Tuesday, 17 June 2025

Near Dark

I generally don't trust invitations to back Kickstarter-type campaigns. You know the sort of thing, I'm sure: "we need to raise £50,000 to start production of our innovative tin opener", backed with various levels of reward if the target sum is raised and if it doesn't turn out to be either a scam or a fantasy that fizzles on first contact with reality. However, I am backing this one – a book of photographs by Chris Dorley Brown, and encourage you to do the same.

Why? Well, first, these are truly excellent photographs that deserve publication, and second, Dewi Lewis is a well-established and trustworthy publisher of photobooks: this is definitely neither a scam nor a pipe dream. Yes, it's a shame that work of this quality can't find a publisher without begging for support, but that's the reality.

Those of you who, like me, are fans of the Hoxton Mini Press will probably recognise Chris Dorley Brown's name from their list, both as a photographer of London's East End and as a compiler of vintage photographs (I have his book The Corners, as well as a couple of the collections). However, if you've been following that press's progress, you'll have noticed their move away from being a specialist in photography (one of their earliest, On the Night Bus by Nick Turpin, is one of my favourite photobooks) to a publisher of "opinionated" guides and themed photographic compilations. In the end, you have to publish books that sell – they, too, had to resort to Kickstarter during the Covid shutdowns (see my post Hoxton Mini Press of 2020) – and the sad fact is that most photobooks do not sell as well as they might. In fact, it is the dirty secret of photobook publishing that many, if not most of the deluge of unexciting books that appear now are vanity projects paid for by the "artists" themselves.

So, Kickstarter is a necessary evil, if work like Near Dark is to, um, see the light of day. If photobooks are your thing and you can afford it, why not give it your backing?

Saturday, 14 June 2025

Desert Island Disco

Most countries have some sort of "honours" system, a way of rewarding prominent citizens for being prominent. Britain has a long-established hierarchy of official gongs, from the humble MBE, through various grades of knighthood, all the way up to peerages. But, as we know, at the top end this system is mainly operated by political patronage and down-payments laundered as charitable donations, and is hopelessly corrupt. It also reveals the bottomless "me too" neediness of those who you would have thought had already summited their personal Everest. I mean, as of today, Sir Roger Daltrey? Sir David Beckham? Really, guys?

But we in the UK do also have an alternative, more honourable institution, which is no less sought-after. It is a radio programme called Desert Island Discs, first broadcast in 1942. The programme's simple but brilliant formula is that someone has to pretend they have been shipwrecked onto a desert island, and can rescue just eight records from the sea.

Yes, records. Look, never mind why they're saving their records rather than, say, food. It's just a conceit, yes? Plus Desert Island Soggy Survival Snacks would not make good radio. And, yes, obviously, the programme was conceived in the days before vinyl, let alone cassette tapes, CDs, or streaming; so by "disc" they mean "single coherent recorded work", whether it be an Abba single or a Beethoven late quartet. You just have to go along with it, OK?

Anyway, every week some notable is chosen to nominate their eight discs recordings, as well as a book (other than Shakespeare or the Bible, which due to their natural buoyancy have washed up ashore already) and a luxury (no, I have no idea what sort of insight the choice of a "luxury" is meant to provide in these days of plenty, but there it is, and no doubt there it will stay). The essential idea is that the eight records are a way of talking us through the stages of the guest's life, in conversation with the host, currently Kirsty Young Lauren Laverne [thanks, Dave!]. Mind you, if this venerable programme has taught us anything in recent years, it is that few contemporary lives, however distinguished, are very eventful, and that eminence in, say, astrophysics or athletics does not guarantee good taste in music; far from it, in fact.

Now, there comes a "Ballad of Lucy Jordan" moment in nearly everyone's life, when you accept – finally, reluctantly – that you will never, ever be invited to select your eight discs and flirt outrageously with Lauren. Oh, well. That honour – not to mention the knighthood for services to bloviation – has definitely passed me by. But, hey, that doesn't mean we can't put the show on right here!

Now, I must admit I had not anticipated quite how difficult this exercise is for anyone who actually likes their music. I mean, just eight records? EIGHT?? That means entire performers and genres, whole phases of my life in music, will all have slipped beneath those tropical waves! You could drown several times over in the time it would take you to flip through all those discs, hundreds of them, sloshing around in the tide.

So, in the end, as per the formula, I divided up my life-so-far into phases that were both biographical and musical; as you might expect, these did seem to coincide quite neatly. Also, after much agonising, I decided to confine myself to a "pop" selection, 1954-2000. After all, no-one really wants to hear the Goldberg Variations or a Bach cello suite yet again on Desert Island Discs, do they? We could always do Part Two – The Serious Stuff – another time.

I did have a first stab at this back in 2016, and took the liberty then of nominating some runners up, but it strikes me now that was cheating, and my choices are so dad-rock predictable, anyway, that keeping strictly to the "eight discs" plan would be a mercy. Besides, this is not supposed to be an exercise in musical one-upmanship.

OK, cue the Eric Coates theme tune and seagulls... "My guest this morning is..."

Here we go:

We like cowboy music!
1. 1954-61
Lonnie Donegan - Rock Island Line
What can I say? Lonnie was the kingpin (hey, that's from another song, from a later life-phase), and I was a five-year-old pioneer of the skiffle air-guitar; what I loved above all else was what I thought of as Cowboy Music. In any establishment we visited that had a jukebox – they used to be everywhere, especially in seaside towns [1] – I could be quite the annoying little show-off. Still can, I know... It was Lonnie who showed me the Way.

2.  1961-67
Ike & Tina Turner - River Deep Mountain High
Crikey! Oo-wee, baby! And check that video! Wow! What riches! What years! I more or less stuck in a pin, but this track is the business, isn't it? (But, phew, please let's sit down now, Lauren, I think I'm getting too old for this dancing lark). Pretty much anything from these years takes me back instantly to Saturday teatimes in front of our black and white TV: Six-Five SpecialReady Steady GoJuke Box Jury... As kids, we had no real idea of how new all this was, and couldn't wait for it to be our turn. Of course, for us junior TV spectators of the pop scene these were still the monochrome years: it took until 1967 for the advent of colour into our drab post-war British lives, the late kick-off of what you might call Sixties 2.0.

