Without Trucks You Get Nothing

Jane’s little Honda does what a car should and causes no fiscal pain. It’s an unrefined and comparatively sluggish drive but what you get for making this compromise is longevity and economy. A practical person, ignoring the popular myth that you are what you drive, will appreciate this. Less so if he is keen to identify himself as a ‘consumer of goods’, which is, to my mind, what a brand focussed lifestyle aspires to. “Hi, I’m Dave and I’m a consumer, strictly designer outlet though, dude.”

Dave could be quite urbane and funny, of course he could, and intelligent to boot but I’d worry if he really thought that a particular set of wheels could really improve his life and make him happier and more attractive even. And yet, if his girlfriend turned out to be prettier than mine, and she admitted that she asked him in for a nightcap because his wheels sang “alpha, alpha, alpha” all the way home, I’d have to ask myself the question again.

This brings to mind a female comedian in Brixton telling of a guy in a wreck tailing her down the street after she paid him no mind, whereas the next dude to hang out of the window of a flash car made her giggly and coquettish. The irony, she said, was that the guy in the wreck was probably a home owner whereas the dude in the Benz...well, that car probably was his home. She said she knew it at the time but rounded the story off with, “you know how it is girls...” I guess those flash guys do too.

Brixton - a world away for me now, as I tow a trailer fan up the M40 early on a Sunday morning. It’s September but there seems to be lot of holiday traffic on the road - cars packed with boxes and duvets, clogging up the centre lane. I’m not allowed in the outside lane with a trailer, so I find this quite annoying. On the Warwick bypass I see a sign for the university and it all makes sense. Grey haired mums and dads are delivering their offspring to university. Most of Middle England is on the move and one day I suppose this will be me, taking my place in the centre lane at 66, years old and miles per hour.

“You’ll be alright,” I’ll offer, to break the pregnant silence.

“Yes, I know dad, it’s only university,” my son will say, hoping I’ll just shut the fuck up.

Later on, the younger one will despise him for a stream of parting tears. But he’ll come back changed and she’ll wonder where her brother has gone. No more tears, like baby shampoo.

But back to the car thing. Motorway driving is so unutterably dull that I find myself looking at cars passing and weighing up my next purchase, even though I’m not planning one. Being bored makes me want to consume, like some kind of flying couch potato. I can’t wait until private car ownership is a curious old-fashioned pastime, which was as bad for your health as smoking and just as expensive.

I’d like to see curvaceous columns erected along the central reservations of the motorway network. A friction-free magnetic monorail installed to transport people swiftly and reliably from hub to strategic transport hub. An electric car/bicycle hire system set up to make up the final/first leg of each journey. There would be no need for a compulsory land purchase scheme, development of greenbelt land or an outpouring of NIMBY protestation.

In this utopian vision, the tarmac below would become a wildflower haven awash with bees. In reality it would probably become an ugly, bellowing truck race, unless the primary function of the monorail was switched, for freight. Shipping containers slipping gracefully through the treetops, putting an end to the heavyweight contest of the slow lane and putting a little pleasure back into car driving. One bumper sticker I saw recently proclaimed, Without Trucks You Get Nothing!, which is in itself a more tantalising and radical proposition.

Strangers in the Night

It’s coincidence that Birmingham turns out to be not only the Black Bullet’s hometown but also the crucible of British Heavy Metal music. Even the slick US version owes a lot to the British invention which swept across the Atlantic in successive waves. The music paper, Sounds, used to refer to NWOBHM, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, which rolled in after the likes of Sabbath, Priest and Zeppelin.

I want to talk today about UFO, they were influential and the first band I saw live in that era. It would be nice to find one of the original members and draw a few stories out about the times which I only saw through the eyes of the hacks on Sounds. There seemed to be a lot of drinking involved, and all the rest, so who knows what state they’d be in now. UFO travelled over to the States and had a go, becoming part of one of Britain’s most successful cultural exports.

Most of Strangers in the Night [1979, Chrysalis], was recorded on tour over there and it stands out, in parts, as their finest hour. A punishing version of Lights Out exemplifies the times. The lyrics to this one describe the experience of an air raid warden in the Blitz:

“Lights out, lights out in London, hold tight til the end, why not now you know we’ll never wait til tomorrow.”

