An afternoon off

     A break from caring. Accompanied by my friend, Mr S, I headed north to look around a couple of open gardens in the village of Aslackby. And how beautiful they were! The pleasure was not so much in the planting but in the texture of hedges (mainly beech) and old walls of brick and stone. The entire afternoon re-acquainted me with an English aesthetic I had begun to lose contact with. It's easily done. There are often too many visual demands made upon us, to many shrieking and competing 'looks' and styles. The two gardens seemed to point in the direction of more concrete and lasting aesthetics. In addition to the the sensory feast on offer the afternoon also offered tea and cake in the village church. (Pews removed some years ago enabled the nave to be used as an exhibition space - wish I had bought that salad bowl!!!) These open garden afternoons, as well as village fetes, always have the added bonus of home baking. A treat! Not much work done recently on revising the book. Reading: I have laid aside the 'Dubliners' and have started 'Caprice' by Ronald Firbank. A novelette (seems the only way to describe it) I started years ago and put down.

After the Jubilee

     The bunting came down this morning, and I have been left feeling somewhat melancholic. Perhaps it is the sensation of the passing of time that these events evoke, who knows? (Funny, but I still regret that for the Silver Jubilee in 1977 I was in France on a school trip. Well it was either the Lake District or France - and I rather I didn't do either but it was compulsory to do one. Character building or something.....) For me the only thing at fault during this Jubilee was the non-appearance of the State Coach. (I'd like to add, 05.02.2013, that was as if the Queen's journey to St Paul's Cathedral had become a purely private event - the lack of crowds along the Strand and Fleet Street reflected this?) A pity. This lunchtime I managed to do some revising of 'Chameleon'. Yet more revision, this time pushed on me by my poor attempts at turning the novel into a screenplay! Writing this I am listening to Kinny and Horne.

Wet Sunday

     I've returned.  The blog resumes....

     Wet slightly cold day here.  This morning my neighbours and I have decorated our houses with bunting for the Jubilee.  The house suddenly looks rather conspicuous, which I'm not sure I like.

     I suppose I should do some catching up....sometime.  I think all I will say is at the present concerns 'Chameleon'.  The first three chapters of the novel are with an agent at the moment and I am waiting for her reply.  It's bound to be bad news - always is!  At the suggestion of the bf I am writing, or I should say attempting to write a screenplay of 'Chameleon'.

Cathedral Quarter

     More madness from Lincoln...

     Not content with the new cultural quarter in Lincoln, the 'Uphill' area of Lincoln - the ancient 'Bail' and not quite so ancient 'Close' - has been renamed the 'Cathedral Quarter'....in fact the 'Bail' - the part of the City that lies within the walls of the Roman upper city - has be known by that name for the best part of a thousand years. Up until the 'reforms' of the nineteenth century it lay outside the jurisdiction of the City; being the outer bailey of Lincoln castle it was under the authority of the Duchy of Lancaster and was administered by a Steward and Court Leet. The 'Close', which encircles the Cathedral, was a later division of the City and formed a fortified enclosure for the protection of both the cathedral and its staff; two of the gates survive, another is a Regency/Victorian 'creation'. It was administered by the Dean and Chapter via a Court Leet that met within the Galilee porch of the cathedral.

Cultural Quarter? Cultural ghetto....

     Apologies for not having blogged for a while (he says euphemistically!) but life has been getting in the way of late....

     In my time away from this blog I have made two trips up to Lincoln - my county town. I knew it had a 'masterplan', but little idea that it involved the creation of a 'Cultural Quarter'. I find I really hate such designations...all it does, in effect is to create a cultural ghetto, perhaps planners and the City fathers of Lincoln believe that artists should be corralled away somewhere safe, where an ever watchful eye can be kept on them? Not that I believe that artists are in anyway as 'subversive' as the avant garde, or liberal intelligentsia, would have us believe, or wish they were....
     Still it seems to be to just another case of all that loopy post-war planning that did so much untold damage to our historical cities....shopping here, working there, sleeping somewhere else. It is merely the same old stuff dressed up in fashionable planning talk....if the arts are to mean anything in being the leaven in the lives of the inhabitants of Lincoln, or any other city, museums etc have to be spread throughout the whole. Public sculpture, for instance, and especially that of an official nature, should be placed everywhere in the city. Institutions too. For it is through them that civil society is created and maintained. To create a 'cultural quarter' is to impose a form of segregation upon the city, to create an area that is tourist destination in a world view that sees and cultural 'product' simply as that - product, something to be merely consumed like something on a shelf in a shop, not something that conveys higher meaning, or even spiritual value for those who use art as a god substitute.
     I remember standing at the end of Danes Terrace and looking down Danesgate past both The Collection and the far more lovely Usher Gallery and not seeing a soul, the place was dead...not vibrant, not living, just a quiet English provincial town. Dead.
     Reading Lincoln City council material on the web I see that the Library and Drill Hall are also part of the 'Cultural Quarter' even though there is no visual link between them and the Danes Terrace area, and therefore no direct pedestrian route. This is ludicrous. They are two separate quarters not one. Apart from the general vacuity of 'The Collection' - the building is what it's about, not the contents, the move up hill has left the old museum empty - what a waste. This is no way to re-construct a city.

