Poem (2): Where I live, people don't understand

This is a classic example of a bad title. The title is the opposite of the meaning, really, but I like it, so keep it.

Anyway, in the pandemic, I thought about outer West London in the 1980s and early 90s a lot, and this is mainly about that.

Where I live, people don't understand

People don’t understand where I live, a real place

within the tamest imagination which has slipped

off a cliff it clung to – just a workplace mishap,

they say, those who dare not venture beyond the script

 

to the source material, to the bodies buried

in the concrete of the overpass in summertime.

For all the conversations I hung on but was not

invited to join, all the errata I underlined

 

in green suburban pen, the blood smudge picnic

of only-child nitpicks, that’s not so hard to grasp,

now, is it? Is it, now we write Horatian odes

to Brunel’s first viaduct as history chugs past

 

with trousers down, sunburnt and swearing it’s blind

like Oedipus, wise like Tiresias, broke like

the marbled ankle of an intercity jewel thief

who lied about falling off his childhood bike,

 

just a journeyman millionaire slowly turning blue

from embarrassment. I live there, a skittering dog

on a working lock, while narrowboats wait for romance

to fade and a stranger to stroll straight out of the fog.

 

Poetry for all (1)

For a few years, I've been posting poems on a site called allpoetry, where other people can comment on them. As well as that, the site has an AI algorithm which instantly gives each poem a "mark" out of 10, which sounds dreadful, and is a bit dreadful, but can be helpful in certain respects. 

It looks out for things like misplaced capitals, repetition, "good" words, ""bad" words, cliches etc. All to be taken with a pinch of a salt, but it can be a helpful way to slightly improve poems or to know if your poem's a bit hackneyed (if you didn't intend it to be).

The comments can also be a bit desultory ("You did a great job with your nice poetic flow here ...") though are occasionally valuable. Sometimes poems get chosen to go on the front page, and you'll get more comments then. Mostly, I'd say, the site's members are American and not necessarily the audience I'm playing to. Still, all of that is, in its way, part of the point. What point? What's the point? I'm not looking to make money from poems, have made no attempt to be published nor will, but, still, I find there to be more intrinsic worth and pleasure in writing poems than any other writing I do. By some margin. My aim is to write one really good one. Or five pretty good ones. It's a beautifully achievable aim which is always out of reach.

I read quite a lot of contemporary poems these days, some of which I like, some of which I don't, but one thing I've learnt is that I am not a natural, not in terms of what is mostly commended in modern poetry. I am operating within emotional, cultural and linguistic limits which the most lauded modern poets are not. Yet still, I might be able to use what limits define me to write one good one if I am able to reshape it and push beyond it. There's a certain push and pull between making the most of the facty, quizzy, listy me and running from it.

Anyway, all this to say, I'm going to change tack for a while on this blog, by posting poems (as I did right at the beginning of the blog). One per post. I'll accompany them with a song or two, a photo perhaps, a thought, maybe an explanation. Most won't be very long. I'll try to post one a day.

I suppose this is just to continue the process of looking at poems I've written in different contexts, to see which ones are most robust. Every time I post one, it is an opportunity for me to look at it with new ideas and maybe improve it. 

Feel free to comment if you like one particularly, or if one just doesn't make any sense at all to you, or if there is something fundamentally wrong, you think, with how it scans or plays out. Feel free not to, of course.

I also, a year or so ago, did a Zoom poetry course, which was ok, gave some confidence and some steps forward, and I did learn one or two useful things - one of which was that I'm not very good at giving titles, and sometimes my poems are too much like riddles, or they ask too much prior knowledge from people (naturally enough, considering who I am and what I do). So that's something I'm also working on, and I'd be happy to receive any notes about.

I'll begin with a short one, called:

Taking the L

I made a small mistake

which made

the engine stall and broke the brake

which woke

the cat who lived next door.

He doesn’t live next door no more.

Top Singles of the 1990s

This is hardly a new idea, either for me or for anyone else. I have previously made a list of 89-93 (The Capital Years), I've done 93-98 (Britpop Years) and I've done 98-05ish (Interim Pop). But, still, I think this is worth doing. It is a thing that can be somewhat perfect.

