Weekend

Good evening, for it is quite late now, and the last blackbirds have long piped in the dusk. As the default weekend blogger, I thought I might serve up a slice of vérité this time and give you a report of my actual Saturday as it unfolded, plus occasional asides. Are you OK with that?

It began when I awoke at 8.30, slightly later than usual (but then it is the week-end), out of a strange dream that featured Egyptian dancing girls, the details of which needn't concern us here. It was one of those mornings that I love to wake up to, blue sky and golden sunlight slanting through the bedroom blinds. I leapt up with alacrity, had a quick wash to get the sleep out of my eyes, and dressed for the gym.

Downstairs, I made breakfast: Greek coffee, toasted olive bread and marmite, an orange and one of those little shots of Actimel in the milk-churn shaped tub, a daily boost to the immune system. Regular readers might be surprised that I made coffee, because I do severely limit my intake since becoming prone to occasional arrhythmia, but life is all about balances, isn't it, and once in a while a cup goes down a treat.     

I stuffed this week's dirty laundry into the washing machine and set it going, as it promised to be a balmy day and maybe the first opportunity of the year to dry things out on the line in the garden instead of on the radiators.

  
By 9.15 I was ready to head for the gym. As my musical accompaniment of choice I took the new Jason Isbell solo album Foxes in the Snow, just released yesterday, actually, got it on a visit to Preston.

After forty-five minutes on the treadmill and fifteen doing some weights, I had a shower and headed home at 11.00 where, so inspired by Jason Isbell, his new songs, just him singing to the accompaniment of his finger-picked acoustic Martin guitar (vintage 1940 model, lucky man), I broke out my own Yamaha six-string and tried playing along to a few numbers.

The post landing on the doormat interrupted those pleasant musical meanderings. A fat Joe Brown's Clothes catalogue (I really should unsubscribe) and a letter from the NHS inviting me to join 1,885,350 other good citizens in the country's largest health research programme. Both went into the paper recycling sack in the kitchen, which was when I remembered the washing-machine full of wet clothes waiting to be hung on the line.

I pegged everything out in warm sunshine, listened to a bit of birdsong while doing so (mostly great tits, an invisible wren, and of course seagulls - if you can call that singing), and over the fence congratulated my Liverpool-mad next door neighbour on the Reds' smash and grab victory over Paris Saint-Germain the other evening. I'd known Liverpool must have scored. I expect all the houses roundabout heard his jubilant roar that night

Shortly after midday, I phoned my friend Kate to discuss artwork for the cover of our Blackpool & Fylde Stanza group's upcoming anthology of poems. We've been going for five years now and thought an anthology would be a fitting way to mark that particular milestone. The collection will be out, we hope, some time later in the spring.

Intermission #1. I got the idea for introducing intermissions from watching The Brutalist the other week. The film was so long they built in a break in the middle. I can remember when epic movies used to do that - Doctor Zhivago, The Godfather, Gandhi, Once Upon A Time In America. Anyway, I remembered an article about American museums in the 1960s pioneering 'free Saturdays' so that wives could come into the city with their husbands and have something cultural to do while the men went to the ball game of an afternoon or early evening. They could wine and dine together in the Bronx or Brooklyn or wherever afterwards as part of the weekend and I'm sure that helped a lot of marriages. . 

out and about on a Saturday

As it was the first spring-like day of the year, I thought I'd do a bit of housework, throw the windows open, turn the mattress on my bed, indulge in a spot of light dusting, nothing too committed. After all, I did write a poem which begins: There's a lazy part of me thinks 'let sleeping dust lie'. 

Then from 15.00 onwards my thoughts were all with Blackpool FC, away at Barnsley today. We'd won away there at Oakfield in our last two league encounters but lost at home to them earlier in the season. I didn't go to the game today, electing to use the burst of fine weather to start making inroads on the jungle my back garden has become, but listened to the game instead and wow! a 3-0 away win for the Seasiders.

At full time I brought the washing in, pleased that it had dried in the fresh air, then sat down to work on the poem that appears below. I didn't quite know where it was going or how it was going to turn out, and although I plan to move away from narrative-style poems for a while, this one wanted to be written.