Leather Chapter Part IV

The final section of the 'Leather Chapter'

     As he said he would, Jason was waiting at the road side when my father dropped me off at the gate to the airfield. The 250 was out of sight; “up on the runway.”
     I stared at him. I couldn’t help it. He stood strong and heavy like some monumental bronze, his leathers gleaming in the cold sharp light like washed coal. It was like the guys on his bedroom wall had sprung from the wall, only infinitely better. There was something gritty and hard, even ugly about him that bitter afternoon. Perhaps it was the sharp glittering beard. And there was the leather: I was stiff limbed and awkward, but Jason moved with athletic ease, the leather obediently creasing and folding at his joints and drawing tight about his muscles. Jason was the master of his leather.
     And that is what I really remember about that afternoon: Jason in his leathers. Little else, except the fear. The leather-bound remembrance of him stands like some great black basaltic intrusion in the landscape of my memory distorting, even crushing, everything else. Later visits to the airfield in the summer, when we went up there in the evenings for sex, came to supply the incidental details: the new steel gate, the rusting oil drums, the curving gravel track leading up through a short wooded valley, the rusting farm machinery in the undergrowth, the white flowers - cow parsley, briar, wild garlic. So that, soon after Jason’s death, when I first thought of that afternoon, it seemed to me as though it had happened in late spring or early summer.
     But as I write, odd fragments of the conversation, are recovered: “It’s not like being in a car with your mum and dad; all cocooned up against the weather with the stereo on – Radio 3 or 4 is it, mate?....This is different….This, mate, is real. It’s just you – or you and your mate holding you tight – inches from the tarmac. You see it tearing past below you. You feel every bump and pot-hole in your spine, and when you accelerate the pull of the wind as it tries to hold you back, but you go for it. You lean with all the curves; smell everything you pass. And then there’s the weather mate – you experience it all: rain or sun, hot or cold. It don’t bother me, mate as long I’m in the right gear….the whole thing’s fantastic, mate, bloody fantastic.”
     Up on the airfield a grey film of frost clung to the grass and the shattered concrete. It was a place of scrub and dereliction. The 250 was there, waiting patiently for us, at the edge of the runway.
     We were quite alone up there.
     “You look nervous mate,” he said, before he kissed me.  “Bricking it, are you?”
     “Yes, something like that,” I said. Did Jason feel as nervous as a ten year old when he came up here for the first time, I wondered.
     Beside the bike Jason gave his instructions: “It’s relatively simple mate. The most important thing is not to put your feet down until I park up the bike. Not before, mate. Not at junctions or at traffic lights. Ok? Just keep your feet off the road at all times.
     “I thought you could do with one of these.” He reached into his upturned lid and pulled out what looked like a single slip of black material, like a scarf or something, but I had a neck tube already. “I got them during the week. I bought us one each. Here.” He parted the fabric and handed me half. “I guess we should have bought them last weekend. It would have made more sense.”
     “What is it?”
     “It’s a hood mate, a balaclava helmet. It’ll help keep you warm.” I watched Jason pull his ‘hood’ over his head, and tuck the ‘neck’ into his collar.
     “Come here, mate.” I let Jason take the hood from me and slip it awkwardly over my head. Fear had cost me the use of my fingers and in any case it seemed right that he should finish what he had started.  “One day, mate, nobody will able to tell us apart.” Later he told me I had looked like Peter Lawford in ‘Danger Diabolik’, and I took that to be a compliment.
     I’m embarrassed now by the intense gut-aching fear I felt as, finally kitted up, I sat on the bike behind Jason and waited for him to turn the key, when it seems so natural now to get on a bike and ride. I ride in London traffic for fuck’s sake. I pass for a ‘right hard fucker’ among my friends, albeit they are a group of middle class queens. I obviously have a reputation of sorts to maintain, so it’s the sort of thing I only confess to when drunk but I was, I admit, shit scared.
     We rode up and down the runway a number of times with increasing speed; he was right, it was bloody fantastic, I found an exhilaration on the back of his bike that I never felt I had lacked before, the fear gave way to exhilaration, gave way to…. by the fifth run we were both thinking of something else.
     There was a derelict hut, something left over from the war, standing there amongst the young trees and the brambles as the far end of the runway. It had a flat concrete roof, grey concrete walls and metal framed windows. The rotting door was ajar - the paint peeling. I followed him inside. There was shattered glass on the floor among the dead leaves and moss and litter of cans and paper. It was almost warm there, out of the breeze. Steam rose from his mouth as the frail sun caught his face.
     We hardly spoke – there was a curious, fragile anonymity between us like a game – and then, after sperm had been spent over black leather and concrete, we rode back to his place, my hands clenching his sides.

