The Man of the Crowd

As though we are talking about Godfather films, one of the teenagers asks me, "Which is your favourite lockdown: 1, 2 or 3?" I tell him that it was the one that wasn't really a lockdown, the one where everything was normal except for... then I can't seem to remember exactly what we were not allowed to do in November and, despite a discussion that involves the whole family, we cannot agree what the restrictions were during that ineffective pre-Christmas lockdown. What we do agree on is that number 3 is the worst in terms of both lockdowns and The Godfather sequence. 

In the first lockdown we were able to spend a lot of time in the garden, which was particularly good respite for the teenagers having spent their days hunched over screens doing school and college work; in the bleak midwinter, however, that is not an option. Instead, we have initiated a Friday night ritual in the kitchen: Uno, beer, party food and everyone taking it in turns to choose music. I have lost a lot of card games, eaten too many mini-samosas and listened to Kanye West more than I care to over the last few weeks; but it brings us together and marginalises Instagram, TikTok and Xbox for a time.

With the usual sporting activities all suspended, there are few opportunities for the teenagers to exercise outdoors: by the time each day's studies have finished, there is a finite amount of daylight left to allow for a short walk if they can be persuaded out into the cold. Even at weekends options are limited: our usual winter routine would be to drive to Bexhill or Hastings, walk dogs along the seafront and eat fish 'n' chips; but observing the instruction to stay local we are left with the nearby footpaths and fields which are wet, wet, wet.

The countryside can be a forlorn place at this time of year in normal circumstances; but a pandemic in winter is testing even my perverse enjoyment of bleak isolation. Skeletal trees and bare fields stretching into the distance under grey skies is no longer liberating but suffocating. I know I should not complain: many are stuck in flats in towns and cities truly experiencing claustrophobia; but I long to see people when I step out of my front door instead of rooks and crows. Birds may be allowed to assemble in their parliaments and murders at the moment but, quite rightly, crowds of humans are forbidden.

When this is all over (how many of us begin sentences with that phrase, now) and life is safe again, I will be Edgar Allan Poe's The Man of the Crowd. In Poe's short story of that name, the narrator follows an old man who he spots in the street outside as he people-watches from a London coffee shop. Intrigued by the man's determined expression and dishevelled appearance, the narrator follows him through the teeming city streets. Never stopping, the man passes through shopping districts, markets, rich areas, poor areas and the pursuit continues into the evening and through the night. When the streets thin out, the man doubles back seeking the crowd afresh. By morning, the exhausted narrator realises that there is no purpose to the man's walking: he speaks to no one, he never buys, drinks or eats. He revels in being at the heart of the metropolis, part of the energy and throng of the city; he is simply the man of the crowd. I can't wait to join him.

20 Things I Discovered This Year Or Remembered That I Already Knew

January and February were the best months - for a change.

The Conservative Party is the single biggest threat to the prosperity and wellbeing of all ordinary people in the UK.

I miss London.

Dogs AND cats: you don't have to choose.

The Fall were amazing from beginning to end. Retrospective listening to their LPs and CDs has soundtracked my year; this has not been an entirely popular move in my house.

Social media can be a force for good: my music corner of Twitter is full of lovely people (just avoid that rancid cesspit, Facebook).

Caleb Femi's poetry collection, Poor.

Discogs.

Reality is gibberish (I saw Jason from Sleaford Mods being interviewed at the End of the Road festival in 2019 and he used this phrase. I wrote it down on my phone for future use; now seems like the right time).

I can happily survive on a rotating diet of vegetable chilli, butternut tagine and spinach and aubergine curry.

Cardomon pods are actually called cardomom pods.

Bill Shankly was wrong: football is not more important than matters of life and death.

One of my neighbours has more power tools than Black and Decker.

The BBC is still the best: Small Axe, Normal People, I May Destroy You.

My Scottish/Irish/northern English heritage has never felt more important to me.

Nubya Garcia's album, Source.

I'm glad I don't live in London anymore.

There can always be a new low in being a Millwall supporter.

England Is A Garden: a 30-year-old British Asian band made the album of the year.

Despair is cumulative.

To Autumn

All too quickly, summer is spent. The intensity of the heatwave at the start of the month seems to have exhausted the season and we are now suffering from early onset autumn. In the vegetable patch, the lettuce has bolted and the courgette plants have stopped offering up fruit; in the greenhouse, the tomatoes have all been harvested and the cucumber plants have collapsed. In the hedgerow opposite, the blackberries are already ripe and are being rustled by a cool north wind. At home, there has already been mutinous talk of lighting the wood burner but there are no logs yet and it seems heresy to wear a jumper in August.