It's going to be a playlist of 100 songs, not a rundown from 100 to 1. There'll be 10 from each year (or maybe 9 or 11, but no more variance than that) from 1990 to 1999. There'll be a spread of genres. There can only be one song by each act. Anything eligible for the singles charts counts, which includes songs from EPs (which I'll get to shortly).

This decade was a time for great singles, but, conversely, not a great time for singles. It was the era when the cracks (which have never healed) started to show in the singles charts - too many high new entries, too many one-week Number 1s, a gradual spread of indifference to Top of the Pops.

There were a lot of fabled genres battling for space in the 90s - daisy age rap, gangsta rap, trip hop, acid jazz, grunge, britpop, house, ragga, dancehall, new jack swing, rave, shoegaze, garage, nu-metal, punk-pop, alt-country, but, let's be honest, the main thing in the charts, and the most resilient genre of all, was dance-pop. Pop music you could dance to. Dance music you could pop to. A sound came along in the late 80s/early 90s which hasn't really gone away.

Some of that stuff is good,  though it's not my favourite. There was more weird stuff at the top of the charts in the early 90s than in the late 90s, I think. Everything got more and more focused and professional, and that trend carried on with a vengeance into the 2000s.

It was when I was compiling playlists for our wedding day in 2014 that I realised, looking at what I'd put together, how much fondness I had for the chart hits of the early 90s, a time I'd previously assigned to being a bit of a dead zone for my taste, before I got into music in a big way, but also not full of "classic" rock. That fondness holds. 1992 and 1993 are surprisingly vintage years for big, slightly weird singles.

An interesting thing I've noted is that, while pretty much all the music I deeply love now is not truly popular, the music I listened to until around 2000 was pretty much all popular. When I was a kid, I knew nothing but pop music and classics; when I initially got into indie music, indie bestrode the charts. I was used to songs I instinctively liked being hit singles throughout this whole decade. Something that has not really been true since (though I do still like plenty of pop songs, or tell myself i do).

Putting this list together, I tried to have a rule that I had to love every song I include, both at the time it was released, and now. The latter is true; the former is almost true, but not quite. There are a few classics which passed me by when I was younger. But not many. None of this is highly obscure. All singles. Mostly successful singles - that's broadly the point of the list. Some weren't that successful, but that will be hopefully interesting too. 

This is a combination of "best" and "favourite". A lot of it is chosen for notability, but some are just personal favourites. I don't think anyone else would put Shorley Wall by Ooberman in their list of 100 Greatest Singles of the 1990s. But, still, Shorley Wall is interesting, because people did really try to make it happen. It was re-released twice, it was Single of the Week in various publications, you'd hear it a lot on the radio in the late 90s, but it never quite made it.

Talking of the late 90s, it is my contention that the EPs released by the Beta Band, Super Furry Animals and Belle and Sebastian in the late 90s were the all-time high point for British indie - such imagination, singularity, range, songcraft. Anyone who thinks British music was in the doldrums in the late 90s is very mistaken - that's the future we could have had. All of those bands were influential, but deserved to be more influential.

And it's something of a relief that this list is defined by the UK singles chart. I don't have to include Pavement. I'm not even going to include Wilco. Other acts I'm not going to include, for reasons I've discussed before (the "reasons" being I just don't like'em, mainly) are Primal Scream, Prince, The Stone Roses, Michael Jackson, the Backstreet Boys and The Spice Girls.

