Kitabı oku: «Sex & Bowls & Rock and Roll: How I Swapped My Rock Dreams for Village Greens»
Sex & Bowls & Rock and Roll
How I swapped my rock dreams for village greens
Alex Marsh
For R, with thanks for putting up with me.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
PREFACE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
EPILOGUE
Notes and acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
PREFACE
It was a new day yesterday, but it’s an old one now
‘Are you sure that we’re meant to be here?’ I scuffed my feet over the shingle, not willing to let this go. ‘It doesn’t matter that we’re not members?’
‘I’m a member,’ reassured Big Andy, pulling his bag out of the boot. I was already intimidated by its professionally battered look, as if it had been passed down through generations of top-level bowls players. Big Andy had always struck me as somebody who would be good at any sport – he is just one of those people. Personally, I have always suspected people who are good at sport – I certainly never thought that I’d end up being friends with one. Perhaps his likeability was just a ruse, in order to lull me into a false sense of security before he chucked me in the showers and stole my dinner money.
‘Yes, but we’re not,’ I insisted, jerking my head towards Short Tony who had jumped down from the back seat. At least he would be as culpable as me. Big Andy didn’t answer this, clearly not appreciating my genuine concerns.
I did not even have the right shoes.
The green itself was sheltered behind a low wooden fence that shielded from public view a raised concrete path and two weatherbeaten benches. Big Andy placed his gear on one of these; Short Tony followed suit with me lagging behind, surveying the scene with narrow, wary eyes, Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Bowls.
‘What if a man comes and shouts at us?’ I wondered aloud.
I have never been a particularly confident type – at least, not without a guitar in my hand. All the key memories from my early life are scary, nerve-inducing ones: accidentally wandering into a fierce lady’s garden in order to pick acorns from her oak tree. Discovering that the hand that I’d reached up to grip tightly for reassurance wasn’t actually my grandmother’s, but belonged to a random stranger who happened to be getting off the same bus. Getting the phone number wrong on a big press advert for the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and thus ensuring that a Barnet pensioner was telephoned at ten-minute intervals by people seeking tickets for a grand Tchaikovsky gala at the Royal Albert Hall.
There are two types of people in Britain – people with the confidence to take risks with social etiquette, and people who spend their lives concerned that a man will come and shout at them.
‘Who’d shout at us?’ asked Big Andy.
I considered this.
‘The groundsman.’
‘Naaah. He’s fine.’
My nervousness did not abate. I didn’t know any of the other club members and I did not want to start our relationship off on the wrong foot – certainly not as a shoutee.
‘Some other important club official?’
‘Earlier this year, we came up here on our own a lot,’ he insisted. ‘It’s practice. And practice is always encouraged.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘How will you know whether you want to play,’ he demanded, ‘if you don’t know whether you’re any good or not?’
Short Tony, who was looking upon the experiment as the start of a potentially interesting new hobby, similarly did not have proper bowls shoes. But they were at least brown, and from a distance they looked like proper bowls shoes. Mine looked like non-proper non-bowls trainers. I studied the terrain carefully. There was some long grass at the far end, where the green ended and met the farmland beyond. If a man came and shouted at us for playing without permission then I would attempt to quickly step into the long grass, thus camouflaging my footwear and ensuring that he would not be able to follow up his ‘Trespasser!’ shout with: ‘Plus you have not got proper bowls shoes on!’
I tried to make myself relax. It didn’t help that I was probably going to be rubbish at this, and thus make myself look like an idiot. I took a deep breath. There was no man in sight. Instead there was the weak but encouraging-looking sun of an autumnal, early lunchtime casting dewy shadows on an English bowling green.
‘Pint, anyone?’ offered Short Tony, motioning his head towards the big pub that stood looking over us like a comforting older brother appearing with a towel after the rough beating-up kids have been dispersed.
This seemed like a good idea, but I was cautious.
‘Are we allowed?’ I asked. ‘To take drinks onto the green, I mean.’
Short Tony disappeared off to buy beer.
The grass was soft and earthy, with well-worn patches from a season’s play. I padded around guiltily in my clandestine trainers. Big Andy handed me two of his woods; I tossed them down carelessly and they made small indentations in the surface. I drew breath sharply, but no shout came. He then disappeared into the small shed that adjoined the green, re-emerging seconds later with a white ball. Disappearing into a shed! Some people have all the self-confidence. If illegal walking on a bowling green wearing incorrect shoes merited a shout, I was sure that shed-disappearing would warrant at least something cruel and unusual.
The bowls police failed to leap out from behind a hedge and charge us with electric batons.
I picked up a single wood. It was wet from the grass, but felt comfortable in my hand, warm and smooth, not the wood of a guitar body, but a pleasing object nonetheless. I have nice dainty, nimble hands and I suspected that it might be slightly too large a size for them, and perhaps a little heavy for me to be totally sure of control. But I did not say anything for fear of bowls ridicule.
Big Andy, my tutor, lobbed the cott ahead to the other side – it bumped and bobbed on the grass. He then knelt and expertly pitched his wood, which rested intimidatingly close to the target. I watched Short Tony reappear from the pub, ambling up the short hillock and across the gravel car park with a tray of beers the colour of bowls shoes.
And then it was my turn. It is always good to give new things a try. But I couldn’t honestly see it being my sort of thing.
ONE
New towels for the old ceremony
‘Excuse me?’
There is a voice. I turn, surprised, from the post box to locate its source.
A man is ambling over from a small four-by-four thing. He is demonstrably from a town somewhere – it is one of those designer jobs that no genuine country-dweller from round here would dream of possessing. The engine chugs over, chug chug chug chug chug. He is clearly the source of the ‘Excuse me.’ I allow my letter to fall from my hand into the post box’s receptive womb, easing my wrist from its slot and giving my new acquaintance my full attention.
Silver-haired, he is wearing immaculate cream pressed slacks, which reveal that he is comfortably off and retired, and probably has a wife named Pat.
‘I don’t suppose you know where these agents are based?’ He gesticulates towards the ‘For Sale’ sign on the bungalow over the road.
A number of houses around mine are for sale – I do not know whether to take this personally or not. This particular one right opposite has been on the market since about Wednesday, 14th March at 11.32 a.m., and I am excited that I might be meeting a potential new neighbour. New people! I study his face closely. I will need to remember, so that I can report the details back to everybody at the village pub.
I give him the information he requires, waving my hand in the general direction of the coast. He asks me what living in the village is like, and I offer him long examples of how we all know what each other is doing and just pop into each other’s houses to say hello at any time of day or night, sometimes when we have been drinking heavily. It is a neighbourly community like that. He looks a bit less enthusiastic after this, and glances over his shoulder several times as he retreats to his car before accelerating off at some speed, doubtless to catch the estate agents before the shops close for the evening.
He did seem like a pleasant chap, and I am determined to stick by my parting words to him: that I would be quite happy to give him a hand with carrying all his stuff from the van when he eventually moves in.
Before he disappears around the corner, I make sure to take the number of his car. He is not from round here, after all, and he could have been looking at houses for sale with a view to committing some crime. I remember it all the way across the road, all up the path and into the kitchen, where I scribble it on the corner of some newspaper, along with ‘Old bloke. Silver hair. McJeep.’
There is no more excitement, but it will be good to have something extra-interesting to tell the LTLP when she gets home. Time is getting on – I need a bath and something to eat before I go.
I can’t remember exactly when I gave up.
It was probably on a platform at Harringay Station. Perhaps and probably it was raining. Harringay Station in the rain, fighting with hundreds of others for a modicum of shelter under the narrow footbridge, the loudspeaker broadcasting crackling messages of doom from a British Rail announcer based hundreds of miles away in a secret bunker buried deep beneath the Cairngorm mountains.
‘We apologise for the delay to the seven forty-four service to London Moorgate. This service is running approximately fifty-two minutes late. The first train to arrive will be the eight fourteen service, also to London Moorgate. Due to a short train, this service will consist of half a coach only, which will be of convertible open-top design, have no seats, and will be powered by passenger-manned oars. We apologise for any inconvenience that this might possibly cause you. To cheer you up, here is some music by the Stereophonics.’
When I say ‘a platform’, that implies a multitude of the things. In fact, there are but two platforms at Harringay Station. Standing, boxed in, elbow to arse with frustrated Key Account Executives and Change Implementation Managers and Human Resource Officers. Waiting, worrying if the tingly electricness of the rain is a genuine cause for concern as it drips from the overhead power lines onto your face. Pacing, irresistibly tempted to bolt for that footbridge, to leap aboard one of the frequent empty and invariably on-time trains returning north from the City, and head for the overwhelming excitement and vibrancy of Enfield Chase, New Southgate or, at a pinch, even Potter’s Bar. But of course you don’t. The train arrives and you fight for any form of nook, stuffing yourself frantically up against your fellow passengers like a veal calf undergoing sardine-replacement therapy.
Yes, it must have been then that I gave up. Then.
I’ve never given up on the music, however.
OK, I’m a bit older now. But Debbie Harry was already thirty when Blondie was formed; she was thirty-five when they released ‘Atomic’, which would have made her almost as old as I am. And yet she was famous and successful the world over at this late age, becoming an icon and achieving sales in the millions of millions, with men becoming physically sexually aroused – literally sexually aroused – whenever she sang or appeared on Top of the Pops. I’ve almost got there once, having supported the Sultans of Ping on one key date of their seminal 1992 UK tour. But Debbie Harry is one hell of an inspiration, and a lesson to anybody who thinks that exciting popular music can only be made by teenagers. Given just one small lucky break, there really is no reason whatsoever why I should not be the next Debbie Harry, but with women.
I call her ‘the LTLP’ for the purposes of the narrative.
I don’t want to upset her by using her real name. The WAGs are generally lower-key than their football equivalents; more down-to-earth and less publicity-hungry. She is my life-partner and has been for a long time; one of the very few people who have been both WAG and rock-chick wife. Every bowls player needs their Yoko Ono figure. She gives me an airy wave as I leave the house.
The canvas bag is weighty, betraying my relative novice status with its clean newness. It contains my four bowls (or ‘woods’, as we bowls people know them), an old beer towel for wiping purposes and some deeply, deeply unfashionable shoes. You have to have four woods, even though you only ever use two, as otherwise the other bowlers will laugh at you and think that you are some sort of idiot amateur without all the proper equipment. I lug it down the drive, across the road, and then sprint to Big Andy’s as fast as an unfit fat bloke carrying a rigid square bag of heavy bowls implements can sprint. He is jangling car keys impatiently; Mrs Big Andy stands hands-on-hips in their doorway, shaking her head and making ‘have a good evening, if this is really the way you want to spend your Friday night’ noises. I leap into the passenger seat and we are away in a haze of dust and sporting expectation.
In my pocket: house keys, some small change, a mobile phone. A mobile phone! Why do I bother with a mobile phone these days? I do not have important people to call any more; there is no reason why anybody would need to get hold of me. I get the odd text message from Short Tony that simply reads ‘pub?’, but seeing that he lives in the cottage next door you cannot really count the mobile connection as a vital communications lifeline. My mum and dad have a mobile phone but do not know how to use it; the LTLP knows where I’ll be all day. My friend Unlucky John, the only other person in the world whom I speak to, tends to prefer mobile to landline. But he’s in London, where such status is important.