Usually, I would embrace the arrival of autumn and the sharp focus it brings after the hazy wide-angle sprawl of summer; but I am in denial and want to put off its arrival for as long as possible: because not everything is normal and not everything is early. Some things are late or not happening at all: the familiar marker of the football season is delayed and mass music events have been cancelled. Usually at this time I would be preparing for End of the Road, the final fixture in the festival calendar; but this year my tent is staying in the shed and I will be watching an online stream from an audience-free Larmer Tree Gardens.

Mostly, I want autumn to wait in the wings a bit longer because of what it may bring. With schools attempting to return to normal, office workers summoned by the clarion call to save the sandwich shops and a stubbornly unmoving R number, we can only wait, watch and wonder while autumn's 'barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day.'

The Old Normal

We venture out. As a whole family. The teenagers are a bit nervous: since the Covid-19 lockdown began to ease they've seen friends in parks and gardens but none of them have been to a built-up area, let alone go into a public building, move around in the same space as other people, sit down and eat and drink in a restaurant.

The De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea has just opened up again after a long closure and we wanted to support our favourite local institution. Numbers are obviously limited so we booked online for a two-hour Sunday lunchtime slot. This gave us access to the exhibitions, the shops and the café.

When we arrive it's all very welcoming. We are asked to wear our masks in the gallery spaces and the shops but we do not have to as we move around the building or in the café. The café is where we head for first as the teenagers find it difficult to go more than two hours without food. The staff seem genuinely pleased to see us: these are their jobs and they're still here; how many jobs is the country destined to lose when the furlough scheme ends?

The food comes and the lime and coriander chicken is a hit with the carnivores; the black bean and beetroot falafels are a hit with me. The Guinness is even better: home drinking is ok but being out and having a pint feels like a liberation. We all admire an elderly gent sitting in the corner: he has a sea-facing table for one, iPad and earphones, pint of bitter. He alternates his gaze between the horizon and his screen and every so often lifts his mask to have a swig of beer. He looks inordinately happy to be out in the world. The middle teen asks me if that's what I aspire to in old age; damn right.

Afterwards we don our masks and wander through the Zadie Xa and Marc Bauer exhibitions and then the kids go off to walk along the seafront and search for ice cream. We mooch around the gift shop: my wife picks up some Eric Ravilious cards and I get a Derek Jarman book. I start to flick through the racks in the Music's Not Dead record shop, now located in the main foyer. I stay too long, obviously, and am left on my own. I buy a Fall album and find a rare Nico LP that I can justify the price of.

The two-hour slot comes to an end so I step outside into the afternoon to find the others. They are all relaxing on a wall eating 99s; the terrace bar is open and some people are soaking up the sun and the beer; a smattering of cyclists and dog walkers are parading on the promenade; this all feels (almost) like the old normal.

Real Surreal

Most people would be forgiven for not recognising the name Edward James as a leading figure of the 20th century art world; but the chances are that you’ve seen a painting of him. Rene Magritte’s famous work, Not To Be Reproduced, showing the rear view of a man looking into a mirror only for the back of his head to be reflected in the glass, features James; and another work, The Pleasure Principle, is also a portrait of James, though it’s hard to tell as the head atop a double-breasted suit is an orb of intense radiating light - Surrealists, eh?

Edward James was born into a wealthy family in 1907 to a merchant father and socialite mother. It was rumoured that he had been fathered by Edward VII, but then, who wasn’t in those days? He inherited his home, the West Dean estate near Chichester in West Sussex, on the death of his father in 1912 but, being only 5-years-old at the time, he couldn’t get his hands on it until 1932. By this time, James had finished his education at Oxford, with contemporaries Evelyn Waugh and John Betjeman, and was gadding about Europe with his wife, Austrian dancer and painter Tilly Losch. Their relationship was fairly brief and they divorced acrimoniously: he accusing her of adultery, she accusing him of being homosexual.

After the marriage, James concentrated on writing, publishing three volumes of poetry in the 1930s, and hanging out with Surrealist artists. He sponsored Salvador Dali for a couple of years and Dali introduced him to Magritte. But his biggest contribution to Surrealism happened back in Sussex. He had amassed a huge art collection, including works by Paul Klee, Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst, as well as Dali and Magritte, and in 1935 he took this to Monkton House, a Lutyens-designed hunting lodge on his West Dean estate. With the help of architects and designers, he set about transforming the house into a surrealist heaven. Behind a purple exterior were rooms with padded and geometrically patterned walls filled with paintings and artefacts. Dali’s most famous contributions to the house’s furnishings were his Mae West Lips Sofa and his Lobster Telephone.