And there will absolutely be naff stuff. Some, not much:

Here it is:

https://music.apple.com/gb/playlist/100-from-90-to-99/pl.u-76MjyuJg3pr

and here it is:

• Groove is in the Heart - Deee-Lite
• Nothing Compares 2 U - Sinead O'Connor
• There She Goes - The La's
• The Magic Number - De La Soul
• Vogue - Madonna
• Being Boring - Pet Shop Boys
• Can I Kick It? - A Tribe Called Quest
• Nothing Ever Happens - Del Amitri
• Doin' The Do - Betty Boo
• Unbelievable - EMF
• Smells Like Teen Spirit - Nirvana
• Justified and Ancient - The KLF ft Tammi Wynette
• Birdhouse in your Soul - They Might Be Giants
• Crazy - Seal
• Stars - Simply Red
• Sit Down - James
• Fall at Your Feet - Crowded House
• Summertime - Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince
• You Got the Love - The Source ft Candi Station
• Innuendo - Queen
• Too Young to Die - Jamiroquai
• November Rain - Guns N'Roses
• People Everyday - Arrested Development
• Walking on Broken Glass - Annie Lennox
• Goodnight Girl - Wet Wet Wet
• Stay - Shakespears Sister
• Under the Bridge - Red Hot Chili Peppers
• Sheela Na Gig - PJ Harvey
• One - U2
• Out of Space - The Prodigy
• Sound of Da Police - KRS-One
• No Rain - Blind Melon
• Cannonball - The Breeders
• Two Princes - The Spin Doctors
• Oh Carolina - Shaggy
• Everybody Hurts - REM
• Ain't No Love Ain't No Use - Sub Sub
• Killing in the Name - Rage Against the Machine
• Rebel Girl - Bikini Kill
• That's The Way Love Goes - Janet Jackson
• Cornflake Girl - Tori Amos
• Regulate - Warren G and Nate Dogg
• Confide in Me - Kylie Minogue
• Stay Together - Suede
• Live Forever - Oasis
• Basket Case - Green Day
• Sabotage - Beastie Boys
• Here Comes the Hotstepper - Ini Kamoze
• You And Me Song - Wannadies
• Trouble - Shampoo
• Back for Good - Take That
• Yes - McAlmont and Butler
• Tiny Tears - Tindersticks
• Set You Free - N-Trance
• This is How We Do It - Montell Jordan
• Waterfalls - TLC
• Fantasy - Mariah Carey
• Buddy Holly - Weezer
• Common People - Pulp
• You Oughta Know - Alanis Morisette
• Hyperballad - Bjork
• Come Out 2Nite - Kenickie
• Ocean Drive - The Lighthouse Family
• Give Me a Little More Time - Gabrielle
• If It Makes you Happy - Sheryl Crow
• On and On - The Longpigs
• A Design for Life - Manic Street Preachers
• Born Slippy - Underworld
• The State I Am In - Belle and Sebastian
• No Diggity - Blackstreet
• Torn - Natalie Imbruglia
• No Surprises - Radiohead
• Beetlebum - Blur
• Don’t' Speak - No Doubt
• Mmmbop - Hanson
• Dry the Rain - Beta Band
• Sock it 2 Me - Missy Elliott
• Triumph - Wu-Tang Clan
• Perfect Day – Various Artists for Children in Need
• Sun Hits the Sky - Supergrass
• Music Sounds Better with You - Stardust
• Ice Hockey Hair - Super Furry Animals
• Never Ever - All Saints
• Teardrop - Massive Attack ft Liz Fraser
• When I Argue I See Shapes - Idlewild
• Monday Morning 5.19 - Rialto
• Brimful of Asha - Cornershop
• Road Rage - Catatonia
• Outside  - George Michael
• Goddess on a Hiway - Mercury Rev
• Shackles - Mary Mary
• Waiting for a Superman - Flaming Lips
• I Try - Macy Gray
• Drinking in LA - Bran van 3000
• My Name Is - Eminem
• Maria - Blondie
• Shorley Wall - Ooberman
• You Get What You Give - New Radicals
• Doo-Wop (That Thing) - Lauryn Hill
• It's Not Right But It's OK - Whitney Houston

And here, for what it's worth, because i can never keep a lid on it, are some others that almost were included ...