It is a comfort thing, however. I will have it to hand should there be an emergency at bowls. The LTLP’s employers have given her a BlackBerry, which means that half the emails that pop up in my inbox with a cheerful ‘bing!’, causing such excitement and anticipation, turn out to be mundane and uninteresting things like ‘get the dinner on and don’t burn it this time you idiot’. So I took her old phone when my one finally gave up the ghost. It is a bright lurid pink Motorola, small and dainty, and adorned with girlish graphics.
But who cares? Once, this pink phone would have been a shameful accessory for me, as I wandered amidst the Neanderthal plains of people in chequered suits and wanky black-rimmed spectacles, of braying rah rah me me me idiots, of money-and-status-obsessed bottled-beer-drinking, testosteroned pre-Dibley clowns. That’s one of the big advantages of living in a tiny village in Norfolk. Nobody is particularly bothered about the superficial. Just one more stupid unnecessary mental weight that disappears when you leave the world of commuter trains and Strategic HR Initiatives.
It’s an easy-going game; none of the other bowlers really mind if you leave your phone on through the evening. Aside from that one time when it escalated a bit, and people ended up shouting ‘Well fuck you then! Fuck you!’ at each other, across the green. That was an exception.
Personally, I have a system. I keep my mobile phone switched on just in case there is an emergency or somebody important does call – but I make sure that I leave it in the pocket of my anorak which hangs in the clubhouse. That way nobody will hear it ringing and be disturbed during a crucial end. It seems a reasonable compromise.
Yes, my name is Alex Marsh and I play bowls.
I am thirty-thing years old, and I play bowls. Bowls is what I play. I am not ashamed of it; I do not seek to apologise or be defensive. I play bowls. It is not as if I am Mrs Karen Matthews, or have been exposed having sex with livestock on YouTube, or wrote and produced ‘There’s No One Quite Like Grandma’. I play my bowls with pride. I would shout it from the rooftops, but I am afraid of heights.
My name is Alex Marsh and I play bowls. And so does Eddie, and Nigel, and Big Andy, and even John Twonil’s been persuaded to give it a try. We are the exciting new faces of the sport. It sits oddly with the guitar hero status, I know. But there have been stranger combinations. Rock and roll, bowls; bowls, rock and roll. There’s nothing mutually exclusive – it does not need to be an either/or. One does not preclude the other. It is perfectly possible to both jack, and to Fleetwood Mac.
Barry Hearn knows.
Barry Hearn is the legendary sporting Svengali who does the snooker, and boxing, and darts. The man who made Steve Davis. The Don King of Romford. The Billy Graham of the baize. What Barry Hearn doesn’t know about marketing sport isn’t worth knowing. And he thinks bowls is going to be the next thing – which is why he has put it on Sky TV, during peak morning viewing. So scoff at the beautiful sport at your peril.
I suppose I have mixed feelings about this. It is like when you discover a new band – you want them to be your own special band all to yourself. You do not want them to become popular and mainstream and put on by consensus as background music at dinner parties. And whilst wishing your special band all the goodwill in the world, you would rather that they starved in the gutter than enjoyed any form of commercial success, as this would spoil it for you.
Something a bit like that happened to my own band. However, more of that later.
Will bowls as we know it survive the Sky TV experience? Will it retain its unique nature, or will it sell out to the forces of Evil Marketing? Will the money grow and nurture it, or will it corrupt it? Will it retain the nobility of sport, or will it descend into a new WWF pantomime?
The television camera itself is a great distortion pedal, a two-dimensional screen that loses the subtleties and many of the unsubtleties also. When you watch cricket, it’s impossible to judge how fast the bowler’s letting the ball go – you have to work it out from where the wicket keeper’s standing. Football is robbed of the intense physical aspect, horse racing is sterile without the flying hooves and mud; long pots on the snooker table appear easy and unmissable. I would not want the casual Sky TV viewer to see what I do every week and to dismiss it casually as some gentle meandering pastime. That would be crushing. But I think Barry Hearn and I are on the same wavelength.
Barry Hearn knows that it’s the new rock and roll.
‘Here you go.’
Nigel strides like a parade sergeant before the row of benches, where we are sitting changing into our deeply, deeply unfashionable shoes. He stops at each player and hands out new kit from a plastic bag – a brand-new, pristine, never-been-used, soft and lovely Stella Artois beer towel.
‘Thanks!’ I say in surprise.
‘I got them from work,’ he explains, moving on to Glen. ‘Given to me.’
Along the line, people take their towels and beam in gratitude, holding them up to look closer. Matching beer towels! The whole thing looks bloody professional, in tune with the new image of bowls, a co-ordinated wave of red that will raise pride and morale in the team, aside from providing more efficient wiping.
That’s us. The village bowls team. Sponsored by Wifebeater Lager.
It’s just a roll-up tonight. No opposition – merely a friendly opportunity to get together and to have a bit of practice before the league starts in earnest. But there is still a buzz of excitement in the air. The dawn of a new season – the first date on my headlining UK tour. The bowling green is my raised stage; the woods are my guitar, and the mat represents my effects pedals. I have not actually ever been on a headlining UK tour, but the parallel is there. The scoreboard is my set list; the beer towel is my guitar lead. Nigel, skipper of our block, is my bass player; Big Andy is my drummer. We don’t have a screaming hysterical audience of teenage girls – our most loyal and regular supporter has been unable to turn out to spectate since he got his foot amputated – although Eileen is here, and she sometimes likes to sit and watch, chucking in the odd heckle, in lieu of playing. But the parallel is definitely there.
I am pleased with my analogy. Songwriting is all about analogies – good songwriting is all about unexpected, hidden ones. ‘There She Goes’ by the La’s is about heroin, not a lady who is going. Really, playing bowls is just like being in a successful rock band. I can’t really see many differences.
Big Andy, Nigel and I do play like a well-drilled trio. We are comfortable in each other’s presence; there is a telepathy between the three of us, like Cream (featuring Eric Clapton). We don’t feel under pressure in front of each other; we barrack and praise each other in equal measure, and we go to the village pub afterwards. That’s the difference between a ‘side’ and a ‘team’, although just to be confusing, in bowls it is called a ‘block’. We are settled together this year – I have high hopes that our near-telepathic understanding will give us a big advantage. There is mutual respect and support there.
There are moments in making music when it all comes together. When you’re rehearsing a new song, the band hits a new chord change, someone drops in a phrase, hits a particular note and it’s just – right. You catch the eye of the bass player, of the drummer, and you know. That’s a magic moment. The tension resolved; the song opens out into perfection.
It’s the same when the skip bowls and you can see the wood coming towards the pack – slowing and arcing for the gap you pointed out, running out its weight perfectly, nudging past the short woods, skipping the bare patch, squeezing through the narrowest of spaces and finally falling to a halt touching the cott itself. It’s magic, it’s perfect. It’s like the big piano chord at the end of ‘A Day in the Life’.
It’s time to start playing again.
TWO
Last night a Strategic HR Initiative saved my life
Past the church gates, past the old Methodist chapel, up through the Tofts and out between the fields of beet. Past the small shed in the woods that acts as the hub of BT’s broadband activities in the area; down the hill through the woods to the junction with the main road that will take me into town.
I’ve lived in three places in Britain: Essex, with my mum and dad; London, in a flat underneath a man with an enormous toilet; and here, in this small and friendly corner of Norfolk. It’s here that I truly feel at home, in this place that’s impossible not to love, in countryside and a community where I truly belong. Where I have my friendly neighbours (Big Andy, Short Tony, etc.), my close family (the LTLP) and – perhaps for the first time in my life – true and unconditional membership of a youth tribe (bowls). DJ Ken Bruce asks a question on the radio, the answer to which is clearly ‘Norman Greenbaum’.
Past the gates of the old airfield, up the gentle hill towards the old service station. The sunshine washes across the fields and hedgerows and the music fills the car. I’d say that it was the sort of morning that made it impossible to have a worry or a care in the world about life, if I weren’t so worried and full of cares about life and – specifically – the morning ahead itself.
I park the car and slowly walk up the street towards my appointment. It’s a nice day, but let’s not get complacent. It’s at just these sorts of moments when life has a habit of hitting you in the face with a hammer.
I am hit in the face with a hammer.
I recoil from the shock and surprise. Not being complacent is one thing, but it is fair to say that I was not expecting anything quite so unpleasantly literal. The man hits me in the face again. Boff.
It is not a nice feeling, not a nice feeling at all, and improves not one jot when he repeats his assault twice more.
At some point, I tell myself, I should say something. He does seem pretty competent, and I get on with the chap reasonably well (although perhaps less so now, seeing that he is hitting me in the face with a hammer), but truth be told it is an unpleasant experience and I would like him to stop.
‘Diss crown is priddy impossible to shift,’ he explains, in a South African accent. ‘I hev tried wiggling it with dee pliers. Now I am hitting it with diss hemmer.’ He bashes my tooth with his hammer once more, to emphasise the point. Boff.
Randy Newman wails from my MP3 player. Unfortunately, I have absent-mindedly selected the wrong ‘genre’ in my haste for musical distraction, and instead of uplifting and rousing cheerful pop music, my head is filled with mournful minor-key reflections on losers and low-life tragedies in the medium of the blues, whilst I am being hit in the face with a hammer.
The anaesthetic seems to have made my face swell up, as if somebody has pushed a marble into my mouth and under my top lip. They may well have done. Or perhaps it is a snooker ball. It certainly feels the size of a snooker ball. It could be a penis, for all I know. I have my eyes firmly shut. I do not wish to open them as the hammer is unpleasant enough as it is without watching its descent. I can’t believe that it is a snooker ball – what dental purpose would that serve? I also do not think it is a penis, as he would not be hammering it so hard if so.
The only really good thing about a dentist putting his penis in your mouth and starting to hit it wildly with a hammer whilst you are under local anaesthetic and have your eyes firmly shut and are listening to mournful Randy Newman songs is at least you know that you will get offered some mouthwash afterwards.
‘It’s coming,’ he explains, not entirely reassuringly.
The sterilising machine in the corner of the dental surgery starts up with a big ‘whooooosh’. It makes me jump, but diverts me momentarily from the hammering, and from Randy Newman, who has just finished singing a verse about a girl who stole his car and went on to cause a traffic accident, running over a man named ‘Juan’. Randy Newman sounds particularly extra doleful about this; he has no car, and undoubtedly his insurance will be affected. The ‘whooooosh’ is presumably steam, but sounds remarkably like an enormous toilet being flushed.
Adam’s enormous toilet was, due to a quirk in the architecture of the London flat conversions, situated directly above my face.
This is what it had sounded like anyway when I lay sleeplessly in bed, my stare fixed on the ornate ceiling, marvelling at the noises that could be made by a simple item of plumbing. Whooosh! it went. Rushhhh! Sloshhh! It is virtually impossible to describe to somebody who has never lived in a converted Victorian house just how loud the noise of a man weeing in the flat upstairs can possibly be. Cities are never quiet, but the background noise will fall to a dead silence when set against the watery rumble of half a pint of urine hitting the base of an enormous toilet bowl over one’s head. The roar of the main stream, the sonically perfect echo of each single salty droplet as it splashed back against the rim.
Sloshhh! Slossssshhhhhh!
