Absent Friend

Ingelheim Exchange, Easter 1971

(Mike, Steve, Tony)

Sad to say, one of my original crew of home-town "besties", Tony Collman, has just died. Most of us, I imagine, get to hear of the death of the friends of our youth belatedly, if at all, and with little or no awareness of who they became or what they did in the years after we chose (or drifted onto) our divergent paths through adult life. The person we remember almost certainly bears little resemblance to the person who has died, most likely in some town you don't know, and mourned by family and friends you will never have met.

This was not like that. Although, curiously, if I had never started this blog I would probably never have heard from Tony again after the last time we met in (I think) 1981, and I might never even have discovered he had died, unless it was many years later, as happened with another good friend, and no doubt with others I have yet to hear about. There seems to have been something oddly prophetic about Jackson Browne's "Song for Adam", from an album that was something of a favourite in our little small-town circle of friends:

When we parted we were laughing still, as our goodbyes were said
And I never heard from him again as each our lives we led
Except for once in someone else's letter that I read

Until I heard the sudden word that a friend of mine was dead.

Except we were not laughing, that last time. Tony had changed, and by no means for the better, it seemed to me.

But before getting to that, I should probably describe who this old friend used to be.

We attended a boys' grammar school in the New Town of Stevenage, 1965-72, that became a "comprehensive" in 1968/9. Tony, when I first knew him, was a mild-mannered, un-sporty, bespectacled boy who usually ended up without much effort somewhere in the top 5 ranked by academic ability in our year. His small size (that is, before a dramatic late growth spurt), heavy-rimmed glasses, and habitual briefcase led him to be given the slightly cruel nickname "Joe", because of his resemblance to Joe 90, the puppet character in the British children's TV programme of the same name. His mother Lena was a Jewish refugee from Nazi-era Berlin who worked for the same patrician chain-store, John Lewis, as my mother, and his father Jim was a bricklayer from London, a Communist, and a very tough customer. Necessarily, as he was the local organiser for the building workers' trade union AUBTW (later UCATT), and played a very significant role during the construction of our New Town.

Tony was by inclination a scientist, but also a very competent linguist, and we first became good friends around the age of 16 on our school's Easter exchange visits with our German twin-town, Ingelheim am Rhein. We shared a taste for intoxication, in-jokes, and improvised goofy humour of the sort that probably only appeals to smarty-pants adolescent boys. We had a lot of fun together, some of it quite foolhardy in retrospect, most notably when we hitchhiked from Amsterdam down through Germany as far as Munich in the summer of 1971, bonding over the sort of memorably mad (and sometimes scary) adventures you could have in those days as footloose 17-year-olds at large in Europe.

At the end of our schooldays Tony went off to Bristol in 1972 to study Physics, and I (after a further term of study and two terms working as a teaching assistant) finally left Stevenage in 1973 to study English at Oxford. For the next couple of years we exchanged letters and visited each other and our friends who were also away at university, as well as those establishing various dens of iniquity back home, and probably spent rather more time entertaining ourselves than was compatible with serious study, certainly of lab-bound Physics, although less so of that slacker's degree, English.

Tony, Bristol 1975

(photographer unknown)

Then, somehow and quite quickly, it all fizzled out. Fast friends went their separate ways, and in those days of frequent changes of address (and no mobile phones or internet) communications would be intermittent for a while, at best, then cease. Around then Tony's hedonism and habitual mood seemed to have darkened in spirit; he went off to Egypt to teach English language for a few years and returned a different, more difficult and even dangerous man. Despite efforts to establish himself as a software developer and resorting, among other things, to taxi-driving, at some point he acquired a profound animus towards the police and other authority figures, resulting in a series of court appearances, fines and ultimately jail sentences, mainly for assaults (such as allegedly deliberately driving a car at two police officers). He also endured periods of homelessness, including a spell living in the woods back in Stevenage, where he was burned out of his encampment by young thugs. In his own words, he had "disappeared into the night" during the 1990s.