7 Seconds - Neneh Cherry and Youssou N'dour, Nancy Boy – Placebo, It's Alright - East 17, Gone Till November - Wyclef Jean, Insomnia – Faithless, Your Woman - White Town, Flagpole Sitta - Harvey Danger, Apparently Nothing - Young Disciples, The Size of a Cow - The Wonder Stuff, Sleeping Satellite - Tamsin Archer, River of Dreams - Billy Joel, Jump Around - House of Pain, One Night in Heaven - M People, Pretend We're Dead - L7, Faded Glamour - Animals that Swim, Call it What You Want - Credit to the Nation, Today - Smashing Pumpkins, Insane in the Brain - Cypress Hill, Ebenezer Goode - The Shamen, Right Here – SWV, Always – Erasure, Reverend Black Grape - Black Grape, Wake Up Boo - Boo Radleys, For the Dead – Gene, Lady Killers – Lush, Sweetness - Michelle Gayle, Turn on, Tune in, Cop Out - Freak Power, Summertime - The Sundays, Always - Bon Jovi, Three Lions - B, S and LS, How Bizarre – OMC, El President – Drugstore, Return of the Mack - Mark Morrison, The Drugs Don't Work - The Verve, Even After All - Finley Quaye, I Ain't Mad Atcha - 2Pac, Hallo Spaceboy - David Bowie, He Got Game - Public Enemy, This Feeling – Puressence, The First Big Weekend - Arab Strap, Chase the Sun- Planet Funk, The Boy is Mine - Brandy and Monica, End of the Line - The Honeyz, Black and White - Asian Dub Foundation, To Earth With Love - Gay Dad, Sing it Back – Moloko, Stay Young - Ultrasound , Jungle Tings Proper - Roots Manuva, Fade Into You - Mazzy Star, On & On - Erykah Badu, Glory Box - Portishead, Connection - Elastica

Love songs

What are the greatest love songs?

A slightly absurd question.

So, in this case, I'll be quite specific as to what I mean by a love song. There are great songs of passion and romance which aren't reallu love songs, from Be My Baby to If This Ain't Love. Nor, necessarily joyous good vibe songs like My Girl and Good Vibrations. You don't learn anything from those songs, you just experience them. And there are great songs of grief, breakup, longing and torment. Not quite any of them. 

I want these to be love songs, that express great love, probably for one specific person, and really make you go "well, that's a lot of love".

Of course, everyone's got a different idea of this. I'm not going to try to be too clever. I remember someone (can't remember who) saying Ace of Spades was the greatest love song ever written, but I won't be too obtuse or frivolous.

These will be songs that strike me as great true love songs. Some of them will be pretty obvious.

• Take It With Me - Tom Waits
• I’ve Been Loving You Too Long - Otis Redding
• The Way You Look Tonight - Fred Astaire
• If I Could Only Fly - Merle Haggard
• Being Alive (from Company)
• A Case of You - Joni Mitchell
• Losing You - Randy Newman
• Into My Arms - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
• In California/Does Not Suffice - Joanna Newsom
• Reservations - Wilco
• Maria (from West Side Story)
• Can’t Do Much - Waxahatchee
• First Day of My Life - Bright Eyes
• 1+1 - Beyonce
• Such Great Heights - The Postal Service
• Maps - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
• Umbrella - Rihanna
• New York - St Vincent
• No One's Gonna Love You - Band of Horses
• Thunder Road - Bruce Springsteen
• God Only Knows - Beach Boys
• Simple Man - Graham Nash
• Ain’t No Mountain High Enough - Diana Ross
• River Deep Mountain High - Tina Turner
• On and On - The Longpigs
• You are Everything - Marvin Gaye and Diana Ross
• Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space - Spiritualized
• I Would Fix You - Kenickie
• Lucky - Radiohead
• Ain't That Enough - Teenage Fanclub
• Scottish Pop - Spearmint
• Something Changed - Pulp
• Protection - Massive Attack
• There is a Light That Never Goes Out - The Smiths
• Jesus to a Child - George Michael
• To You Alone - The Beach Boys
• How Deep is Your Love - Bee Gees
• Absolute Beginners - David Bowie
• Songbird - Fleetwood Mac
• Someone to Watch Over Me - Ella Fitzgerald
• What’ll I Do - McGarrigles
• Hyperballad - Bjork
• My Funny Valentine - Ella Fitzgerald
• Wichita Lineman - Glen Campbell
• Alyosha - Susanne Sundfor
• I Believe When I Fall in Love With You It Will Be Forever - Stevie Wonder
• Starlings - Elbow
• My Girls - Animal Collective
• Rainy Night in Soho - The Pogues

I got distracted by thinking about another list, but here we go. Might add more. Might make a playlist ...

