peterdavey2

If we move towards eternity

eternity is not

here, the blaze of finches’ wings,

of thistledown

If we move towards eternity,

eternity is not within

each stone, each drifting seed

nor turn of tide and time, the seasons

turning ever on themselves

If we move towards eternity

eternity does not endow

the planet’s poise, the slow majestic round

of sun and moon

If we move towards eternity

eternity is not within

each moment we are here

and now

ourselves

This poem is read by Sonia Vilimova at http://www.soundcloud.com/sona-vilimova

It always amuses me when I hear the expression ‘He’s an animal in bed’ (suggesting a violent passion bordering on savagery) since animals, in my experience, are usually rather half-hearted when it comes to sex. I mean they do it, obviously, or the planet wouldn’t be teeming with life the way it is, but to them it’s just a response to an urge – like crapping. They don’t waste hours building up to it or winding down from it, they don’t write poetry or make avant garde movies about it or anxiously discuss with their counsellors whether they’re attaining the full sunburst of orgasmic ecstasy they deserve. They just do it and then get back to eating. Now eating, that’s another story – that they really do throw their hearts and souls into, especially dogs.

Having been born and raised on a farm I’ve seen more bonking than your most seasoned hardcore cameraman. I’ve seen them all at it – cats, dogs, horses, cows, goats, hens, ducks, geese, turkeys – not to mention the wildlife merrily doing it in the trees and hedgerows all around us. I even had a pet bantam called Basil who used to do it with my slippers. And always the same story.

Take bulls for example. Throughout history the bull has been the great symbol of machismo – in art, in literature, in religion – the monstrous, muscle-bound embodiment of the primordial male force. Not a bit of it. I’ve seen bulls in action and I can tell you it’s about as sexy as watching repeats of Last of the Summer Wine. First he stands and stares at the cow in a bemused fashion, issuing a few perfunctory snorts (for effect), she feigning (or maybe not feigning) total indifference. Then he moves around the back and stares at her arse, to which she responds either with more indifference or an encouraging waggle of the tail. Finally, after sniffing her rather in the way one might sniff a bottle of milk to see if it’s gone off, he hops aboard and you can practically hear him thinking, ‘Oh God, I suppose I’d better get this over with’. Then he hops off again and surveys his audience – cowman, farmer, farmer’s wife and any other curious onlookers – as if to say, ‘Are you happy now?’

One exception to this norm was our magnificent Muscovy drake called Henry who had 3 (not 6) wives but who really was a demanding old tyrant. My mother, being a kind person, used to visit the local retirement home for ‘distressed gentlefolk’ and take a gang of about five old ladies shopping once a week. They became close friends, naturally, and one summer’s day she invited them all to tea. Now Henry had a habit – while peacefully grazing with his harem on the lawn – of suddenly getting the urge and making a bee-line for whichever wife happened to be nearest. Her response was to run for cover (I use the term ‘run’ in its loosest sense, since running to a Muscovy is just a kind of enhanced waddle) and the cover – on this occasion – was the front door of the house which stood open onto the hall and another open door leading to the drawing room where my mother was entertaining the ladies to tea and scones.  Throwing caution to the wind, the enflamed Henry charged in after her and the ladies were treated to a bit of furious ducky fornication on the fireside rug. Having had his wicked way Henry suddenly became disorientated, panicked and scarpered leaving his wife lying flat on her back, webbed feet waving in the air, savouring the moment with a smile on her bill that can only be described as embarrassingly post-coital. She eventually got up and waddled nonchalantly out, quietly quacking and glancing around as if to say, ‘What?’

I can’t remember my mother’s reaction to this incident but knowing her she probably roared with laughter (she was always laughing, bless her) then offered the ladies a refill.

Sex, as I remember it down on the farm, was divided into official sex and unofficial sex. Official sex was that approved and supervised by humans – the pedigree dog with the appointed bitch, the mare with the stallion of choice etc. etc. And then there was unofficial sex which was usually a lot more fun and a lot more successful. The leading exponents of unofficial sex were the cats whom I’ve always regarded as the hippies of the animal kingdom, with their freewheeling lifestyle and contempt for authority. Their sex life was so unofficial you seldom even saw it happening – the queen would simply slink out after supper and a few hours later you’d be woken by a lot of yowling from some rooftop. Then everything would fall silent while they smoked a quick joint and, lo and behold, a few weeks later you’d come upon a clutch of newborn kittens crawling blindly around in an impromptu nest in some dirty laundry. I don’t remember our cats ever even looking pregnant – they seemed to carry their bumps as discreetly as the Duchess of Cambridge even though, unlike her, they were often carrying five or six offspring. 

