razor-blade and carefullyslice through the cigarette paper from top to bottom. Finally (drawing back his cuffs conspicuously to show that the hanky-panky didn’t happen at this stage), he would tamp the loose tobacco into the cupped palm of his assistant and pass what was left to the volunteer from the audience.
‘Would you please read what is written on the piece of paper you are now holding in your hand, puh-le-e-e-e-ze!’ And what was written, of course, was what was spelled out on the board which the assistant was now parading across the stage like one of those girls in savagely-cut satin hot-pants who go around with the round-cards at championship boxing matches. Cue walk-off music. Cue applause.
These meaningless snatches of sentences, recited importantly several times in the course of a few minutes, in a disembodied, almost an incantatory way, could be oddly potent. With the repetition, some sort of meaning seemed to coalesce around them.
Many times I would be halfway through the first song of my set and I wouldn’t have heard a word that I’d sung; my mind would still be snagged on some random string of words which, more often than you would think possible, seemed to have a hauntingness or mysterious resonance.
I can now remember only two of them.
The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away is one.
‘You’ve dyed your hair since then,’ remarked Jordan, is the other.
Why I should have remembered these two and wiped the rest is impossible to know. But the fact is that they stay lodged, stubborn as meat between the teeth, when many things of much more obvious relevance or significance have been casually flushed away. It has encouraged me to nail my flag to the mast of randomness and chance.
It is something I think about often in the evenings when I find myself idly leafing through a book here in Kiln Cottage, waiting for something to leap out and grab me.
When it does, I might include it in the notebook I keep for the purpose. It was 99 per cent virgin when I came here, as her record company used to boast of Joni Mitchell in the sixties. Butnow the covers are ringed from cups and glasses, and some of the pages are stuck to each other with make-up, spilled coffee and dog-slobber.
There is no television in the cottage, but it is well stocked with books. There are full bookshelves either side of the open fireplace in the sitting-room. Books line the upstairs corridor. There are even books wedged under one of the legs of the bed in which I sleep, compensating for the way the floor dips away to the window overlooking the quay – E. Keble Chatterton’s The Yacht- man’s Pilot of 1933 ; and, on top of this, a dog-eared copy of Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale , with a cover painting of a woman by Toulouse-Lautrec – only her hair and a hand rather tensely gripping the back of the garden bench on which she is sitting are visible.
If I was ever serious about making good the gaps – the outbacks and Saharas – in my knowledge, the last few years have been the perfect opportunity. The trouble is, I lack the application. I have always been a dipper and a browser; have always enjoyed what in today’s terminology I believe is called ‘grazing’, rather than the full tombstone read.
Books, like churches and classical music, have always made me feel turned in on myself and involuntarily gloomy. It gives me no pleasure at all to say it, but there’s hardly a book that I’ve started at the beginning and read all the way through.
The only exceptions are the American pulps, the paperback shockers which circulated on the long train journeys we were always undertaking between engagements in the fifties. They completed my education.
Like violets, and small saucers of prawns and whelks, they were sold by men with trays around the pubs in Soho and the equivalent areas of the bigger towns, and this contributed to the sense of illicitness I always felt about them. ‘Any health mags, love
‘Would you please read what is written on the piece of paper you are now holding in your hand, puh-le-e-e-e-ze!’ And what was written, of course, was what was spelled out on the board which the assistant was now parading across the stage like one of those girls in savagely-cut satin hot-pants who go around with the round-cards at championship boxing matches. Cue walk-off music. Cue applause.
These meaningless snatches of sentences, recited importantly several times in the course of a few minutes, in a disembodied, almost an incantatory way, could be oddly potent. With the repetition, some sort of meaning seemed to coalesce around them.
Many times I would be halfway through the first song of my set and I wouldn’t have heard a word that I’d sung; my mind would still be snagged on some random string of words which, more often than you would think possible, seemed to have a hauntingness or mysterious resonance.
I can now remember only two of them.
The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away is one.
‘You’ve dyed your hair since then,’ remarked Jordan, is the other.
Why I should have remembered these two and wiped the rest is impossible to know. But the fact is that they stay lodged, stubborn as meat between the teeth, when many things of much more obvious relevance or significance have been casually flushed away. It has encouraged me to nail my flag to the mast of randomness and chance.
It is something I think about often in the evenings when I find myself idly leafing through a book here in Kiln Cottage, waiting for something to leap out and grab me.
When it does, I might include it in the notebook I keep for the purpose. It was 99 per cent virgin when I came here, as her record company used to boast of Joni Mitchell in the sixties. Butnow the covers are ringed from cups and glasses, and some of the pages are stuck to each other with make-up, spilled coffee and dog-slobber.
There is no television in the cottage, but it is well stocked with books. There are full bookshelves either side of the open fireplace in the sitting-room. Books line the upstairs corridor. There are even books wedged under one of the legs of the bed in which I sleep, compensating for the way the floor dips away to the window overlooking the quay – E. Keble Chatterton’s The Yacht- man’s Pilot of 1933 ; and, on top of this, a dog-eared copy of Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale , with a cover painting of a woman by Toulouse-Lautrec – only her hair and a hand rather tensely gripping the back of the garden bench on which she is sitting are visible.
If I was ever serious about making good the gaps – the outbacks and Saharas – in my knowledge, the last few years have been the perfect opportunity. The trouble is, I lack the application. I have always been a dipper and a browser; have always enjoyed what in today’s terminology I believe is called ‘grazing’, rather than the full tombstone read.
Books, like churches and classical music, have always made me feel turned in on myself and involuntarily gloomy. It gives me no pleasure at all to say it, but there’s hardly a book that I’ve started at the beginning and read all the way through.
The only exceptions are the American pulps, the paperback shockers which circulated on the long train journeys we were always undertaking between engagements in the fifties. They completed my education.
Like violets, and small saucers of prawns and whelks, they were sold by men with trays around the pubs in Soho and the equivalent areas of the bigger towns, and this contributed to the sense of illicitness I always felt about them. ‘Any health mags, love
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