Category Archives: General bleakness

Summer of Love

Some notes on Latitude 2008.

Standing outside the back of the Uncut tent. It’s too crowded to go inside. On stage are ‘Black Kids’. I stand behind the opening for the sound desk – lots of other people stand around me. None of us can see very well. It’s almost completely pointless standing there – we are experiencing the group live in the smallest possible way. In front of me is a black, rubber covered ramp leading up to the sound desk. Behind the desk are various people – technicians I guess and other people connected with the band. Lying on the dirty ramp is a baby – maybe 18 months old – I don’t know, not old enough to walk. She is sprawled on the ramp, shuffling slowly on her belly up and down. She’s filthy. She looks very vulnerable amongst all the feet crowding around. Occasionally a stringy woman with dreadlocks comes out and checks that she’s still there and, I guess, that she hasn’t been trampled on. I have bad thoughts about this woman. I can’t concentrate on the band, I find myself getting more distracted by the baby and the woman. The woman may well have nothing to do with the baby. I don’t know. I’m not really getting much from the gig, I walk away.

On another occasion I’m watching another band, I can’t remember who, inside the tent – but still at the back. There is a tall man nearby who appears to be drunk. He shouted something when the band first came on and lurched forwards. Now he addresses comments directly into the ear of whoever happens to be near him. Some move away, some smile and nod. One woman enters into conversation with him, perhaps not realising how drunk he is. The music is loud and so he has to shout right into her ear. I can see bits of spit flying from his mouth and landing on her ear. She instinctively leans her head to one side, away from his mouth and he moves with her, keeping the distance between his lips and her ear at just a couple of centimetres. She is stuck now with her head at a painful angle and this man shouting into her ear. I don’t notice what the band are doing. I can’t watch anything but this man. I leave the tent.

 

Festive Road

I drive along the city’s arterial roads. I see nail parlours, pound shops, chicken disposal units, mobile phone unblockers, and then I see balloons – a blossoming of red and yellow fluttering from the crash barriers and lamp posts. This means there is a flooring shop.

I’m not sure why they do this. Is it that these dismal smears of retail culture aren’t depressing enough without somehow adding the extra poignancy of festive balloons. Sometimes it’s not balloons, sometimes it’s one of those big, disturbing half-man, half-windsock creatures who jerk erratically and sometimes collapse on the pavement in front of you making you yelp and feel foolish.

I suppose it’s easy to understand the logic – people see balloons as signifiers of fun, they walk trance like towards them, they discover it’s a flooring shop, they feel no crushing disappointment but instead are filled with an overwhelming desire to buy strips of plastic with photographs of wood stuck to them and then glue them to the floors of their houses. The shopkeeper smiles.

Millions now living

In a cold room in a castle, in files entitled ‘Ancestors’, are hundreds of sepia photo portraits of anonymous people from the past. Most have lost their moorings on the page and have slipped down into a slush of moustaches and frowns. In another room in a damp bookshop is a tabletop piled high with magazines and journals on everything from motorcycle maintenance to the Kennedy dynasty. In the corner – towers of detailed instructional paperbacks on obsolete technologies. All these forgotten people and words – what can you think about except death? Or in fact worse than death, the utter futility of everything in the face of death?

Hurray – welcome to Hay on Wye.

I don’t know, in the past it’s always been a pleasant way to spend an afternoon, browsing around the various bookshops – but this time it was just a slow slide into despair. I couldn’t work out why this was so – then I realised it was the disorder. If the magazines had been sorted by genre and date and piled neatly…..if the ancestors had been stuck down properly and all the moustached men put in one file, the milky eyed women in another…then it would have felt like a triumph over oblivion. That was when I realised that the first weapon in the ‘War on Death’ is tidiness. Our parents obviously knew this – this is why they went so crazy when they saw the state of our bedrooms – it wasn’t crayons and Beano annuals they saw on the floor – it was the abyss.