Our dogs didn’t seem to enjoy quite the same laidback lifestyle – maybe because they were more closely allied to us humans and didn’t possess quite the same wild and independent spirit. Nonetheless I vividly remember the nightmare when one of the bitches was ‘on heat’ – and since we had four this seemed to be more or less all the time. My mother would vainly implore us to keep the doors shut but in a ramshackle old farmhouse with three boys, various lodgers, a petulant au pair and a mad old woman called Lammy who seemed to have taken up residence, keeping the doors shut was a bit of a fantasy. Besides, you only had to open a door a crack for a determined bitch to barge through and a minute later she’d be out on the lawn glued arse-to-arse to one of the mangy old mongrels who spent their lives roaming the neighbourhood in search of a bit of totty.

Of course, no one likes to have their sex life arranged for them – we like it to happen organically through our own choices and impulses – and I guess animals are the same. I remember a few years ago on a walk with our border terrier Harry, he met a gorgeous little border bitch with whom he struck up an instant friendship – in fact it was more than that, there was serious chemistry there. Her owner – a giant of a man covered in tattoos – wanted to breed from her and thought Harry would make the perfect sire – he even had a pedigree buried in some bottom drawer. We exchanged numbers and, sure enough, when the time was ripe, he turned up with his wife and three small children, we made coffee, set the young lovers together in a suitable arena then waited with bated breath for things to happen! Nothing did. Whatever chemistry had been fired up on that walk had clearly vanished  – Harry gazed at her and then at us with the look of someone who’s agreed to do a skydive for charity but then, stuck in the open door of the aircraft, wonders what the hell they’ve got themselves into. And the bitch was equally unenthused. We waited for them to ‘get to know each other’. And waited. And waited. We separated them, made more coffee and awkward conversation, put them back together again. Still nothing. In the end the tattooed man and his clan departed, disappointed and politely hiding their disgruntlement. At least they hadn’t been charged for this fiasco – we were only amateur pimps.     

I don’t want to linger on this rather tacky subject but I will just mention the ritual of the ‘goat-mating’. We only had a few goats – more as pets than anything – the matriarch being a cantankerous old nanny called Bambi who bore no resemblance whatsoever to her on-screen namesake and who pioneered political incorrectness by only ever butting women – jolly hard and just where they were least expecting it. Various other nannies comprised our little herd – some were Bambi’s offspring and others bought in, and we developed a bit of nonsense by giving them all names beginning with ‘B’ – Bonny, Betty, Babsy, Binny, (it became a bit of a strain after a while) and every so often they had to visit Billy. The goat mating was a major outing involving the whole family and anyone else who wanted to come along for the ride (pardon the pun), my mother filling thermos flasks and making mountains of sandwiches. We had an enormous old shooting-brake called a Lee Francis (a name familiar only to the most vintage of vintage car enthusiasts) – a kind of car equivalent of those wonky half-timbered houses you find in the back streets of York or Chester – and, though it would turn heads nowadays, I remember as a child being distinctly embarrassed by it. We would all pile into this monster, my father at the wheel and the on-heat nanny in the back where she would sit and watch the world go by. The billy belonged to a wealthy lady called Mrs. Tanner who owned a very swish farm about 20 miles away (20 miles was an epic journey in those days) and we’d stop en route to allow our blushing bride to have a pee (if she hadn’t already done it in the car) and stretch her legs while we had our picnic. The billy was the size of a moose and magnificently horned and bearded and stank like a piece of very old Camembert. However, unlike Harry, he always did his job efficiently and our nanny would be totally chilled and relaxed on the way home, lying in the back with a look of complete satisfaction with the day’s proceedings. In my mind she’s smoking a cigarette.

Although I was clearly not shielded from the raw realities of reproduction as a child, there was one thing that always mystified me. All these creatures – be they winged, webbed, horned, hoofed or bearded – all seemed to reproduce in the same rather disgusting fashion and yet we humans only had to get dressed up in beautiful clothes, exchange rings and spout some vows in front of a smiling vicar then drink champagne and eat a very large cake. How on Earth did that work? I remember wondering. The strange thing was that in spite of the copious copulation going on all around us, my mother was always acutely embarrassed by human sexuality and never discussed it. As to my father, he just lived in a world of his own and was happy to leave everything to her. It was my elder brother Dave – a man of the world by eleven – who finally disabused me, though his explanation was so fraught with anatomical inaccuracies it left me even more confused – not to say traumatised. It wasn’t until sex education at school (at the now incredibly advanced age of 14) that the truth was finally revealed to me clearly and graphically by our biology teacher using chalk, a blackboard and a talent for horribly accurate drawing. He was a short, spherical, balding man in his fifties (I won’t mention his name in case he’s still alive and reading this – though that’s highly unlikely) but I do vividly remember him saying, ‘When you meet the girl of your dreams and fall in love, you’ll find that all other women recede into the background and no longer attract you.’ Even then I remember thinking ‘Yeah right’ (or its 1964 equivalent) but then he horrified us all by adding, ‘My dear wife Elizabeth is the only woman in the world who can give me an erection.’  My thoughts at the time were exactly as they are now, looking back to that dim and distant moment: too much information.  