Just another teenage dirtbag...
3 & 4. 1968-73
Fairport Convention - A Sailor's Life
Those prime teen years... Finally, it was our turn. Again, I could have stuck in a pin... The Stones were at their peak, as was Rod Stewart (no, really: check out Every Picture Tells a Story), then there were Jethro Tull, Free, Pink Floyd, David Bowie... Any number of must-have choices (mostly British, I have to say) from that head-swirling, arm-waving, foot-stomping blitz of innovation and lovely noise: the apotheosis of guitars, drums, and sixth-form poetry. Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive... But Fairport: I was a huge fan of these pioneers of electric folk, and this track was the first spine-tingling indication of where things might be heading. Best listened to on a mono Dansette-style player in a darkened bedroom, deep in a torrid imaginary affair with Joni Mitchell.
Jimi Hendrix - Voodoo Child (Slight Return)
Whoah! I couldn't not include this. Those opening bars still give me the chills, every time. Inside, in the secret place where we are all superheroes, this is who I am. If I don't see you no more in this world, I'll see you in the next one, and don't be late... A friend had this track as a 7" single as well as "Honky Tonk Women", and I'd make him lift the needle and play the similarly riff- and drum-heavy introductory bars of whichever was on the turntable repeatedly. Yes, I can be annoying in private, too.


The Essay Crisis Kid
5.  1973-77
Steely Dan - Bodhisattva
University... If I'd known then what I know now, I'd probably have done more work. Instead, I had a lot of fun, which I felt I'd earned by getting to university (first in the family, etc.). Late nights in various smoke-filled rooms, getting to know new friends from strange new worlds, with a constant sound-track of strange new music on someone's stereo. Add an early-hours carton of cold milk and a bar or two of chocolate from the college vending machine, and that, my friends, is heaven. It is my sure and certain hope that the hereafter is organised on a collegiate basis.


The local NALGO executive's Education Secretary assembles the banner
6 & 7. 1977-84
Ijahman Levi - Are We A Warrior? 
Emphatically not! Do we 'ave to 'ave a war? First proper job, sweet long summer nights in St. Paul's, Bristol, finally done with exams and looming essay crises. But bloody Thatcher managed to get me out on the streets, angrily holding up one end of a trade union banner. Oh, and then there was the 1980 Riot... Nothing to do with us, but there we were in the middle of it, burning police cars and all. Babylon!
I reluctantly spent a further year studying in London, 1980-81, and this never fails to remind me of walking home at 2 a.m. from a friend's squat off the Caledonian Road, through Islington and Hackney and along the Balls Pond Road, back to a squat in Dalston. London was eerily quiet at night in those days, and the pavements were oddly cushioned, too, which made walking a challenge. The actual police were always disappointed to find nothing more interesting than lecture notes in my bag, however.


What's going on back there, mister?
8.  1984-2000
Paul Simon - The Cool, Cool River
Like any impoverished person of taste and discrimination, I lost interest in rock and pop in the 1980s and 90s and stopped buying records. Artists I had loved in previous decades were still turning out "product", but I wasn't paying any attention. However, in 1984 I had left Bristol to take up a job in Southampton, and one day I discovered that the Central Public library loaned out cassette tapes, of which it had a substantial and up-to-date collection (those were the days...). Like catching up with old friends, I decided to see what those guys had been up to since we last met. One of the many tapes I borrowed was Paul Simon's album Rhythm of the Saints. It instantly became a favourite, and this track is the stand-out for me. It always moistens my eye when the rhythm and acoustic ambiance change: "I believe in the future we shall suffer no more. Maybe not in my lifetime, but in yours, I feel sure..."  It says there is hope, and that the future will belong to the humblest, now living in resilient poverty at the margins of the First World greed-fest: "Who says, hard times? I'm used to them!" A good note to end on, Lauren!

Which ONE record would I take, you ask, Lauren? Too hard... Do you know, I think I'd rather have none of them than just one of them? As the man said, "heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter". Oh, all right, then, probably Steely Dan.

Book:  Oh, God. This is worse than the music. Let's say the complete print edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, plus supplements. That's about as close to inexhaustible as you can get. Plus those over-sized, slab-like tomes would make a decent foundation for a hut.

Luxury:  Must I? I'm not really a "luxury" sort of person. Under the circumstances, wouldn't a bar of soap be a luxury? But, all right, let's say an enormous box of pencils in assorted grades, a sharpener, eraser, and some unlined A5 hardback notebooks.

Cue theme music... Da da da-da dah...

Phew. I think that went rather well, although I realise now we didn't even mention the Beatles once! But, no, thank you, Lauren: it's been an honour.

For another time, perhaps: The tinnitus years...
(the high price of loud music...)

1. Apparently the jukebox at the far end of Clevedon Pier in Somerset was the only one for miles, and became the centre of a nascent "scene" in the 1950s.

Saturday, 7 June 2025

Read It Again!

I'm busy doing stuff at the moment, none of which is particularly blog-worthy, but is all quite time-consuming and energy-sapping. So, just to keep things ticking over, I may continue to re-post some of my older efforts (with the customary edit and polish), which most current readers will probably either never have read at the time or forgotten all about by now.

As with columnists, reviewers, or any other provider of literate amusement, even your best efforts quickly go the way of yesterday's papers. Very quickly, actually: I realise now that I read something in the TLS earlier this week that made me hoot with laughter, but cannot remember exactly what it was, and can't be bothered to find out; that issue is already in the recycling bin. I used to keep a notebook to transcribe such things and my own occasional aperçus but lost the habit, probably around the time I realised I was never going to become a "serious" writer.

But most weeks I'm surprised to see that some old post that I, too, had forgotten all about is briefly having a moment in the blog stats for some reason and, although I say it myself, I am often agreeably surprised by its quality. This one, for example, which was originally published in 2013; a year which seems quite recent, subjectively, but ... isn't. Where does it go?

Just So

Many years ago, as a thoughtless young man I upset my mother by telling her – intended but not taken ironically – that I had had a deprived childhood because I had not been read, or been given to read, children's classics like Alice in Wonderland.  This was perfectly true, though, and hardly surprising, as both my parents had left school at 14 in the 1930s, and were never big readers. They had no idea that there was a children's canon that, as I discovered when I got to university, formed the bed-time bedrock of middle-class literacy. Wind in the Willows? Never heard of it. Treasure Island?  Arrh, Jim lad! All about pirates, and parrots with wooden legs, isn't it?  Never actually read it, though. Swallows and Amazons? That was on TV, wasn't it? Seemed a bit girly. And so on. You name it, I hadn't read it.

As a consequence, I find myself belatedly picking up these best-beloved books to read. The latest in this line of never-too-late classics has been Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories. Like Treasure Island, these stories are already over-familiar to everyone who has never actually read them. So much so, I could barely bring myself to read "How the Elephant Got His Trunk" (or, as I now know to call it, "The Elephant's Child"). What would be the point? Yeah, yeah, the crocodile bites his nose and pulls it. Very droll.