I had been on friendly terms with Adam. He was an amiable man who tended to keep himself to himself, but would always be up for a cheery ‘hello!’ as we passed on the stairs. Living on his own, his habit was to go to the pub each evening, returning at around midnight to start weeing.
I would lay in bed listening to the performance, work anxieties surging around my head. Beside me, the LTLP would snore gently in her anxiety-free woman’s world. As the weeing tailed off, the noises of the city would gradually fade back in: some drunks shouting, the clatter of freight on the East Coast line, perhaps somebody trying to steal my car. And then forty minutes or an hour later, the weeing cycle would begin once more.
Sloshhhhh! Slossssshhhhhhh!
Boff. Boff.
Another couple of bashes with the hammer brings me back to the present day.
The music fills my head to bursting point. Piano, bass, slidey guitar. As each chord hits home, I concentrate hard on trying to envisage myself playing it; the shape of my left hand across the strings, or the sensuous womanly caress of a minor seventh on the ivories. It is not enough to dismiss the hammering stuff, no matter how I want it to. Boff. I blink to myself. Why am I here? Why the bloody hell am I here? The hammer pauses for the gap between songs and then starts up again in earnest.
Why am I here?
Boff boff boff boff.
Why the bloody hell am I here?
Boff the boffy-boff boff boff boff.
Why the…and more to the point, how is this man hacking into my own personal inner monologue in order that he can hammer in perfect time with it? I give him an angry look from behind my protective goggles.
Why am I here?
Boff boff boff boff.
Why am I here? Here in Norfolk, pressed rigidly down into a dentist’s chair, being hit in the face with a hammer.
Lots of reasons.
The little picture reason is that I have a toothache; an abominably bad toothache that crept up on the roots of my incisors; a toothache that has lingered like a man in my area who has come round to give me a free consultation and a no-obligation quote.
The medium picture was the Harringay Station Herd, and the fact that my life seemed to consist of: wake up, fight my way to work, work, come home, listen to man weeing.
But the big picture was all to do with Strategic HR Initiatives.
Strategic HR Initiatives. The foundation stones of modern business. The management engines that are so vitally important to ensure that the companies of UK plc can innovate, thrive and come out clear winners in the global war for talent. There is nothing as pathetic as a moribund stuck-in-the-past company, doomed to hostile takeover, bankruptcy or a slow slide into sales oblivion because of the absence of great – or the implementation of poorly thought-out – Strategic HR Initiatives. That is why we must have them. And just as these initiatives invariably transform the fortunes of the smallest partnership to the most major conglomerate, so they have profound effects on individual employees.
This is what happened to me. Admittedly not quite in the way that was intended, but there you go.
I guess you would say that I had been quite successful in business alongside the musical accomplishments. Admittedly I hadn’t actually started any businesses, or employed any people myself, nor had I spotted an idea that had become really really big and had led to my share capital becoming millions of pounds overnight. However, I had managed to get paid every month without killing anybody or provoking employment tribunals or bringing the company to its knees by confusing ‘Press F1 for Help’ with ‘Press F8 to Delete Exchange Server’ on the IT system.
I just wasn’t entirely happy.
Modern, bland, large, rectangular. I was in a meeting room dominated by an impressive glass boardroom table – an artefact that had been hand-picked by somebody who knew the vital importance in business of impressive glass boardroom tables. I loitered at the back, nervously crushing and reforming my plastic tea beaker, thinking that perhaps I should be taking a more visible position with the other management types.
Dusty windows watched out across the City of London towards the bowling green at Finsbury Square – this was no glamour view, however, but the rooftops of low-rise rented office accommodation: fire escapes and heat extraction systems. Occasionally during a meeting I would identify the pipework of a particularly interesting heat extraction system and follow it around as far as my eye would go. It was a bit like examining the fantastic exhausts of a spaceship in the year 2508. The air shimmered above it, like on Venus.
Inside, we had no heat extraction system. The space was close and humid; there were too many people present. The lift was broken again – a succession of bodies staggered in, loosening ties with the sweat of a six-floor climb.
A succession of board-level speakers had lined up to intone to the room. This happened every week, as a way of motivating people for the days ahead. Words and phrases lumbered through the thick air towards and past me; some clung exhaustedly to the wall behind, some expired and slumped in defeat to the nylon carpet. It was, to all intents and purposes, a perfectly normal Monday morning.
And then, out of the blue, I had started to catch some of these words. And the interminable speaker of the moment drawling in a monotone as turgid as the very turge itself:
‘La la la la la la la know that we are all genuinely excited about this new Strategic HR Initiative that we’ve been working on.’
I gaped at the man. The words churned round my head as I tried to grip hold of them. And as the phrase settled down inside me I looked around the room and, to my horror, saw a sea of nods of interest and concentration and enthusiasm and thoughtful assent. Left, right, left again. Nods – genuine nods. And the fear gripped me, with the icy fingers of a creeping Gantt chart. These people were not pretending; this was no sham for personal corporate advancement, no calculated sucking-up to the powers-that-be.
I was in a room with people who were genuinely excited about a new Strategic HR Initiative that was being worked upon.
It was alarming. My eyes darted round the room looking for exits. I was too far away from the door. They would catch me and wrestle me to the ground and beat me and inject me with the Strategic HR Initiative serum that the others had been given. Catch me! Catch me and inject me! Tape an institutional hub across my eyes and force delivery outcomes into my anus. Brandishing photographs of Harringay Station and massive tubes of Toilet Duck.
That’s why I’m here.
Randy moves on a track.
If that’s why, what’s how?
How did this major change happen? What coup did I pull off, what stroke of daring, what gamble did I take with my life, risking it all on the throw of one die for the sake of a new horizon? Like a frontiersman of the early days of the American nation, what was in my mind as I grimly stowed a rifle and provisions in the wagon, pulled my woman close to me and explained that – for all the dangers, the unknowns, the immense hardships – sometimes a man has to strike out and face these, in order to carve a new life from the dust and rock?
‘I’ll expect dinner when I get in every night,’ said the LTLP. ‘A proper one.’
Sexual equality has come a long way in a very short space of time. For thousands of years there were very clearly defined roles for the genders: the men would do the fighting and hunting and making the decisions etc., whereas the women would do the stuff at home and have babies. Then, from the sixties onwards, society entered a period of hypocrisy. This was when women were ostensibly given the same opportunities as men, but thwarted at every turn with casual sexism. Meanwhile, blokes still would not get involved with domestic chores.
It is impossible to say why the final sea-change occurred: perhaps it was the sudden nineties surge in the average male’s confidence about their sexuality, perhaps it was the advent of The Vicar of Dibley on BBC1. But we are happily out of the sexist Neanderthal period, and it is not unusual at all now for men to do women’s jobs like housework or cooking. Twenty years before, options simply wouldn’t have been available to me, and I would have been forced to remain a stressed, insomniac, on-a-downward-spiral putting-a-brave-face-on male provider. But with a flash of fortune, I was the beneficiary of a second sexual revolution.
I became a househusband, and I’m not ashamed.
(‘Househusband’ is not quite the right word, as it is a bit effeminate. But it will do as a short-term description.)
So that was it. I shed the trappings of Neanderthalism and stepped bravely into my own corner of twenty-first-century post-Dibley Britain. The LTLP took her massive and important new job in the east of England, and I took my huge leap of faith. I packed up, I handed in my resignation. We said goodbye to friends, goodbye to Harringay Station, goodbye to meeting rooms and motivational addresses, goodbye to Adam in the flat upstairs with his enormous toilet.
And, gobsmackingly, I said goodbye to the band.
Taking my last few big gulps of choking, Strategic-HR-Initiative-polluted London air, I had felt joyful for the first time in a decade. A stressed businessman, with all the trappings of success but with no time or energy to make the most of them, I was downshifting to the countryside to enjoy a better quality of life. Truly, it was a unique step that I was about to take – a pioneering move that I couldn’t believe that anybody else had ever thought of, ever.
‘You won’t know it…I’ll be right behind you…don’t try and run away…’ There should be an emergency Randy Newman button on MP3 players for just this situation. You would press it and it would immediately leap to something cheerful by S Club Seven or the Proclaimers. ‘Little girl…wherever you go…’
The dentist now has my tooth by the pliers, gripping the crown and pulling and wiggling hard. It is like a surreal silent movie. I half expect him to put a boot up against my chest to aid leverage, or to use the pliers to pull my head back and forth exaggeratedly, bashing it alternately against the mouthwash basin and the headrest. I would laugh, except he is pulling my tooth out with pliers having hit it repeatedly with a hammer.
A few more yanks and my old artificial tooth thing is no more; I have a huge gap in my mouth that is dripping pus and blood along with an unidentified fragment of metal that appears to have been left in there by a previous dentist. We take a two-minute break before he starts to clean out the abscess – but it could be two hours for all I know, such is my state of stunned distress. Randy croons dolefully in my ears.
When I was a small child, I fell off my bike quite spectacularly, via the simple mistake of trying to emulate not just US daredevil Evel Knievel and his stunt bike, but the plastic US daredevil Evel Knievel that you could wind up and send soaring over a dozen Matchbox lorries, as featured on Channel 4’s I Love the 50 Top Toys That You Should Not Try to Emulate. I required an immense amount of dental surgery as a result, but I cannot remember those particular times being as bad as this. I suspect my teeth have become more sensitive as I’ve got older. The session finished, I take my jacket with shaking hands and stumble from the surgery in a dull state of shock.
The road outside is noisy; market town traffic passing each way, a brewery lorry unloading. But I hear nothing. I just walk, my eyes fixed on some random point in the far distance, my mind blanker than it has ever been. I take out my mobile phone to ring the LTLP, but a passer-by looks at me very oddly and as I do not feel like talking anyway, I shove it back into my trouser pocket.
I feel utterly alone. With shock I realise that I am already sinking into negative thoughts so early in my brave battle against tooth abscess. I should do something positive. If I write to the Observer demonstrating that I can face tooth abscess with wit, good-humour and poignant humanity then they will probably give me a column in their magazine, ‘Tooth Abscess and Me’. Being the person who brings the ‘TA’ word out of the darkness of taboo and into an environment where people are not afraid to talk might be my crowning achievement in life.
‘Crowning’!
Even in my lowest hour, I can still laugh at my own very funny jokes. I rejoice in the smile that spreads across my war-torn face as I traverse the mini-roundabouts and head towards the centre of town and the pharmacy.
THREE
Return of the grievous bowls players
Past the shop, past the village pub and south, where the cottages peter out and there dwell just deer, pigs and pheasants. Across the Peddars Way, the ancient thoroughfare that brought the Romans from Suffolk to their holiday villas on the north Norfolk coast; down through the fields and woodlands of the Royal estate to the main road. Popular Radio 2 DJ Chris Evans spurs us on, playing ‘Can You Feel It’ by the Jackson 5. If there was ever a record to pump you up for a bowls match then it is ‘Can You Feel It’ by the Jackson 5.
Game one. Game on.
Unusually, we have a passenger. Karen has joined us this year, from another club. It is her very first game for us, and she will probably be intimidated and nervous. Big Andy and I put her at her ease in between funking along to the music.
‘Canyoufeeeeelit!’ I sing, indicating right.
‘It’s quite a nice green tonight, although you wouldn’t expect it right in the middle of town,’ says Big Andy.