Okay, you’re thinking, enough has been said about Margaret Thatcher and you’re probably right. However, following David Cameron’s controversial (and hastily qualified) assertion that ‘we are all Thatcherites now’ it occurred to me that most people under the age of 30 don’t have a clue who Thatcher was nor why, nearly 23 years after her departure from Number Ten, she is still capable of so dividing the nation: why for some she’s a kind of latter-day Joan of Arc while for others the most evil woman since Sauron’s grandmother. So, in the unlikely event that any young people are reading this, switch off your Smartphones, take your earphones out of your lugholes and listen while I tell you a story.

Once upon a time, long long ago (even before The Apprentice or The X Factor) a strange force prevailed in the land called Socialism. This involved all kinds of really whacky ideas like society caring for the poor, the sick, the elderly and disabled and those suffering abuse, discrimination or injustice at work or in society at large. In politics it took the form of the Labour Party (not to be confused with the current Labour Party which is just another version of the Tory Party) and also in archaic institutions called Trade Unions. The two were closely linked, though the link was often strained as the unions were immensely powerful, largely undemocratic and had some annoying habits like refusing to empty your dustbin or switching off all the lights just when you were settling down to have tea and watch The Magic Roundabout. Unlike today’s slick offerings, the Labour Party in those days spawned Prime Ministers who wore duffle coats, had bushy eyebrows and did cosy thinks like smoke a pipe. They even did a fairly good job of seeming sincere. 

Now you may have heard from your pot-smoking grandparents that the 60s (the 1960s that is) were quite fun, what with free love and everyone shoving flowers in their hair, but when we got to the 70s everything frankly turned a bit crap. Fashions were a disaster for a start (men took to wearing platform heels and weird things on their heads called “mullets”) and, if that wasn’t bad enough, the Middle-Eastern oil-producing nations thought it would be fun to band together and place an embargo on oil supplies. I won’t go into the reasons now but the bottom line was that oil became extremely scarce and the price went through the roof, thus making life extremely hard for anyone who used oil – i.e. everybody. Inflation also went through the roof as a result, life became drab, difficult and depressing and the unions responded by demanding more and more for their members and going on strike if they didn’t get it. By the end of the decade the country, to be honest, looked like Mordor on a wet Sunday.

But then a humble grocer’s daughter from Grantham in Lincolnshire came to the rescue riding on a white charger called Geoffrey and brandishing a feather duster.  Her name was Maggie Thatcher and, though she came from a humble background, she had been taught to talk posh. She came armed with a number of firm principles (and an amazing collection of handbags), the main one being that everyone should stand on their own two feet, be totally and utterly selfish (sorry, self-sufficient) and not expect any help from the state.  The task she set herself was nothing less than to knock the country back into shape while still finding time to visit the hairdresser four times a day. She regarded the unions as a cancer and the most reliable way to get rid of a cancer, as every idiot knows, is to kill the patient – which was what she proceeded to do. Her strategy was called ‘Monetarism’ which basically meant choking off the money supply by jacking interest rates up so high that no one could afford to invest in anything. It killed off the unions all right but it also killed off everything else, including British industry. Unemployment soared to record levels and fine old companies involved in manufacturing and heavy industry went to the wall on a daily basis. Whole communities, especially in the north of England, had the life knocked right out of them and Maggie became – for some reason she could never quite fathom – rather unpopular.

But then she had an amazing stroke of luck. One grey April morning in 1982, the British nation woke up to find it was at war – or was about to be. The Argentinians had invaded the Falkland Islands which was British sovereign territory. The nation’s response to this terrible news was to wonder why the Argentinians should lay claim to a group of islands somewhere off the Outer Hebrides but then they dug out their old Philips School Atlases (Google Maps wasn’t around in those days) and discovered, to their amazement, that the Falkland were actually thousands of miles away in the South Atlantic about 600 miles off the Argentine coast. Suddenly everything made sense.

Various half-arsed diplomatic efforts were made by the Americans to persuade the Argentinians to shift but they were having none of it and nor, truth be told, was Maggie. She wanted this war, she needed this war and by golly she was going to have this war! Suddenly seeing herself as Churchill, Nelson and Queen Elizabeth I all rolled into one, she sent an Armada to the south Atlantic to drive those beastly Argies out. For a few days, some, at least, of the British people were distracted from their misery and went down to Portsmouth to wave little union jacks as a bunch of battleships, aircraft carriers and knackered old liners requisitioned as troopships steamed off into the sunset (well, the figurative sunset – the actual sunset was in the other direction) to prove that Britannia still ruled the waves.

