Thursday 11th October

The older I become the more I realise we are on a treadmill, repeating the same patterns of work and behaviour all our lives, and never really getting anywhere. Treading out the days, treading out the weeks and treading out the years.  It is partly the system in which we all seem to be trapped, like flies on flypaper, seemingly unable to gather the necessary strength to heave ourselves up and fly.  Largely though it is our own preference for the known, boring and predictable and treadmill though it might be, to the inherent dangers that might lie in the unknown.

I have found myself made redundant at least three times in what people call a career, but which has actually just been a series of jobs, and each time though full of dread and worry over how I would pay the rent or mortgage, I survived.  No, actually I thrived each time, and found I was actually happier in my new job where I had been pretty miserable before.

At least four times too, I have found myself with a disintegrating relationship falling apart in my hands, desperately trying to hold the broken pieces together and hoping for some glue to hold long enough to make the thing whole again.  Each time through despair and depression I came out the other end stronger, or at least able to try again.

But maybe even this series of relationships is my own treadmill too. Is human experience then one of constantly repeating the same mistakes, or do we actually learn anything other than how to place one foot in front of the other in order to keep the treadmill turning.  Maybe we do, but what do we do with this modicum of knowledge gleaned through experience. Because at the end we settle for a retirement which in itself becomes another, maybe less strenuous and more comfortable treadmill as we eke out our resources until at last we can stop treading and rest.

Wednesday 10th October

In 1975 Dylan came up with a batch of songs, the mood, stark honesty and beauty of which has never been equaled, either by Dylan himself or many others.  Blood on the Tracks may or may not be specifically about his own life and falling out with his wife Sara, but it has some of the most wonderful lines ‘Like a corkscrew to my heart, ever since we’ve been apart.’  It feels of a piece also, the songs almost running into each other and being in the same vein.  He followed this with the almost as good ‘Desire’ and then took the whole show on the road with ‘The Rolling Thunder Review’ and made the film ‘Renaldo and Clara’ at the same time. Other albums followed ‘Street Legal’ and the religious trio ‘Slow Train Coming’ ‘Saved’ and ‘Shot of Love’ where though he might be singing about Jesus the songs were still brilliant. During the eighties his output became more patchy – ‘Infidels’ and ‘Oh Mercy’ were excellent but ‘Empire Burlesque’ and ‘Knocked Out Loaded’ were poor, but even here were half-buried gems like ‘Brownsville Girl’.   He is still knocking out albums, and they are still patchy.  But alongside this has been a series of releases which started with ‘Biograph’ and continued with at least nine albums, many of them doubles, and some entire live concerts called ‘The Bootleg series’.  And here the real genius of Bob Dylan becomes clear, the demo’s, the live acoustic versions, the myriad songs he discarded along the way show how almost everything he touched was gold.  He is impatient in the studio, and drops songs if they aren’t working and tries others. The rejects are often brilliant and one suspects there are still treasures to be uncovered.

He is by all accounts a cantankerous old sod – he was never exactly a nice person – and continues to perplex and frustrate and amaze and deceive in equal measure.  He has spent the last forty odd years weaving the mystery that is Bob Dylan, and trying to hide behind the mask he has created.  A true poet I suppose.

Tuesday 9th October

While not for a moment denigrating the experiences of the girls who were molested by Jimmy Saville, I am more and more certain that it was symptomatic of the whole adulation surrounding Pop-Stars, D.J.s and the whole Pop World at that time.  We all know about ‘Groupies’ and the sexual exploits (and exploitation) of Rock and Roll Stars.  Two things come to mind.  Did these pop stars ever ask the age of the girls who were queuing up to sleep with them, did they even ask if they wanted to actually have sex with them anyway.  How many of these teenage girls were just so obsessed by their heroes that they would do anything to meet them.  Imagine how excited and thankful they would be just to be asked backstage, imagine how honoured they would be if their idols actually chose them, and wanted to kiss them.  Would they have had the courage to have said no, even if they for one moment thought they might have the right to refuse?  And how many of these girls were underage?  We simply do not know.  Apparently the Beatles, teenagers themselves, had prodigious sexual appetites when they were in Hamburg and would sleep with girls in the breaks between their on-stage sessions.