Well, you might as well ask, "Why bother to see Hamlet yet again?" What I discovered is that these are genuinely, startlingly original pieces of writing. They are spellbinding, begging to be read at bedtime, again and again, ideally by a talented reader capable of bringing to life and inhabiting the different voices and registers that Kipling weaves so inventively, and so intimately. Where else will you find something as delightful as "he smiled one smile that ran all round his face two times"? As vivid as "Off ran Dingo – Yellow-Dog Dingo – always hungry, grinning like a coal-scuttle"? Or as memorable as "One, two, three! And where's your breakfast?"

True, there are moments when cloying cuteness threatens to break out. Victorian and Edwardian gents were 'sclusively sentimental about characterful little girls: see Edward Lear, see Lewis Carroll, among others. But when you learn that Kipling was still mourning the death of his own eldest daughter, Josephine, the sentiment seems less toe-curling. Little Taffy in "How the First Letter Was Written" is clearly the great-grandmother of many feisty little heroines who neglect and reject their household duties in favour of more inciting adventures.

Also true, there are some dodgy undertones that bubble up ("'Oh, plain black's best for a nigger,' said the Ethiopian"). But I think Kipling both honours and teases the language, traditions and manners of India and Africa, just as he does those of the common British soldier in Barrack-Room Ballads. Nobody loves slightly bent English as much as Kipling.

With hindsight, this could be condemned as colonial "orientalism" or simple condescension, but his attitude could never be described as malevolent. Kipling is an imperialist, no doubt, but very far from racist. That unfortunate swastika on the rock in the illustration to "The Crab That Played With the Sea" is a Hindu symbol for "auspiciousness", which is why it also appeared on the bindings of Kipling's collected works. Kipling himself ordered the symbol to be removed as "defiled beyond redemption" after the Nazis had usurped it in the 1930s.

The tone of the Just So Stories is one of controlled but intense playfulness. It's a story-telling voice, rather than a story-writing voice. It is the relaxed, unbuttoned, domestic voice of upper-middle-class imperial Britain in 1902, as heard in a nursery within a large house, buffered from boring routine by servants, nannies, and cooks, and secure behind the impenetrable firewall of the greatest army and navy the world had yet seen.

Those were Good Times for the fortunate few able to enjoy that long Edwardian summer, soon to be disrupted forever by the industrialised slaughter of a world war. Indeed, Kipling lost his own son to the so-called Great War, having had to pull strings to get him into it, writing afterwards, "If any question why we died, / Tell them, because our fathers lied" (Epitaphs of the War). Now there's a "just so" story.

Then there are Kipling's own illustrations. They are bold, Beardsley-esque, and – let's be honest – really not very good. Often described as "woodcuts", I'm pretty sure they are actually ink drawings imitative of the woodcut style. "The Cat That Walked By Himself" is an exception, and rightly popular, although few people seem to realise it was drawn by Kipling himself. Most of these illustrations, though, are crowded, mannered, uncertain of line, and have neither the delicate clarity of a Beardsley, nor the compensating vigour of bold shapes and composition (see Edward Wadsworth, for example). Above all, it's hard to make out what they're meant to be – never a good thing in an illustration –  and it's no wonder Kipling felt the need to write a commentary on each. Some of these commentaries are so whimsically strange you have to wonder what Kipling used to put in his pipe.

But I am much taken with these stories, Best Beloved, and if I am ever blessed with grandchildren I shall scare them something hijjus at bedtime with my gritted-teeth rendering of the crocodile in "The Elephant's Child".


Royal Mail Just So centenary stamps
Illustrations by Izhar Cohen

Incidentally, if you're even slightly Kipling-curious, you might enjoy my illustrations to "Puck's Song" from Puck of Pook's Hill, another later-years discovery. The book can be seen as a flip-book on Issuu (recommended, especially in  full-screen view), and should you happen to want to buy a copy (it's expensive, but the PDF is cheap) then go here to my Blurb Bookstore.


Monday, 2 June 2025

SRSLY?

Received in my email today from the National Portrait Gallery:

Tracey Emin homeware range (tea towels and plates).  Exclusive to the National Portrait Gallery. 

This 100% organic cotton tea towel features a portrait from Tracey Emin's Untitled, 2023 series. Featuring a design from her preparatory acrylic on paper drawings for the unique commission The Doors, 2023, printed in deep blue to emulate the original brush strokes with Emin’s signature printed at the bottom. 

The artist shares her thoughts on the project: ‘Women in history are greatly underrepresented. I didn’t want to depict specific or identifiable figures. I felt like the doors of the National Portrait Gallery should represent every woman, every age and every culture throughout time.'

Well, I think it's safe to say that she has certainly succeeded in not depicting any specific or identifiable figures, although I can see that they might be women, once this is pointed out. I suppose I could be persuaded that she is quoting (ironically? angrily?) the mask-like faces that Picasso used for the young prostitutes in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. But, so what? And it's hard to imagine many regular gallery-goers who would be happy to pay £14 for one of these sketchy tea towels.

In many ways I admire Tracey Emin – she has been a bold and provocative presence on the bland contemporary art scene – but her elevation as a modern exemplar of excellence in drawing of all things (she was elected Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy in 2011) is baffling to me. Her work is instantly recognisable, yes; but convincing as graphical artistry? No. But then what do I know? Perhaps the idea is to decry "mere" graphical skill as facile and elitist, and to show that Art is something anyone can and should be doing. An excellent point, but doesn't it seem odd, then, to bestow accolades and loadsamoney on anyone holding that view? After all, football may be the people's sport, but you wouldn't get far as a professional if you deliberately avoided scoring or saving goals as mere show-offish skills, contrary to the true, deep, democratic spirit of the game. Not yet, anyway...

But plates and tea towels? Really? Although, in the end perhaps that's the true destiny of all art, however well or poorly executed. Tea towels, key rings, coasters, fridge magnets... You know you've arrived when you've been merched.

Tuesday, 27 May 2025

Dunkirk Revisited

This week sees the 85th anniversary of the evacuation of the British army from Dunkirk, so I thought I'd repost my father's account of his experiences there, which I originally published in 2017 after Christopher Nolan's rather air-brushed film had appeared. As usual I've lightly edited it, but it's substantially the same post.

Dunkirk

Before the War
(bike: probably a Phelon & Moore Red Panther)

Following the release of Christopher Nolan's film, and now the 85th anniversary of the actual events, there has been a revival of interest in that curiously mythic event of May/June 1940, the evacuation of Dunkirk; perhaps the "hardest" Brexit imaginable, and the epitome of the British love of a magnificent defeat. As it happens, my father was at Dunkirk, and in his final years I managed to persuade him to commit to paper his vivid memories of this and the rest of his military service as a Royal Signals despatch rider, which spanned the entire war, from France, through the Western Desert, and finally to India and Burma, eventually arriving home from Burma on VE Day. As an independent agent, criss-crossing the landscape from unit to unit, an observant DR necessarily got a wider-perspective view of the war than the average soldier. I have extracted here the chapter describing his experience of Dunkirk in its entirety.