Of course not everyone bought into this jingoistic spirit. The war divided the nation as wars always do but most took the view that Maggie was right to win back the Falklands. The great British Empire on which the sun never set may have shrunk to the size of your average Sainsbury’s car park but it was still British, it was still inhabited by British people who took tea in the afternoons and posted their letters in red letter boxes and to abandon them to all that dodgy corned beef and tapas would have been unpardonable. The sinking of the General Belgrano was regrettably a war crime but hey! What’s the odd war crime between friends? Tony Blair, Saddam Hussein, Churchill – we’ve all done it. The important thing was that the Union Jack was once again flying over Port Stanley – the island’s capital and largest town (well, only town) – and, apart from the odd exploding sheep, normal life had been pretty much restored.  

For a while Maggie was back on top – winning  a landslide victory in 1983 – but the patriotic fervour couldn’t last forever. The country was still in a frightful mess and those pesky trade unions, it turned out, hadn’t been completely killed off after all. One of the most powerful – The National Union of Miners – was growing ever more furious as The Coal Board (i.e. Maggie) kept shutting down pits and buying in cheap, nasty coal from Transylvania or wherever. In 1984 the miners went on strike under the NUM’s fiery young leader Arthur Scargill – proud winner of the All Yorkshire Worst Haircut Competition. The strike dragged on for almost a year, causing untold misery and hardship and finally the miners were forced to back down. Maggie saw this as a victory comparable to the Falklands only this time the enemy was ‘within’. Not everyone saw it like that.  

Maggie knew she had to do something to jolly things up a bit, to try to restore ‘The Falklands Spirit’ and her somewhat tarnished image. An improvement in the economy would certainly help, so she had the brilliant idea of climbing up into the loft of Number Ten to see if she could find any old bits of junk she could sell. Imagine her delight and astonishment when she discovered not junk but a hoard of really beautiful stuff left behind by former Labour governments – the Gas Board, The Electricity Board, the Water Board, British Railways, bus companies, council houses… there was piles of the stuff! Okay, it all looked a bit old and dusty and unloved but with a good polish it could be worth a fortune!

The technical term is Privatisation and it works something like this: You go on holiday and leave your dog with a neighbour, then you come back, go to collect your dog and find your neighbour’s sold him. That, in a nutshell, is privatisation and the present Government are still doing it, only now they call it ‘mutualisation’ to make it sound a bit less Thatchery. Maggie, after all, was only a tenant in Number 10 – as are all Prime Ministers – and what was in the loft wasn’t hers to sell – it belonged to you and me (or, at least, your parents and me).

Never one to be fazed by such minor technicalities, Maggie got out the Brasso, rolled up her sleeves and set to work! And as she did so, it began to dawn on her that all this stuff was so valuable she could afford to flog it off really cheaply and still make a whacking great profit. So she pitched it at a price that would make it accessible to ordinary people – thus promoting the brilliant idea that ordinary people could have a crack at owning shares – formerly the domain of banks and unit trusts and people living in places like Downton Abbey with a private phone line to their stockbroker. A huge television campaign was launched involving a shady character called Sid who never actually appeared but seemed the sort of guy who might live in a cardboard box under a bridge and pester passers-by with requests like, ‘Spare a quid for a cup of tea and a few British Gas shares, Guvnor?’

Now the really cunning part was that as soon as these shiny new companies were floated on the stock market, the share price would go whizzing up towards its true value, the Sids of this world would sell for a quick profit to the banks, unit trusts and the guy living in Downton Abbey (which was where Maggie wanted them to be all along) and even they would be getting them at a knockdown price. She (sorry, the Exhequer) would have made a fortune and a proportion at least of the British people would momentarily have the thrill of feeling like Gordon Gekko. Win Win! Maggie made around 30 billion quid from selling public utilities and another 20 or so from council houses (home ownership being another of her political convictions which, like all her political convictions, also happened to be a nice little earner!) Now 50 billion quid may sound to you like the average Man United transfer fee or One Direction’s weekly paycheque, but in those days it was a lot of money. And if this wasn’t brilliant enough, money was starting to flow in from other sources. Enough oil had been discovered under the North Sea to power Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Hummer for a whole week and Maggie was making a fortune selling drilling rights to American oilmen in big hats. All in all, the accounts were looking so rosy that one could almost be forgiven for thinking the country was back on its feet.

It was enough to win her yet another term of office but then she started to get just a teeny bit carried away. IT was transforming global financial markets and Maggie thought it would be a brilliant idea to get out her old feather duster and whisk away all those annoying little rules and regulations which had been put in place for boring reasons like preventing the world economy going into meltdown. Nothing like that could possibly happen anyway, not now that she was in charge and everything was great! Suddenly all those wideboys who’d been making a few quid selling dodgy video recorders to gullible old ladies in Camden market were round the corner in the City selling dodgy options, bonds and securities to one another. Films and telly dramas of the time frequently featured scenes of trading rooms with lots of fit young guys in shirtsleeves and braces – their hair slicked back with tons of Brylcreem – frantically waving their arms about, swearing into telephones or gazing at screens covered with brightly coloured graphs and charts and numbers that looked so complicated they might have been controlling a mission to Mars. All they were actually doing was making loads of money and not – as Maggie would have had you believe – for the country but for themselves.  