In the 1940s, James visited Mexico and, having fallen in love with the country’s natural beauty, he dedicated the rest of his life to creating Las Pozas, a subtropical garden containing waterfalls, pools and works of art. In 1964, he donated his West Dean estate to a charitable trust to establish a centre for the teaching of traditional arts and crafts. Much of his art collection was sold before and after his death in 1984 and, although West Dean College of Arts and Conservation continues to thrive on the estate where James is buried, Monkton House is in private hands and is closed to visitors. However, if four-storey high Surrealist concrete sculptures are your thing, Las Pozas is open.

Saturday Fever

Saturday morning. The teenagers are still in bed, freed for the weekend from the surprising pressure of remote learning. Suffering from cabin fever, we think about going to the beach; but even though we can now, we don’t. Stay home. Stay alert. We stay home. We sit in the garden. We are lucky. The quiet of the missing planes heading for Gatwick is still a joy. We watch the jackdaws desperately clinging on to the birdfeeder to peck at a fat ball; the sparrows sit on the veg plot fence trying to find a way through to eat the young beetroot seedlings like they did last year; I must put a net over those gooseberries.

I make some more coffee. I am almost sick of coffee – but not quite. The radio – what would we do without radio – is playing Nick Cave. I wonder if Nick’s sitting in his garden wearing a three-piece suit; I like to think he is. The continual temptation to check the news has eased. I am past caring which government minister has revealed their ineptitude in the morning round of media appearances. Still people will vote for them, even with 40,000 dead. What would the toll need to be to stop them being elected? 50,000? 75,000? Vote for me and I promise to keep casual slaughter and immigration both below 100,000.

Power Tool Pete on the end is out; furlough has pushed him to the limit of his tether. There is no drill, mower, blower that he cannot deploy hourly in the relentless cause of maintaining a tiny terraced cottage and garden. Daughter has reported from her back-bedroom eyrie that he is instructing his ten-year-old son in the art of shed-building.

Back indoors, the excitable long-legged dog dances about in front of us, like a prancing show pony, in anticipation of a walk. We take him out. The little-legged dog has to stay home. He is eleven and feeling it; on the last lengthy walk, I had to carry him home for the last two miles. A saying kept popping into my head: there’s no point in keeping a dog and doing the walking for both of you - or something like that.

We have always walked the dogs along the local footpaths and fields, here. Even walking every day, we rarely saw another soul. When lockdown started, we kept coming across dogs and people we had never seen before. Where had they come from? Didn’t they walk their dogs in normal times? Today the paths are deserted again; they’ve all gone to the beach. Coming home we nod and smile to some of the neighbours we nod and smile to during the weekly Clap for Carers - even the ones who had a Vote Conservative placard up in December. You want to save the NHS? I’ll tell you how you can fucking save the NHS…

We eat and read and doze and drink through the afternoon; teenagers concoct ever more unlikely snack combinations to sustain the TikTok and Xbox activities. The temperature drops a few degrees and the smell of cooking meat wafts across the gardens. The young couple next-door-but-one have friends round for a barbecue. Is that..? No. From the other direction, Pete fires up his patio heater to compensate for the grounded aircraft. We head indoors for the evening and torture ourselves by listing the things we’ll do on a Saturday when this is all over: go to The Codfather in Hastings for fish ‘n’ chips; sit on the balcony of the De La Warr in Bexhill and buy records in Music’s Not Dead; wander through The Lanes in Brighton; go to a gig. The ordinary. We crave the ordinary. If we can just have the ordinary back we’ll never complain about anything again, we say. Except Pete and his one-man war on the environment and those bastards up the road who vote Tory.

London: Walk With Me

Lockdown. We truly are a nuclear unit: no wider family, no friends. Fixtures in the calendar fall one by one and we begin to doubt that any of the things we planned will take place. Every year, I meet up with two friends for a day of walking during one of the school holidays; we are in an endless break from school now but there is no prospect of a ten-hour trek. With 2020 looking like a write-off, my mind turns back to last Easter when, after ten years of rural walks, the three of us broke with tradition and set off on a Maundy Thursday urban odyssey. As the only Londoner, it fell to me to plan a route across the capital that took in some of the things that always dominate our walking conversations.

Having met at Victoria station – two of us arriving from Sussex and one from Somerset via an Airbnb that was a converted domestic garage in Vauxhall - our first stop was the Regency Café. Designed in an art deco style in 1946 and still retaining the original glazed tiled exterior and interior, the café has featured in film and television many times as a current and period location. Its Formica-topped tables, full English breakfasts and builders’ tea make it popular with workers and tourists alike and it was amid a heaving and noisy atmosphere that we fuelled ourselves for the day ahead.