Chapter Four (Dunkirk) from: Memories of a WW2 Despatch Rider, by Douglas Chisholm.

Got back to base one evening to find Bill Asher had got a fire going with a dixie boiling ready to brew some tea. I took off my gloves and respirator and hung them on a gate post - suddenly there was a loud whooosh and a big bang, the fire and dixie went up in the air in a cloud of ashes and steam. I dived into a ditch on top of someone who beat me to it - there were twigs and leaves falling from the bushes on to my face, presumably from bullets or shrapnel. After a short while it quietened down and I went to get my gloves and respirator; the gloves were stitched to the gatepost by splinters of wood and the respirator was cut to ribbons - the haversack was in shreds and the carbon granules were dribbling out of the canister. I had to find the Quartermaster to sanction the issue of a new respirator; I don't think he was very pleased, it probably meant a lot of paper-work! I kept the gloves as a souvenir.

Riding through a village I caught up a convoy of French horse-drawn vehicles, guns, etc., when we were jumped by several Stukas who started bombing and strafing. Soon there were dead and wounded horses all over the road, some trying to gallop away with overturned wagons.  The noise was horrendous, the screams from the planes as they dived, bombs, machine guns, horses screaming, French running in all directions. I was in a ditch trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, when a Frenchman joined me saying over and over "Oh, mon Dieu!"; he had a nasty gash on his wrist and had no field dressing so I bound him up with mine.

Another time I worked my way to the front of a column of vehicles to discover they were stopped by level-crossing gates. I sat there for what seemed hours, keeping a watch for unfriendly planes; I folded my arms along the handlebars and rested my head on them. I felt so tired, the next thing I knew I was lying on the road with the bike on top of me. I had fallen asleep!

Riding through places that had been bombed was hairy, there was broken glass, wooden door frames with large nails sticking out, roof tiles, bricks, all very unstable and liable to cause punctures.  I soon realised that being on a bike was not the best way of knowing what was going on all around, it was difficult to hear any but the loudest and closest noises and impossible to see what was happening behind, so I began to stop occasionally and listen; I also watched carefully the actions and reactions of anyone, especially if they were paying close attention to the area behind me. If there was any sign of unwelcome activity I got off the road as soon as possible, parked the bike, and  moved swiftly off the road at right angles to the direction of approach of the problem.  I fully agreed with the lesson rammed home by the instructors at Prestatyn: "the safety of the message is the most important thing", as that also implied my safety!

One raid resulted in me being covered in white dust which I assumed to be chalk.  It did not come off very easily, so I must have looked a strange sight. Later I caught up with some of the section just after dark. Occasionally it became as light as day, someone was firing parachute flares which hung in the sky for quite a while. I went into a small room at the rear of a building and in the dark managed to find a vacant space between some of the lads already asleep on the floor.  I thought the floor felt a bit bumpy, but a chance to get some sleep was most welcome. At first light I went outside, to discover that the room was a coal shed, and I was now covered in a mixture of chalk and coal-dust.

Refugees heading west away from the Germans were a big problem, they came in cars, buses, horse-carts, on horse-back, bicycles, prams, wheelbarrows, just walking, all spread right across the road going in the opposite direction to what we were going, and threading through the crowds was hard work. They were a sitting target for German bombers and fighters who just flew up and down the roads unchallenged. So some of the sights along the way were not very pleasant. Gradually, mixed in with the civilians I saw occasional khaki uniforms, they had no weapons or steel helmets, just mixing in with the crowds. Sometimes as the result of a raid there would be groups of bodies, men, women and children pulled off the road, perhaps under some trees and left there. After a time I suppose we just got to the stage when it became the norm and no longer felt involved in something over which we had no control.

During one of these strafes I felt a thump on my right leg just below the knee. That night when I took off my boots the right sock was caked with blood,  whatever hit me had gone through the very thin skin on my shin almost to the bone. Luckily I had a spare pair of socks and the wound was not painful and it healed quite quickly.

During the early days we were riding quite deep into Belgium, but slowly it seemed that we were not going so far, and units were moving west. We recrossed the French border near Poperinghe. As we moved back deeper into France I was detached from the Section, to work with a captain with several trucks with wireless and other equipment. The captain seemed to be in a bit of a flap, got his map out and said, "Go and see if we can get to this location along these lanes". I went and took a look, and told him, "We can get the lorries through, and there is no sign of enemy activity". Off we went, it was a bit tight in places, and when we arrived at the spot pointed out by the captain I got a roasting because the overhanging trees and bushes had scratched the paint on some of the lorries!

Soon the columns of refugees thinned out and there were practically no civilians, but more and more uniforms, some I didn't recognise, all without rifles. They took up the whole width of the roads, so it was easier to get up on the verges and have a bumpy but quicker journey. For the first time there were lorries heading in a northerly direction packed with British uniforms and looking lost. I kept getting asked, "Is this the way to Dunkirk?", and when I'd helped they went off in a hurry.

We began to see mixed groups of men from various regiments and different arms walking in the same direction as the lorries had gone, a fair number still carrying their rifles.

I was attached to a major with a wireless truck. As the messages came in we'd go off to find a unit, occasionally on return to our starting place someone would be waiting with a new map reference, always further north or north-west. The fields alongside the roads (which were on raised banks) were being covered with water, to make it more difficult for Jerry tanks. If bombs or shells landed in the fields up went fountains of mud and water.

One night we slept on the edge of a field under a hedge with the bikes out of sight from aircraft. We were woken at first light and told not to start the bikes, but to wheel them to the edge of a railway line, then at intervals carry the bikes over the tracks without any metal touching the lines, wheel the bikes a considerable distance, before being allowed to start up. We never found out why. Up to that time I had been wearing over my battle-dress a Barbour suit, it was warm and waterproof and although it was fraying on one leg from battery acid spillage caused when I'd fallen off a few times, I liked it because it was ideal when sleeping outdoors. But about this time an infantry officer advised me to stop wearing it because, being a greeny-grey colour, some of his chaps might mistake me for a Jerry and take appropriate action, so I dumped it.