‘And it’s directly behind the pub,’ I add. ‘Although to be frank it was a bit lively in there when we went last year. ‘Bahbahbahhhh-bahhbahbahcanyoufeeeeelit.’
‘Wasn’t there a fight or something?’ he asks.
‘I don’t think it was exactly a fight,’ I recall. ‘I think it was just a bit lively. There was lots of shouting and stuff. Certainly I remember the barmaid running in and hiding behind the door. But then it was almost…six o’clock on a Friday night.’ I slow down as we approach a roundabout. ‘Baahbahbahhhbahhhbahhhbahhh-canyoufeeeelit!’ I add.
‘Hopefully we’ll be there with a bit of time to spare,’ says Big Andy. ‘Get a quick pint before we start.’
‘Right,’ says Karen.
It is good to have a bit of new blood in the team. We struggled for players last year, after the club suffered green-uncertainty, and we had almost considered dropping out of the Thursday night league altogether. But a strong showing in the tables and our reputation for being a good-natured bunch of people have held us in good stead.
‘You might find that we take it a bit less seriously than some of your old lot,’ I call over my shoulder, as the Jackson 5 make way for the traffic report. ‘We’ve got some good players, but everybody’s there to have fun. There’s a – there’s a good atmosphere about it, is the best I can say.’
We will indeed be in good time. Park the car, go for a quick pint, get into the Zone. When you play bowls, it is very important to get into the Zone. Mental and spiritual preparation is everything.
‘A good atmosphere,’ confirms Big Andy, as we pull to a halt.
‘No we are not fucking all right,’ snarl Ron and Vicky, stepping out of their car and responding to my cheerful greeting quite alarmingly angrily. ‘He hasn’t picked us, has he? Years we’ve played for this club! Well he’s a fucking arsehole so we’ve turned up here anyway to fucking tell him so, and he can stick his fucking bowls club where it belongs.’
The Zone announces a temporary suspension and apologises for the inconvenience.
‘Right…um,’ I reply.
‘No offence to you lot, and we wish you well, but it’s time he had a piece of my mind, and I shall fucking give it to him when he arrives and it won’t be pleasant, I can tell you,’ says Vicky.
‘We’ve got the trophies from last year – he can fucking take those as well,’ adds Ron.
‘Um – perhaps we’ll go for a quick pint and leave you to it,’ suggests Big Andy.
‘Best not to interfere,’ I agree.
I see a car approaching out of the corner of my eye.
‘Here he is now,’ says Ron.
As the car pulls up, we realise that it is not Howard the club captain, but Nigel. I make frantic ‘we are going to the pub, quick quick stop the car and leap out and join us as fast as you can as there is going to be an angry scene in the car park’ gestures. But he just blinks at us in incomprehension, so we sportingly abandon him.
‘Just a little disagreement,’ explains Big Andy as we hasten away.
‘Right,’ says Karen.
I can see both sides of the quarrel. Doing the Human Resources for a small club is not a job that I would personally volunteer to do, even if I wasn’t so busy at the moment what with the stuff at home and the sorting out the band and things. It is a thankless and tiring task, and you are always likely to upset someone in the act of doing it. But I have always got on well with Ron and Vicky, having played in their block many a time. I hope it will sort itself out, somewhere else, where I won’t be involved with people shouting ‘fuck’ at other people. Big Andy clearly feels the same. We will hide bravely in the pub until the scene is over. It has always been a nice pub.
The pub is closed.
An aroma of angry dispute drifts on the air from behind us. ‘It can’t be closed!’ I moan, pulling once more at the door, ignoring the scrunch of broken glass beneath my feet.
‘It’s definitely closed,’ confirms Big Andy, stepping back from the tightly drawn blinds, the empty bottles discarded on the step, the sign on the door saying ‘This Pub is Closed’.
There are more raised voices. We stand awkwardly on the concrete slabs, thinking that perhaps a cheerful and very slightly out-of-breath publican might suddenly arrive with a key. I wander round the corner to the other side of the pub. That side of the pub is closed as well.
‘I guess we could just walk the streets for fifteen minutes?’ I wonder.
There is a small huddle of players clustered by the gate to the green as we nervously walk back with a view to sprinting around the edge of the car park and thus not getting involved in shouting and finger-poking. It transpires that the gate is locked, so we join the huddle, like refugees from the Gaza Strip. We examine our shoes as the argument approaches. They really are very interesting shoes. You can stare at them for ages without getting bored. The stitching runs all the way round, from the heel, round the toes, back to the heel again. And they keep your feet warm. Warm. And dry.
‘I’m sorry about that little scene,’ the club captain says helplessly, as his antagonists disappear in a cloud of petrol.
A greenkeeper arrives to unlock the gate. We traipse in slowly, in single file, still fixated on our shoes. The Zone hangs up a small sign: ‘This Zone is closed’.
The rules of bowls are simple.
Of course, I mean the local rules: the rules that we play by every Friday night before we go to the village pub; rules that are probably written down somewhere but that may as well be unwritten, that have been passed down by generations of Norfolk bowlers. I am sure that there are variations in different counties, in different leagues, or when you go overseas to any of the other great bowls-playing nations. But as far as I am aware, there is no Sepp Blatter of bowls; no white-capped Juan Antonio Samaranch figure passing resolutions and presiding over standardisation. I guess there is Howard, who goes to the league meetings and picks the team. Howard, or Barry Hearn.
In any case, there aren’t many rules in the big scheme of things. Not compared with cricket, or American football, or just living in general. If we assume that everybody knows the object of the game – to get as close to the cott – the little white ball – as possible, then we can dispense with that and get on to the important bits. And the most important bit comes at the very beginning of each match, before a mat has been laid or a wood tossed.
The first, undisputed law of bowls is to shake your opponent’s hand and wish him a good game.
‘Have a good game.’
‘Have a good game.’
‘And you – have a good game.’
‘Have a good game.’
‘Have a good game.’
If you are playing triples – three on each block – as is normal on Fridays, then that equates to eighteen announcements of ‘have a good game’. That is, I wish each of the three people on the opposing block a good game, and each of those three wishes one back – six ‘have a good game’s. This is repeated by the two colleagues on my side, making eighteen declarations in total before you even acknowledge your own side. That is not all, however. A ‘block’ is merely one-third of a bowls team – we play nine-a-side, three blocks playing their separate games side-by-side on different parts of the green (‘rinks’), their individual results being added together to decide the outcome of the match. That is fifty-four ‘have a good game’s resounding around the green, drifting amidst the trees and the mats and the scoreboards and echoing off the hedgerow. Often it is dark before we have finished wishing each other a good game.
And ‘have a good game’ it must be – that is the wording that is acceptable. There is no ‘good luck’; no ‘have a nice one’; no simple ‘cheers’ or ‘all the best’. ‘Have a good game’ is the phrase that is said, and has been, and always will be.
‘Have a good game.’
Cricket was my first sporting love.
Travelling with my dad to watch him play, my own small child’s kit stashed hopefully in the boot, in the wishful anticipation of one of the men suffering a horrible injury and being unable to continue. Watching my dad intently as he stood crouched like a panther in the gully; ambling around the boundary together as he waited for his turn to bat. And then – oh joy! – somebody would be too slow to move and would be hit in the nuts at silly point, and I would be called upon to substitute. And then cakes at tea, and being given cider in the pub afterwards. What could be a better way of spending a Saturday afternoon for a boy?
Then making it into the team, and running around, and batting and bowling, and buying cider in the pub afterwards. And playing with your dad, and discovering rock music, and skipping the odd game because of band practice, and leaving before the cider to go drinking with your new friends, and not having so much time on Saturdays to do stuff with your dad, and…
I think I am a bit fat to play cricket these days. I did give it a go again a couple of years back, but I was really only still good at the cider bit, and after a while I became aware of small boys lurking around the ground, regarding me as a dead-cert nuts casualty. It was fun, but I don’t miss it. That was then and this is now.
Football was never my thing. I did play at a reasonably high level, for the 3rd Billericay cub troop. My position was left back, which, as my dad explained to me, was probably the most important position on the field. Unfortunately, none of the other cubs realised this, and they used to shout things like ‘Haha – left back in the changing room, more like! Left back! Left back in the changing room!’ I didn’t move on to another club when I left the cubs. My fellow players eventually went on to become people in the City with aggressive suits and wanky spectacles and too much testosterone. They were happy times.
Tennis half-killed me, and I was never built for rugby, so now it’s just a bit of snooker, with John Twonil, Mick and Short Tony and the gang – and the bowls. I wonder what would have happened had I discovered bowls at a very early age? There are probably hundreds of thousands of small boys who have never had a chance to play; never seen a bowling green. It is a shame, and the reason why Barry Hearn must succeed.
Triples – three on a block. Each has a specific role: the ‘skip’, the ‘lead’, who bowls first, and the one who bowls second/in the middle, who does not have a particularly satisfactory title.
The first thing that you’ll not appreciate on Barry Hearn’s television coverage is this: when you step forward to bowl, you can’t really see what’s happening at the other end – the ‘head’ of woods that collect around the cott. It is too far away, and difficult to judge distances between the woods. This is the role of the skipper – to stand by the head, making judgements about the position of each wood and letting you know what’s going on via a combination of words and gestures. These will include his recommendation on what would be the best shot to try in the circumstances. Sometimes this is a gentle suggestion, sometimes a barked order followed up with ‘Oh well – do it your own fucking way then.’ Skips have different styles.
Each player has two woods to bowl. The home and away skippers bowl theirs last, their responsibility being to tie everything up – not merely hoping to gain points for the team, but perhaps to knock an opponent’s wood out from a scoring position, or to block things off in front in order to protect an advantage.
If you’re the one in the middle, then you have a dual role to play. First, you will be looking to build up a good strategic position within the head, to make the skipper’s life easier when he comes to claim the points. Second, you will sometimes be called upon to merely get as close to the cott as possible, if the lead bowler has failed to trouble the surrounding grass with his efforts.
The lead has a simple job – a very simple one. The lead must bowl two woods that come to rest right next to the cott, thus putting the opposition on the back foot from the word ‘have a good game’. It is a big responsibility, and it takes a certain type of person to make a good lead. Paradoxically, as your two colleagues are yet to bowl, there is the opportunity of rescue, and thus the lead position is also a good place to hide somebody if they are shit.
I usually bowl lead.
Unlike many sports there are no white line markings, behind which you must stand. Instead, as you bowl, part of your body needs to be in contact with the mat. It’s a black mat, but the colour isn’t particularly important. Clubs can get hold of mats from specialist bowls providers, who can supply a range with a combination of grips and surfaces to suit wet or dry weather conditions, indoor or outdoor surfaces, or with their own logo embossed in the rubber. Ours are reassuringly bog standard.
Placing the mat is the responsibility of the lead bowler. It is a responsibility that brings much pressure. The exact position of the mat is defined in the rules – but the rules tend to be different for each league, and are complicated, involving distances. In general, you can split bowlers into two groups – those who know exactly where the mat should go, and those who haven’t a clue. Being in the latter camp, and as a lead bowler, I have a particular mat-placing strategy that seems to work in all scenarios. I chuck it on the ground where I think it might go nicely, and if anybody shouts at me then I move it to where they say. It’s the same for both sides. If you get excited about poor mat-positioning then you are very likely an arse, and should be formulating Strategic HR Initiatives rather than wasting your time playing bowls.