Intermission #2. I couldn't let a blog about the weekend pass without referencing the euphemistic phrase by which barbers in the last century would enquire whether a customer might be interested in buying a packet of condoms, for barbers in those days regularly stocked personal items that gentlemen might require - brylcreem, razor blades, shaving foam, combs, prophylactics. I suppose that as most dating occurred on Friday and Saturday nights, "Would sir like something for the week-end?" was both an explicit enough and yet still discreet way of offering condoms for sale to men who might be embarrassed to walk into a chemist's shop to make such a purchase. How the world has moved on.

"Something for the week-end, sir?"

At 19.00 I gave my 'stepson' a lift down to St Annes for a hot date with his new flame. He was nervous as a kitten, I hope all want well.  Then I drove back to Adele's for spaghetti bolognaise and to provide her with moral support watching Everton in the 20.00 game. Sky would have football on our screens 24x7 if they could. I have to say as a football match is was pretty lame, but the food was good.

And now I'm back home and have just written up my blog, which I hope entertains. This has been my Saturday. To conclude, here's the latest from the imaginarium. It's a wistful piece. Let me know what you think. 

Egypt In The Snow

I'm in cosmopolitan

and a little crazy New York City

on a sweltering Saturday

at the beginning of September.

The twin towers are still standing

but not for long.

Spent the afternoon

sunbathing in Central Park,

indolently reading Monty Christo's

Southbound Train to Saqqara

to a backwash of traffic snarls,

planes, laughter, the piercing calls

of water birds in this Birkenhead

across the pond.

 

Early evening,

I ride the subway from 96th

through East Broadway,

Brooklyn bound. 

It's close in here

and at one point

and I find myself opposite 

a woman with kohl eyes

and long dark hair.

 

She pulls two books 

out of her carpet bag,

Mars Telepathic by Omar Makoub

and Southbound Train to Saqqara,

catches me looking at her.

'I can't decide which one to start'.

I lift up my copy of Southbound Train.

She has a laugh lights up her face, says

'What were the chances of that?'

and places Makoub back in her bag.

We read in the sultry rush,

or at least pretend to 

through every jolt and sway

and I don't look her way again

until Egypt Station* when she says

'Want to go dancing tonight? 

I know a place'. 

I shake my head. 'I can't'. 

'Dance? Everybody can dance'.

I make no reply, 

my normal reticence, 

so she shrugs, smiles 

and gives a little wave

as she heads for the door.

I'm in cosmopolitan

and a little crazy New York City

on a sweltering Saturday

at the beginning of September.

Working abroad,

weekends are the worst.

I've been out here 

for several at a stretch

and hot, dusty hotels

have the loneliest smell.

Right now 

my wife and daughters

feel longer ago

and further away even than Saqqara

and Egypt in the snow.

*Egypt Station is not a real stop on the New York subway, but an invention of Paul McCartney's which I've borrowed for the occasion.

Thanks for reading, S ;-)

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Tangerine - Follow Your Dream

I was born and grew up in West Africa, 3,000 miles  - two continents, one desert and an ocean - away from my nearest English League team. That would probably have been Portsmouth, which was where my Mum came from. Her family were big Pompey supporters. Her Dad had been sacked for taking the Saturday off work to go and watch Pompey in the 1939 Cup-Final. He and his mates had asked for the day off and were refused. His mates threw a 'sicky', lied to their boss, went to Wembley and kept their jobs. My granddad refused to lie about going up for the Final and lost his. Pompey wasn't going to be my team, however.

My Dad came from a small town in Derbyshire, was a rugby enthusiast, played it through school and university and never had very much time for football. Regardless, rugby wasn't going to be my game. (More on that later.)

I was born in 1953, just a few months before Blackpool won the FA Cup. From the moment I was old enough to take an interest in football and understand anything about it - probably aged 5 - I was a hooked. It was a Boys' Own thing, the romance of those 1953 cup exploits by Harry Johnston, Stanley Matthews, Stan Mortensen, Jackie Mudie, Ernie Taylor and the men in tangerine. Blackpool's famous football team was the one for me. I was going to play for them one day! (Of course, as it turned out I was never talented enough to make it as a professional footballer.)

Back in England from West Africa, we lived in Peterborough for several years and then Cambridge for several more, both of them a long way from Blackpool! The first league game I ever went to was Peterborough v Swindon at London Road. My best mate's Dad took us. (I told you my father had no time for football.) The Posh won 3-2 and it was magical to go home and listen to the result on the radio - some compensation for hearing that Blackpool had lost 4-0 at home to Villa that same afternoon.