Eventually, however, the Stevenage local authorities found him accommodation in a small council flat, and he seems to have settled into a relatively contented life in the new century living on state benefits, helping to edit Our Stevenage, an online archive for reminiscences about the town's history, and pursuing his two enthusiasms, cryptic crosswords and the "abstract strategy board game" Go. As a fan of comedy, he would catch the train into London to join the audience for BBC show recordings: somewhere there's a video clip of his enormous beard getting noticed and riffed on by comedian Paul Merton and Private Eye editor Ian Hislop on the long-running TV show Have I Got News For You. It seems the idea of ever getting a job, never mind a "career", had dropped off his agenda altogether, along with any prospect of a family life: AFAIK he never settled into any steady relationships. That darkness seems never to have completely dissipated, either, but we won't go there: de mortuis nil nisi bonum.

But that is all retrospective knowledge on my part. Whatever did or didn't happen to Tony in the 1980s that resulted in his effective self-immolation in the 1990s – I can only speculate – his personality had undoubtedly changed from the brilliant, mischievous and essentially benign jester I used to know into a glum, paranoid misfit with a gift for alienating people (including most of his old friends from home and those he had made at university) and, even more puzzling, someone capable of occasional fits of violence. The word went out that, in the Byronic formula, he had become "mad, bad, and dangerous to know". I didn't have any more contact with him for the three decades after 1981, as I did have a career and serious family responsibilities to consider, and the few rumours that reached me were sufficiently troubling to put up some solid precautionary barriers.

Then in 2011, quite aggressively at first, he began turning up as a transparently pseudonymous commenter on this blog. After a spell of light skirmishing in public we began a wary email relationship – he was clearly quite bitter about the friends he felt had abandoned him, and I was nervous about bringing this volatile stranger back into my life – but things steadily grew warmer over the years. I started posting him the TLS crossword every week – he was an active and expert participant in various cryptic crossword solving and setting circles – and he clearly enjoyed inducting me into the baffling conventions of cruciverbalism, sometimes asking for help with the more recalcitrantly literary ones. Despite some occasional spikiness – he would vehemently reject any offers of financial help, for example – it seemed that the old friend of my youth could still be detected somewhere in the voice and personality animating these email exchanges.

Knebworth Festival 1973

(photo: Martyn Cornell)

However, I only actually met Tony once in these latter years when our friendship was reviving, and that was entirely by accident. To celebrate my birthday in 2018 we travelled up to London to meet our children at the Hayward Gallery for the Andreas Gursky exhibition there. On that day, behind the galleries and theatres on the South Bank, there was an open-air market selling food, and as we walked through I heard someone calling my name. It appeared to be an elderly derelict with a long matted and plaited chest-length beard sitting on a wall, eating a curry from a cardboard tray. My partner and daughter hurried on, but I was curious. I walked over, and asked, "Sorry, do I know you? How do you know my name?" To my amazement, it was Tony, utterly unrecognisable to me, even standing face to face in broad daylight. Given we had been in regular email contact for a few years by then, it was a very unsettling experience [1].

Anyway, in September last year he revealed that he had been diagnosed with Stage 3 lung cancer, had declined any treatment (wisely, I think), and been given "weeks to a year" to live. He asked me to keep it a secret from our mutual friends – I really don't know why, unless he thought this would be a suitable posthumous reproach for their neglect – and (with one or two honourable breaches) I respected his request. Which was not difficult, as in all honesty it was hard to think of many mutual friends whose contact details I still had or would be able to find who, sad to say, would be particularly interested in his state of health. As I say, from somewhere, somehow, he had acquired a true gift for alienating people.

Then, at the end of January this year, he was hospitalised with shortness of breath, and was discovered to have Covid. They put him into intensive care with an oxygen supply and intravenous antibiotics. He still seemed chirpy enough via email, though, and quite his normal self – he asked me to send the latest TLS puzzles to the hospital – so I agreed to set up a Skype video call. Sadly, this turned out to be a bit of a wasted opportunity, at least from my point-of-view. It was clear that there was much he wanted to say, but his laboured, widely-spaced attempts to speak between breaths kept getting snagged on some idée fixe about a locally-sourced brand of sausages. Now, I'm a patient listener, and I like a sausage as much as the next guy, but this seemed rather beside the point under the circumstances. It was such a bizarre contrast to the lucidity of his emails, but then I suppose he may well have been under heavy sedation. So I listened to him ramble on for an hour or more until some nurses appeared, made my excuses, and closed the session, feeling that this was not an experience I was in any hurry to repeat.