‘Oh dear,’ I mutter, as I land about ten feet away from my target. We are rusty; I am rusty. No matter how many rehearsals you go through, nothing will prepare you for leaping up on stage in front of an audience of thousands. Likewise, the roll-up has blown away a few cobwebs but that is all. It doesn’t prepare you for the pressure of a match situation. I concentrate very hard for my second wood. I need to take quite a bit of pace off it, and give it a wider angle.
‘Oh dear,’ I repeat.
Some people would call the little white ball a ‘jack’ – in fact, this is probably the more commonly recognised term worldwide. A ‘cott’ or ‘the dolly’ are stubbornly local designations – I’ve never heard anybody use the J-word. If you referred to it as a ‘jack’ around here, people would immediately spot you for a tourist. It would be like walking through Edinburgh wearing a kilt and eating shortbread.
So the skips stand at the other end of the green, giving you instructions based on their reading of the game. But when the lead and second have bowled their two, then it’s their turn. Everybody swaps places. We walk up to the head of woods; the skips return to the mat.
The halfway pass is a key moment. Normally, it is the cue for a whispered ‘Well done!’ or a muttered apology, or a snarl of contempt. Sometimes you might stop to discuss a tactic or two; sometimes you might fit in some constructive feedback.
‘Put in a long cott. They haven’t worked out the slope.’
‘You’re bouncing them slightly. Try to get closer to the ground as you release.’
‘That was, without doubt, the biggest load of dog shit bowling that I have ever seen in my life.’
And suddenly, as you approach the cluster, the woods open out to reveal exactly what is going on in there. Invariably, your shot that you thought was really good turns out to be rubbish, whereas your shot that you thought was rubbish is still rubbish. Under normal circumstances it would be mine and Big Andy’s turn to shout at Nigel. We enjoy this. We usually shout things like ‘I’d go this way if I were you. Or that way.’ Big Andy tends to offer lots of advice, I am often less vocal. Nigel listens and then does what he was planning to do anyway, which is usually for the best.
Bowls is scored very simply – the closest team to the cott gets the points. So if you have the two closest woods, and your opponent has the third closest, you get two points and he gets nothing. Even if that third closest is still very close indeed.
‘Can’t play next week – I’m going to Lord’s,’ Nigel mutters as we cross.
We stare at him; so much for well-drilled trios and mutual respect and support. ‘Lord’s,’ I repeat.
‘See the West Indies,’ he explains.
No shots are counted until the end is finished. Tonight, Big Andy is getting one or two close, I am getting one or two close…but then their skipper is stepping up and rolling one closer. He is very good, demoralisingly so. Despite the initial Zone fiasco, we’d be winning by miles if it were just Big Andy and me against their support act. As it is, the game balances evenly – swinging this way and that, with one side never more than a couple of points ahead.
We go into the final end one point down. Then something odd happens – their skipper misses his shot twice. He’s been playing like a bowls god all evening, but the pressure has got to him. We shrug in surprise as his second wood pulls up two feet short and wide. A missed drop shot, a saved penalty, Lewis Hamilton going through on the inside – who needs the likes of the West Indies when bowls can produce its moments of high drama such as this?
Final score: our block wins by one. The other blocks are yet to finish; the overall outcome will depend on their results, but Jason is a few shots behind and we are not going to make up that margin. A few minutes later and it is confirmed – but we have had a good game several times over. The mats and scoreboards are collected; the captains sign the cards. A big piano chord descends over the green.
We pass the closed pub sadly on our way out of the car park. Bowls is not a game to be played dry.
The village pub is austere and slightly intimidating from the outside, sitting haughtily in its prime position at the head of the little settlement. The whitewashed brick is always pristine; the metal tables dotted around outside polished and gleaming; the menu neatly typed in its menu box beside the front doors. Inside, modernity intrudes – some odd modern art prints and the remaining nine-tenths of the chandelier that Big Andy’s raised fist had connected with after Liverpool scored in the Champions League. The left turn into the main bar reveals a smaller than expected room – the presence of an enormous chimney breast carving the area into an awkward ‘L’ shape that would make it very difficult to accommodate a band and PA equipment. I’ve thought about this a lot, and the only practical solution I can think of would be to move all the chairs and tables and set up at the very apex of the ‘L’. There would still be very little room for the sort of audience that I would envisage, but they could overspill into the corridor, from where we could sell T-shirts and souvenir programmes.
There are more modern art prints, and a wooden floor that catches the light from the huge old mullioned windows that look back out across the road. There is a lot of history behind the building, I would expect, but really the main point of interest about the place is that it sells beer, will sell it to me, and I don’t need to pay for it immediately due to my bar tab arrangement.
Here dwell the people with whom I spend my life: the staff – principally the Well-Spoken and Chipper Barman; Mike, Ben and Lottie – and the regulars, who stand clustered in the usual area, adjacent to the Mini Cheddars. Short Tony from next door; Len the Fish, who knows all there is to know about fishing and fish; John Twonil who drives the bus for the old folk; Eddie with his soft Cambridgeshire burr. I chuck my stuff on the side of the bar and throw my coat on the back of a stool, where it’s gazed upon suspiciously by Len the Fish’s dog – a rustic and uncomplicated countryside dog, the epitome of uncomplicated countryside dogginess in this epitome of uncomplicated countryside.
‘Is that your phone?’ gasps Short Tony incredulously.
I explain the phone situation, matter-of-factly. It would be foolish to spend money on a new flashy Londoner’s phone when I hardly make any calls at all, and when the LTLP has a perfectly good one that I can use. Everybody laughs at the thought.
The Chipper Barman is a placid character. I am sure this placidity disguises some deeply hidden threat; his slightly short and swarthy appearance conceals a robust frame beneath. In fact, he is a double black belt in something from the Far East and despite being a steady and thoughtful chap, he could probably steadily and thoughtfully break your neck. I am always careful to compliment him on his barrel-tapping.
With the momentary rush at the bar easing off, he acknowledges us with a nod, wandering slowly over to the corner where we live.
‘Show him your phone!’ someone prompts.
The Chipper Barman’s face lights up. ‘Girl’s phone! It’s a girl’s phone! Hahahaha!’
There is a bit more laughter, which I am starting to think might be at my expense rather than the ludicrous fashion-victimness of city types. It is good-natured, and I smile it off, but I am surprised by the ‘pink is for girls’ sexist implications, to be quite honest. It is as if The Vicar of Dibley never happened. I am not particularly affected by it – it is just boring and predictable. If people want to spend hundreds of pounds on the latest gadget when there is one in perfect working order that they can get for free then they are the idiots, not me.
John Twonil returns from the toilet.
‘Mppphhhhhffrggghahahahaha!’ he chortles, bringing up the phone thing again. He is bloody immature for somebody his age. Short Tony and Big Andy join in once more. So are they. Even Mrs Short Tony, who you think would have some sort of gender solidarity.
‘You are wasting your breath,’ I inform them. ‘Water off a duck’s back.’
Honestly, they are all living in the dinosaur age. It is the post-sexist twenty-first century now, and if I want to carry round a pink phone then I am perfectly at liberty to do so. The world has moved on, and I am proud to say that I have moved with it. There is a bit more laughter at my expense. I smile it off and place my order. The banter of the locker room is part and parcel of sport, and bowls is no exception; to be teased and wound up (albeit immaturely and unfunnily) means that you have genuinely arrived.
FOUR
There were three fine English boys
I go for a run.
Run, run, run!
Across the road, right at the tiny bus shelter, past the secluded bungalow that neither the silver-haired man nor Pat, his wife, have ever returned to. He was probably a time-waster, bored, with nothing else to do during the day. Across the lane that leads up to the church and towards the village shop and the back lanes.
Many people who knew me of old might find this unlikely. I was never a particularly fitness-conscious person, and even now I wonder whether I am doing the right thing or whether I am just encouraging myself to drop dead. Against other males of my age, my height and weight do place me comfortably into the norm group; unfortunately it is the ‘Norm from Cheers’ group, and I have been advised quite forcibly that I should do something about this.
That is the LTLP and her all-encompassing medical knowledge for you. But I have to concede her point. I’m not a natural dieter. And whilst bowls and snooker are sociable pastimes, you cannot really count snooker as exercise. If a further honing of my athletic physique makes the love between us ever stronger then the odd run is a price well worth paying.
Psychologically, running is nothing like bowls. With bowls, once you get into the Zone, your focus is entirely on the pack of woods ahead – the game, and what you must do. But I have come to find that running sets your mind free once you have got your legs and lungs working. It’s great quality time to reflect and to lose yourself in the world.
I love music. I love music really a lot, much more so even than John Miles in the song ‘Music’, where he takes pains to emphasise that was his first love and will be his last. For as long as I remember it has enthralled me, apart from a few years in the 1980s when Miner Willy on the ZX Spectrum said more about the anxieties and aspirations of teenage life than Limahl.
‘Highway Star’, ‘Autobahn’, ‘There She Goes, My Beautiful World’. Things that touch me in the way that other art has never been able to. Film, paintings, mime – they are all very nice as media, but are as ping pong and horse dressage are to bowls: you’d watch them if they were on the telly, but could never become truly emotionally involved. Whereas there is nothing like a good song.
The first ever song that truly spoke to me was ‘We Are the Champions’ by Queen. I had heard pop songs before, of course, Bob Dylan’s and Steeleye Span’s and Leonard Cohen’s – but they were my mum and dad’s music. ‘We Are the Champions’ was mine. It came on the radio and it was the most brilliant thing that I had ever heard. When you are a six-year-old boy, it is extremely cool to be a Champion. It is the best. For a six-year-old boy, the song says everything about what you want your life to be: it is noisy, it is rousing, it involves punching the air a lot and it involves being better than everybody else, who are all losers compared to you. ‘We Are the Champions’ is the ‘Teenage Kicks’ of being six. Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, then a final chorus with mindbogglingly aspirational lead guitar soaring high above it, to end on that oddly and yet brilliantly unresolved bass note.
I do not listen to ‘We Are the Champions’ any more. I have immense respect for Freddie and Brian still, but I have a policy of not listening to music that might ever conceivably be played over the tannoy at any sports arena on the occasion of a goal or point being scored. This discounts much of Queen’s later repertoire, as well as ‘Simply the Best’ and the woman that constantly and repeatedly sings that she is Ready to Go. I find this policy protects you from much pain, and if it has meant that ‘We Are the Champions’ has disappeared from my personal playlist then that is sad from a personal history point of view, but a price well worth paying.
Listening is one thing, playing is another. I love playing music. I love the butterflies beforehand; I love the embarrassed blink when you realise that it is about time to start. I love the looks on people’s faces as you hit the first couple of chords and they realise that you are going to be brilliant; I love seeing drunks dancing as they lose any awareness of your presence as a musician and just start getting into the groove. I love the power of being behind a mic stand and holding an excruciatingly amplified guitar that sings and hums and squeals even though you’re muting all the strings because it’s so powerful. I just love the noise that playing music makes. I love it.
I cannot imagine a time when I will not be playing music. Apart from the present day, when I don’t have a band or anywhere to play.
Speak to any musician and they are likely to tell you that they started small. My personal musical journey began like so many others – in a garage band. Dave’s dad’s garage.