People starting coining the term ‘Thatcherism’, calling Maggie our greatest peacetime Prime Minister of all time etc. etc. and I’m afraid it all started to go to her head. Ever since the Falklands War she had identified herself with Queen Elizabeth I but now she seemed convinced she actually was that great Tudor monarch. She took to wearing flowing gowns and lacy ruffs and using the royal ‘We’ and whenever confronted with a puddle she would insist that her Defence Secretary Michael Heseltine (nicknamed ‘Tarzan’ due to his beautiful flowing hair and amazing pecs) should bow down and spread his golden tresses over it to prevent her heels getting wet. Another visionary (i.e. mad) idea she had at this time was to replace the old system of household rates with the Poll Tax. This would be levied not only on her beloved homeowners but on everybody in the land – even our old friend Sid who, after a brief and disastrous career in the stock market, was back in his cardboard box under the bridge. The proposed tax seemed so unfair and was so unpopular it caused riots in the streets and Maggie had to back down. In spite of this she became ever more ‘Presidential’ (i.e. bossy, autocratic and generally dotty) in her style of government and finally her Cabinet colleagues had had enough of her. It was actually Tarzan himself (no doubt sick and tired of the havoc those puddles were wreaking on his lovely hair) who formally challenged her leadership. Maggie, who’d assumed she would despatch the treacherous Tarzan with one flick of her feather duster, only just squeaked through the first ballot – not winning a sufficient majority to retain office – and so the contest had to go to a second ballot. Before this happened, however, Maggie – feeling, like Julius Caesar, betrayed and politically assassinated by her closest allies – suddenly marched out of Number Ten during a telly broadcast and announced to an astonished nation that she was leaving and taking the curtains. Her abrupt departure left a bit of a power vacuum and the cabinet finally plumped for a grey floppy thing called John Major whose main qualification was that he wasn’t Maggie Thatcher. His novel method of dealing with the problems and crises she had left behind her was to lock himself in the loo and hope they’d go away. Nonetheless, he soldiered on for nearly seven years until defeated by New Labour and the fabulous Tony Blair. He it was who rehoisted the old Socialist flag then decided it’d make a really cool tee-shirt in which he could be papped while relaxing with his wife and kids on various tropical islands owned by his party donors.   

So that, for those of you who are still awake, is the story of Maggie Thatcher. It’s a bit sketchy I know – I couldn’t possibly include every detail – her links to various hunky guys like Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev and General Pinochet for example – but hopefully you’ve got the gist. And even though it may all seem very remote and long ago to you, the fruits of Maggie’s labours can still be seen all around us today – in double dips recessions, record deficit levels, spending cuts, toxic debt, bailed out banks and banker’s ‘modest’ bonuses. Of course, Maggie didn’t achieve all these wonderful things alone but she certainly played her part. And even though she is no longer with us, even though she has been taken from us, the spirit of that shy little grocer’s daughter who became our greatest peacetime leader and first woman Prime Minister lives on.  

Let us pray.

IN AN ANCIENT WOOD ON FAWLEY DOWN

Sunlight only

penetrates, transforms

this tangled mound of thorns

the wild clematis

One leaf

bears all the sun’s radiance

bears all the shadows of the earth

about itself

LUNAR ECLIPSE

Last night I walked on empty hills

and saw the full moon’s slow eclipse

all human life was held within

the shape that shaped that bloodred shadow

on the moon’s face

These poems are read by Sonia Vilimova at http://www.soundcloud.com/sona-vilimova

    The lorry pulled in at the truck stop to let Patrick off. It had carried him for over seventy miles but now it was heading north and Patrick wanted to head south-west. The driver – a stocky, ginger-haired lad and an Arsenal supporter – had talked football for most of the journey, undeterred by the obvious fact that the tall, skinny young hitchhiker he had picked up near Reading knew nothing about the subject and had frequently nodded off to sleep. They bid each other a cheery farewell.

    Patrick stood alone on the wide concrete apron and watched the lorry return to the highway and disappear. He gazed around – just another service station like millions of others all over the world. Ranks of lorries parked in the distance, a few cars. A sweet wrapper scratching across the concrete in the wind.

    The sun was a white disc just leavening the pale sky but the air was cold – not a day for sitting outside. On the grass the long wooden tables with integral benches where families picnicked in summer on their way to the coast were now deserted. Or almost deserted. As he entered the plate glass doors of the café Patrick caught sight of a solitary girl hunched over a cigarette and a cardboard cup of Costa coffee. He couldn’t make out her face but there was something about her body language that seemed so unbearably sad.

    Having purchased an overpriced coffee of his own, Patrick went back outside, partly because he wanted a cigarette himself. The girl had not moved, so he went and settled himself on the bench across the table from her.

    “Hi.”

    She did not respond at first. Then she said, “Fuck off.”