Nonetheless, the Covid cleared up and, after checking out his flat for fire hazards, a hospital-style bed was installed so that he could sleep upright with a supply of oxygen, and he was sent home on the 8th February. He had already asked me to post the next TLS crossword to the flat in anticipation of his imminent discharge, and on the 12th he acknowledged its receipt by email, as he always did.

There was then was an ominous silence, that stretched on and on for ten days. Nothing. Eventually I decided to ring the hospital to see whether he had been readmitted. But the doctor I spoke to informed me that, as I suspected, he had died. When? On the 12th February. I found this hard to believe: not so much that he had died, but that he had died ten days ago, on the very day that he had sent me that last email from home. But by checking his name, address, and approximate date of birth it was confirmed: yes, he was dead, or "had passed", as the doctor kept saying, as if he had been sitting some kind of exam.

So, there it is. To be honest, it's a relief no longer to feel conflicted about whether to make the trip up to Stevenage to say a final goodbye, even though I knew in my heart that was never going to happen. We always like to think we will "do the right thing", don't we? Despite knowing that we'll generally choose the comfortable thing instead. Less selfishly, it's also a relief to know he won't have to suffer the final painful stages of a terrible disease.

Tony sent me a selfie from hospital, an honest portrayal of himself in the gaunt days before his death, still with that matted and plaited chest-length beard, but it's not easy viewing, and so I choose to remember him as he was in summer 1971, a bright young man of 17 experiencing full liberty for the first time, with every prospect of an exceptional life of achievement and happiness ahead of him. That this was never to happen is, in the long view, perhaps just a simple twist of fate, an unexpected kink in the narrative, or even – as I suspect the later, belligerent version of Mr. Collman might have argued – just your opinion, mate. And who asked you, anyway?

Tony, Ingelheim, summer 1971

1. In a typical Collman move, when I emailed him to apologise about this the next day, he replied, "SO tempting to reply 'What the hell are you talking about? That wasn't me!'"...

A Second Lustrum of Calendars

Every year since 2010 I have produced a small number of copies of a simple spiral-bound A4 calendar featuring my own photographs or artwork, for distribution as a Christmas / New Year gift for close friends, family, and – before I retired in 2014 – my more esteemed co-workers. The numbers in those categories were never large, and are inevitably declining, so the costs involved in this largesse have always been manageable. The standard of art reproduction I choose is quite high (I use and recommend Vistaprint) so that each calendar constitutes a little portfolio of some of the better work I have produced in the preceding year. If nothing else, it's a nice way to be present in the domestic environment of some people I never get to see often enough.

It occurred to me – calendars being essentially ephemeral items – that it would be worth putting together a book to record some of them. So in 2019 I made a Blurb book with the title A Lustrum of Calendars (a "lustrum" is a fancy way of describing a five-year period, although it also had a more specific meaning in Ancient Rome), as I had decided to record the run from 2014 to 2018: the five-year sequence in which I seemed to have hit my calendrical stride most convincingly. To make the book more interesting, I also paired the calendar image for each month (on the right) with a photograph taken by me during that particular month of that calendar year (on the left).

Why? Well, a calendar picture is a very public kind of divination (a hostage to fortune-telling, you might say): in November you pick what seems like it might be a suitable image for, say, June in the following year, without any idea of what those few weeks in the future will be like, not least in the lives of those who will be living with that picture for the whole of that month. By pairing the two pictures I thought the book might suggest how each month in each of those five consecutive years had turned out for me, even if only as captured in a single photograph. I also thought it would be curious to see how often there might or might not be a connection of some sort to be made between the two images, the one as prophecy and the other as actuality.

This produced quite a big book of 134 pages, which in hard copy is inevitably also an expensive book. I had really only produced it for my own amusement, however, and didn't seriously expect anyone else to buy a copy (do I say that every time I make a book? I might as well...). So, now that another five years have passed, I have made yet another book for myself with an identical format and the unsurprising title A Second Lustrum of Calendars. But, in the spirit of my decision to use Issuu, I'm making it freely available as a PDF flip-book.

Here it is: you can either run it in miniature here within the the blog page, or – if you click the little circular device in the centre – you can go to a full screen view (recommended). From full screen press <ESC> to get back here on the blog.