Later, in Cambridge I went to a rugby-playing secondary school, no football allowed except in our break-time. That didn't stop my schoolmates and I from forming a football team and playing in the local Sunday League - though the Headmaster would never recognise our existence and refused to read our results out with all the rugby results at Monday assembly. I lived quite near to the ground of Cambridge City, so we used to go and watch the Lillywhites even though they were a non-league team, in preference to Cambridge United who got admitted to the football league. It was all about community. When I wasn't playing or watching football I was playing Subbuteo - Blackpool, naturally - and following the fluctuating fortunes of my tangerine dream team from afar.

The first opportunity to watch the mighty 'pool live came in 1970 at Oxford, last game of the season. We lost 2-0! I'd been hoping for more of the rampaging stuff that (so I read in the paper) saw the team secure promotion to Division One the previous Monday when they'd trounced PNE 3-0 at Deepdale no less; (Fred Pickering's famous hat-trick night). But at least I did see Pickering, Suddick and Hutchinson in action, plus Jimmy Armfield in his penultimate season for the club.

For three years I was at Warwick University and living in Coventry, by which time Tommy Hutchinson had been sold to Coventry City. So I used to watch Tommy and the Sky Blues at their old Highfield Road ground playing Division One football while Blackpool under Stokoe and Potts struggled in vain to get back up out of Division Two. (It was to take nearly forty years.)

After university I lived and worked in London and saw Blackpool when I could, mostly at Brentford, Fulham, Millwall (scary place) and Orient, though there were at least a couple of visits to Stamford Bridge in there somewhere. Came the '80s and marriage and children and the dream team faded to the background somewhat as my adopted second club, Coventry City, enjoyed some heady times.

But fortunes fall and rise and this side of the millennium my beloved Blackpool has been on the up again, so with time and disposable income on my side I started watching them regularly. They took me to Wembley three times and up and down the M1/M6/M55 'exile run' every other Saturday (and some Tuesday nights) for years after I'd become a season-ticket holder at Bloomfield Road. Driving into Blackpool used to feel like  coming home - although I'd never lived here - and watching the Seasiders play in the top flight of English football again was something of a dream come true.

I worked for over thirty years for Kodak but the photographic industry has shrunk to almost nothing with the rise of digital technology so when I turned 60 I took a voluntary redundancy package and early retirement. That allowed me to buy a little house in Blackpool just a stone's throw from the football stadium. It was going to be a week-end base to ease the pressure of that 450-mile round-trip but after a period of domestic turpitude it became my permanent home.

Blackpool FC's problems of the last few seasons have been well-chronicled elsewhere. Suffice to say that five years ago we were riding high in the Premier League and now we're in the relegation zone of the third division. The owners of the club have not proved ideal custodians of the social enterprise that is Blackpool FC and a legacy has been squandered. Blackpool supporters are living the nightmare at the moment. I was going to spend my retirement years living by the sea, writing novels and enjoying watching my team play. There hasn't been much to enjoy recently. So I joined Blackpool Supporters' Trust  upon its formation last summer, prompted by an ever-growing dissatisfaction with the way the club, our club, was being run. For the last year I've been putting my energies into the Trust, first as press officer and then as chairman, trying to help turn the nightmare back into a tangerine dream again. It's going to be a long haul, but the supporters are the heart and soul of Blackpool Football Club and we will reclaim it for this and future generations of fans.

I've not yet written my definitive football poem (though I did write one about Stanley Matthews for an Imperial Hotel poetry project last year), so I'll sign off my 50th Saturday Blog with Tangerine, featuring Led Zeppelin in one of their more reflective moments. You can also listen to it via the YouTube link below.

Tangerine
Measuring a summer's day,
I only find it slips away to grey.
The hours they bring me pain.
Tangerine, Tangerine,
Living reflection from a dream.
I was her love,
She was my queen,
And now a thousand years between.

Thinking how it used to be,
Does she still remember times like these,
To think of us again?
And I do.
Tangerine, Tangerine,
Living reflection from a dream.
I was her love,
She was my queen,
And now a thousand years between.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XdDq_E34Cc

Thanks very much for reading #50. Have a good week, S ;-)

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