Every Whisper of Every Waking Hour

My Dear Fellows and Dear Princess Normal,

I have just re-read what I have written. It's a bit bloody self-indulgent today. You can just look at the picture if you like and skip it. This one was written just to write it. If you see what I mean. Anyway, onward.

A good thing about these days of streaming is that it gives me the opportunity to look at old albums I sold or gave away years ago. I'm sure you know what I mean. We all had vinyl collections, and they contained many impulse buys. 

For myself, I remember buying Into The Gap because there were about five minutes there when The Thompson Twins were really cool* and there were plenty of others too. Welcome To The Pleasuredome, "Howard Jones: The 12 Inch Mixes", Midge Ure's solo album that he did that time. 

You'd go to the 2nd hand shop and the cool guy behind a counter would shuffle your albums into two piles. 

"10p each," he'd say to the shitey pile. Sorry Howard. Business is business.

I do remember selling good stuff too though. When I moved to Scotland I sold the remainder of my vinyl collection. All of it. All of The Beatles, all of Led Zeppelin, all of R.E.M. I LIKED these bands, sure, but they were just extra weight and besides, vinyl was on the way out**.

This week at work I put on Out of Time by R.E.M. which I loved at the time and found I love still. R.E.M. were my favourite band of the 80's. I loved the way all of their albums sounded different. Sometimes it didn't even sound like it was the same band.  

I think the thing I liked best about them was that you could barely make out the lyrics, and even when you could, they were often incomprehensible to me. This may not sound like a good thing, but it gave me space to impose my own meaning on them. And Michael Stipe always seemed so unsure of himself. In Pop Song he sang, "I'm sorry I lost myself, I think I thought you were someone else." See, I like that. I like that things are never certain because uncertain is how I feel. 

Another REM song I love is Let Me In, which I always thought was about striving for meaning or purpose that I'm too prosaic to achieve. 

Let me in, let me in
I've got tar on my feet and I can't see all the birds
Look down and laugh at me, clumsy, crawling out of my skin

It turns out that it was actually all about Kurt Cobain. Oh well, whatever.

Like I said, meaning-wise, I used to fill in the blanks myself, and it is for this reason that their songs bring back the strongest memories for me. 

Out of Time was released shortly after I moved to Bristol. And as soon as it started up on my phone, I was right back there.

The world is collapsing around our ears, 
I turned up the radio, but I can't hear it...

I first listened to it sitting in an upstairs bedroom in the blistering hot summer of 1990. For me it conjures up a vivid picture of that new build we rented, and the smell of hot fibre glass insulation. If I have never spoken much of my time in Bristol, it is because I didn't like it much. I'm probably being unfair to the city. In the centre it seemed kind of a groovy place, full of galleries, funky cafes and arthouse cinemas. Unfortunately I lived a considerable way out. I was working at British Aerospace (Airbus) Ltd as it was known, which was based in Filton. It felt like going into the city was as much of a mission as actually going to ANOTHER city altogether, so I never made much of it. 

But the people I worked with were actually very nice. And because Bristol is sort of on the cusp of the West Country and Wales there were a LOT of accents. There were the Welsh accents, where they BREAK all their words EP in-to lit-tell pee-ces. And then there were the, "Oi support Bristo' Roverrrrrs oi do", accents as well.

BAe was an interesting place to work. It was basically a big airfield with planes coming in to land all the time. To do my job I occasionally had to walk through the facilities and I loved it. Strolling past big old VC-10's which were being converted into refuelling planes, and into the shop where they assembled the Airbus wings. The wings themselves were then picked up and flown to Toulouse where they were attached to the fuselage. The plane that picked them up was called "The Guppy" and it is a weird-looking thing. It used to fly over my house all the time and I always wondered how it stayed up there. They told me that a prototype Concorde used to be parked on the runway, right next to the M4, but it kept causing accidents due to people saying, "Oooooh look! It's the Concorde!!" 

- CRASH - 

- So they put it away in a hangar.

The job itself was shite. I did not realise it at the time, I thought that was just how IT was. They gave me a tool called "Datavantage" to work with and a bigger tool called Dean to teach it to me. Dean's teaching method was very much of the, "Here are my badly-written notes, see ya" style. And being young and stupid, I thought it was all my fault that I didn't get it. Datavantage was basically just File-Aid for IMS and my sole job was to fix shitey data on the system, which had been buggered up by who knows what. I didn't get to do any programming. You fixed the shitey data by poking it with Datavantage until it worked again, then making notes on how you poked it, in the hope this would work every time. (It never did). 