Class at university

I've always seen class as quite a complex thing which most people get wrong, though the nature of that perceived complexity has probably changed as I got older.

e.g. as someone from an atypical social bracket at a public school, I allowed for lots of nuance in what might be described as the "upper reaches". Then, as I've aged, I came to somewhat dismiss that viewpoint, certainly in terms of people's perceptions. Private school is posh, there are no two ways about it really. Privilege is privilege, whiteness is whiteness, maleness is maleness etc

In terms of my own place in it, I was happy to accept that I wasn't as "other" as I thought when I was younger. Though there were some twists along the way, so there probably were with everybody, and I was a pretty standard common-or-garden posh guy after all.

I had mainly seen the deciding factor in class as schooling, which I think is broadly accurate. Access to an elite secondary education gives most people an advantage other people don't have. Even if you hate it, even if you have a scholarship or assisted place, even if, even if ....

But, just this week, I remembered that actually the clearest dividing line in class I'd ever seen was not at school, or in the wider world, but at university.

St Andrews in the 1990s might have been its own particular ecosystem, but I'd still suppose that some version of this phenomenon exists in the majority of British universities most of the time. University is the place where people can really decide who they are, after all.

I think the perception of St A's is that it's full to bursting with posh English folk, but actually that wasn't the case. The posh English were a very visible minority, but still, very much a minority.

In some places they call them Rahs; in St Andrews, they were called Yahs, and they had a uniform of faded baseball cap, pink shirt, gilet. The usual stuff. And they wore it with pride.

I chose St Andrews because I wanted to get away, I wanted to be somewhere remote, I wanted to be in Scotland or Ireland, also because it seemed like a nice place. I suppose it wasn't a particularly a revolutionary choice, I was hardly breaking the mould. But still, I didn't want to be typecast. In my first week or two in first year, I found myself on nights out with a couple of (perfectly nice) English public school boys meeting other (less nice) English public schoolers, and I actively thought to myself "i can't be doing this".

So, genuinely, my first term at university was pretty solitary. Not a natural maker of friends, I wanted to make sure I didn't fall into line with the obvious - didn't go to the black tie balls, join the exclusive clubs, I even made a self-sacrificing decision not to go to university cricket nets when I saw what the vibe was.

Eventually by Term 2, I settled into a group of people I was happier hanging out with. And so it remained. It was hardly the working class revolutionary party, but it was a very solid, normal group of people. Some from state schools, some from grammar, some from private schools, played football, went to pubs, Scottish, Northern Irish, southern England, northern England.

The point is ,,, I guess ... that's where the line is, or can be. A choice in early adulthood rather than destiny or a choice in childhood. (by this, i understand that a limited number of people have that choice, and that's the privilege). Being a member of the "upper class" can be ingrained but it can also be aspirational. The pink shirt wearers chose to stay on that path. Some, with enough chutzpah, are able to join that path.

Conversely, lots of people who are privately educated want not to stand out, to just be "normal" whatever that is, and university gives you the opportunity to do that.

Arguably, as you go out into the world of work, some of that good work gets undone, as people who at one time aspired to normality achieve high financial standing, and find themselves back amongst the elite ... anyway, I still think there's something in my passing thought,

Test XI of 12

There are twelve teams that have ever played men's test cricket.

I thought I'd try to pick the strongest possible team made up of one player from each team (with one Twelfth Man).

Starting with the weaker nations, there are some shoe-ins, and you can build the structure of the team around those.

Rashid Khan is by far the greatest Afghanistan cricketer. He hasn't played much test cricket but what he has suggests he's entirely equipped for it.

Shakib Al-Hasan is by far Bangladesh's greatest cricketer.

So, we already have two spinners.