Leather Chapter Part III

     So here it is...another instalment of 'Chameleon'

     “Well?” he asked as he effortlessly backed the car out of the drive and on to the road. “What did your Dad say to you then? I take it he did have a word with you – you could have cut the atmosphere there with a knife. Your mum didn’t look pleased to see me either? Blame me does she, mate?”
     “Something like that,” I said.
     It was now half past eight that evening and Jason and I were in his father’s BMW. It smelt of leather: grey leather on the seats, black leather on Jason – he was wearing his Christmas present again. We were on our way to Stannington. I was pleased to be out of the house.
Jason, I decided, was enjoying this, revelling in playing the ‘bad boy’ like he was Dean or Brando, or Montgomery Clift in some black and white fifties film. It was another role for him, one he perhaps long waited to play, another persona like a skin for him to adopt and slough at will. At lunch, because he knew he was safe, he had wound up my father by relating his accident at the end of the previous year’s racing season; and when he saw my mother squirm at the detail of the actual injury he added more just for the effect.
     In my mind there are two versions of the events of that afternoon when my father confronted me over the gloves. There are the events as I remember them, and there are the events as I presented them that evening to Jason. There isn’t much difference; only that as we drove up to the traffic lights in the Market Place I decided to withhold things – just small things - from him. I reckoned it was easier that way.
     My father wasted no time. As soon as we heard Jason close the backdoor behind him, and while we were still sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee, he started on me.
     “Well young man, are you going to tell your mother what Jason bought you for Christmas?”
     Innocuous enough, but it was asked with that quiet, measured way my father liked to reserve for family crises; what Scott called dad’s ‘solicitor’s voice’, the ‘SV’.
     My mother who was paying little attention, looked up from peeling the satsuma she had just taken from the bowl on the table. She smiled. “Something nice?” she asked.
     “A pair of leather gloves….”
     “That was very generous of him.”
     “….for when Jason gives me a pillion.”
     “I knew it,” she said eventually. “I just knew it. I knew this would happen as soon as you became friends with him, I knew this would happen. I told your father at the time, and he told me not to worry.”  She shot him a reproachful glance.       “He said you were far too sensible to do that. And yet here you are telling me this. Please Alex, please tell me you’re not going to do this. I’d wear myself away with the worry.”
     “I’m sorry, I can’t do that,” I replied quietly, forcing the reluctant words from my mouth.
     “You’re not seriously thinking of going on the back of one of those things with that boy?”
     “Yes,” I said, “yes, I am.”
     I told him the truth because for once I was angry enough; angry at the contempt with which he spat those two final words, that two word encapsulation of all that my father thought of Jason – ‘that boy’. ‘Those things’, ‘that boy’; it was more than just contempt it was almost superstitious, as though to use their proper names would somehow invoke their power as strange gods.
     He offered to loan Jason and I the car when ever we wanted, even to buy me my own car, but I didn’t want that. I wanted to sit behind Jason on his bike, for both of us to be dressed in leather, that’s what I wanted.
     “So, you’ve both talked about things before now, or is this something that boy has done under his own initiative, and that you’re happy enough to go along with?”
     “We’ve talked about it. Vaguely.  That Saturday I went round to look at his garden, well, he showed me his bikes too. I suppose we talked about it – me riding pillion, that is – then. And I suppose we may have talked about things before then.”
     “And the gloves? Did you talk about them then or before?”
     “I didn’t know anything about the gloves, not until I unwrapped them this morning; this isn’t some sort of conspiracy if that’s what you mean – well, not in that sort of way.”
     “Well, in what sort of way?”
     “He just offered to give me a pillion sometime, but that was only after I expressed an interest. That’s all. We didn’t make any definite plans.”
     “I take it the gloves fit?”
     “They fit very well.”
     “Then how did he know which size to buy?”
     “He guessed. He was just lucky, I suppose. He’s kept the receipt in case he had to change them.”
     “Well, there’s no need for you to feel obliged to him because of his generosity.”