Teenage bands are the most important thing in the development of popular music. Everybody should be in a band when they are a teenager, whether they want to be a successful musician or just a nicely well-rounded character. It doesn’t even have to be a very good band, although I like to think that ours was better than most. It teaches you discipline and interpersonal skills, unlocks the man or woman within and provides a way in to understanding and exploring the fundamentals of intellectual creativity, arts and literature.
This, I think, is what we were attempting when we formed Wïldebeeste.
I had a cheap white Hohner electric guitar and a small practice amplifier. Dave played the bass, four strings of utter cool through one single enormous bigger-than-Adam’s-toilet speaker. The low notes resounded around the concrete and breeze-block like earthquakes. His younger friend Iain was a drummer, with all his own gear: drums, cymbals, sticks. Even back then I knew that this would be the start of something big.
Wïldebeeste had a limited repertoire, solely performing works by Pink Floyd. This was the single band that each of us knew some songs by. There was a limited audience locally for a teenage band that solely performed works by Pink Floyd, and – what’s more – one that solely performed them without a keyboard player to include the bits that might make them sound a bit like Pink Floyd. But Dave had a birthday party planned for his eighteenth, so we were able to gain our one and only public booking, from his mum.
When we were not getting bookings from his mum, we stuck to practising hard in our garage studio, which we had customised by taping an eiderdown against the door to create a modern noise-free rehearsal facility.
Growing in confidence, we incorporated ‘Walking on the Moon’, a song that didn’t need a keyboard player but that retained the slow tempo required to let us consider which chord to play well in advance. Meanwhile we were starting to write and eventually added two original songs. One was by Dave the Bass Player himself and was a simple straight-from-the-heart statement that he didn’t like motor racing. It was called ‘I Don’t Like Motor Racing’.
The chorus went like this:
The best thing about it is the theme tune
The best thing about it is the theme tune
The best thing about it is the theme tune
The best thing about it is the theme tune.
As a chorus it was pure gold – direct, hard-hitting, to-the-point. After the second time round, we would stop and play a bit of the Fleetwood Mac motor racing theme, before hitting the final verse, which resolved with a reconciliation between the lyricist and the sport of motor racing.
To my mind, it is a song that still has the power to shock today.
The other original number in our set was mine, and I was mighty proud of it. It was called ‘Aliens’ and was weightier all round, having more chords and being concerned with the implications to society of prospective extraterrestrial contact. The chorus to this one was more imaginative than a simplistic motorsport-related chant and stemmed from my early philosophical conviction that the human race cannot possibly be alone in this universe of unimaginable vastness. It went:
We are the aliens. We come from the planet Og.
We look like a cross between a monkey and a dog.
Run, run, run! Over the crossroads that might provide a sneaky short-cut home via Big John’s unnaturally elongated cottage, and up the brief but steep hill where the village starts to peter out into non-village. The grass is growing long here, and I keep my eyes firmly fixed on the ground, in case of dog shit. Then it is a hard left and I am back on the ill-maintained tarmac. The MP3 player moves on a track. It is Echobelly! This spurs me on more – it is good to keep up with what the kids of today are into. The immense opening guitar riff crashes into my ears.
I have a particular criterion for running music – it needs to be stuff that I can imagine myself standing on a stage and playing. That helps me concentrate and switch off from the agonising pain of the actual running. I am not just ‘listening to music’ with each step, I am experiencing it, examining the guitar, keyboard and drum parts, hitting the guitar solos, stepping up to the mic for the lead or backing vocals. To a non-musician this might appear odd. But it enables me to immerse myself in my world of performance. I do not close my eyes, in case of dog shit, but my brain and being is there, adrenaline pumping as I belt out the MP3 tracks.
I don’t have any tracks of Wïldebeeste – just a battered cassette tape in a drawer somewhere. It is a shame. We deserved a bit more than that.
A three-piece band puts huge pressure on the guitarist. We weren’t quite Cream (featuring Eric Clapton), but we approached the rapport of the Alex/Big Andy/Nigel bowls power trio. Dave was the larger-than-life character – the charisma of the band – the guy who would go on to do all the band’s media interviews, as he was funny and could do a more-than-passable Richie Benaud impersonation. Iain was a quiet lad, who preferred his hi-hats to toms, which is unusual in a teenage drummer. I brought everything together like glue and, as you have seen, was already developing as a promising songwriter.
When you are in a band as a kid, you suddenly become cool. I am used to being cool now, and being looked up to even by the likes of Eddie and Short Tony and the guys on the bowls circuit, but it is a shock when you are seventeen and have a friend-of-your-mum’s haircut.
‘I’m sorry – I can’t hang around outside Budgens today. I have band practice. I have to go and get my guitar. The electric one. Because I need to go to band practice. With my band.’
That’s what rock and roll is about.
We were so cool that other people did not realise how cool we were, because we were so cool. I guess our main problem was getting noticed by the musical establishment. If you are in a garage band today, you have a million outlets for your music. YouTube, MySpace and the internet in general – idiots from London can even download your songs as text messages to use as the sound for when their mobile phone rings. Like the Beatles, Queen, Cream (featuring Eric Clapton) and Pink Floyd before us, Wïldebeeste did not have this advantage of technology. And whilst those bands got their lucky breaks, we were stuck in our Essex commuter town, perfecting our sound in Dave’s dad’s garage. We just practised. We practised and practised. Waiting for our own big break that we knew was just around the corner.
Just around the corner is the last stretch of my usual circuit – a barely perceptible upslope that takes me from Colin’s farm up to the church gates. In fact, my entire run appears to be a barely perceptible upslope, apart from the upslopes that I very easily perceive. It is like one of those impossible Escher paintings. I am trapped in it, like a Kafkaesque Steve Cram, a Sisyphean Dick Beardsley, for ever destined to run uphill around a village.
Beside me on the road, a car slows to a crawl. A head pokes out of the driver’s window. I know what is about to happen.
Mixed feelings go through my head. Helping people with directions is the best thing ever, as it proves that I am as local as local can be. But we runners do not like stopping mid-run. It makes the breathing and stuff go all funny.
The car is an old Fiesta. It has been sprayed luminous yellow, given an outsized spoiler and some wheels that have been taken from a more powerful and striking vehicle, perhaps a Ford Focus or a Vauxhall Viva. Bulbous arches complete the effect. Somebody has clearly spent some money on it. Although it’s beyond me as to why they didn’t use that to just buy a better car in the first place.
It is less a car than a cry for help.
I slow my jog, nod to the chap leaning out of the window, and remove my headphones in a gesture of communication. He looks at me from beneath his baseball cap.
‘Scuse me,’ sneers the man in the Car of Shame.
I do a bit of a double-take. This is a different sort of ‘excuse me’. It is not the polite ‘excuse me’ of a well-dressed homeseeker, with a wife named Pat, who will be genuinely grateful for my help – it is ‘excuse me’ as a contemptuous throwaway, as an insult, as a challenge. Not knowing quite what to make of an ‘excuse me’ of this ilk, I slow to a halt, there in my tracksuit, jogging on the spot to keep the breathing going correctly, the living epitome of health and exercise.
‘You got a light on you, mate?’
I gape at him. Although this is hardly the vibrant metropolis of Norwich or Fakenham, I can see at least three other people going about their business in the street or in their front gardens. No matter how I try, I just cannot comprehend the thought processes that have led him to conclude that I’d be the particular one likely to be carrying a silver Zippo and twenty Benson’s. I pat my tracksuit apologetically.
‘No. Sorry, mate,’ I reply. I almost add: ‘You got a copy of The Brothers Karamazov?’ But I am keen not to be hit.
He does not reply, but sticks his foot down on the throttle and the car accelerates away. I am incensed by this rudeness. I want to shout after him: ‘Don’t you know who I am? Don’t you fucking know who I am?’ But this would involve finding something to do, and practising it really hard, then working at it for years and years until I receive some form of recognition from the public at large. So instead I stare at his rear lights angrily. I can see him swearing as he goes.
People like that don’t respect real achievements. He probably knows as much about music as he does about bowls. I guess he would have been more polite had he seen me on the X Factor or Pop Idol or whatever it is people with hair gel settle down to watch in lieu of serious programming such as Later with Jools Holland. He’s probably never even heard of the Sultans of Ping. This small incident makes me just a little bit more determined. It is criminal to leave a talent lying dormant.
I love music, and music has always loved me. Whatever I plan to do in the future – and if I am completely honest it is probably time that I started thinking about this in-the-future thing – perhaps it will involve music. I have a few irons in the fire. Some solo ideas that are running around my brain which might come to fruition. But it is early days.
There was no big break back then. Despite our coolness and two prospective dynamite gold top-ten singles, Wïldebeeste petered out after a year or so. There was no single reason. We had no gigs, we had no transport, we had no focus. I wrote a couple of songs of which I was really proud but that the others rejected as ‘too Jethro Tull’. It is not quite being dumped by your girlfriend or having your home address mixed up with a paedophile’s in the local paper, but being told that you are ‘too Jethro Tull’ when you are a teenager can be firmly placed in the mental lever-arch file marked ‘Disappointing’. The BBC lost the rights to cover motor racing to ITV; the title sequence changed accordingly – including the music. And whilst this was after the band split, and I am not claiming it as a major reason why we didn’t make it big, it seemed to drive the final nail into our prospects.
I don’t want to live in the past, but it is quite nice to pop in there for a short visit, and perhaps a spot of breakfast. It’s so easy to be embarrassed by stuff that you’ve done when you’re a kid. But I can think back and smile, given where I am today. We were a good little outfit, a good start. Yes, it’s time to do something like that again. I have to. I really have to.
FIVE
These deeply, deeply unfashionable shoes are made for walking
Lord’s.
Nigel is at Lord’s.
So much for well-drilled trios and mutual respect and support. Pissing off to watch the West Indies and upsetting the delicate balance of the block like this. I haven’t even donned my deeply, deeply unfashionable shoes yet, and already I am thinking negative thoughts about the game. I shake my head and curse my stupidity, dragging myself back into the Zone.
The first home match is always an interesting one. Let’s get some points on the board.
Immaculate, fine grass, mown lovingly once lengthways and then once on the traverse, to create a geometric criss-cross of stripes that makes you want to hug the ground or at the very least stroke it with your cheek. Manicured borders and a white picket fence, with a wooden pavilion constructed simply but in the Edwardian style, with a small verandah. Three elderly men, rooted to the same seats since time immemorial, sit watching the play knowledgeably, smoking clay pipes, whilst a couple of wives diligently cut the crusts off ham and cucumber sandwiches.
I would imagine that some bowls clubs are like this. As for us, we sit outside the draughty builders’ demountable hut that serves as our rain shelter and toilet, waiting for Howard to allocate the score cards for this agricultural square of land. You need a score card before you can move on to the ‘have a good game’s, as this tells you which rink that you’ll be playing on and against whom – and there’s not much you can do until you know that.
This is the key to home advantage. It’s nothing to do with being comfortable in your surroundings, or having a large crowd to roar you on. It’s certainly been a bit less since we were asked to vacate the nice green beside the pub. It’s the fact that by rights it should take the opposition three or four ends to work out that there’s a slight slope up and down, and that when bowling forehand on the uphill you need no angle at all.