Whether I'll still be sending out calendars every year until 2028 and then making a third five-year collection of them in 2029 when – with any luck – I'll be 75 and still "sound in body and mind" remains to be seen. It's remarkable how passing a milestone as predictable and inconsequential as a seventieth birthday can nonetheless compress, confuse, and complicate one's projections into the future. "Five years from now" – once the vast and storied distance between ages 8 and 13, or 13 and 18 – now seems both incredibly brief and alarmingly ephemeral as a span of time.

Kafka's very short short story The Next Village – which to a 17-year-old me seemed so hilariously surreal – now reveals itself as a glittering shard of cold-eyed, gritty realism:

Grandad always used to say: "Life is amazingly short. Looking back, even now, everything is all so closely crowded together that I can scarcely imagine, say, how a young person can make up their mind to visit the next village without the fear that – quite apart from any mishaps – even the length of a normally, happily unfolding life will be anywhere near enough time for such a trip."

OK, I exaggerate, but I recall writing in a post on that story in March 2009, not long after my 55th birthday, "is it not amusing ... that life, as lived, has an exponential quality which makes the banal, the eminently possible, as daunting as a trip to Mars?" Well, not so much amusing at 70, young 'un, as baffling. Why on earth would anyone want to go to Mars, anyway?

But if that vision of befuddled stasis seems a bit too comfily chair-bound, let me put before you another short, single sentence "story", one of Kafka's first published pieces, Wanting to Become an Indian, which embodies much the same idea, but filtered through Karl May in an exhilarating, ecstatic inversion:

If only you could be an Indian, ever-ready on a galloping horse, tilted against the wind, jolting again and again over the jolting ground, until you lost your spurs – there were no spurs – until you threw away the reins – there were no reins – and could barely see the land before you as smooth cropped heath, with the horse's neck and the horse's head already gone.

(my translation)

That's a vision of old age, too. Hoka hey!

Threescore Years and Ten

Would you give up your seat for this man?

So, over the weekend I turned seventy, and should probably now reluctantly concede that I am old. Or, at least, getting there. Possibly. In a few years. I have to admit, though, that I was taken aback, standing on a very crowded train back to Southampton from London a few weeks ago, when an Asian woman made her daughter get up and offer me her seat. I refused, naturally, but it did make me wonder: maybe I look older than I think? Perhaps it's time to reboot the magic bathroom mirror...

Anyway, rather than ramble on about how young I still feel inside, despite appearances, I thought I'd offer you a small celebratory anthology of blog posts, one for each decade, and selected from the Top Twenty most-read posts according to Blogger's statistics: current No. 1: Bee Boy at 3.5K reads since it was published in April 2017.

These posts do seem to cluster around the years 2016-18, which may well have been peak blog, who knows? But I have published 1,992 posts since 2008 – so close to a neat 2,000 – and quite a few not listed here would figure in my own personal Top Ten, if I could only find the energy and motivation to dig them out (did I say I am seventy?). Maybe another time. But I'm happy to hang my idiotic hat on these few for now, as chosen by The Wisdom of the People. So here they are:

Bee Boy: In which I interrogate Gilbert White.

Snake Oil: In which I investigate the nature of art.

Mister Unsafe: In which I invent a new musical genre.

The Height of High Culture: In which I fail to read Emma. Again.

Hey Presto!: In which I contemplate politics and astrology (Aquarius with Scorpio rising, since you ask).

Culloden: In which I look askance at tartanity.

Moscow Rules: In which Gomer nods.

And one for luck:

Homeopathic Ancestry: In which I consider the making of my mark.

No need to read them all at once, obviously... Or indeed any of them at all, although I'd be pleased if you did dip into a few, and found them to your liking. I have no idea why these particular ones out of the 1,992 available posts should have attracted the largest number of hits, and I also have no way of knowing whether these were actual "reads" or hit-and-run glances resulting from searches for, say, "metheglin" (Bee Boy) – not to be confused with methedrine – or "Yevtushenko" (Moscow Rules).

