Mad, Bad and Dangerous in Paris

If you’re ever truly down-and-out and in need of the price of a meal either stick your head in a bucket upside down on Princes Street or do what I saw a guy do once in Paris.

We were busking, Me and D and Rube and Ray outside the Pompidou Centre, right on the plaza where all the culture-vultures assembled, the Tower of Babel voices jarring sonically with what the likes of us were banging out, some Irish dirge that Rube knew from his Planxty albums.

Such songs seemed to relax Rube, like their rebelliousness struck a chord within him. Maybe being Irish and bold and romantically heroic in the face of the foe (the English) was better than being Jewish and depressed and being helpless in the face of the oppressor (his mother).

Only a matter of weeks before with Rube in Goodmayes, his doctor suggested it would be a good idea to take him on a trip to Southend, that old-style holiday resort on the Essex coast. His parents further suggested that it would be a good idea to take Ray and I with them. So, there we were all in Monty’s family saloon coasting down Eastern Avenue toward the sea: a madman, his mad mother, pretending to be deaf father, Geordie Ray and me, the seventeen-year-old and seemingly in charge of it all.

“Sing a song, Dave”

“Eh, aye, Rube, what kinda song?”

“An Irish one, Dave. Sing Spancill Hill”

“Oh no, please no” moans Phyllis.

Spancill Hill is a song of exile, a dreamer dreams of his home town in Ould Ireland. Not one of us in the car is Irish but I’m the closest to it.

I sing for Rube.

“Last night as I lay dreamin’ of pleasant days gone by

My mind being bent on ramb-i-lin’ to Ireland’s isle did fly..”

Phyllis knows little of Ireland, it’s culture, it’s music or probably even its location and for all she knows what I’m incanting is some anti-Semitic, pagan, devil curse that her nutcase son has summoned down on her as some form of Freudian retribution. Or maybe she just doesn’t like the song!

She signals her discomfort by huffing her shoulders and talking all the way through it. Monty is oblivious in his mock-deafness. Ray sits mute. Rube is transfixed. In his tranquilised haze he is the exiled dreamer who “awoke in Californ-i-a, many miles from Spancil Hill”.

Just mere weeks later he is standing with us observing a very unique street-entertainment indeed. A man has drawn a crude circle with chalk and in the middle of this makeshift arena he rants and raves in a fury at passers-by and those stopping to spectate.

The act is that he dares them to set foot within his domain and if they do he chases them out with Gallic curses, not quite touching them but in a very much threatening-to-do-so manner. This causes great hilarity among his fast-growing audience as they play along with his game, daring over the chalk and then racing back into a lovers arm as the madman careens across his circle in a storm of outrage. The money rains down on him in his circle as the crowd express their enjoyment for this unexpected spectacle.

The irony is not lost on me that we have an actual certified madman in our wee busking gang and we barely make a centime between us.

Mad Market Research

While I was living on Chingford Hall Estate and having left the care home job I became desperate for cash and followed my brother, his girlfriend and his friend Clive into market research work. This was truly desperate stuff! The big assignment at the time was gathering public opinion concerning the effectiveness of the recent AIDS ads on the telly. Fair enough, but it was who I had to ask that was the problem. Afro-Caribbean men and Asian sub-continental women. In East Ham! I’d be run out of town or killed!

“Excuse me, Mr Fella Dredd, I wonder if I could talk to you for nearly an hour on how your sexual and drug-taking habits have changed – if at all – due to the recent AIDS ads?”

"Thank you for your time, Mrs Begum. Do you still allow your dear husband rear entry or is it missionary only since the recent….”

Needless to say, I filled all the questionnaires in myself down the pub.

God Has a Dark Sense of Humour

“It’s as if a higher power – say God – had chosen to send me a romantic partner that was the very opposite, certainly in terms of my ego and pride, of what I need. If he was sitting there with his son Jesus, slow day, wee bit bored and says let’s have a laugh. Let’s send that slovenly time-waster Wylie a girlfriend that will never compliment him, in fact, let her diminish his every achievement and everything he thinks are his accomplishments. It’ll do his head in. And Jesus says, nae bother Da, I know just the female”.

The young psychologist laughs at this suggestion. He likes Wylie for his wry humour; his self-deprecation. How ‘put upon’ he is by life. He thinks Wylie doesn’t need a psychologists office, he needs a stage but the fella just hasn’t got the chutzpah for stand-up comedy.#

“In bed, she says ‘give me more’. I say, look hen, it’s not a fucking snooker cue. It doesn’t have an extension!