Big Andy checks the card. Three – we have been given rink three. The one with the most pronounced hump three-quarters of the way on the downhill, where the skill is to attempt to bring the wood to a halt just on the prow where the grass is barest, so that it might roll gently down the other side vaguely towards the cott. We stroll across the green, up and down, up and down its undulations until we reach the mat. Light brown patches, dark green patches.
But it doesn’t matter.
The Stones, the Beatles, The Who – all the great records from the golden age were recorded on primitive equipment. The Kinks had a cheap guitar and a broken amplifier, and produced ‘You Really Got Me’, whilst even well into the seventies, Pink Floyd were using Sellotape to stick together fragments of master tape to create ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’. But then what happened? Pristine, flat, mown criss-cross stripe technology brought us Jean-Michel Jarre and Cher doing ‘Believe’. The idea that rough-and-ready is by definition not acceptable is not something that needs necessarily to be brought to bowls.
EBA-affiliated greens generally benefit from the slickest production techniques. The English Bowling Association is the national governing body for bowls, although affiliation is voluntary and the association has nothing to do with our own club. We play very occasionally on an EBA green, and the difference is palpable – formal notices, honours boards, professional greenkeepers and flat, flat, flat. It is nice, but alarmingly favours the better bowlers, and most of us are just as happy with a flattish piece of grass and the services of a bloke with a mower.
I remove my Stella Artois beer towel from my bag and wipe my wood with pride.
If non-believers know one historical fact about bowls, it’s that Sir Francis Drake refused to prematurely curtail his game, preferring to complete the final end before engaging and defeating the Spanish Armada. There’s no firm evidence that this is anything other than a patriotic tale, although to anybody who’s been forced by a sadistic enthusiast to play on through howling gales, squalls and electrical storms the story does have the ring of truth about it.
‘We still have time to finish the game and to thrash the Spaniards too!’ is the quote that’s cited. One suspects that, in the remote event that this episode did actually take place, Drake was fortunate that we didn’t go on to lose. Still, it is a good legend, and ‘Drake’s Pride’ is now a well-known brand of wood and bowls equipment, endorsed by – among others – Short Tony.
Drake was a well-to-do sort but when it came to the lower classes, bowls was illegal in England – right up until the midnineteenth century. Henry VIII had worried that the sport would distract workers from their jobs; that they would piss about playing bowls instead of doing an honest hard day’s work. How things change. Subsequent rulers agreed with him, and bowls went underground – becoming known as a sport for drunkards, layabouts and vagabonds, a sport during which violence might occur at any minute. We’ve had none of that, although we did see a little undercurrent of tension at an away match a couple of years back, when the bowls people clashed with a folk club.
It’s an odd concept now, but pick any era, and you’ll find an interest of the common people that the establishment has identified as a threat. Marilyn Manson, rave music, the Sex Pistols – even the Beatles and the Stones. For a few hundred years, this perceived threat was bowls. The game might be the new rock and roll – but once it was more than that. It was too rock and roll.
Jason has been given Nigel’s place for the evening.
He’s only just left college, which makes him my generation if you look at the big picture, although clearly I am senior to him in life experience. It’s great to see fellow young people playing, let alone taking the important skipper’s role. We shared a block together a couple of years ago when I played in the Monday league, and hopefully have a bit of a rapport. It’s a big responsibility for a youngster, and I’m looking forward to giving him the benefit of my knowledge – be it in hints and tips, or just by getting those good shots in first to take the pressure off him and to allow his game to settle down naturally.
‘Have a good game.’
The away team always bowls first, so I have a chance to lurk behind their lead as he launches his first wood from the mat. Frankly, it is not a good wood – fifteen degrees wider than the optimum angle, and far too hard, coming to rest – I estimate – six feet behind the cott. He grins ruefully, and I give him a sympathetic smile.
Having carefully studied the path of his wood, I step up to take my own. This sets off at about fifteen degrees wider than the optimum angle and I have put too much pace on it – it comes to rest – I estimate – eight feet behind the cott.
‘That’s a good start!’ calls Jason. ‘Just take a little bit off it, and a bit narrower!’
I give him a nod. I am frustrated with myself, but it is good that the boy’s nerves aren’t getting to him too much – keeping the volume up is a key skill for any skipper, and I wouldn’t want him to feel that he couldn’t pipe up to offer me advice.
I take some pace off my second wood, but unfortunately miscalculate the angle adjustment, bowling it pretty well straight at the cott. The natural curve of the wood consequently takes it far to the left, drifting well out of contention for anything. I am cross.
‘Absolutely perfect length!’ calls Jason. ‘Couldn’t be a better length!’
Big Andy’s woods cluster round the cott closer than mine – but he has had the benefit of being able to lurk behind me and watch for the right trajectory. As we cross, I make sure to buttonhole Jason to pass on some important words. ‘Don’t forget it’s slightly downhill,’ I say. ‘Just drop it in there, and you’ll be fine.’
Jason’s two woods drop in utterly adjacent to the cott. Two up. It’s good that he’s got a bit of luck so early. Settle the nerves.
It’s such a simple and ancient sport that it seems that systematic codification has never really taken hold. Not round our way, anyway. I mean, I’m sure there’s a rule book somewhere that the EBA or World Bowls or Barry Hearn or somebody has come up with – but I don’t know anybody who’s read it. ‘Get as close to the white one as possible, and take it in turns.’ Nobody has needed to demand clarification of the dozens of ways that you might get out, or be caught offside, or be adjudged to be interfering with the scrum.
Every rule I have seen has really been a regulation. Where exactly the mat should be placed; the distance away from the cott that a wood must rest within before it can be counted as a score; what happens if you roll the cott too short. I believe that there was a letter once circulated to the league, reminding clubs to ensure that people wore the requisite deeply, deeply unfashionable shoes. But it’s not a game for pedants, for jobsworths or the terminally anal.
‘He’s a fine young player, that one is,’ comments an opponent, as Jason’s final wood takes a wick sideways and drops in to save two points.
He’s right. Annoyingly, Jason is better than me. I am not quite sure how this has happened. When we first started playing, we were much of a muchness. Suddenly, he is streets ahead. Perhaps he has had coaching, or secret practice, or hypnotism.
It hadn’t occurred to me, when I had played those first couple of games, that I might not be much good. I had assumed that it would be the sort of sport that you really only needed to turn up to every week. I was never a natural footballer or runner or cricketer or tennis player – but millions of people aren’t. Now it’s a bit disappointing to start bracketing bowls into that mix. But I can try. I have always been a trier.
We lose by one single point.
I can’t help reflecting that this is my fault as I stuff my deeply, deeply unfashionable shoes into the burgundy bowls bag. Despite my energy and enthusiasm and trying, I have not had a good start to the season. Jason, who has consistently played a blinder, tells me not to worry.
‘Bah,’ is my considered reply.
Perhaps I am being a bit hard on myself. Form, they say, is temporary – whereas class is permanent. It is probably something to do with the Zone. Nigel! That’s it! It is all Nigel’s fault for missing a game, and thus disturbing the fragile ecosystem that is a bowls block. I know he’s the skipper and everything, but next time I shall have a strong word with him about his commitment.
SIX
I am a lineman for the county, on sabbatical
I miss the next match, as I am away with the LTLP. Meeting up with Eddie in the village pub a few days later, I find out that we had lost badly. But the classic line-up is back together again for the following game, and it clicks immediately. We storm to victory on our home green, winning all but five ends and ensuring that the points tally across all the blocks is well in our favour. This gives us the bonus two points, and Howard is smiling broadly as he tells me ‘well played’.
Consistency. You’ve got to be consistent.
There is a commotion.
Glancing out through the shed window, I can see some activity at the front door. I hasten to investigate. Mrs Short Tony from next door is there with the LTLP; some raised voices are occurring.
The LTLP turns and gives me her Rosemary West look.
‘She’s brought you round some books from the library.’
As soon as I see the titles piled up on the kitchen table, I step back guiltily. I had been meaning to mention something about their subject, but recently all my energies have been diverted elsewhere into concentrating on not mentioning it.
‘So this is why you’ve been pissing about clearing up at the end of the garden.’ She strides indoors and brandishes the books one by one: Practical Chicken-Keeping, Choosing and Keeping Chickens, Hen and the Art of Chicken Maintenance.
‘I had been meaning to mention…’
‘This is another one of your plans, isn’t it?’ she demands. She doesn’t actually use the phrase ‘hare-brained scheme’, but I can see her contemplating having it tattooed on my face so that she can save herself some trouble in the future by just pointing.
‘I thought it would be really nice to get some chickens…have them pecking around…in the country…’
She explodes, like a tin of out-of-date exasperation that has been left in the sun. ‘Can we just get this straight? This week I’m in London on Monday, Bristol on Wednesday, Liverpool on Friday. I’ll be late home on Thursday. I am not spending my weekends cleaning out chickens. I am not spending my weekends feeding them, or watering them, or doing whatever it is you need to do with chickens. Have you got that?’
I stare at her in astonishment. ‘But I’ll do the cleaning out an’ stuff…’
‘You?’ she goggles.
I gaze weakly at Mrs Short Tony for some support. But I gaze in vain. By rights she should be looking sheepish or guilty for her role in creating this unpleasant scene. But, as with all women, all compassion is set aside under the instinct to show solidarity with another female. If men had that sort of blind pack mentality then we would have ruled the world for thousands of years.
The LTLP slams the books back down on the table. I retreat to the shed. ‘You’re bored, aren’t you?’ she shouts after me. She is such a townie. Chickens! I have lived in the countryside for ages now – it is about time I had some chickens. I will be known locally as ‘the man who has the chickens’, and I will take people free eggs, and they will be my friends. If rock superstars like Ian Anderson and Roger Daltrey can have their salmon farms then there is no reason whatsoever why I can’t have some chickens.
Walking out of a highly charged executive role without another job to go to is a powerful statement. Unfortunately, it is a powerful statement that you are unemployed. It is funny how things turn out. One minute you are the undisputed head of a household, the next you have made a principled Nelson Mandela-like stand against Strategic HR Initiatives and found yourself a dependant.
So we had moved to Norfolk and I became an appendage.
No. I had become a househusband.
No. I had gone on ‘sabbatical’.
That is the word: ‘sabbatical’. A ‘sabbatical’ as far as I can work out, is where people stop doing proper work for a bit but get away without being labelled a parasite on society by dint of using a well-to-do phrase (of Latin origin, I would expect) that makes them sound important and in control and not just fucking about wasting their lives because they’ve thrown a bit of a wobbler about Strategic HR Initiatives.
You take a holiday. He/she malingers. I have gone on sabbatical.
And when I had embraced and kissed her on her first day at work and my first day at home, when I had handed over the delicious freshly prepared packed lunch, when I had waved through the window at her getting into the car, and then at the back of the car, and then at the side of the car as it turned right out of the gate towards the village, and then just the empty street in general, I took one step back, shrugged my shoulders and wondered what the fuck to do with the rest of my life.
‘Sabbatical’. I was young, I was brainy, I was enthusiastic and I had my whole life ahead of me. This would not just be a new personal dawn; it would be a new personal big bang. A million opportunities, a billion things to do, a trillion chances to do something really special with my life that morning. My time to plan and achieve some things that other men my age could only dream of, stuck in their city-centric nine-to-five drudge routines, prodding away at a keyboard whilst in glass offices, floors and floors above them, faceless managers formulated Strategic HR Initiatives.