     “I don’t,” I said. “This is something I want to do; something, in fact, that I’ve wanted to do for years. I suppose it was one of those reasons, like both us being into Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll, that I became friends with Jason.” I paused. “It’s something I decided years ago I was going to do eventually.”
     “I suppose that will include a bike of your own one day?”
     “Perhaps, I don’t know.”
     It was too much for my father.
     “Oh, for Heaven’s sake Alex see sense! Surely you must realise how very dangerous those things are.”
    Of course I did, in fact it frightened me, but I wasn’t going to let them know that. I couldn’t give them a weapon like that. Their victory would have been easy if I had.
"Anyway, didn’t Granddad have a bike?"
“That was nearly fifty years ago, Alex. It’s hardly relevant. The roads are far more dangerous these days, you know that. You must have seen the endless reports in the media - week after week there are stories about people getting killed and what’s worse, getting paralysed riding those things. I don’t want that happening to you.”
     He must have said other things too. I presume he did, but I can’t recall them now. I only remember now my wandering mind and my hand reaching out towards the fruit bowl.
     “Put that thing down, and concentrate!”
      Reluctantly I let the satsuma slip from my fingers and bounce petulantly on to the table.
     “That boy broke his leg last year, and you decide you’re still hungry. He could have been killed.” (“I didn’t fucking say that. I was nowhere near getting killed. Your dad knows nowt, mate,” Jason exclaimed that evening.) “Doesn’t that mean anything to you?” my father asked.
     I shrugged. “I still want to do it,” I said.
     There was nothing left to say, no room left for manoeuvre. My father and I just stared at each other.
     “Could I see the gloves? Please,” my mother asked
     “Sure.”
     When I stood up I found I was shaking.
     “Jason has a pair just the same,”      I explained when I handed them over to her. “That’s why he bought them for me, because he had got on really well with them.”
     My mother handled them carefully with a disdain she was all too obviously trying to hide.
     “They’re an interesting design…”
     “We’re not going to get you to change your mind, are we?”
     “No….no.”
     “….sort of organic and yet there’s something rather militaristic, if not combative about them. They look expensive.”
     “End of line, I think. I don’t know.” I spoke hurriedly, nervously - I was still shaking. “Jason bought them at a discount; Blanchard’s – that’s the bike shop in Medhamstead – they sponsor Jason, so he was able, he said, able to do a deal.”
     My mother placed the gloves on the table.
     “Well, young man, we can’t pretend to be happy about all of this, but you’re old enough to make your own decisions, we accept that. You’ve given us no choice. However I do think it’s highly reckless of you, if not irresponsible, even stupid, but neither I or your mother can tell you what to do anymore, as much as in this case we’d like to.” My father glanced over at the kitchen window. “Who’s this now? Just promise us you’ll think very carefully, and don’t allow yourself to be rushed into anything. Jason is an articulate young man.”
     The back door opened and closed.
     Eager to resolve it I readily agreed to his proposal.
     Scott came into the kitchen. He and Danny had been out to lunch at the Rugby Club. He was slightly drunk.
     “What’s this then?” he asked, “Family crisis? Any Coffee? Hey, neat gloves! Whose are those?”
     “Mine.” I said.
     He picked them up and looked them over and pronounced them cool. Scott was never convincing with his use of ‘cool’ or any other street slang. “Where’d you get from?”
     “Jason. They’re a Christmas present.”
     “Neat.”
     “Your brother wants to ride pillion,” said my father dismally.
Scott thought that was cool too.  “You ought to do it,” he continued, “You’ll enjoy it. It’s great fun.”
     “Scott, I don’t think that’s particularly helpful.”
     “You’ve ridden pillion? You didn’t tell me.”
     “You’re trying to stop him? And anyway didn’t Granddad…?”
     “I’ve been over that with your brother.” interrupted my father. “It’s not relevant. It was a long time ago and the roads were far safer.”
     “Why are you doing this?” Scott asked, eventually. “Why do the pair of you treat Alex differently? You didn’t try and stop me flying.”
     “They’ve always treated me differently,” I told Jason, “what with one thing and another. They denied it this afternoon, just like they’ve done before, but it’s true. They do treat us differently. They think I can’t cope or something.”
By then the car had reached the narrow wooded section of road beneath the golf course.
     “So you going to think about it,” Jason eventually asked. I wasn’t.  “Cos I thought we could go to Blanchard’s on Sat’day and get you your gear.”
