Fourteen

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God it must be great to be fourteen.

At fourteen you have your whole life to come and so many choices.

When I was fourteen I was convinced I was ugly. I wasn't - that came later. At fourteen my hair had colour and my skin was smooth. I was shaving, but only just - it wasn't something I did every day, I didn't have white stubble to worry about, and how I wished that I could grow a moustache.

At fourteen I could play rugby four times a week and not ache at all. I could run up three flights of stairs and not get out of breath, and get up and down from the sofa without making that involuntary 'Uh!' sound.

At fourteen I laughed a lot - even at things that are no longer funny, and probably never were - 'Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam'.

At fourteen I won the school art prize and chose 'Monty Python's Big Red Bok'. Not a good choice as it turned out; Lord Longford was presenting at prize day that year and was deeply into campaigning against pornography at the time (Myrah Hindley came later).

Our headmaster 'Stosh Goodall' was appalled by my choice of book and removed the typographical dust jacket so that Lord Logford couldn't easily see what he was presenting - after all Monty Python was very subversive back then. Unfortunately the hard cover beneath showed a photograph depicting a group of very entangled, very buxom, and very naked young ladies.

Stosh frantically flicked through the book, his face becoming redder and redder with each turning page. He almost exploded when he got to the page showing a soft focus, but naked, Graham Chapman obviously pleasuring himself.

I tried to argue that it was art in the tradition of Dada and the Surrealists (I was in the school debating society, and no...we didn't do it on mass), and that the image was a satirical and slightly avante-garde statement rather than an image to be taken literally - but Stosh wasn't having any of it - particularly from a fourteen year old boy who had only recently started shaving.

So, Lord Longford came and went without presenting me with my prize, and I got a reputation around the boarding boys for being a little wild - which was pleasing, but untrue.

Ironically, a few years later Stosh's son, Howard, went on to write music for the 'new wave' of comedians that followed 'Monty Python' - 'The Young Ones', 'Black Adder' even 'The Vicar of Dibley'. He's a radio four presenter now with his own classical music show on Radio Two, and I heard his 'Desert Island Discs' last December. I never even got a mention.

Yes, fourteen was good. At the time it seemed hard; exams, double maths, the six mile run, spots, trying to get into the pub...girls - it wasn't though.

At fourteen I was going to, to...

Anyway - that's my fourteen year old daughter on the beach in Wales at the weekend. Pretty isn't she.

Twig

Twig,
Look at you
Freshly green,
Budded and leafed,
And blossomed soon.
Still new.
A delight to see.
Stay this way
Always,
Do.

The third of May 1808

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Do you like Goya?

The fog and mist lifted just long enough on Saturday for me to get an hour on Hell's Mouth beach. It was pretty cold and very windy but I wanted to go and make my first beach sculpture of 2009.

I knew what I wanted to do - a self portrait - so here I am on the seventh of March 2009 facing the camera, in the wind, ready to meet my fate.

I wanted to do a funny piece, something to make people laugh. I look pretty funny don't I with that head that looks like a dunces cap, my coloured guts spilling out of my middle? Look, the blue touch paper is waiting to be lit and my arms are open in a gesture of surrender. I'm not expecting any mercy though - so fire away.

I'm trying to look quite normal but its hard when your mouth is full of blue and you know you have the 'L' brand imprinted on your forhead. Look at the top of my pointy head - my radar's gone all wonky - and if I'm not careful I'm going to trip myself up with my two left feet. Its only a matter of time.

What a laugh.

Collections

Are you a collector? I am. I’ve been a collector all my life.

My first collection was snail shells. I was four or five and we lived in Oxfordshire. I remember that the garden was full of snails. Large brown snails, small yellow snails, red, black, brown striped – all colours, all sizes. I used to catch the snails and, with a darning needle, scoop out the creature from within. After two weeks soaking in vinegar and a good wash in soapy water, the snail shells were ready to go on exhibition on my wide windowsill in my bedroom, above the porch of our semi-detached in King’s Close.

Once, I went to the Chinnor Hills and found dozens of ancient calcified snails. I wasn’t sure if they were snails or fossils but they were included in my collection – white and powdered - creatures from another time.