I sat down and watched Bargain Hunt.
I really don’t watch a lot of television – I’ve got so much else to do. A bit of the daytime stuff, the news, Prime Minister’s Question Time, very occasionally Countdown. Now it’s the season, I’m looking forward to Barry Hearn’s bowls coverage; the cricket will be on Sky and there are often bands playing on Sky Arts – even if I’m not into the music in question, I like to watch these for professional reasons, to pick up some tips. Repeats of Crown Court are always interesting. But I ration myself carefully – you can waste your life on such stuff. Eggheads is fun as well.
Bargain Hunt is my favourite. I think the thing that I like most about it is the sheer good-naturedness of it. Amiable people accompany amiable presenters around amiable antiques fairs. The amiable winning team is thrilled to walk away with a twelve pound profit; they give big, amiable, enthusiastic hugs to the losers, who are in the red for the sum of two pounds. The presenter wraps it up with an amiable bad joke and the whole thing will be on again tomorrow, just with different people, unless they cannot find any different people in which case they will use the same ones and nobody will notice.
There is a lot to say for good-natured, undemanding television. It is as heart-warming as good-natured, undemanding music is bland. I don’t know why this should be the case. Why should the amiable people on Bargain Hunt make you feel all warm and comfortable and pleased that they’ve done well, when listening to the equivalent sort of music – say, Dido – make you want to kill people with an axe?
I have a theory about this; a theory upon which I have been working for some time and which I think contains a germ of profundity.
That is, when the television is on, people have to focus on it. Accordingly, they get drawn in to the exclusion of all else; watching happy people on undemanding programmes causes viewers to project the scenes on which they are concentrating into a vision of humanity as a whole. We do not resent the mindless friendliness or the clunking set-ups because we know deep down that, whilst an artificial reality, it is a version of reality that might well be better than our own. Put simply, in the case of television, we see two or three amiable people on our screen and momentarily believe that all the world is like that. That is why it becomes reassuring rather than irritating.
Whereas Dido inserts secret messages into her audio recordings, telling you to kill people with an axe.
Lumped in with the antiques programmes are the cookery programmes and the property programmes, and the programmes about going on holiday, and the programmes about going on holiday to find a new property and sitting down for something to eat at the end. The shows are all interchangeable and formulaic, but very watchable. Kirstie Allsopp – the homely, comfortable long-term cottage prospect in the countryside against Sarah Beeny’s wham-bam crash pad in the city – is a particular favourite of mine. Her presenting skills give even the pokiest hovel the warm, welcoming feeling of a breast.
However, as you venture outside the antiques show community, the amiability becomes slightly forced; imperceptibly less genuine. And if you watch enough, sooner or later you will come across Max.
Max and his wife Becca are the subjects of much of the property-, holiday- or dinner-related content in the daytime hours. Stressed by their successful businesses in the City, they have a hankering to move to the countryside with their children, Harry (12) and Amelie (8), and a Labrador. The property must be a cosy olde-worlde period cottage in a very rural middle-of-nowhere setting, with all mod cons and good transport links.
Max is very tall, due to his successful business in the City, which is probably something to do with portfolios. None of the cosy olde-worlde period cottages with good transport links are quite right, as the ceilings are too low and the rooms are too small, or they are too close to a road. Becca is dead set on having large grounds around the property. These are partly for the use of Harry (12), Amelie (8) and the Labrador, but mainly because she has spotted a gap in the market and wants to set up a small studio in the old converted garage ‘for her art’. Then she will not have to be stressed by her own successful business in the City any more – which is probably something to do with recruitment consultancy – but will make an honest yeoperson’s living selling hand-crafted and beautifully-framed leaf images to a market hungry for such objets.
Max makes some compromises to get the place he wants. The presenter suggests that he can knock through from the dining room to the living room to increase the space available, making the house suitable for modern living and getting rid of all the nice-but-impractical olde bits. A Reliable Local Builder has provided a quote for this. Harry (12) and Amelie (8) are happy enough. They are hopeful of being given a quadbike, and it is fully four and eight years respectively before they discover that there are no jobs, no off-licences, and no places to meet people with whom they might have sexual intercourse but yet not be forced to enjoy a subsequent acquaintance. This causes them to move to the city and set up successful businesses, in portfolios or recruitment consultancy. The Labrador just goes with the flow.
There is a particular scene at the end of every Max-and-Becca programme. This is the ‘dinner party scene’. Max and Becca have thrown themselves into village life, and have been delighted to meet and befriend a group of solid village local types, all extremely happy as they are no longer stressed by their successful businesses in the City. We watch their perfect dinner party, with perfect jollity around a perfect country dining table. There is lots of complimenting Becca on her starter, and probably a toast. It is horrible.
I do not want to turn into Max. If there is one thing in my life that I do not want to be, it is Max. That is my aim in life – non-Maxism. It’s not much, but it is always good to have a goal.
The thing about chickens is that they are a connection to the land. My Auntie Miriam keeps chickens; she is a well-respected organic permaculture farmer and land expert living in the wild part of New Zealand. The chickens peck around her land, devouring grubs and other unwelcome pests. They give her eggs, and every now and again she wrings a neck and enjoys a delicious chicken dinner.
The LTLP has insisted that the chickens keep within a specific fenced-off point, and that should they be found pecking around her land (whether devouring grubs and other unwelcome pests or no) then it will not be their necks that will be wrung.
It is a collaborative project with Short Tony from next door. The chicken enclosure will start at the back of my garden, and then extend in a large ‘L’ shape behind my shed and onto his land. We shall share the eggs and the responsibility of husbandry. It is our first step towards setting up a self-sufficient commune for when society finally collapses in an implosion of racial violence, terrorist outrage and the totalitarian imposition of Strategic HR Initiatives.
Cleaning them out will not be the hardest thing I’ve done. I’ve been cleaning things out ever since day zero, ever since I came to Norfolk, ever since LTLP sent me to Tesco on the very first day of my sabbatical with an instruction to buy cleaning products.
Tesco in Norfolk is nothing like Tesco in North London. There are far fewer people; there is more space and a friendlier atmosphere; you are not worried that if you turn your back as you reach for a new carrier bag then somebody will artfully reach round and steal your Cathedral City. The checkout assistants wait patiently, looking eagerly for customers; they wave at you cheerfully if there is any danger of you having to queue. It is always good to support local retailers like this. And if I leave the house at the same time as the LTLP leaves for work, I can be in Tesco for eight o’clock and have the household shopping done by nine. That is the sort of time management skill that I have brought to my role from my previous successful career in the City, and why my sabbatical is a continuing success.
I am well known in Tesco these days, and always chat to the staff. There are the Eastern European guys who you sometimes find stacking the shelves, a nice chatty middle-aged lady on the tills who is new and just getting to grips with things, and the man with glasses who supports Spurs. A man on the tills! That is not even worthy of comment these days, thanks to Dawn French and her associates. People might criticise Tesco, but it has led the way. It is commendable. He packs at least as fast as the ladies, proving the dinosaurs hopelessly wrong.
Despite their enlightened social policies, I am, of course, aware of this well of criticism, and that Tesco verges on Evil Corporation status. Colin, whose family have farmed in the village since about 489 BC, stringently boycotts them due to their perceived shabby treatment of the farming community – and there is the very real problem of local shops and businesses being forced to close whenever a Tesco moves in nearby, despite the store’s protestations that its presence increases consumer choice. On a wider level, the ‘food miles’ issue is a serious one, the extra packaging used by supermarkets contributes to our landfill surplus, and the ‘big brand’ mentality is a key factor in the homogenisation of Britain. But you have to balance all these factors with the fact that you get points whenever you shop there.
Personally, I have a rule that governs my Tesco use – I try not to buy vegetables, as I can get nicer and better and more local and cheaper ones elsewhere, and for ethical reasons I don’t buy meat there, unless it is heavily reduced in price. Tins, frozen stuff, drinks, cereals – they are OK. And cleaning products. Cleaning products.
It is not as if I had never been in a supermarket before – it’s just that I could not remember ever having been in one on my own. On sabbatical day one I had no idea that I would eventually become close friends with the Eastern European Shelf Stackers, New Middle-Aged Lady, or Man With Glasses Who Supports Spurs, the Rosa Parks of the Tills. It was not my comfort zone at the time. The second sexual revolution was all very welcome and overdue, but you cannot overturn millennia of evolution in eighteen episodes of a thirty-minute situation comedy featuring a girl vicar.
I stared at my list.
‘Cleaning products,’ read the item.
‘Cleaning products.’ Cleaning products. This was typical. How was I supposed to know exactly what to buy? The rest of the list didn’t simply read ‘food’ and ‘drink’ – it was broken down properly, by item. Lettuce. Tomatoes. Low-sugar lemon squash.
‘Cleaning products.’ I noted with irritation that the list wasn’t even properly arranged. When you walk into a Tesco, the first thing you get to is the fruit and veg, and then, after you turn left and progress from aisle to aisle, there are the household items (including ‘cleaning products’), then general groceries, followed by the frozen stuff and, finally, soft drinks and alcohol. Therefore, that is the logical way to structure the shopping list. Yet ‘Branston Pickle’ was right at the bottom, ‘beer’ was in the middle, and salad items were sort of dotted all the way through. I made a note to talk to her about this. No wonder the CD collection was in such a state.
The cleaning products aisle was colourful and shiny and absolutely full of choices. I wandered up and down the planet Og, amazed and enthralled by the options available.
There were things that would clean wooden surfaces, and things that were good for stainless steel. Kitchen dirt was obviously different to bathroom dirt or living-room dirt, so there were different products for each of those rooms. There was special stuff for the windows, for the shower, for the inside of the dishwasher, for the oven, for wooden floors, for vinyl floors, for floors (unspecified), for those difficult-to-reach surfaces, for putting down the plughole to remove blockages, for putting down the plughole to remove stale odours, for putting down the toilet to remove both blockages and stale odours, and for ‘all general cleaning tasks’.
It was difficult to quell my panic. If I inadvertently effected a spillage of, say, coffee on the dining table, some would be likely to drip over onto the floor. I would then get it onto my hands, and need to wring a cloth out down the sink. Several products displayed a ‘helpline’ number, but I was not entirely convinced that their help would be truly impartial.
There were Cif cleaning products. There was Mr Muscle. There was Fairy and Domestos and Tesco’s Own and Weirdy Beardy Ecological Brand that doesn’t cause the creation of grotesquely mutated hybrid monsters in your toilet pipe. I realised that I had never bought a cleaning product before in my life. They all looked super, like they would get things really, really, really clean.
I swung my head from side to side, casting my eyes up and down the aisle. From what I have read in the magazines, if you look a bit lost and helpless when you are on your own in the cleaning products aisle of your local supermarket then an attractive divorcee/single mother will probably sidle up to you and start giving you advice, and before you can say ‘Bang! And the Dirt is Gone!’ you are having sex on her kitchen floor in the half-hour between dropping off for playgroup and morning yoga class. I swung my head and cast my eyes for ages and ages, but nothing whatsoever like this happened. Perhaps I looked too on top of things. That can intimidate women occasionally.
Ücretsiz ön izlemeyi tamamladınız.