Zimbabwe's two greatest are probably Heath Streak and Andy Flower. Flower takes its and is a batter-wicketkeeper. Perfect.

Ireland is the only country that hasn't had a great cricketer, if you don't count Eoin Morgan. Harry Tector is very promising. He's 12th man.

So we have 3 and a back-up. Now it gets trickier. There are several options for every country.

We need two openers, unless Andy Flower does it, which is asking a lot. We don't need loads of all-rounders, which is tricky, as so many of the greatest cricketers are all-rounders.

So ... Australia has to be Don Bradman. Otherwise what's the point....

South Africa ... I think it has to be Jacques Kallis, unless we find ourselves severely unbalanced.

Sri Lanka - Murali or Sangakkara. I'm going for Sanga. We have two spinners already. 

So now we have three or four great batters who aren't openers. We need more bowlers.

So - first shocker. Not Sobers. We need some proper bowlers. I'm going for Marshall or Ambrose. Marshall. [the issue here would be Sobers and Rabada/Steyn or Kallis and Marshall/Ambrose. Almost impossible to choose ...]

New Zealand - Hadlee or Williamson. Has to be Hadlee. Now we have two great opening bowlers - Hadlee and Marshall.

Pakistan ... Imran Khan is their greatest. But we have Hadlee. And we don't have a left-arm pace bowler. So it's going to be Wasim Akram.

Now England. The most flexible. Several great cricketers, but none that stand way way above. So England can fit the team. So Jack Hobbs. Possibly the greatest opener ever.

And India. Well, Tendulkar feels the obvious choice, but we need an opener. Gavaskar or Sehwag. Or Rohit Sharma? I think i have to show some respect and go for Gavaskar.

So, here's my team:

Jack Hobbs

Sunil Gavaskar

Kumar Sangakkara

Don Bradman

Jacques Kallis

Andy Flower (wkt)

Shakib Al-Hasan

Richard Hadlee

Malcolm Marshall

Wasim Akram

Rashid Khan

It's not the best team ever, but it's pretty well balanced. Maybe Ambrose for Marshall for a different height. Maybe Sobers and Rabada/Stein. Apart from that, I think most of it is self-explanatory.

One book

I wrote a quiz book that came out in 2022. I'm also the co-author of a couple of other books, but this is the book that is really mine. It contains 10,000 questions, which is a lot, and I wrote nearly all of them. I put all of the rounds together, decided on the format of the book, fact-checked it, edited it, proofread it ...

Other people did some of those things too. Jack was checking it, consulting, all along the way, Will, the publisher, likewise. Some of the questions were from our historic resources.

But it's mine. I worked on it when I could for several months, in between other projects. I wrote a great many new questions and also used a lot of questions I'd written down the years. I re-ordered and rewrote and gradually knocked it all together. I was quite chilled about the whole thing most of the way.

Then, there was a moment shortly before our first deadline, after colleagues had been assigned sections to check and pointed out plenty of little changes, that I had a bit of a panic. This is going out and staying out. It has my name on it and there are 10,000 places it could be wrong.

I realised I needed to try and make it perfect. 

It was sent back to me, and I went through it with a whole different set of eyes for a few weeks. Then again. It wasn't that there was much wrong. But there were dull questions, unbalanced rounds, inconsistencies of layout, things that were poorly worded. I improved it.

Just to be clear, there are various reasons why this isn't quite the same as what I feel about all the work I do. Obviously with TV shows you have verifiers. With a lot of other things, the stakes are lower, and there is less. And, bluntly, it doesn't usually have my name on it.

Eventually, I felt like I'd done pretty much what I could. I still worried. I still worry now, even though it's been out for 17 months and I managed to make it pretty good. No big mistakes. A couple of small ones, which, for a book of 10,000 questions without a budget for outside verifiers, is pretty good. It's had good reviews, including from several quiz masters,  it's had good sales and a good star rating on Amazon.

It's just a quiz book, and I've done lots of quiz work down the years, but the thing I treasure most from this was that moment when I realised "this is mine and it's on me and I need not to feel I could have made it any better".

One ought to feel that more in life.