While riding it was difficult to be aware what was going on all around - apart from the engine noise, trying to ride against the flow of men and trucks took a lot of concentration. I found that watching the column coming towards me gave early warning of a bombing or strafing attack; the column peeled off the road on either side like earth off a ploughshare. A Jerry fighter came towards us at ground level followed by a Spitfire. To stop the Spit from firing the Jerry flew straight along the road just above our heads - to our delight the Spit got his propeller under the Jerry's tail and slowly pulled up, forcing Jerry to climb or have his tail cut off. They climbed, one under the other until Jerry levelled out, the Spit followed, a short burst of machine gun fire, the Jerry tipped on his nose and crashed into a flooded field, burying the plane well past the cockpit. A great cheer went down the line of men who were by now back on the road, heading north.

Our next move was to the house of a smallholding just off the road. We could now see the cloud of black smoke hanging over Dunkirk and watch bombing raids on the town. The columns of men no longer needed to ask the way, all they had to do was head for the smoke. They were by now very ragged looking; occasionally a company of infantry would march by in good order, but not often. There was abandoned equipment everywhere, in fields and side roads.  I was amazed to see a field full of artillery and big ack-ack guns, it looked like hundreds of them, many of them had their barrels pointing to the sky, but the barrels had the ends blown out like the petals of a flower.

One night I was riding through a small village and was slowed down by an M.P. with a torch: there were hundreds of infantry men lying in the market place in orderly rows as if on parade - three ranks in perfect lines. I could only assume they were one of the Guards Regiments taking a rest before marching on.

I had scrounged a mug of tea from the crew of a Bofors gun when a twin tailed plane came into sight from the north, they got off several clips of shells before the plane veered away and disappeared. I said "I reckon that was a Lockheed Hudson, one of ours". They said for them every plane is unfriendly.


In training, Sherwood Forest (no, really)


In France
(bikes: BSA WD M20)

By now the journeys were getting shorter and more frequent, so every opportunity was taken to get a few minutes sleep. Petrol was obtainable by syphoning it from abandoned vehicles, the bikes stood up to the rough treatment very well. During one trip along a cinder track I suddenly found myself on my back, the bike several yards away. I hadn't heard a bang or seen a flash so I stayed where I was. Nothing happened so I checked myself over, my right elbow was very sore and the battle-dress sleeve torn and frayed a bit. Just below the elbow was a large graze, so I checked the bike - just a bent footrest and brake lever and that was that. I saw some RAMC blokes, they had a look and told me that I'd live and asked if it hurt?  I said no, and they said, "It will now", and they rubbed some sort of gel into the graze and I was sent on my way.

Digging a slit trench one day we unearthed boxes of .303 rifle ammunition in very good order, but dated from WW1, just about eighteen inches below ground.

A group of Artillery men stopped for a rest on the verge near us and I saw they were concerned for a young officer who had his great coat slung over his shoulders and looked "all-in". I went across and asked if I could help and noticed that a piece of shrapnel triangular in shape, each side about an inch and a half long was wedged vertically in the brim of his steel helmet, just in line with his eye, so I said, "That was close".  He said he wasn't worried about that, then showed me his right shoulder which was a mangled mess of blood and bandages. There was nothing I could do, and after a while they resumed their trek to Dunkirk. Later I wondered if they were the survivors of a group of four Bofors guns I had watched being bombed, machine-gunned and knocked out in a field earlier that day.

The sound of gunfire was gradually coming nearer and we seemed to be increasingly inactive, then one day the major said we had finished our job, we were to destroy the wireless sets and vehicles and make our own way to the beach at Dunkirk. I didn't fancy walking what seemed quite a way to the smoke cloud, so I rode to the outskirts of the town, then drained the oil out of the engine, set the throttle to high rev's, kick-started the engine, and set fire to the petrol tank and walked away.

It was evening by the time I got onto the beach, there were groups in trenches dug in the sand, others seemed to be wandering around aimlessly. Some were wading out to sea hoping to get on one of the small boats that came in as close as possible.  I took off my boots and hung them round my neck and got to the water's edge, realised it was low tide and decided to wait until the tide was right in, then I wouldn't have so far to wade in order to get on a boat.

I walked up and down the beach for a time wondering if I would see anyone I knew, but no luck. There were lorries that had been driven out as far as possible at low tide, so at high tide they formed a jetty which gave easier access to the boats. I made myself a hole and tried to get a few minutes sleep, but air raids on the larger boats waiting well out to sea made it difficult.  I watched one raid and was sure I saw one bomb go right down the funnel of a destroyer which seemed to explode in slow motion. When the smoke cleared there was nothing left.

At high tide there were bodies being washed ashore so I gave a hand to drag them above the high tide mark. Two torpedoes suddenly hurtled up the beach clear of the water, their propellers sending up cascades of sand and water - we backed well away until I suppose the compressed air in their motors ran out, then they just lay there, like a couple of stranded fish.

A rumour went round that we should make our way to the East Mole at dusk, so I thought I'd give it a try. It was dark when I got to the mole and we were marshalled by a group of sailors into single file and then told to move along, there seemed to be hundreds of French soldiers just standing there watching, it was very eerie. Once on the mole we realised why we were in single file, great holes had been blown in the concrete and these had been bridged by planks about two feet wide and we could hear the waves about twenty feet below. When we got on a solid piece of mole we were told "wait, make way for wounded".  Some were on foot others on stretchers, when they passed we moved on again. Finally some more sailors helped us onto a slide made from planks and we slid down quite a distance and landed on the deck of a ship. We were told to spread ourselves round the ship. I got my back against a rail of some sort and sat down. I woke up to the fact that we were moving so dozed off again. I vaguely remember hearing a machine gun on the ship firing, and thought that everything must be under control, so went back to sleep.

At dawn I got up and had a look round and realised that although it was a civvy ship it was manned entirely by the Navy, then I was amazed to find that it was the ship in which I had sailed from Southampton to Le Havre - the "Tynwald". I think we docked at Dover and were surprised to see flags and banners waving and women offering us tea and sandwiches. We were hustled quickly on to a train waiting in the docks (we were not a pretty sight!), and off we went. If we went slowly through a station people ran alongside the train offering food and cups of tea, we were puzzled by all the flag waving and cheering, having just been chased out of France.

We arrived at Winchester station and were lorried to the Kings Royal Rifles barracks, given two blankets, and shown into a barrack hut where I got down on the floor and sank into a peaceful sleep.

After Dunkirk

Dad died in 2008; he was 89, just one month short of his 90th birthday. He was never one for going on about the war – "swinging the lamp", as they called it –  but he had a terrific album of photographs taken by others in his unit which, as a young boy, I stumbled across in the bottom drawer of a bedroom wardrobe. I regularly used to open it up and pore over the photographs. I would insist on knowing all about the who, where, and what of those mainly benign images, and Dad would reluctantly revisit the not-so-distant past, no doubt redacting his memories somewhat for my childish ears. For boys of my age, born in the 1950s, WW2 occupied a similar place in the imagination to that held by Star Wars, say, or even Lord of the Rings for later generations. It must have been hard for our fathers to have reality and fantasy constantly brought together in such a potentially "triggering" way, as we would say now, in the form of comics, toys, and their own children running around the streets and woods playing "army".