It may be more erotic fantasy than biography, it’s reminiscent of Don’t Want to Wait Anymore by The Tubes [Completion Backwards Principle, 1981, Capital]:

“Stranded on a desert isle, with no one around for thousands of miles. Imagine any place, if this is what it takes, but don’t tell me to wait.”

Michael Schenker had made a move across to UFO from The Scorpions and found his shine with them before pursuing a solo career, or a career in soloing. He dovetails neatly with Phil Raymond (guitar and keys) who, one imagines, was the balladeer in the band, much to Pete Way’s (bass) disgust. Raymond had the Dr Who scarf and Miami Vice jacket thing going on, where Schenker and Way used to plant their legs wide, shirts off, rugby socks down the front, screwed up faces plastered with sweat and hair.

On You Tube there’s an interview with Schenker in which he describes a back and forth picking action as a secret of his speed. It seems asinine to me now, as speed is only half the deal, even for a metal guitarist. There are hundreds of quick and yet ultimately tedious practitioners out there, Schenker is a lyrical monster with superb dramatic timing.

In a very real sense, much of the power came from the feeling that he was teetering on the edge of his abilities, a few fluffs here and there were more exciting than seamless soloing, as if on rails. Perfection was more of an American metal thing back then, to my mind. The track Rock Bottom puts these qualities of Schenker’s at the fore.

He left soon afterwards and, to my mind, lost his raw edge becoming, if you like, more American. I don’t know if this is fair as I stopped following him and don’t own a single MSG album but early Scorpions and mid UFO eras, with Schenker involved, were the best these bands ever had. Don’t let me bang on, but Lonesome Crow holds most of my guitar playing ambitions, right there. It’s got that urgency, with blues feel, and grunt, like Black Sabbath’s first album.

Pockets of Surplus

A small window of opportunity opens up and I’m in the garden at six, burning a stack of old papers faster than Gaddaffi. It’s the usual Rubik’s Cube of Saturday jobs that need doing, addressing one thing to facilitate another, and the first thing in the sequence is to get some of the garden rubbish burnt before anyone hangs out their washing. This presents an unmissable opportunity to simultaneously dispose of a box of personal papers, sifted out our filing by Jane who is keen to prepare the ‘office’ for our new arrival. We will eventually move into this room, which is the biggest, and shift the kids into ours. And so it goes on, sorting one thing to accommodate another.

About midday I lose track of what I’m doing. I’ve picked up the new glass for the shed [NJW 22.08.11] and I’m food shopping when I realise that I’ve left my wallet in the car. It’s a small thing but there’s a funfair in town and the car is parked ways away, so I have to under-shop and make do with whatever cash there is in my pocket. Sometimes I think I tend to make things too complicated, No Journey Wasted is fine, as a concept, but there’s only so much computing power available in real life to allocate to weighing up the odds. If you push it to the limit and something unexpected happens, you risk losing a lot more than a single thread. A whole construct can become compromised, which can really piss you off.

The answer is that you have to remain flexible. I had planned to make a round trip; get money (town), get glass (out of town) and visit a farm shop (out of town) on the way back, instead of the supermarket (town). But I also needed to stop at the lighting shop, which was behind the barriers set up in the town square to accommodate the funfair. This threw me and I shot through town thinking I’d hit the lighting shop on the way back from the glass shop, which was half-day closing.

It’s a dull story, I know, but when ‘me’ time is so hard to come by, rolling all kinds of jobs into one helps. And if time is money, it’s much the same as the save-to-reallocate attitude. It’s not really about being a dweeb or a miser, it’s about being a bit lazy and tight, on time that is. Cutting back on waste, in terms of time and money, should, in theory, leave me with a bit more of both and it's in that pocket of surplus that my teenage wants live on. This is where the bike gets fixed, the guitar comes out, the beer is drunk and my book gets written.