The old molluscs piqued my interest and soon my collection of snail shells was joined by some fossils that I dug up in our back garden – ammonites and belemnites - belemnites mainly. Soon I was looking for fossils wherever I went - and the space on my windowsill grew smaller and smaller. I found fossilised mollusc shells on the beach on holiday, and a fragment of trilobite in a field nor far from where I lived. Pride of place went to a fossilised fish, all bones and an eye, which I saved up and bought mail order.

For a while I collected bits of clay pipe also excavated from our back garden. Some had ornate stems and bowls with faces moulded into them. Once I found a whole pipe, with only a slight crack in the base of the bowl.

In those days comics were full of advertisements for stamps, and the local newsagent, ‘Castles’, sold stamp books. For my eighth birthday my uncle Charlie gave me a stamp collector’s book, a small packet of transparent stamp hinges, and ‘fifty assorted stamps from around the world’. I was soon a keen collector and had stamps from Togo, Italia, Nordsk, Quatar, Great Britain (of course) and just about everywhere else in the Commonwealth and beyond. I even had a facsimile of a penny black and a real (heavily franked) two penny red.

I used to spend hours carefully folding and licking the far too thin mounting hinges, attaching them carefully to the back of my stamps, and gingerly mounting them in the pre-printed dotted lined squares in my stamp collecting book. I lusted after the ‘approval books’ that stamp companies advertised in my comics so badly that it made me feel sick, all you had to do was send them a stamped address envelope and they’d send you back a long, thin book (about the size of a pound note) with complete sets of stamps on every page for you to purchase.

I'd to dream of sending for one, and one day I couldn’t contain my lust any longer – so I forged my mum’s signature on the application slip. You had to have your parent’s permission to apply and I knew my dad would never agree - they were too expensive - and if saw the stamps - I’d want them - and I knew we couldn’t afford it. Two weeks later the book of stamps (total purchase cost ten pounds) arrived. I was excited and appalled. I’d got away with it! They’d sent me the approval book and all the stamps it contained!

I told my Mum that I’d won a stamp competition and that this was my prize - and she believed me!

I looked through the ten pages of carefully mounted stamps - it was almost a religious experience…a trio of triangular stamps from Mauritius – red, green, mauve, for five shillings…five rectangular air mail stamps from the Ivory Coast depicting bi-planes, tri-planes, and propeller driven beauties flying above elephant and crocodile filled jungles for six shillings and sixpence…and (most coveted of all ) a collection of fifteen stamps from Iceland all showing the same exploding geyser, but in such a range of colours and hues - all for an incredibly expensive ten shillings!

The stamps were mine ‘on approval’ for two weeks.

Three weeks later I still had them. Four weeks ran into five, then six, eight, and ten – I couldn’t send them back – and I certainly couldn’t afford the ten pounds to buy them. With every envelope pushed through the letterbox (by Cyril the postman) I expected a ‘demand’ letter. Every rap at the door was the representative from the ‘World Stamp Trading Company’ coming to ask for payment, or even worse, the local police. It was awful. I was in terror.

I hid the approval book in one of my ‘Arthur Mee’ encyclopaedias (volume seven out of ten I think –I only had nine) and pushed it far against the back wall under my bed. At night I lay awake certain that I’d soon be caught as the thief and liar that I was.

Two years later I stopped worrying, dragged the encyclopaedia out from under my bed, and nonchalantly stuck the stamps in my stamp book – by this time I’d moved onto coin collecting anyway.

My uncle Len had a milk round and at weekends and through the holidays I’d help him to deliver milk to the small villages around the market town where we lived. Some people used to leave the milk money by the side of the empties, and one old lady seemed to always pay with Victorian coins. I took to carrying the money Uncle Len paid me in my pocket and swapping the Victorian coins with my wages. Soon I had a large collection of ‘bun’ pennies and dozens of the older Victorian pennies, all dark and weathered with use. I had sixpences, shillings, florins, half crowns – even a silver three-penny piece mistakenly left out for a sixpence.

I bought a coin collectors book and began to look out for rarities – I found ‘H’ pennies, Georgian sixpences, Edwardian copper thrupenny bits, even a George V florin with Britannia standing up and not sitting.