When they realised they were getting too old to look after themselves, my parents moved from Hertfordshire to Norfolk, in order to live in a mobile home in my sister's back garden. For the sake of some company, Dad joined the local branch of the Dunkirk Association, where men of like age and with a shared, unique experience could swing the lamp a bit over a cup of tea (men in their eighties tend not to drink pints). This was how he found himself at the epicentre of one of the darkest chapters in the Dunkirk story, the massacre of captured British troops of the Royal Norfolk Regiment by the SS at Le Paradis. This terrible story can be read here.

Talking with these Norfolk veterans, I think, shifted something in his perception of his own wartime experiences, rather like realising – fifty-five years after the event – what a close-run thing it had been at times, not just nationally, but personally. For the first time, he began reading accounts of the war and attending Remembrance Day events in chilly Norfolk village churchyards. He asked me to find him a copy of this painting by Charles Cundall, which he'd seen on TV:

The Withdrawal from Dunkirk, June 1940, by Charles Cundall

I bought a print of it from the Imperial War Museum, which he had framed and hung over his bed. Shortly before he died, he said to me, "You know that painting of the beach at Dunkirk? It's not quite right, you know. Those great big clouds of black smoke? I'm pretty sure they were blowing the other way." Dad's memory being what it was, right to the end, I'm sure he was right.

Thursday, 22 May 2025

Twyford Down III



When it finally comes time to sequence a book, I have found that making some very small prints that can be dealt out onto the table like a pack of cards is a good way to kickstart what can otherwise seem a daunting task. Twenty-four 7 cm square photos fit nicely onto an A3+ sheet (13" x 19"), for example, which can then be cut up. That way, just two or three sheets will provide a booksworth of prints.


Spread out like this, a lot of things immediately become clearer than they ever would by repeatedly shuffling through a stack of larger prints.

Straight away, you start to see duplicates and obvious pairings for facing pages, and by constant critical scrutiny and re-ordering of the deck the rhythm and shape of a book sequence starts to emerge. The obvious pairings give way to better ones, and the stand-out images start to determine the key points around which the sequence will be hung, as if in a gallery: there's no point in blowing all the best stuff in the first few pages, or keeping it all to last. It also exposes the gaps: there will be missing pictures you need to go back to the files and look for, or even go out again and take. There may not be enough scene-setting images, for example, or too many taken at the same time of year, or in the same place from the same vantage point, and so on. A book, like an exhibition, invites a narrative, even when it's just a book of landscape photographs. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find it.

You might say all this is a waste of time and effort, of course.

For a start – and setting aside the stark fact that hardly anybody will ever buy or handle a copy of your book – hardly anyone other than fellow practitioners appreciates that the contents of a visual book will have been (or ought to have been) arranged with this sort of care and attention to detail. But, in a way, that's the whole point: a well-sequenced book should simply feel right, and be a pleasure to page through. It's not unlike the care someone might take in preparing their appearance – clothes, hair, shoes, accessories – for a big night out; in the end they should just look good and appropriately dressed, no analysis required. People only really notice when some clueless dork like me has turned up to collect the Nobel Prize for Blogging wearing hiking boots, jeans, and a tie-less, un-ironed shirt. What? Why is everybody whispering?

Also, it's quite unusual for anyone actually to page through a book sequentially, front to back, page by page. They'll open it at random, home in on those standout images – oh, I like that one! – and may just glance at the "filler" that doesn't immediately hold their attention. Besides, it's a fact that for left-handers like me it's simply natural to hold a book in your right hand, and let the pages fall from your left thumb starting from the back: to page from the front is simply too awkward. Don't believe me, you righties? Try paging through a substantial visual book from the back without creasing or dog-earing any pages – or even dropping it as the weight flip-flops in your left hand – and you'll see what I mean. These are great arguments for the virtues of the PDF flip-book, of course. [1]

So, unless you're going for some "creative" scrap-book style layout (my advice? Don't...), the really crucial decisions are all about the facing pages. The traditional-but-bland layout for a photobook is to have a single image on the right-hand side, faced by a blank page on the left, possibly with a caption on it or a running title at the top of the page. This looks elegant, saves a lot of effort and handily doubles the page count: convenient if you only have a small number of candidate photos. More interesting, though, I think, is to have at least a few well-chosen pairings of two facing images, and this can often best be achieved not by careful thought but by playing around with those little prints laid out on the kitchen table. Otherwise, how would you ever come up with that serendipitous placing of X next to B, when X next to Z had seemed so obvious at first?

Some variations in image size can engage the attention, too, and, if you're really going for the narrative approach, why not have the occasional page with a couple of small images as a sort of punctuation? In the end, a book is not a portfolio, and visual interest will trump absolute image quality nearly every time. Unless you're thinking of spreading one picture across two pages, with the result that some of it vanishes into the central "gutter"... Again: don't; just don't. It works in magazines, but virtually never works in a book. You can trust me on that one...

But, hey, why listen to me? Go and make your own mistakes! I've got sequencing to do.


1.  I put a lot of effort into sequencing this one, for example, one of my first serious attempts at bookmaking, following my exhibition at Mottisfont Abbey in 2003/4. Whether it works better as a hard-copy book or as a flip-book is an interesting question.

Sunday, 18 May 2025

Twyford Down II



The picture above is the earliest in my current retrospective Twyford Down "project". Somehow it looks a bit ancient, too, in a painterly kind of way. By around 2010 our children were both young adults leading independent lives, so weekend rambles were becoming more frequent, ambitious, and wide-ranging. What, you've never tried dragging a tired toddler or sulky teen across a muddy field? In particular, I had begun to explore the area around St. Catherine's Hill and the Hockley Viaduct, an abandoned Victorian railway structure near Winchester that had become semi-derelict. Standing on the viaduct one day, I realised you could see into the Twyford Down cutting and, as I happened to have a telephoto lens on my camera – then a 12 MP Canon 450D – took some pictures. This particular one was taken in March 2011 standing on some high ground on the opposite side of the M3.