     Fear returned, welling up from the floor of the car until it submerged me. It had been with me all day, since it invaded my bedroom, pushing its jealous way between Jason and me when he said: “I wanna be the one who turns you into a biker, mate.” It was oddly naïve of me really, but before that declaration I thought the gloves were just for sex, not biking.
      It was there at lunch, but my father said nothing, and it was there at tea and dinner, when the four of us had eaten in silence rather than start another argument; although by then it had become an argument solely between Scott and my father. It was there too in the Lounge Bar of the Angel Hotel amidst the panelling and the silver plate and the brass and the hunting prints. And it was there when, at nearly midnight, Jason and I drove home through a night that was appropriately leather black.
     Inside, the Roberts’ car was warm and comfortable. We had brought the affluent scent of the lounge bar with us. The radio, I remember, was on very low. I would have fallen asleep if it weren’t for the mix of fear and sexual attraction coursing around my body. Jason was talking about the bike again; he had talked of nothing else all evening, or so it seemed:
     “I want you out there with me Alex, (he hadn’t called me ‘mate’ all evening, and his accent, too, had disappeared), on the back of the bike, riding pillion. I know we could borrow a car whenever we like. In a way it’d be easier. But it’s not the same. You’ll understand once you’ve been out with me.” And, “I’ve got permission to use the old airstrip up at Gunby anytime I want, so I thought we could have a bit of practice up there first before I take you out on the road. I thought we could start sometime next month. I want to get you out there with me as soon as possible. The sooner we do the sooner we can go places together - give ourselves some space.”
     Jason was full of plans.
     “In the summer we could go away together on the weekends I’m not racing. There’s loads of places I want to go and see. I’ve a tent we could use; it sleeps two. I use it when I’m racing. We wouldn’t need to take much stuff; we can live in our leathers. The pair of us, mate, in gear the whole weekend. Yeah, the thought of that makes me horny too. (Jason began to talk dirty, before reverting to the subject) We could even go down to London for a couple of days, if you want, and stay in a hotel.”
     I said nothing, just stared out of the window. The fear was there too standing invisible but blank-eyed among the dark fields.
     This was all too quick. Way too quick. I hadn’t expected to go out on the bike just yet; it was something in my mind I had presumed to postpone to some future, unspecified date. The spring perhaps, when it was warmer. But if I had rejected it –the gloves, the leather, the bike - I would have what? I didn’t know. Rejected Jason? Not quite. It wouldn’t have ended the relationship, but its development would have been stunted. The thing, the relationship, would have been deformed. A thing without completeness.
     I looked at Jason, at the dark shape of him beside, but he was distant, concentrating on his driving.
     It had been there encasing my hands, the new me, the one I had fantasised about for over six years - I still couldn’t believe it, even if it was really something inevitable - condensed and realised in a pair of gloves. I had a pair of bike gloves. I held up my bare hands before me in the dark. The leather would follow soon. It had been there, finally graspable, concrete, and yet I had been, and perhaps still was on the cusp of rejecting it. It had partly been my father’s attitude that had propelled me into agreeing to this when the thought of it all terrified me and a different approach could easily have won him a victory.
At the time I couldn’t have explained this hesitation, not fully. It was something I didn’t wholly comprehend myself. If asked I would have said something about having to deal with my parents and the fear, that real intense fear of getting on the back of his bike that had repeatedly manifested itself throughout the day. They were real but partial, inadequate explanations for what I felt. There was something else, larger, darker, some other vague unease that had nothing to do with either riding pillion, or confronting my parents.
I understand it now.
Jason was asking me to move beyond my bedroom, my parents, the house and step permanently into his world - his perceptions, his image - a world that was never dull or ordinary, and in effect make a display of my sexuality, to sexualise my life and live like him in a state of perpetual sexual awareness and opportunity. It was like asking any one else to go around naked.
And suddenly, as the car swung around the roundabout on the bypass the whole thing - the leather, the bike - seemed repulsive. Sordid.
     “You’re quiet, mate,” he said, and reaching across when he should have been concentrating on his driving Jason found and took my hand. “It’ll be ok, mate. Honest.”