I'm a little uneasy about this, now that I write it, because if a job will soak up as much time as you can give it, it's hard to see how these 'pockets of surplus' (POS) can ever really exist, except in theory. I turn to thinking about a recent fantasy POS indulgence; sitting on a beach with a cold beer, waiting for a plate of BBQ blackened prawns (previous post). Does this person really have to have worked hard, saving time and money, to arrive at this point? Or could this be the result of a lifestyle choice? He could run the bar, or be a beach bum, so he can live his dream.

It's a nice thought, but I'm not sure this kind of life qualifies as a long-term goal. Outside of a holiday scenario, it strikes me as a gap year or retirement thing, so I think I'll stick to my guns, for now, safe in the knowledge that the beach ain't going anywhere.

She has a nice body

September, kids are back at school and the tube is packed so I’m pressed into the end of a carriage, with three women and some guys. One guy looks like Blackbeard, if the Pirate had a job in The City he’d look like that. The girl right in front looks like Lily Allen, in a figure-hugging jumper dress. She has a nice body which trembles pleasantly as we rattle along the Central Line.

It’s a humiliating crush of bodies, though, with little love going spare. A girl in a seat is putting on some slap, making a sideways face as she flicks her blusher brush back and forth. It’s a stranger’s intimate moment, blatantly put on view. Am I supposed to watch, to appreciate the effectiveness of her technique? Or am I obliged to look away? I don’t know the rules, which has the effect of making this act unnecessarily provocative.

I look around for answers but nobody else seems to be taking a blind bit of notice. Perhaps they’ve each already employed a look which looks like they’re not looking at all, I can’t tell. Hell, now she’s making me feel like a bumpkin. I simmer silently, switching back to Lily Allen, the tendrils of her bob cut curling around iPod wires. Then I remember that I always felt kind of provoked by this behaviour, even when I was a city dweller. Sure, I used to down a cold can of Special Brew on the tube, as a precursor to a big night out, which may also be distasteful, but it hardly qualifies as an intimate moment.

When I get home I’ll ask Jane what she thinks. She’ll probably laugh and call me over-sensitive, and ask why I don’t just read a book or something if it annoys me so. I’ll sulk a bit and switch to my Big Mac attack – we’ve all endured that sickly smell on public transport. She might quietly remind me of what gets her goat; stupid old men having a go because deep down inside they feel life didn’t deal them the cards they were led to expect, that they were promised even.

And she'd be right. As I get off the train I tell myself there isn’t much in my life worth getting upset about, not really. I am the rider of the Black Bullet and I have everything I ever wanted. And yet somewhere in the world someone is wriggling their toes in the sand, slugging on a cold beer and waiting for a plate of blackened prawns, and that person isn’t me, godammit, it isn't me.

Momentum

How many building consultants does it take to put up a shed? Well, if it's two, something is bound to fall through the gaps in their thinking. It might be that we deferred to each other, it might also be that we were too busy chatting to really pay attention, but after young John left I noticed the rear panel was upside down. If you can imagine roof tiles, and how the courses are lapped to shed water, the laps to the weatherboarding were clearly the wrong way up and open to water ingress. It was two days before friends, Nick and Rosie, came by and Nick helped me flip it over.

Sometimes there seems to be just too much to think about but passing tasks to others is a luxury we can’t afford. In some ways, despite my homespun philosophy of self-reliance, I think it would be better to get a man in, someone who knows what’s what with a thing because he does it all the time. Then we can each think about a thing, develop skills in our own field, and act as pieces in a jigsaw - the whole being bigger and better than the sum of the parts. Then I remember I’m a building consultant and weathered enclosures are kind of my thing, so there are no excuses.

Anyway, let it go, flick hair back, the shed is up at last. The bikes and garden things are out of my workshop, I’ve even installed a storage rack given to me by old Vince, source of the shed. The rack has tilt-out drawers which I’m thinking of using to store bits that come off the bike, in sequence, top to bottom. This will help me to reassemble parts and fixings, when the time comes, correctly and in the right order. Ever mindful that the new baby is due in a few weeks time, that this project is likely to extend through the winter and that it wouldn’t do to lose track while otherwise occupied. The DIY-way is littered with the road kill of projects gone bad due to loss of focus and momentum, I don’t want this one to be another.