A lot of the photographs made around then were consolidated into a Blurb book, England and Nowhere, that I put together in 2016 (also to be seen in higher resolution on Issuu here). Naturally, I've taken a lot more photographs in the subsequent decade, with higher resolution kit as well as a more practiced eye and more sophisticated processing skills. So, in addition to the wide format photographs described in the previous post, I've been making some more frame-friendly square photographs. I have always enjoyed the challenge of composing within a square – not as easy as it might look – which started for me back in the days of film when I was lugging around a hefty Mamiya C330 as my "serious" camera, and subsequently when I discovered the pleasure of using lightweight old folding cameras like the Agfa Isolette. You can really get down to the essence of what works in a picture by grappling with the constraints of a square frame, and cropping a square out of a rectangular image is not unlike going over a piece of writing and cutting out the superfluous verbiage.

Out of about 300 candidate image files I have now made about 60 squares, of which I'd say 40 are top quality, by my standards at any rate, and the remainder are B+ images, perfectly good enough to be used as linking and scene-setting images in yet another Blurb book sequence, which is where all this is inevitably heading. I think a 20% hit-rate is about right, and there's probably nothing more in there to be extracted, especially given the inevitable repetition of working such a small area over many years.

Here are a few of them, in no particular order. They're not spectacular, in landscape porn terms, but true to the patchwork spirit of the place, and it's undeniable that the clouds up there are often quite something. The fun part of finding the pictures is pretty much completed now, and the hard work of polishing and sequencing has yet to begin.








In case you can't read it at this size and reduced quality, the engraved stone in the first picture reads "THIS LAND WAS RAVAGED BY G. Malone, J. MacGregor, R. Key, J. Major, D. Keep, C. Parkinson, C.Patten, M. Thatcher, C. Chope". Some of those names will be very familiar to Brits who were politically-aware in the 1980s and 90s. I've no idea who erected the stone there, at the very edge of Twyford Down overlooking the motorway – it's very nicely done, and reminiscent of the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay at his garden at Little Sparta – but it has since fallen over (or more likely been pushed over) and broken into several pieces. So it goes... But should anyone propose any further encroachment onto this land I'll be dusting off my protesting hat and signing up with the Dongas Tribe.

Monday, 12 May 2025

Twyford Down


I doubt that Twyford Down is any longer a name that invokes much by way of association, but in the 1990s it was the scene of prolonged protests and their violent suppression by the police and private "security". The cause was the proposal to excavate an enormous passage through the ancient chalk landscape adjacent to Winchester, in order to accommodate the M3 motorway. My protesting days were over by then, having transmuted into an all-consuming combination of nappy-changing and long days at the office, but it was a big deal at the time, all over the news, and saw the beginnings of an environmental movement in Britain committed to direct action. It also saw a curious alliance between the local landed gentry and camped-out nomadic "crusties".

Ancient history now: the digging got dug, regardless, and the motorway has been bypassing Winchester for decades. If there's some kind of traffic jam at the Winchester turn-off, what most people see as they gaze out of the car window is this:


More often, though, it will be some variation on this, as they speed through:


But above the cutting Twyford Down survives, permanently separated from St. Catherine's Hill by this uncrossable river of traffic where there once was a shoulder of chalky downland, although still linked by a single footbridge (you can just about make it out in that driver's eye view). For us, it became a place to take weekend walks, and I have recently begun to collate and edit the many photographs I have taken there. A wide format seems to match the expansive, rolling feel of the place.






It's still a magical place, an elevated plateau bearing a patchwork of flinty ploughed fields, chalk downland grazed by cattle and sheep, and at its southern end a golf course, where the presence of the motorway and nearby Winchester fade away into insignificance, and you can hear the songs of rival larks rising ever higher above you.

Winchester from Twyford Down

St. Catherine's Hill, the M3 cutting, and Twyford Down from the south

Twyford Down as seen from the Itchen Navigation water-meadows

Wednesday, 7 May 2025

Only Five Leaves Left


Once upon a time, only labourers, style-conscious inverted snobs, and impoverished eccentrics used to roll their own cigarettes. Smoking tobacco was an unremarkable and universal habit – not to smoke was the unusual choice – but the way you did it was a strong marker of social status. The men digging a hole in the road or laying bricks on a building site would be smoking "rollies" along with their ultra-strong and super-sweetened tea; anyone else bought their twenty cigarettes – or, back then in post-War austerity Britain, sometimes just ten – ready-made in a packet. [1] Unless, of course, they smoked cigars or, worse, a pipe: both vile and antisocial habits capable of clearing a room, the pipe strongly associated with (male) teachers and academics. As I have remarked before, to open the door of any teachers' common room at lunchtime before the 1970s was like opening a fire-exit to Hell, allowing a multi-branded fug to billow out in a suffocating, toxic pall.

For everyone, though, from brickie to Oxbridge don, your choice of brand was an early form of consumerist self-expression: I can't think of any other single product stocked in such diversity and with such attention to distinctive packaging as tobacco. Cigarette packets and tobacco tins were little masterpieces of exuberant graphic design and typography, boosted by dubious advertising slogans and tempting collectibles for the young in the shape of cigarette cards. For hand-rollers a two-ounce tin was a permanent, decorative, and air-tight pocket vault in which to keep your half-ounce refills of tobacco, rolling papers, and perhaps even some filters or one of those hammock-style rolling gizmos for the hopelessly cack-handed.

In Britain, the brand Rizla dominated the market for hand-rolling papers. To the extent that – like Hoover or, um, Durex – the brand was synonymous with the product. You asked for a "packet of [colour] Rizlas", where [colour] was your choice of three: red for standard weight papers; green for standard weight papers with two corners cut off to enhance rollability; and blue for a lighter weight of paper, the nimble-fingered sophisticate's choice. There was also an orangey-yellow for the unspeakable liquorice-flavoured variety, although why anyone ever thought those were a good idea is beyond me.

Surprisingly few people seem to have realised that these ubiquitous papers were actually a French product in origin, or had worked out that the attractively typographic name "Rizla" placed alongside a large cross (in heraldic terms, a "cross potent") was, in fact, a play on the name of the manufacturers, Lacroix – la croix being French for "the cross" – who made "rice" papers (riz in French). Thus: Riz Lacroix became Rizla + ... QED.

Things changed with regard to who hand-rolled their cigarettes when higher education was opened up to anyone capable of benefitting from it. In the 1960s, many young people from all social classes found themselves temporarily impoverished as students and discovered the advantages of “rolling your own”. As did those who had adopted the fashionable student lifestyle – studenticals? – often funded by "signing on" for state benefits, which in those days were sufficiently generous to be like living on a very modest trust fund. Without this support for motivated idleness, the creative scene in pre-1980s Britain would have been very different.

