Chasing the Only Meaningful Memory…

These are the pictures I took in May with the intention of putting them up here.  Rather than backdating posts, I’ll just post them all in one job lot.

As you can clearly tell from my expert photography, this was Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds playing at Hammersmith on the 9th May.  Okay, so I was miles away and I knew you’d see sod all in the picture but it was more to remind me about being there because it was a pretty monumental gig.  (Albeit a hot and sticky one too.)

My monthly portrait malarky.  I’m proper well brought up me innit?

It’s a tortoise!  That’s about it really.  I was visiting my family, they were tortoise-sitting and I was deeply amused and thrilled by them…until you realise that as pets go - not the most exciting things to watch…apart from when they’re eating like little old men.

This is the porch of a church near Langham in Suffolk.  It’s a hidden gem and involves trapsing through several fields, but it’s worth it because it’s beautiful and quite tucked away from the noise and bustle of the world.  It’s overlooked by a nearby stately home and if you were in an especially whimsical state of mind, you could probably imagine yourself in the midst of some Austin-esque scenario.

Personally I was more thrilled by the old graves and Norman arches - but then I do have a tendancy to go wibbly at the knees over all things medieval.

As you can see I’m finally back in action.  The last month has been a lengthy battle with BT over my billing and trying to get my internet reconnected.  As you can see, I won.

Fear not though…I have been taking pictures and stuff and junk and so I’ll fill you in on my missing month and a bit very shortly.

On Sunday I went to watch a football match.  This is a striking fact on it’s own, given that I don’t generally as a rule like football.  This was a bit different though, it meant a trip up to see my home team play at Portman Rd in Ipswich. (careful what you might say at this point!) and it was part of a school trip to take a small group of kids, who are frankly lucky if they get to leave the estate they live on, for a bit of a treat and a change of scenery.

It was a glorious day both weather wise and in the sheer enjoyment of watching the game, singing along with the (admitedly mostly obscene) football songs and watching the kids have a bloody brilliant time.  Call me a sentimental idiot, but it’s still the biggest thrill of this insane job I do.   It’s the payoff for all the other crap that runs alongside it.

oh…and Ipswich won.   Clearly down to my ever so lucky presence, of course.

I’m a bit behind on the old updating malarky so prepare yourself for a flurry of postdated…er…post-iness.

Here’s last fortnight’s picture:

This was the progression from this.

I can’t say that it made teaching any easier…in fact, funnily enough, a bloody great digger moving bloody great piles of bricks from one bloody great mountain of bricks to another makes a frankly unsuprising amount of noise. It’s all tad distracting!

This is a fairly accurate representation of how I spent my last hour.

p.s - I know…I need a scanner.

p.p.s - actually I did read a really good article about the Hungarian Rising…not remotely relevant to anything I need to achieve today.

p.p.p.s - I really need to do some work!!!

p.p.p.p.s - If someone could just mercifully put me out of my misery right now, that woudl be fab.

…oooooh. Cup of tea time!

(I had this slightly bizarre idea last night of writing six short stories with six chapters made up of six words each.  There is some kind of method in my madness…but I’m not going to explain it, so there!  Anyway, here goes nothing…)

I

It began to stir.  We knew.

II

Those who were asleep finally awoke.

III

Somnambulant, had we waited too long?

IV

One singular truth formed itself. Freedom.

V

We could not disambiguate the meaning.

VI

Our eyes opened.  We saw nothing.

This is something I wrote a couple of years ago. It was posted elsewhere, so it might be familiar, but I’m trying to tidy up my webserver and this seems as good a place as any to archive it.

(NB: Sean Flynn was son of actor Errol Flynn. He had a short career as an actor himself but later become a renowned photojournalist, going out in the field during the Vietnam War to take exceptional pictures. He is mentioned in Michael Herr’s book Dispatches. He went missing in 1970 after setting off with fellow journalist Dana Stone. They were headed for Cambodia and were never seen again.)

A Hollywood golden boy is not supposed to die in the cloying heat of the jungle, sweaty and dirty and captive. The hero gets to ride off in to the sunset. There are no guerrilla factions in the storybook and a fight to the death is done with the utmost honour and always with a quip, not blood and guts and tears.