Then they came to me with an opportunity. "You're going to learn ASSEMBLER," they told me. This sounded all right, except that:

- The Assembler course was on self-teach videos which referred to manuals. Which we didn't have. 
- My Assembler mentor was Barbara, who was both deaf and a hypochondriac. So when she WAS in the office she couldn't hear my questions and I didn't understand her answers. 

I was given a project to do and no idea how to do it. Every week they asked me when I would be finished, and every week I'd say, "Next week". This went on until I took voluntary redundancy. I think this is why I'm alert to people struggling with work in the office. That poor sod used to be ME, you bastards, I want to say to managers who tell me to stop helping people. 

Outside of work it wasn't all bad. Did you know that Bristol is the most heavily fox-populated city in Britain? Neither did I until one Xmas when I left a roast lamb to cool in front of the kitchen window. The next thing I knew there was a FOX on the window-ledge outside! His big brush illuminated orange under the sodium lights. I started putting dog food and eggs outside and would sit in my living room with the lights off, watching fox families coming around, carrying off the eggs ever so gently, or burying them in the garden.  

Plus, this was when I lived in The House With All The Cats. Shortly after moving in, word got around the local cat community that we had no pets. And then all the neighbourhood cats just started appearing. They would come in and hang out. I think they thought of my living room as the "Neutral Zone". They usually took it in shifts, so we'd have only two or three of them at once, but I swear on one occasion there were 15 cats sitting around, all in the one room. 

Also on the positive side, in Bristol I met Jenny and Mark. They were lovely and kept my spirits up. Jenny, I have mentioned before. She was a middle-aged lady who slurped around in cardigans and swore all the time in very posh English. She taught me backgammon and gave me tapes of her attempts at folk-singing, which were hilariously bloody awful. She didn't care. 

Mark was a very funny chap from Belfast and so he HOD THOT OK-SUNT where you rearrange all the vowels. I think he opened my eyes a lot to life in Northern Ireland which was still bad, back in the early 90's. He was a Catholic who grew up in a Protestant neighbourhood and told me how he felt like a prisoner, trapped in his bedroom for years, looking at his posters and his pale yellow wallpaper. 

"Thot focking wall-pYAY-perr," he'd say in his accent.

He didn't support the IRA, he thought they were a part of the problem. "Scotland'll got endependonce before WUI dui," he muttered. But he REALLY hated the British army. It was a bit of an eye-opener for me. My dad had always done his best to downplay his Irishness during the 1970's and 80's, which I suppose was understandable given where he worked. And my mum openly hated the Irish based on the fact that they'd ostracised her and called her a "Protestant hoor" on the one occasion she visited. So I'd never really felt that Irish until I met Mark, who loaned me books and music.

I started hanging out with both Mark and Jenny a lot, but this did not sit well with Soozle, who could be very insecure and jealous back then. So when voluntary redundancy came up, I decided to take it. I was seriously depressed about work, and I decided to take the money and run back to Scarborough where we had free accommodation awaiting us (Soozle's dad kept a flat there, but lived most of the time in Saudi Arabia). 

Sadly, I lost touch with Jenny and Mark. Those pre-internet years were not good for keeping contact. On the advent of Friends Reunited and later Facebook and Google, I tried numerous times to find them but to no avail. 

So that was three years of my life that you probably don't know about. If you are still reading at this point (I know it has been a bit dull) I hope it has filled in some blanks. I remember when I made the decision to go, it was the winter of 1992. Freddie Mercury had just died and Automatic for the People had just come out. 

I loved that album too, but it was very different from the sunny, shimmery sound of "Out of Time". This album was darker***. I think it may have been a reaction to George HW Bush, who (at that time) seemed like the worst president you could possibly have. 

I'm probably wrong. But that doesn't matter. For me, songs like Drive and Sweetness Follows, were all about sorrow, acceptance and resignation. It suited my mood, I suppose.

It's these little things, they can pull you under
Live your life filled with joy and thunder
Yeah, yeah, we were altogether
Lost in our little lives

I sat at the dining room table, looking at Christmas decorations I'd made out of Quality Street wrappers and felt sad about saying goodbye to Jenny and Mark and the foxes and the 15 cats. Meanwhile the song Nightswimming was playing. It is sort of a song of nostalgia and yearning, or at least that is how I hear it now. At the time, I just wondered what would come next. 

The photograph on the dashboard, taken years ago
Turned around backwards so the windshield shows
Every streetlight reveals the picture in reverse

Still, it's so much clearer.

S.

* Until we listened to "Into The Gap" by The Thompson Twins, I suspect.
** Another one of my brilliant predictions.
*** Apart from The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite! which I suspect is not so much a song as a 4 minute willy joke to music.