I had deliberately chosen the timing of our walk to coincide with, not only the Easter holidays, but also an exhibition at Tate Britain. As we walked down to the Tate through the Lutyens-designed council flats of the Grosvenor Estate, and the Millbank Estate where each block is named after a Victorian artist, we discussed why the photographer Don McCullin had always cropped up on our walks: primarily because of his photographs of Somerset and Sussex, but also because we constantly confused his name with television presenter Don Maclean of Crackerjack! (Crackerjack!) and we further confused him with Bernie Clifton, the guy who used to pretend to ride an ostrich on the same television programme. It became a running joke - but perhaps you had to be there. McCullin’s retrospective of sixty years of photography was stunning: the stark monochrome images, each hand-developed himself, of conflicts from Vietnam through to Syria, via Northern Ireland and Cyprus, and poverty in London and Bradford, are a vivid and influential commentary on the post-war world.

Leaving the gallery and walking north up through Westminster, we crossed Parliament Square where the pro and anti-Brexit protesters had temporarily ceded possession to Extinction Rebellion. Cutting through St. James’ Park we headed for Regent Street where we turned off into Heddon Street. Heddon Street is where, on the evening of 13 January 1972, Brian Ward persuaded a young rock musician to leave the warmth of the photographic studio to take some pictures outside in the cold, dark street. Wearing a jumpsuit, with a guitar slung over his shoulder and his foot on a rubbish bin, David Bowie posed under the sign of K.West, a firm of furriers, for a black and white shot that would later be colour tinted and find its way on to the cover of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. In all the years I lived in London, I had never visited this spot. We unfurled a homemade K.West sign to recreate the scene and posed for photographs next to the commemorative plaque. The alfresco diners at the restaurants that now dominate the street didn’t bat an eyelid: this sort of thing must happen all the time.

Crossing Regent Street to start heading east, we made our way through Soho, pausing only for a spot of record buying at Sister Ray and Reckless Records in Berwick Street. One of our number had expressed a wish to eat pie and mash for lunch as a typical London delicacy. Not having the time to cross south of the river to visit Manze’s in Tower Bridge Road, we had to settle for a tourist alternative; at Battersea Pie Station (groan) in Covent Garden we had pie and we had mash but it wasn’t pie and mash.

After our brief lunch stop and a quick cider, we walked north to Bloomsbury and then on to the fringes of Clerkenwell. All three of us being English teachers, two of us having read all of Charles Dickens’s novels and one of us having been taught at Birkbeck by Michael Slater the foremost Dickens academic, a visit to 48 Doughty Street, WC1 was a must. Now a museum, Dickens lived there from 1837; it is the house in which Catherine Dickens gave birth to their first three children and where The Pickwick Papers was completed, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby written and Barnaby Rudge begun. We saw the desk where he wrote and also drafts of his novels and articles for the Evening Chronicle. A tall, narrow Georgian terrace, its interior has been recreated as the Victorian family home the expanding Dickens family left in 1839.

All our walking in recent years having been in open countryside, it struck us that travelling half the distance in London made you twice as tired. It was late afternoon and the stretch of Clerkenwell Road ahead of us seemed a daunting prospect; but the traffic and the crowds temporarily thinned as we progressed further east. The sun had been shining all day and as the shadows lengthened we knew we were nearing our final destination. The roar of traffic from the roundabout increased but we turned off Old Street and plunged into the relative quiet of Bunhill Fields. Graves of the famous – Malcolm Lowry, Spike Milligan, Frankie Howerd, Siegfried Sassoon - have been a feature of our walks over the years but none so illustrious as that of poet, painter and visionary, William Blake. Blake was buried in a shared grave at Bunhill Fields when he died in 1827 at the age of 69 but, until recently, it was only marked by a stone that declared his remains were ‘near by’. In 2018, following 14 years of work, the exact location of Blake’s remains was found. A group of street drinkers directed us from the original stone to the new one with its inscription of a verse from, probably his best-known work, Jerusalem.

Bunhill Fields is now a public garden and, as we sat on a bench reflecting on our walk, we were joined by meditative City workers at the end of their day taking advantage of the oasis of calm the setting provided. Like any well-prepared teacher, I had an extension activity planned in case we finished early but it was not required. One year on, and I’m sure the drinkers will have been moved on and the office workers discouraged from lingering and I know that all the places we visited during the day are now closed. When the lockdown ends, we’ll meet again in Bunhill Fields to complete that extra task; we’ll walk north up City Road to the Angel and visit 25 Noel Road, where playwright Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell so tragically lived and died; then we’ll retire to the legendary Island Queen pub further down the road and spend the rest of the day drinking. I don’t know when that will be but, whenever it is, everybody’s welcome.