    Patrick glanced at her. She was slight, pale and thin, with small, delicate features, and her bob of rather floppy hair was dyed henna. She had three rings spaced up her left ear and a silver stud in her nostril.

    “Bit cold for sitting out, isn’t it?” he remarked.

    “You can’t smoke inside. I needed a fag more than I needed warmth.”

    “Yeah, fucking nanny state regulations. As if they give a shit whether you or I or anyone else gets cancer. They just don’t want to have to pay for our treatment.”

    Patrick’s political comment invoked the same silence as his original greeting. He got out his tobacco pouch and packet of papers, laid them out on the table and proceeded to make himself a roll-up.  

    “Where are you headed?” he asked as he carefully sprinkled a tiny trail of tobacco along his paper.

    “Nowhere.”

    “Well, that’s a coincidence, I’m going there myself. How are you travelling?”

    “In my Porsche. How do you think I’m fucking travelling?” 

    “Girls shouldn’t hitch on their own nowadays. It’s too dangerous.”

    “What are you, my Dad all of a sudden?”

    “No. Just stating a fact.”

    “Anyway, I wasn’t on my own. I was with a guy, but he fucked off and left me.”

    “I’m sorry.”

    “So am I. The bastard took all my money – what was left of it. I spent my last quid on this coffee.”

    “Well, this is your lucky day. I’ve got money. I’m loaded.”

    The girl grunted. “Yeah, and the Pope’s a fucking catholic.”

    Patrick looked puzzled. “But… the Pope is a fucking catholic, isn’t he? Or have I missed something?”

    “I know that. It was a joke.”

    “Oh, right. Sorry. Anyway, I’ll prove it to you if you don’t believe me.”

    The girl looked up and for the first time seemed faintly interested in him – or, at least, in the creased and weathered but promisingly chubby wallet he had fished out of his pocket. He opened it and held it out to her and she leant forward and peered at the upper edge of a neat, dense wad of blue and orange notes.

    “Jesus, you have too! What did you do? Rob a bank?”

    “No, I was staying with a friend. This old guy who picked me up hitching. Divorced. He let me crash at his place for a while – let me do gardening and stuff to earn my keep – and when I left he gave me a present.”

    “I won’t ask what you had to do to earn it!”

    Patrick laughed. “No, it was nothing like that. He was a good bloke. When I left he said, ‘Look, Patrick, I’m not rich, but I’m not poor either. I’m comfortable… and I don’t have any dependents. So I’m going to give you five thousand pounds on condition that you use it to make something out of your fucking useless disaster of a life – he didn’t use those exact words but that was the gist – get yourself somewhere proper to live, he said. Get some sort of training. Get a skill – you could become a landscape gardener, you’d be good at that. And take responsibility… for something. Or someone. Or even just for yourself.”

    “I wish I had a few friends like that!” she snorted.

    Patrick placed his stringy, sagging cigarette in his mouth and lit it. The sight of it caused the first twitch of a smile on her lips.

    “So, this guy who took your money?” he asked, “was he your boyfriend?”

    “No, just some loser I hooked up with. He needed drugs.”

    “So that explains why he took your money. Money you needed for drugs.”

    “No, I don’t do drugs any more. I’m clean.”

    “So you’ve done rehab?”

    “Yep.”

    “So… you’ve been to hell and back.”

    She was silent for a moment, then murmured, “Yeah. I’ve been to hell and back.”

    “But at least you’re back.”

    “I guess.”

    “How long were you doing drugs?”

    “I started shooting up when I was fifteen. My parents wanted me to go into rehab but I only agreed to do it if they let me live away from home without going totally apeshit. I put on a good show – made out I was a responsible young lady who was in command of her life. Got a flat-share. I even went to college for a couple of terms.”   

    “And how old are you now?”

    “Seventeen.”

    “And you’re wondering why you bothered? Getting clean, I mean.”

    “Something like that.”

    They both lapsed into silence for a while. 

    “I’m Patrick, by the way” he said, extending his hand.

    The girl looked at the hand for a moment, then reached out and shook it limply. “Kate.”

    Patrick looked up. Beyond the main road, open farmland stretched away and upwards into a wide sweep of downs. He allowed his eye to follow their pure, clean horizon until it reached a range of sunlit hills so far in the distance it was barely distinguishable from the sky.

    “You fancy going to Cornwall, Kate?” he said.

    “Why? What’s in Cornwall?”

    “My uncle. Uncle Jim. He’s got this little farm down there… well, it’s not really a farm, more of a smallholding. Just a few acres.”

    The girl looked wary. “You mean… uncle as in… parents’ brother?”

    “Nah, he’s not really my uncle, he’s just this old bugger I’ve known for years so I think of him as my uncle. He’s got a big bushy beard and wears a little hat, and you can hang out with him as long as you want, free of charge. And you don’t have to work – I mean, you can work if you want to – in the veggie garden or feeding the ducks and goats and stuff, if you feel like it. Or you can just lie in the hammock under the apple tree and go to sleep. Jim’s cool with whatever you want to do.”