Sean Flynn was an icon in an iconic moment of human history. To me he is symbolic of the microcosm that was Vietnam, the epicentre of what the Historian Richard Polenberg called the “American Earthquake.” The son of a screen great, an idol to middle America. Errol Flynn’s boy, cutting a dash and saving the woman. Defending good and protecting against evil. The American dream. How the hell did Sean Flynn end up crawling in the mud of Vietnam, taking photographs dropped out, strung out and stoned.?

Perhaps to anxious parents at home he was the mirror they held up to their lives. A glorious boy who’s life was snuffed out too soon. No wooden box for him though. No solemn flag folding. No dog tags and body bags. He was the tragedy that normal Americans suffered day after day after day.

Perhaps he was the symbol of everything that had gone bad and wrong in America. Expectations turned on their head. To some there were no more clear lines between right and wrong, oppression and freedom, truth and lies. Poverty, racism, sexism, liberty. These ideals exploding and spewing out dissent all over the American public’s clean linen.

Perhaps he is the ultimate counter culture hero. The man who bucked against the expectations of a nation. A cat from Frankie’s House sticking a dirty finger up at everything he was supposed to be and melting away in to the music, the chaos and the trip, lost in a purple haze of ganja and gun smoke.

I don’t know if he’s none of those things or all of them. He’s fascinating. He captivates. In Tim Page’s iconic photograph there is a distinct sense of both peace with the world around him and an imposing feeling of sadness. Did he suspect that he wouldn’t make it, like so many reporters and photographers and was he ready for it? Was he a thrill seeker who stupidly placed his life on the line, out there for all the wrong reasons?

Some like to imagine he’s still out there somewhere and maybe, like the movies, he’ll turn up dazed and confused and wondering where the last thirty years went. Or maybe he’ll be drinking next to you in some backwater bar, name changed, enjoying the anonymity of a quiet life, a lifetimes worth of wild times spent in Hue turned to stories that he keeps to himself with a secretive smile as he denies your suggestion that he’s that film star’s son.

Here’s the ironic thing. He got his Hollywood ending. The silver screen son rode off in to the sunset, this much is true. He’ll stay young and beautiful forever, a closing credits death. Living the wild life and burning out in the blaze that was Vietnam.

This is taken from an LJ entry that I wrote, but it’s both fairly amusing and fits the bill in terms of memories and stories and all that malarky. Just a few childhood pictures that scarily tell you an awful lot about my formative development in to the shining beacon of normality and stability that you see barely standing before you today!

I was rummaging through a box of various bits and pieces and I found a photo album that my cousin made up for me some years ago. I thought I share a few childhood pictures of me because quite hillariously they just go to show that my current drunken sarcastic fruitcake status was in clear development at an early age and they’re also pretty funny. Excuse the quality, I don’t have a scanner so they’re pictures of pictures.

Ah, my first birthday and already my descent in to cynicism and world weariness is underway. Despite the presence of chocolate cake and an adoring crowd (ordinarily things that would make me very happy), I’m decidedly unamused. Anyone who knows me well will probably be eerily familiar with that expression on my face. I know my students are.

I’m fairly political and not afraid to wave a placard and do a bit of shouting if needs be and it seems that even aged three I was aware of the power of non-violent protest. I remember being in a major strop about something that was not to my liking so despite the appeals of varous family members, I decided to demonstrate my non-compliance by spending the whole of the party sat in the middle of the living room in a washing up bowl…and I mean the WHOLE party.

On reflection maybe it just shows early signs of being an attention seeker and a little bit wrong in the head.

Note my cousin and my brother (both sporting fantastic haircuts, it has to be said) beaming in an angelic fashion at the camera….aaaaand then there’s me. See above re attention seeking/head wrongness. (also scarily I seem to be making a grab for my cousin! Perhaps she was sitting in my chair? That could be what all the shouting was about!)

Finally, if anyone was wondering where my ability to consume large amounts of spirits and still be functioning came from, lets just say I started young!

(an honorable mention has to go to my brother here for being the epitome of the 1980’s, not only with the fabulous shirt he’s sporting but also with a fantastic double thumbs up, probably acompanied with a gleeful shout of “ace!”.)

Due to a lack of a scanner this is a photo of a drawing, but given that I’m really quite bad at drawing I can’t say it’ll affect the quality that much. Just a little something that popped in to my perverse little brain at a stupid hour of this morning.