I write a song for her, she ignores it. Won’t comment at all. I write something for her, she looks annoyed and asks what it means. She praises my friends but never me. I try to speak to her but she looks at me askance”.

“Why do you put up with her?” asks the young psychologist who is from Poland and his name sounds like ‘Magic’, a great name for a psychologist.

“She’s very pretty and a good bit younger than me”

We are man to man. He grins, the young psychologist.

“So she does do something for your ego and your pride?”

“Yes,” I answer “but just not enough!”

The Department of Shirk and Truncheons

Now that Bain was in the job he had to wonder at the whole palaver of the application process. The hoops they put you through, it was like you were applying for a job at NASA or Director General of the United Nations or something. That’s the way the world was these days. 

Everything was phony-baloney and over-hyped. The Department of Shirk and Truncheons had obviously hired some hot-shot consultancy firm to construct a ‘recruitment process’, and to prove they were truly hot-shot they’d come back with some over-blown psychometric/competency-based MENSA thing that was almost wholly unrelated to what was required to do the job, which was basically to answer phones, not swear at people if at all possible, then log a few documents onto an in-house computer system so basic that yer auld granny could do it.

This was to ensure that ‘only the cream got through’ but looking at some of his colleagues you had to wonder: if this was the cream what on earth had the dross been like? Bain imagined Cro-Magnon knuckle-draggers with IQ’s of about four. Folk who tried to bite the interviewers and soiled themselves unselfconsciously when asked ‘did they have any questions?’ at the end.

But, you were forced to ‘play the game’ if you wanted to succeed otherwise you faced banishment into the outer darkness of Food Banks and Christians in vans that came round at midnight offering blankets and soup.

The Tories were for ‘workers not shirkers’ so they said. What they didn’t say was that they were also lying bastards and hypocrites who didn’t like splashing the cash for people who suffered under their credo. Bain didn’t much like folk who were ‘at it’ either and claiming for benefits they shouldn’t be getting: it meant everyone was tarred with the same brush. But, when the folk at the very top were ‘at it’ as well, whether it be fiddling expenses or siphoning off huge wealth to offshore islands then where was the example? At least your benefit claimant, fraudulent or otherwise, was spending the money back into the economy. With the rich, we’d never see it again.

The phone rang again.

“Department of Shirk and Truncheons. Can I help you?”

See? Hardly rocket science.

We Cry For Ourselves!

“The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun”

I was living on a temporary basis in Kilmarnock when the Lockerbie bombing happened. Just down the road 90 miles Pan Am flight 103 death toll rising with every news report, a devastated area the size of London. Carnage on a massive scale: indescribable; beyond words. Seven in the evening settling down to watch the Christmas edition of Emmerdale Farm after your tea next minute; obliteration; end of days.

Expect the unexpected, by Christ!

A lady still in her aircraft chair found in a tall tree: human beings plummeting at a hundred-odd miles an hour in the freezing night sky, blown to smithereens by strangers.

I’m amazed now at how little all of this registered with me at the time.

I was in my own little world of pain and the carnage of my own emotions: sent back from Ireland on a boat, rejected and discarded. She said I didn’t love her enough but the opposite was more like the thing.

I’m reminded of a time when I would be about seven or eight and there had been a gas explosion at Clarkston train station, East Renfrewshire killing about eight, I think. My paternal grandparents would have been living in that town at the time in their detached bungalow high on a hill. In East Kilbride, we were merely five miles away and I remember the lady upstairs being concerned at the late arrival home of her husband who travelled through that way from Glasgow (he later arrived home the worst for wear and oblivious of his possible peril).

For many months the rubble from the explosion lay in huge heaps at the side of the tracks, and I was fascinated by it. There had been death here but the world moved on as normal.

I missed the carnage of 7/7 by a couple of tubes (although I wouldn’t have been going as far as Russell Square). I was decanted from the tube system at Finsbury Park due to ‘an incident’ in Central London. Even though heading for my workplace at Euston Tower I was carrying my guitar in a case (I’d written a play to perform for some high-end tax officials depicting Flexible Working Practices and intended to sing Don’t Fence Me In at the start) and I must have made an odd vision schlepping into town as if to busk amid the exploding buses and general mayhem.

“I see a bad moon a-rising…”

And 9/11? Happened on the very day that J told me we needed not to see each other again: that it was over. I watched the footage on the telly, but the tears I shed were for myself only!