8th of November, 2010, 14:02, Glasgow.
They say that during the siege of Stalingrad, the heavy ones died first. Or, as Peter put it, ‘the smack-heads were the last to drop’. In the armies, only the horses were fed by weight. Last night, at the gig, I fell asleep on a chair. My body temperature plummeted. Peter and Steph reveled in my weakness. They took photographs of me.
My thirst for sleep was met with a two-seater couch and a Scottish draft from the window. A sheet was better than nothing. But, only just. Mark was in a worse position: on the floor. Steph said last night, ‘this tour is less rock and roll then my fucking granny; it’s all laptops and bad food’. I suspect many tours are not rock and roll, or, most people’s understanding of rock and roll is wrong.
Last night the TomTom took us down a street that dead-ended – no lights, trees blocking the view to the main road, a walk-way coming out next to a stone wall – but, hark the herald angles sing, between the stone wall and end terrace was an alley, which snaked. Didn’t snake. Zig-zagged. Mildly zig-zagged as if it were designed for a marble to travel along. We rounded the last corner and came out into the back of a shopping street adorned with warmth, fairy lights, and Tudoresque black-and-white bricks and beams.
The move from dark to lightness, from what was not seen to what wanted to be seen, needed to be seen, to what only manifested when seen, served to speed time up. Transitions do this. We were like waiters leaving the kitchen for the floor. Like a lecturer entering the auditorium. Like a child stepping into the light. The street was in every sense a toy. An abstraction. A face put on. An officer. A racing car. The shops were ‘Ketchup’, an exclusive burger bar; a cinema, whose lettering was old fashioned; the ‘Wee Curry House’; ‘Wodka Vodka’. The street was narrow, the alley the syringe to this needle. The ceiling was fairy lights, structured like the alleys of Seville, whose ceilings are canvasses to keep the sun off the shoppers’ heads. There was no danger in the street, only couples in scarfs, cobbles on the streets, and lights arranged to entice, to seduce, and create a sense of warmth. It was medieval.
Our bar was the first one on the right. It was medieval and small and thin and therefore reminded us of Holland. The guys flew into autonomous activities: sound check, merch stand, posters, flyers on seats, little black dresses, cigarettes, food. You kill time until you can’t kill it anymore. Time you can’t kill is game time. If playing rugby, or writing, or building software, or following musicians has taught me anything, it’s that wait time is preparation time for game time. How you spend the former is obvious in the latter.
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Earlier in the week, day 1, I spoke about art being society’s superego. Art is a way to bring attention to the things the self needs to know. I also spoke of tics and neuroses and said they modulate the ego, too. This theme came up at breakfast, again, this morning.
In this morning’s newspaper, in an article entitled ‘Children need parenting classes to break cycle of poverty – Field’, it was reported that ‘The theme of [Frank] Field’s review is “how to prevent poor children becoming poorer”’. His final recommendation is that poverty should not be fought on financial grounds – duh! – but on teaching children how to parent in order for the cycle of poverty of thought to be broken. Hold that thought.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759), starts:
I Wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider’d how much depended upon what they were then doing;-that not only the production of a rational Being was concern’d in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;-and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:- Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,-I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.
Hold that thought.
In 1914 Freud, in ‘On Narcissism’, wrote that an individual’s impulses – for sex, for food, to mother their children – could be be repressed if they came into conflict with the individual’s cultural and ethical ideas. He said,
The same impressions, experiences, impulses and desires that one man indulges or at least works over consciously will be rejected with the utmost indignation by another, or even stifled before they enter consciousness.
I think that most parents – mothers and fathers – have a natural urge to look after their child. I think, if they could, they would not go back to work. Yet, this is repressed because of its conflict with society’s wider demands. Anyone, however, who lets someone else raise their children and claims to be against poverty is 1) a liar; 2) thick as pig shit; 3) deluded to the point of pure repression. Without a shadow of a doubt, society is effected by the last point. Field went onto say,
I think it is more difficult to parent now than it was. The pressures on you are greater. It is expected that people, mothers, should work, and rather quickly after birth, even if they are on their own. Postwar housing developments have split up communities. You are bombarded with demands from television about the things that children should have. It puts a much greater pressure on parents. To add to that you may not have had a good role model yourself.
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We started this story in the middle – in media res. We are now at a point where the only way to move forward is to move backwards. Wait time is preparation time for game time. How you spend the former is obvious in the latter.