As for the birthday, I'm not big on celebrations, but to mark the occasion we met up with our (now very adult) children at the Royal Academy for a pleasant chat and then a stroll around the exhibition Entangled Pasts, 1768-Now. This show is a very mixed bag, especially compared to something as solid as 2017's Revolution : Russian Art 1917-1932 discussed in the Moscow Rules post. It can seem that a lot of second- and even third-rate art gets a free pass when "message" is prioritised over quality in an exhibition, but this one does have enough outstanding moments not to deserve the panning it got in some reviews.

Should you be able to visit the RA while it's on, my recommendation would be to head straight for the three-screen video installation by John Akomfrah, Vertigo Sea: take a seat, and settle down for an awe-inspiring 45 minutes. The experience is completely mesmerising, in the way a Tarkovsky film is mesmerising, and I could have happily watched it repeatedly for the entire afternoon. You might, of course, rate just as highly the other video installation, Lessons of the Hour, by Isaac Julien, which is clearly very popular, but which I didn't watch as it was too crowded; you had to step carefully over the legs of those seated on the floor in the darkened room to pass through. But Vertigo Sea is probably the best video installation I've ever seen, aided by a superb soundtrack, and worth a trip to London all by itself.

Justice for All, by Yinka Shonibare

The Gloves Are Off

For many years now I've been noticing the personal items that get dropped onto pavements and roads, and which – if not found or picked up by someone – can spend a lengthy afterlife getting kicked around, trodden on, and slowly degraded into roadside rubbish. What these items are tends to change over time, along with fashions. For example, once upon a time easily the most frequently encountered escapees used to be black plastic combs, but these are no longer carried by men precariously in a trouser back pocket, and have become a rarity. Similarly, biros in varying degrees of distress and destruction used to be a much more common sight than they are now. The sheer variety of such kerbside casualties seems to have increased in recent times, although people have become such terrible litterbugs that it's hard to tell whether an object has been "lost" or simply tossed carelessly away, along with all the empty cans, snack wrappers, and plastic bottles.

I had often considered assembling a photographic series of such items but never did, partly because it seemed such an obvious idea that far too many others must already be doing the same thing. I enjoy the "taxonomic" work of Michael Wolf, for example, collating the rubber boots, coat hangers, stray bits of laundry, and plastic chairs to be found in the backstreets of Hong Kong, and no doubt he had his own precedents to follow and now has hundreds of Wolf-wannabes all over the world. But my resistance was also because I had developed a prejudice against such mechanically cumulative "projects" which, in lesser hands than Wolf's, have in the end nothing much to say about anything other than the desire to have something – anything! – to photograph. Which didn't stop me photographing them myself, of course.

During Covid and in its wake the quantity of lost and tossed facemasks and "disposable" protective gloves in the street became ridiculous, even allowing for the fact that we do live quite near a hospital, where you might expect the odd one to be discarded or dropped. The grimy things are everywhere, almost rivalling the crisp packets in number, and naturally nobody wants to pick them up and do something with them. By "do something" I mean put them in a bin, of course, not create a sculpture or collage, although no doubt someone somewhere has been doing exactly that. Again, I rejected the idea of a photographic "masks and gloves" project, as I expected that dozens of people will have been documenting these strange years in precisely that indirect but handily material way.

But I found that this did prompt me to notice other varieties of lost glove lying around all over the place, and in particular what struck me was that they usually seemed to have made their bid for freedom one at a time. Perhaps the other in the pair gives the escapee a boost on its way out of a pocket or bag, or off the back of a builder's truck? Whatever, single escapes seem to be the runaway's rule, and it occurred to me that I had actually already been photographing them casually whenever they turned up, not least because they seem to retain a level of personality that other lost objects lack (the two giving the finger here date from 2018). I suppose that is because, unlike most articles of clothing, even when discarded they closely resemble what is probably the most emphatically expressive part of our anatomy, and in many accidental configurations they would seem to be trying to communicate something ("Oh, shit... Help! This is not what I imagined...", in the main).

So I started looking and photographing less casually, primarily with my phone, and now I've almost gathered enough to put together a little PDF-only booklet, as proposed towards the end of last year (see Pentagonal Pool on Issuu). It's not ready yet, but will be as soon as I can fill a couple of gaps in the intended sequence. Which, given I'm relying entirely on chance finds, might take longer than I'd intended. But, no, I'm not going to start posing my own gloves in the street: that would be disrespectful – gloves are clearly quick to take offence – and I don't want to inculcate any fantasies of escape.