    “It sounds okay.”

    “It is. It’s more than okay.”

    “So, will this Uncle Jim of yours mind me tagging along?”

    “No, of course not! He’ll love you! He loves everybody. And he doesn’t judge people.”   

    The girl was silent for a moment and then it was as though a switch had been thrown inside her. Her shoulders began to tremble. She lowered her face and Patrick could see tears streaming down her cheeks. She shook her head helplessly from side to side. “Oh… fuck.”

    He reached out and took her hand. “Hey, Kate. Don’t cry. It’s okay.”

    Her tiny white hand clung to his as thought she were drowning and he was a piece of driftwood. “I just get so fucking scared, Patrick.”

    “I know. But stick with me and you won’t have to be scared ever again. I’ll look after you, Kate. I promise.”

    She looked up at him, sniffed loudly and dragged a tear out of her eye with her fingertips.

    “Why would you do that? You don’t even know me.”

    “I do. I know you.”

In the shelter of the firs

a hiss of seas ascending into waves

rough wood and cones and needles sliding on the sky

a high

burnishing of sun

This and other poems by me are narrated by the wonderful audio artist Sonia Vilimova at soundcloud.com/sona-vilimova

Cars. We can’t live with them and we can’t live without them. Or can we? No we can’t is the short answer, unless you happen to live on a rock in the South Pacific or in a Buddhist monastery on a mountaintop or (even more unlikely) on a regular, reliable bus route. Whether we like it or not, those carbon monoxide-farting little bombs on wheels with a scented pine-tree slung from the rear-view mirror and mood-music oozing out of the dashboard determine every aspect of our lives – where we live, our work, our education, our shopping, our leisure and entertainment, even, very often, the final resting place of our mortal coil. Even our attempts to ‘get away from it all’ (i.e. get away from all the cars) are dependent, ironically enough, upon the car. Love them or hate them, one thing’s for sure – we’re stuck with them.

Yet, in spite of all that, we take them surprisingly for granted until they go wrong or we’re faced with the tiresome chore of having to buy a new one. We expect them to be waiting obediently for us in the driveway and to spring into action the moment we turn them on – like the cooker or the washing machine or the computer. And yet, when you stop and think about it, our relationship with our car is a very strange one, psychologically. Its interior is a little part of ourselves or, at least, of our world. We establish our personality on it the way we do on our living room. If you’re a slob like me, it’s interior resembles that of a dustbin whereas if you’re one of those fastidious types who likes everything neatly stowed in its place and your environment niffing of flowers or ocean breezes, the opposite is true. And, as with our homes, our cars become expressions of our personality. We place stickers in the rear window to announce to the world the things it really needs to know, like the fact that we’ve given our life to Jesus or been to AltonTowers. Young couples stick up ‘Baby on Board’ or ‘Small Person on Board’ stickers (a lady I knew once bought one of these for her husband, who stood 5’ 4” in his socks, but he didn’t really appreciate the joke) and, most vomit-inducing of all, ‘Little Princess on Board’. These signs are ostensibly to warn other drivers to exercise the utmost caution around their precious progeny but the real agenda is to tell the world that she’s done her bit for procreation and that he, contrary to malicious gossip, isn’t firing blanks. Some try to cheer everyone up by positioning a cuddly toy – a small dog, for example – in the rear window, its head swaying hopelessly as it gazes soulfully out on the utter futility of all human endeavour.      

Discussions about cars and psychology invariably lead back to the old cliché about them being expressions of our sexuality but I think that is overdone or, at least, oversimplified. Okay, an E-type Jag with its thundering 4.5 litre six cylinder V-8 engine does look a bit like a prick (as does its driver, especially when wearing one of those caps) and those smiley, curvy little red or pink hybrids do bear an embarrassing resemblance to an enthused vagina, but, that said, most cars are pretty androgynous. And, let’s face it, you don’t often see a muscle-bound Terrano having its wicked way with a flirtatious little Ford Kaa (except maybe in the later work of Nouvelle Vague director Jean-Luc Godard) so the metaphor has its limitations. What I think is more accurate is that our car is a magnification of our whole personality – our hopes and dreams as well as our fears and anxieties and neuroses, because we are taking that little bit of ourselves out into the big wide world where it’s going to be tested and come under threat.

We don’t analyse all this while we’re actually driving, of course, we’re just aware that all our emotions are abnormally heightened. Questions which seem fairly academic back in the comfort of home suddenly assume epic proportions: Will I get to the patisserie before they shut and, if not, will my family survive without their pains au chocolat? Will I get to the hairdresser in time for my appointment and, if not, will they give it to someone else? Will I be late picking up my daughter from school and, if so, will she be abducted into white slavery by some Mercedes with tinted windows at the gates so I’ll never see her again and have to spend the rest of my life tortured with guilt while crying over that little photo of her dressed as a postbox for the Queen’s Jubilee? The delay caused by roadworks, diversions, a tractor, an old lady crossing the road on a zimmer frame, a teenager failing their driving test by stalling on the three-point turn threaten to derail our entire universe, and of course, they’ve all been maliciously engineered by fate purely and simply for that purpose.  

