Pointlessly tapping the digital thermometer on the landing and blinking sleepily at an unbelievable minus eleven, then twisting the tie of my nemaki into a small bow and shambling downstairs for a pee, I think of my father who’s last years were preoccupied with two things; the temperature and a lack of uninterrupted sleep. He had prostate problems, though, not prostrate problems, as someone in a pub once said, possibly in respect of some failure of catholic humility.
The old man showed me how unfortunate getting very old is and I’m trying not to accelerate the process but this morning I feel sluggish and jaded, un-refreshed by what sleep I’ve had. An overlong day yesterday in a freezing concrete basement with hours and hours sitting in London traffic haven’t helped. I got up at five, to get ahead of the game, thinking I could always get some breakfast at the other end. Seventeen miles out the traffic stopped dead, queue city.
“It’s half past six for pity’s sake,” I cried out slapping the wheel, “haven’t you all got homes, beds, families?” I could understand an isolated idiot like me being out there at that time but many of those people must be M40 regulars. The lure of the satellite towns, with an estate agent’s hollow billing echoing in their heads, live in the countryside but with convenient links to the city, it must seem like cold comfort now. Kids come and you get suckered out of town, supposedly for their sake, then go and sit on the motorways so you hardly see them anyway.
I wanted to mention The Streets. Mike Skinner, that extraordinary little git, has an incredible ability to conjure places and states of mind in a few words, with storytelling that is extremely visual, if a bit one-crack minded. Original Pirate Material [2002, 679 Recordings] stands out as one of the best salutes to wasted youth.
It captured time and place brilliantly and I loved it instantly as I drove through Brixton in the summer of 2002, windows down, heat bouncing up off the road. I bought it and played it to everyone, whether they wanted it or not. A few months later it was being played back at me, like 'you should get into this', and I wondered if my so-called friends ever took notice of anything I ever said.
Feeling a little depressed in yesterday's traffic I listened to a later offering, The Hardest Way to Make and Easy Living [2006, 679 Recordings], and wondered if Skinner had managed to keep his edge. I know he's done other work since but success can ruin things for creative people, pull out the carpet, disrupt the muse. I resloved to find out, he's too good to ignore and if he's still got it it would be worthwhile.
Going back to the old man; I guess I'm a lot like him, the apple never falls far from the tree and all that. I find it hard to lay down the law with my son and I don't remember the old man being particularly authoritarian with me. “You left me here to remind me of you," sings an abandoned Skinner, bleak and pointy. He seems to have lost his father early but his sorrow remains comforting in an oblique kind of way, always determined to stay positive. Even so, I soon had to turn it off. In twenty years I’ll be seventy, I thought, and right now, in this traffic, it doesn’t seem all that far away.