Aside from the obvious attraction of economy, there was also the anti-bourgeois cachet that hand-rolling seemed to endow, not least in beery, folk-singing, left-wing circles. Nothing, it seemed, said "boycott apartheid South Africa", or "nuclear disarmament" as much as a badly-made ciggie, plus a duffle coat, a chunky-knit sweater, more pints than was wise or necessary, and a boisterous chorus of “The Wild Rover”. Perhaps to some rolling your own signified the unalienated labour of the artisan, but for most it simply gave a vague sense of solidarity with the hole-diggers and brick-layers. All together now... "I spent all me money on whisky and beer!"


© 1974 Fiona Thompson

Then, as the decade progressed, Reefer Madness took a hold on our impressionable young people. Many youngsters who otherwise would probably never have become smokers – the health hazards of tobacco were well-established by the 1960s – became habitual hand-rollers through a desire to take part in the new “underground” subculture. Or at least the part of it that involved getting pleasantly stoned rather than horribly drunk. Why? Because in cold, rainy Britain, cannabis usually came in the form of solid resin – smuggled into the country in improbable quantities from the Middle East – and this was generally prepared by crumbling it into tobacco contained in an improvised sheet made by sticking three papers together, with a rolled cardboard "roach" stuffed in one end. Part of the top torn off a Rizla packet made a handy roach, so the display of a mutilated packet became a secret handshake between members of the Stoner Community, as we'd probably dignify habitual potheads these days.

Other social changes were reflected in hand-rolling, too; subtly at first, then rather less so. For example, for many years a packet of Rizlas had contained a little printed slip that emerged as you came towards the end of the packet which read "Only 5 leaves left"; a nicely-judged and discreet hint, like a polite cough. It was pleasant to think that the guys digging a hole in the road appreciated and deserved this courtesy. However, towards the middle years of the 1970s this gentle nudge was replaced by the blunt imperative, "Time to buy another packet": it seemed that hand-rollers were now deemed too dense to take a hint, and a little bit of poetry and politesse had gone from the world. Then, worse, Rizla started making "king-size" papers, which was embarrassing, frankly, in its opportunistic knowingness, and rather too much like your parents deciding that jeans were quite comfy to wear, after all, and buying a pair in M&S. (For my rant about jeans, see the post Bar Tacked At Points Of Strain).

With such small straws in the wind the full-on late-capitalist consumer society – in which nothing would be sacred, out of bounds, or incapable of appropriation and exploitation – was heralding its arrival. For many of us born before 1960 there was a distinct “before and after” located somewhere in the 1970s that separated what we might call, in Blakean terms, the years of innocence and those of experience, between the three-paper DIY counterculture of army-surplus greatcoats and charity-shop dresses and the commodified off-the-peg youth fashion trends of the High Street. You might say that so-called "punk" was a doomed attempt to regain that lost innocence. But it was already too late for many: those years of the late 1960s and early 1970s had been a massive creative vortex that threw up so much that was new and wonderful, but which quickly went into reverse and became the plughole down which too many "boomers" vanished, their descent sped by drink, drugs, and a stubborn refusal to play by the new rules.

Which brings me to the sad story of singer-songwriter Nick Drake. The poetic and, as it turned out, prophetic title of his first album Five Leaves Left – laid-back to the point of somnolence – is clearly one those nudging insider references that, if you got it (or, more likely, had it explained to you [2]), meant you could feel you were in with the in-crowd. But his tragically truncated life was a parable of the times: the story of how a sensitive, talented misfit could for a short time shine brightly, but never brightly enough to attract commercial success. Many thousands, like me, will have heard and admired “Time Has Told Me”, his track on the cheap Island Records "sampler" album Nice Enough to Eat, but very few went on to buy the album. Quite apart from anything else, for regular teens in 1969 full-price LP records were far too expensive to be a speculative pocket-money purchase; we still lived in a 7-inch "singles" culture. Then, after a couple more commercial failures – and despite the best efforts of friends, fellow musicians, and his record company – he declined into a paranoid, lonely, and ultimately terminal medicated sulk, dying of an overdose of antidepressants, whether deliberate or accidental, while in retreat back at his parents’ house. Sadly, he didn’t even make it to membership of the 27 Club.

I smoked my last ever roll-up in December 1989 – one of the few New Year's resolutions to endure beyond February – but what better metaphor for the bitter-sweet melancholy of later-life reflection is there than to realise you have lived long enough finally to have drawn the equivalent of that slip reading "only five leaves left"? With any luck there may well still be a fair few good years left for you, if dismayingly fewer than the original full complement, but – contrary to the blunt metaphorical untruth of that later version of the message – there never was and never will be the possibility of buying another packet, not even for those later generations so obsessed by fitness, diet, and "wellbeing". You might think you can identify as immortal but, as another early 70s casualty and full founder member of the 27 Club put it, no one here makes it out alive.

So we more fortunate "olds" who made it through those youthful years relatively unscathed, whether through luck or judgement, had better take the hint, and make the most of whatever is left in our one and only packet of days, striking each off the calendar with a mindful mix of regret and gratitude, and with the occasional glass raised to the "absent friends" who didn't make it this far. And, perhaps, always with a little background buzz of apprehension that the habits and excesses of youth may yet exact a price that was never exactly hidden in the small print of the contracts signed so blithely with various patient demons so very long ago.

© 1974 Fiona Thompson

1. Thereby hangs a tale. On our first (and, in my case, only) trip to the USA in 1980, I was still a hand-rolling smoker. However, for whatever reason, I thought it would be more appropriate to buy regular cigarettes in America, so at the first opportunity I went into a shop and, in the British fashion, asked for “Twenty Marlboro, please!” The guy gave me a quizzical look, disappeared out the back, and came back carrying two bricks of ten Marlboro packets: that is, 400 cigarettes. It seemed no-one had bought cigarettes in tens in living memory in the USA, so specifying the size of packet required was both unnecessary and confusing.

2. This sort of homespun hermeneutical decoding was the essence of playground folklore. I remember that in 68/69 a local Stevenage rock band went by the name Vinegar Tom. It was explained to me by one of my more hip classmates that "vinegar" = "acid" (true enough), and "tom" (Tom Mix) was rhyming slang for "fix" (it's not), so the band's name meant "acid fix", even though nobody ever took a "fix" of LSD (although Google tells me that "acid fix" is now a type of facial care product). So I was duly surprised when I came across this illustration in a book on witchcraft in 1970:


Others had spotted this name, too, most notably playwright Caryl Churchill. You'd imagine there must be some connection to the rather more successful band Vinegar Joe (launchpad of Elkie Brooks and Robert Palmer) but in fact it seems this was the nickname of a WW2 American general. Curiously, "Grizzly Greediguts" (see Familiar No. 4) was still current as a term of abuse in my childhood.