Can you imagine that any of these Pop-Idols ever thought of asking their ages, or if it ever crossed their minds that they might be underage anyway, or that it might be wrong that they were taking advantage of teenage girls, underage or not.  After all wasn’t this every young man’s dream, to have young girls screaming at you, so besotted with the idea of you that they would have sex with you without question.

Obviously there is a difference between what Jimmy Saville is charged with, the deliberate procurement of known underage girls, and the general assumption that all young girls wanted to have sex with Pop stars.  A difference, but morally perhaps not that great a difference; it was the acceptance of girls being objects for the sexual gratification of these men that was wrong in itself, and at the time no-one, including many of the girls themselves, even questioned it. 

Monday 8th October

What a wonderful word, Octoberon.  Oh, and in case you were wondering, I didn’t make it up.  It is actually the title of the eighth album (October being the eighth month in the Roman calendar) by Barclay James Harvest.   And again, in case you were wondering – this will not be a review of that admittedly beautiful album, which came out in October of 1976 by the way.

But whenever we slip into the month of October this lovely word comes into my head.  It is of course an almagam of October and Oberon, king of the faieries in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’  We only studied three Shakespeare plays in my Grammar school years, or the only three I can remember were this one, Macbeth and The Tempest, and I always liked this one the best.  Macbeth – I could never quite get the hang of who was slaughtering who and why, and the Tempest – I think by then I was past caring about Shakespeare or any other schoolwork either.  So that left ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and I don’t really know why I liked it so much, perhaps the language – it is almost entirely written in verse, but maybe because of the surreal nature of the thing and the very fact that it was all a dream making it possibly the first really modern piece of literature ever written.

So, Octoberon, a word that I have come to almost accept as real – the magical dreamlike month of October, full of woodland mists and faieries, and also a great album.    

Sunday 7th October

As a child we came to Walton-on-the-Naze a few times.  We used to park the car and head for the beach which almost everyone does.  It is lovely yellow sand that when the tide is out goes on for ages.  The tide comes right up to the promenade wall so the sand is washed clean twice a day.  Of course you do need the weather and far too often, especially this year it has been cloudy, overcast or just raining.  The town runs just behind the beach, but hidden from view and a complete secret are the backwaters.  The strange geography of Walton means that it is almost completely surrounded by water.  The Naze itself is a bit of land rising quite high and jutting out past the town.  There is an eighteenth century brick tower where a fire used to be kept lit as a shipping navigation light, guiding boats into the river Orwell and the port of Ipswich.  But behind the Naze the land is low-lying and the tidal backwaters fill square mile after square mile of with an everchanging watery landscape, reaching right back and almost into the centre of the town itself.

Cut through the shops and away from the sea and the houses soon peter out and you come to the Town Hard and Yacht Basin.  Here, tucked away from the day-trippers is the peaceful and beautiful Mere, which at low tide is mud and grass but when the sea comes in transforms into an inland lake of breathtaking beauty.  Here there are all manner of boats tied up, from luxury schooners to tiny fishing smacks, and a couple of repair yards where the yachts are hauled up and put on stilts to be re-bottomed or painted.  There are rarely more than a handful of people around and on sunny days it is the best place in the world to just sit and watch the occasional boat come in or out of the lock gates.  When I bought my house here I barely knew of its existence though it was only a couple of hundred yards away.  And all the day-trippers and away-day train excursion makers and even a lot of the beach hut owners have no idea that if they just turn their backs on the sea and walk in the opposite direction what a gem they are missing.

Saturday 6th October

Party conferences are now such stage managed show pieces that they are almost not worth watching. Time was when there would be real controversy, with delegates arguing furiously, disagreeing with the executive, criticizing their own Government, voting against official policy and other misdemeanors.

