not a good idea.

I said I would have said hello if it were not for the fact that it might well have freaked her out in the darkness. She agreed it would have been the case!

I have drafted the poem, Smoke in the Night, and hopefully, if I can find a generic picture to go with it, I shall post a refined version as this week’s poem on my site.

I took a call from the outrageous comedienne Natalie Haynes’s PR man. It seems that she is getting her knickers in a twist over the idea that I might mention in my article about her that she shagged one of her pupils while she was a classics teacher at Harrow.

This despite the fact that she partly built her comedic reputation in the early days on this anecdote.

I said that it was hilarious that she was worried about it but I would happily drop the line as it was well documented and definitely not new.

The PR chap was delighted. I said to him: ‘I was only teasing her, joshing that the boy must have been 17 or 16, but we don’t want to see her on the Sex Offenders’ Register.’

Just goes to show that topping a Mensa test does not amount to a whole hill of beans if even someone as thick as me can freak her out.

I wonder if the penny has dropped with her yet that I was the one comedy critic who panned her show last year.

Music is floating into my new bedroom at the Garret from a party across the park. In my younger days I would have put my shirt back on, grabbed some booze and tracked down the party to boogle the night away and God knows what else. Now it is 12.22am and I am cream-crackered, ready for bed.

At 9.30pm, I went down the Jug and Jester. Another good night. I particularly like it when Sinead sings and plays the guitar. As Bowie might have said, she screws up her face like some cat from Japan.

The grey goatee-bearded guitarist Chris was brilliant as usual.

A really nice thing happened during the day. I was trying to change my Orange phone from account to pay-as-you-go, and got talking to an Orange lady on the telephone at lunchtime.

For technical reasons, I said I would call back to her department after work and, unusually, I got her again. I immediately recognised her by her accent and said that I has spoken to her earlier.

She remembered me and said she was German. I asked where she was from and she said Bremen, which is my mother’s home town. She wanted to know where I knew in Bremen and I told her my grandmother had lived in Rembrandtstrasse.

Suzanna (the Orange lady told me her name) knew the street. We then had an amazingly open conversation about pre-war and post-war Germany, the Holocaust, the modern German mindset et cetera.

It was thrilling. And she sorted out my phone. A great woman in a call centre I know not where. I felt I was glad to be with Orange. They hire the smile.

Back to Thursday, 13 July. 7.16pm. Victoria Station. A couple of chav girls have sat down near me and are finding it very hard to keep their breasts under cover. God, I love watching chavs! I am sorry but I cannot help it.

They are supping alcopops and loudly talking about how they cheated on their boyfriends while on holiday in Spain! When I got up to put up my luggage – to allow a couple of old people to sit down – I caught them craning their necks to check out my bot. Girls will be girls!

It is a gorgeous evening it the Capital. Battersea Power Station (up-ended fags that have become whiter over the years) looks glorious; clouds above like plumes of smoke; the Thames which I am currently above heavenly calm. Like a mill pond!

There was a bizarre incident last night. A heard this tremendous sound of shouting, swearing and struggling from the street below.

So, clad only in my boxers, I clambered out on to the roof to have a look down to see what was going on.

Six skinheads were fighting for fun, although really battering each other, sometimes three on one, the victim turning into the bully. All of them seemed to be getting hurt.

It goes without saying that they were off their effing heads, dangerously so. I was glad I had not encountered them at street level.

They were all topless and well muscled (and tattooed, of course). Suddenly, in the midst of the violence, one of them shed his jeans and started streaking around, next to the gardens, stark bollock naked.

The other headcases fell about laughing.

Lewes Garret. 10.16pm. The Israelis and Palestinians are beating the shite out of each other again. How stupid is that!

Having spent some time in the Holy Land, I was left with very little sympathy for an Israeli state with a population armed to the teeth, and a Palestinian / Arab community unwillling to make peace.

The innocents suffer while the mad people slaughter in the name of God.

How desperately depressing, especially as we know someone stranded in the Lebanon. I pray he will be all right.

Paradise Lost (Flashback to Friday, 12 May 2006)

A beautful sunny day in lovely Lewes. 8.30am. Hoped to be have a head as clear as a bell today, but, alas, I am still feeling groggy. It was a bender and a half - real damage was done. I suspect I will have to be on the wagon for weeks to fully recover and fix my back, which is as stiff as a gas board.

I have made an appointment to see Dr Jet, my part-time GP, at 11.30am, and, then, at 4.45pm I am going to see Dr Nicole, my friendly chiropractor.

The toughest task so far today was finding a respectable, unladdered pair of boxer shorts to wear for that particular appointment.

11.40ish I am waiting to see Dr Jet. A pleasant GP and old enough to know something about medicine. I hate it when you get a young doctor. It is the pits.

It reminds me that the Bishop of Nottingham, Malcolm McMahon, used to dish out medical advice, booming: ‘Trust me, Ollie, I am medically trained!’ (In fact his degree was in engineering). Strangely, I would take his advice, sooner than that of a newly qualified medic.

My appointment was for 11.30am but doctors never run on time. I would not be surprised if I were still sitting here in the sunshine beside the window in half an hour’s time.

That’s just what the NHS is like. Waiting, waiting, waiting. Hospitals are even worse. They are like giant mini-cabs with the consultants’ and other doctors' clocks expensively ticking.

When I talk to Dr Jet, I must ask her to check my blood pressure. Dr Nicole told me it is sky high. Not a great surprise, considering how much I had been drinking; but I need to keep an eye on it, especially now I am off the loopy juice. It should go down pretty quickly, one would hope.

I am hoping Dr Jet will fill in my insurance form without charging me – as avaricious doctors tend to.

2.15pm. It is blisteringly hot up here in the Lewes Garret, the visage one of yellow and green. Truly lovely!

Rather enjoyed my visit to Dr Jet. When I asked how she and her kids were, she blushed. She is a sweet person under that tough medical exterior. She even let me off the payment for doing my insurance form.

It was a cunning move of mine to bring it to her at an appointment rather than drop it into reception. So that’s a few quid saved.

Apart from my mouth, which is sore for reasons I fear to guess at (smoking, possibly, although I cannot recall), I am truly feeling a lot better. Dr Jet was concerned I might become addicted to the codine opiates she has prescribed me.

I said, ‘Don’t worry about that. I don’t even like taking them.’ It is true. It is a pain to have to take anything at all – and, when combined with alcohol, they are evidently not good for my mental health.

11.28pm. Bed, Lewes Garret. Tonight, my elder daughter and I went to see John Milton's Paradise Lost performed by the Oxford Stage Company at the Theatre Royal, Brighton.

A very good production. I found myself feeling very sleepy during it though. The pills, I think. Or, maybe, that wonderful old theatre did it to me.

The last time I went to the Theatre Royal I slept through almost the entire production.

All I can remember of it was some dancing dwarves. I think it must have been a pantomime.

Quite a few people walked out of tonight's show, we were surprised to see. A lot went in the first half - I guess they found the old-fashioned, otiose language hard to understand.

There was much full frontal nudity in the second half; naturally, because it involved Adam and Eve. A few punters walked out on that, too. And there was I thinking Brighton was a liberal city.

All the same, it was a large audience for a production as heavy as Paradise Lost. And not a dancing dwarf in sight!

Oliver's Poetry