I collected coins for years, eventually diversifying into collecting foreign coins. I bought five Churchill crowns and a Mexico Olympics commemorative coin. Then one day I just gave up. I think it was around the time that I started to collect girls. Bad mistake that, it turned out to be very expensive.

Over the years I’ve collected enamel metal signs, cigarette cards, beer mats, wooden cigarette dispenser boxes, antique glass bottles, screen printed cover children’s books, black and white woodcut book illustrations, old sweetie tins, ceramic cats (over a hundred) snow globes (over two hundred), and most recently pebbles (thousands).

Most of my collections are long gone. I remember coming home from school one day to find my collection of over a hundred and thirty-two blown bird eggs (including a huge Swan’s egg, only slightly cracked, that I’d picked up from the side of a river where it’d been dumped) mysteriously removed from the cotton wool lined chest of drawers, that stood in the shed, where I carefully kept them. They’d been replaced by a collection of rusty screwdrivers, hammers, spanners and rasps – I have no idea where my beautiful eggs went, but I often think of them and the fun that I had collecting them - and I only took the cold ones.

I still collect, but these days my collections are more random, less driven. A few of the old things still gather dust around the house, but I hardly notice them. These day my collections are more cerebral and less tangible. These days my collections are mainly memories. I find them, polish them, and put them out on display.

And you’ve just read one of my collections - my recollections – thanks.

Gardener

These are some tumbleweeds that I've been growing for a long while now.

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They didn't start out like this. When I first planted them, they grew well, were lush and green, and people were impressed with their vitality. 'What great plants!' they cried. 'Let's have some more of them.' So I grew some more, and then some more - they couldn't get enough of them.

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For a long time my plants thrived, grew stronger, and life was good.

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I can't remember when people stopped admiring my plants - it didn't happen overnight - and I didn't understand because as far as I could see they were still the fresh, green, good stuff that they had always been.

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But little by little people stopped noticing how good and green they were.

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Some of the people even started growing their own plants - they weren't as strong or as vigorous as mine, but they were green and they were new, and most importantly they belonged to them, not me, which made them better in their dull eyes.

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There came a day that I noticed that my plants had started to brown. They'd begun to sicken and die. I fed them and tried to keep them green but they continued to wither - it was the poison around them I think.

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They are almost dead now. They can't live here.

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What little life left in them is ebbing fast.

Soon they'll be brittle and dry and the the wind will pick them up and carry them away. They'll roll across the desert, over and over, tumbling as tumbleweeds do until they come to a stop somewhere good where the sun shines and light rain falls, they'll be revived, grow green once more, put down roots and blossom - and when this happens I'll catch their sweet fragrance on the breeze.

Short road

Here's a road. It isn't an exciting road, it isn't dangerous, and you can travel it at your own pace - best of all I know where it leads.

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I wish all roads were like that.

Reaching my fool potential

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In my very early twenties, back in the late seventies, I went along to the hairdressers and got myself a tight bubble perm. God knows why I did it. I was living in Great Barr in Birmingham at the time and suddenly people in cars and complete strangers in the street began to wave or shout 'Hiya' when they saw me.

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I had no idea why until one day travelling on the train to Wolverhampton I heard a young girl say to her mum "doesn't he look like Doyle out of The Professionals". Her mum looked my way and laughed out loud - still it did explain my sudden popularity with the good and gullible folk of Great Barr. Martin Shore was brought up in Erdington and went to school at Great Barr - at speed or at a distance (and with my tight bubble perm) I must have looked a little like him - remember I was young and in those days there was no widescreen, high definition television.

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Actually I did look a little like him back then - in a poor light - and yes, you guessed it...that was the reason for the perm.

Over the years, and usually due to a wide variety of hairstyles, I have been told by various people (often various drunk people) that I've looked like Simon Le Bon (highlights, blow dry, and a frilly shirt), George Michael (gold hoop earring in both ears, he was chubbier then) and weirdly Patrick Swayze (this must have been after a long mystery illness where I lost a lot of weight, my skin turned to plastic, and I got tall - or perhaps it was just the woolen leg warmers).

These days I look like some person who goes by the name of Ship - or is it Sheet? I don't know who he is or what he does, he may be a famous actor or a gangsta rapper for all I know, but I must resemble him strongly because increasingly people tell me that I look like him - 'You look like Sheet (or is it Ship?)' they say.