It is now almost all about presenting the leader in the best light possible, glossing over the divisions and mistakes, presenting a roll-call of successes that are fanatically applauded by the bussed-in minions.

I attended two Labour conferences in the late seventies.  An uninformed observer would never have guessed that Callaghan and Healey up on the stage were actually running the country as they were ritually torn apart.  Of course those were the bad old days of real passion.  Who nowadays can really get excited by academy schools, or who is going to cut faster and further than the other.

So far we have had Nick Clegg with his maybe misfiring Apology and Ed Milliband with his One Nation Labour Party re-branding (a bit like Compassionate Conservatism without the blue tinge) exercise.  Surprisingly Milliband seems to have pulled off a bit of a coup, almost all observers have declared it was an excellent speech, and if it did no more than re-energise his own party it would have been a success, but it may just have reached a few Labour voters who deserted the party last time and may now come back.

David Cameron has maybe a much harder job to do.  He has to appease the right wing of his party who hate his dalliance with Clegg, while not upsetting those in the centre.  He has to try to turn what has been by almost universal acceptance a pretty poor last six months shambles into some sort of success.  He has to show us that even though the cuts are beginning to bite and will only get worse and that the wretched deficit is still yawningly wide it will all soon be worth it.  He has to defend the internal contradiction of ‘We are all in it together’ with the new 45p tax rate.  And he has to make us believe that he ‘Dave’ (not that old-Etonian toff) is the bloke to vote for next time.  A pretty tough task – let’s see how he does.

Friday 5th October

I have before suffered the dread of the blue screen and the physical dump of memory.  I have before suffered glitches in loading Windows, when the screen gets to a certain point and no further, and have learnt to open it in safe mode.  As a result of these and the fact that you just cannot afford to lose all your data I now have everything backed up in the clouds by Synchplicity, though how you would ever retrieve it is a mystery I have yet to understand.  Added to these I have in the past had my laptop stolen and tipped a cup of coffee over one too, so in a way I should be used to these little incidents.

Yesterday I took the laptop out of my bag as usual and attached the cable and pressed the on/off button.

Nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  Not even a glimmer of life, no little green led light indicating that the power was on.  Of course I checked the plug and tried it in a different socket, but still nothing.  I hadn’t been using it on battery, so that should have at least kicked in.  I took the battery out and tried to start it just with a cable, then with the battery and no cable at all.  Still nothing.  I rang a couple of people, who had never heard of such a thing.

I do have a spare laptop, but the thought of the hassle of downloading Sage, and Payroll and then all the data really depressed me.  I have done this before and it takes forever, and there is always something you miss along the way.

I went to bed a bit pissed off, and in that stupid way I just couldn’t switch my brain off. After half an hour of sleep evasion I decided to take it to a PCWorld in the morning, it might just be the cable or the battery faulty.  I came down to use the internet on the PC to find the nearest branch and just tried the laptop again.

It worked.  And has done since.  I can only hope and pray it continues.  Maybe the battery was faulty, and is now okay.  Who knows.  As every computer expert will tell you. “Have you tried switching it off and on again?”

Thursday 4th October

After the hiatus caused by the motorbike accident, when Dylan escaped from his audience for a while he released a series of strange and very mixed albums.  ‘John Wesley Harding’ was a quiet, almost biblical album full of drifters and saints and outlaws, hauntingly beautiful but a very different sounding Dylan.  Then came the sublime ‘Nashville Skyline’, a beautiful country album where his voice has never sounded sweeter.  ‘Self Portrait’ followed, where he seemed to be experimenting, singing old favourite songs and throwing the whole idea of fame back in our faces.  I love it and think it may actually be his lost masterpiece, but then, what do I know.  During much of ’67 he was holed up in Woodstock with the Band, and he later released the poor quality ‘Basement Tapes’ which had only a few good songs and a lot of dross on it.  A gap of three years then ‘New Morning’.  Was this an attempt at a comeback?  If so, it was a flop.  Some good songs though nothing really outstanding, and a lot of strange piano led numbers where you felt he wasn’t really trying.  You got the idea he might just be doing it for the money.  He was having difficult discussions with his record company who when he left them for one album released the truly awful ‘Dylan’ an album of covers far worse than on ‘Self Portrait’.  Then came a tour with The Band and an unexceptional live album followed by ‘Planet Waves’, a cold hard album which I have never really liked, despite a couple of reasonably good songs.