However, when we are faced with a real threat, one which doesn’t just inconvenience us but seems to blow our entire future (or, at least, our afternoon) clean out of the water, our frustrated fury gives way to a something even more primeval – a kind of grim survival instinct. I remember once being stuck on the M25 while driving back from Heathrow. Okay, hold-ups on the M25, they happen, they’re a pain in the arse but they usually clear after a few minutes. This one didn’t. People were turning their engines off to save petrol, they were getting out and gazing into the distance to try and ascertain what was going on only to discern a grimy mist and some ominous flashing lights. My sole preoccupation, however, was not the cause of the hold-up nor whether I was ever going to see my beloved home and family again, but my bladder. Why, oh why, did I have that gigantic (and overpriced) cup of Costa Coffee at the airport? And why did I have to be stuck in one of those sections with twenty-foot sound baffles rather than those beautifully landscaped banks designed to encourage voles and kestrels and middle-aged men with enlarged prostates? Suddenly I wished those jokey conversations I’d had with my wife about making our fortune inventing a kind of in-flight urination system had born some actual fruit. I began eyeing the empty Volvic bottle on the passenger seat and wondering if it was man enough for the job and deciding it wasn’t. The first principle of urination, after all, is never start what you can’t see your way to finishing, because it’s nigh on impossible (not to mention deeply frustrating) to have to jam on the brakes half way due to receptacle deficiency. So in the end I found myself thinking the unthinkable.

I was reminded of a conundrum (double flash-back here, bad idea for a writer) which I’d discussed many years earlier with my brother. It went like this: If you’re in the unlikely situation of bathing nude in a swimming pool and a party of strangers suddenly turns up, do you put your hands over your face or over your willy? (The answer, I suppose, will depend to some extent on the size of your face). This rather pointless debate was based on the premise that it doesn’t matter how embarrassing a situation is if it cannot be linked in any way to the real you. This was how I applied the principle to my motorway crisis. If I went and relieved myself against that sound baffle in full view of twenty thousand throbbing cars each carrying an average of two occupants, it wouldn’t matter if, to those forty thousand pairs of eyes I was a nobody, not somebody to whom they could attach an identity, about whom they could say, “Oh look, there’s Mr. Davey taking a piss!” This was what I told myself when I finally plucked up the courage to get out of the car and go and perform the dastardly deed. The principle didn’t really hold up in practice, however, especially when the five teenage girls in the Mini in front of me started cheering. Clearly they felt the need of the human body to pass liquid waste was something to be celebrated.  

However, the only thing which can really tame the mighty car and bring it to its knees is Mother Nature herself in the form of flood or ice or especially snow. All of a sudden the great God which rules our lives is reduced to a slithering, sliding, skidding, struggling parody of itself (as I recently discovered when we got stuck in a blizzard near Battle). Yet this situation demonstrates another facet of our car-controlled lives. Normally we’re separated from other drivers, contained in our little bubble of insularity and selfishness. We know nothing about them nor they about us and neither has any wish to know anything about the other. But in snow we’re suddenly drawn together in the face of the common adversary and the bubbles start breaking open – literally. Stuck in a queue that’s unlikely to move for the rest of the century, people get out and start chatting to one another, assessing the situation, berating the council for their failure to act – they had enough warning, after all – and wondering what they pay their f****** rates for. Then someone remembers they have a blanket in the boot, someone else a shovel, someone else a flask of tea, resources are pooled and suddenly people are doing what people ought to do all the time – help each other. I remember once, many years ago, being stuck for hours opposite a charming young lady going the other way – normally we’d have flashed past each other with barely a sideways glance. We got chatting and it turned out she worked as a barmaid in a pub I’d never visited (though I promised I would) and soon we were deep in conversation about the most intimate subjects pertinent to the situation – my bladder and her chronic cystitis. We didn’t quite reach the point of exchanging phone numbers, but we almost did. I’m glad we didn’t though, in a way, because the beauty of that moment lay in its transience. Like Leslie Howard and Celia Johnson in ‘Brief Encounter’ we were ships (or, at least, old bangers) passing literally in the night.  Then the engines started up again, we got back in our respective cars and crawled off in opposite directions. But I shall never forget that moment.   

I think I’ll shut up now as I’m getting rather bored with the subject. Cars tend to do that to you. Unless you’re Jeremy Clarkson.   

This is my beloved Volvo estate. What does it say about me – boring, old, reliable, creaky – and red!

This is my other car. It doesn’t go but I keep it parked in the drive to try to impress the neighbours. I’m thinking of keeping chickens in it, like they do in France