Shaving in the mornings I glance around the mirror trying to catch a glimpse of Martin, a hint of Simon, a nuance of George, or even an icily terrifying flash of Patrick - but if they are still in there somewhere then they are very elusive - all I see is this latest version of me and this version looks increasingly like a stranger. I stare into the glass looking at the caricature I'm becoming...where have I gone? 'Where am I?' I wonder.

I guess as we grow older these thoughts are inevitable as the face falls apart and gravity redefines the way it looks. It probably happens to us all, even Martin Shaw.

My English teacher at school, Mr Gould (Chunky- an emigre Greek Cypriot with an impeccable taste in ties, beautiful skin, and a wife who lived in the same house but wouldn't speak to him), once said to me that I must strive to reach my full potential - he pronounced it 'fool potential'. He was very insistent, making sure to inform me at least weekly that I must reach my 'fool potential', warning me that if I didn't I would waste my life and end up regretting it when I was older.

He also once told me in front of a classroom full of quite snobby, very judgemental, teenage boys that my imagination was so vivid that I would probably hang some day due to it. I didn't bother to point out that the last hanging in the UK was in 1964, but inevitably his remark led to me being hanged in the showers the next morning after the six mile cross country run. Fortunately the rope was tied to the shower head with a slip knot so I only suffered a little chafing around my neck - it was only a schoolboy jape - boys will be boys - although one of the boarders did try to hang himself the following year - another story, another time.
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Chunky wanted me to go to university to study English - I wanted to go to Art School and paint. I went to Art School - started to paint - then transferred to graphics when I realised that, although I could paint a little, my work didn't have a strong message - unlike the students that dressed in white coats and poured black sand down a child's plastic slide for seven hours or so at a time, and the twins who made a collage out of rubbish tip detritus, set fire to it, and filmed (no video then) as it went up in flames and smoke. They had a message, they were relevant, and all I wanted to do was paint pictures - nobody seemed to be teaching that anyway.

So, 'fool potential' - not a writer - not a painter - into graphics - management...and now?

As I look in the mirror trying to look beyond the caricature that's reflected back in the glass, and searching for those other Me's - the ones with the potential - I wonder what Chunky Gould would make of this me? Would he tell me that I've reached my 'fool potential', or would he tell me that I've simply become a fool? I think I know what he'd say. He'd tell me that I must still try to reach my 'fool potential', that it isn't too late and that the chance isn't quite lost. He'd tell me that I have to move fast, because time is running out. He'd tell me to use my vivid imagination and not to worry about being hanged because of it. He'd tell me all this, straighten his impeccable tie, smile his too white smile - and he'd be right - he always was.
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I do still have to reach my 'fool potential'. Maybe it's time for a change of hairstyle - how about an orange Mohican?

Stoned Weekend...

Sunday. 9.15. Late home, after a weekend of stones.

Collected pebbles - I'll write this later - and went to some standing stones that I know of on the Llyn for an article at some point in the future.

Standing stones are not of this world. I've visited many - now don't get me wrong I'm not a new ager, but there is no doubt - and they really do have lives of there own.

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I think they are alive - or at least were once.

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Anyway, I'm sitting by a Menhir on a sunny day in a place that it has taken me over and taken me over an hour to walk to from the single track road where I parked the car in a passing place where I shouldn't have - and something is buzzing me, making me feel different, taking me back to another time, another world, another life...and here it comes...stream of consciousness stuff...oh no...not another of those stupid poems!

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Even I have no idea what they are all about!

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Ring

Stone.
Who stood you here?
Upended
When you might lie
Flat.
No sleep for you
Upright
Alone
To sky.
You
Silent stand
Passing of days dead
Keeping close
Memories
Except in you unsaid.
Sacrifice
Snow, mist,
The thunder rain,
Battle pass you by,
Dawn on dusk again.
What know you?
Silent
Remembering.
Pre born
Forlorn
Stand on.
In stand alone
As ever
As stone
Kept council
Deep.
Watched
Waited well
Listened.
So still may tell
What you do know
Or keep you secrets
Deep below.

Stone.
Who stood you here?