So what was happening to Dylan?  Was domestic happiness with Sara stifling his creativity?  Had he lost his muse, or was he just catching his breath, because within a year he was back with some of the best albums of his career.  This streak had nearly started with a 1973 album ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’, a mostly instrumental film soundtrack which included ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.’  Inexplicably it came out before ‘Planet Waves’, but is so hauntingly beautiful it should be lauded as one of his best.

So, a strange period, but none the less interesting for that.

Wednesday 3rd October

I have three times found myself separated unwillingly from one of my children, and no matter how much we think we suffer, the heartache, the desperate feelings of rejection and abject misery, believe me we are not the real victims.  Our children are.  I was lucky, mostly, and managed to have reasonable relations with most of my ex-partners, and ensured that I kept in contact with my children, almost.  But I have seen time and again parents who use their children as weapons, and aimed straight at the heart of their partners too.  Men in particular seem to be the victims here, not only do the courts invariably decide that the woman has custody, but also arrange things so that the biggest contribution to the split-up family the man can make is a financial one.  And one hears so often of the unreasonableness of the mother, denying access time and again on the flimsiest excuses; the child has a cold, or a clash of arrangements and the father has to lose out.  Too often these spiteful women use their own children as poisoned arrows to hurt even more the one they used to love.  But however hurtful this can be what can never be forgiven is those men who use the final weapon in their miserable arsenal.  What can never be understood is those men who, maybe in desperation but so mistakenly, take the lives of their children and often their own too. It is as if they are saying if I cannot have them then I will make sure that you don’t either.  Awful and unforgiveable, and ultimately the most selfish thing anyone could ever do.  And it seems it is almost contagious, as another tragedy unfolds in Hampshire maybe in some distorted mind elsewhere the final revenge is at least becoming thought about.  And how can we ever stop it, except by all of us stopping using our children as weapons.

Tuesday 2nd October

It is Monday morning, and added to the return to work, the cranking up of the engine, the dollar-making machine, it is raining.  So, what a nice surprise on exiting Green Park station to be offered a free newspaper.  I sometimes pick up the Metro, but usually flick through quickly and discard this rightwing drivel.  I like to read City A.M., or at least the editorial – it is quite handy to know how the enemy is thinking.  But today I was handed a copy if the ‘i’, the shorter snappier version of The Independent.  Time was, when I seemed to have the time to actually read ‘The Independent’ some days, but with the advent of internet news I usually catch up on the BBC news on line.  Sometimes on a Friday I get the ‘I’, not only because it is cheap at 20p but also because it is a damned good newspaper.  It manages to combine the spontaneity of a tabloid with the serious news analysis of a broadsheet.  And it has a ‘daily briefing’ to give you a taster for more lengthy articles on pages following, so if you are in a hurry you can scan these little précis, and decide whether to read a bit more or not.

The problem for all newspapers is not only that internet and TV news is all around us, but distribution.  The fact that you have to go to a newsagent and actually decide to buy the paper every day is a real bind.  The Evening Standard is now given away free every night, and seems to be a success; presumably selling enough advertising to pay for the journalists and printing costs.   Who knows maybe this will be the way forward for all papers, I cannot see internet subscription as being a real winner, people have gotten used to free news for too long now.  If they can make enough from advertising then giving the paper away is the only long-term solution.  Or maybe, daft idea that this may be, a voluntary contribution box next to a pile of free newspapers.  Yes, it is a stupid idea.  Still at least it was an idea.