One of the things that strikes me looking over my life – and I suspect this applies to many people – is just how long it takes to get yourself sorted. In my case, it wasn’t realistically until my late 20s that I got my ducks into any kind of a row, although I can locate the row-getting in a specific moment: The time when, having agreed a large book translation project, I received an advance payment of 10,000 Euros. I had a gig that evening and remember saying to the audience ‘If I look surprised tonight, it’s because I’ve been paid’; from that moment on, things started to somewhat take off for me.
But it does take an awfully long time, and there were periods of my life before when things were not so good. When I look back now, I can though see certain safer harbours and kinder passages within even these leaner years.
One of these would be the cold winter of 2005, when I was back at university; I had already begun my Berlin love affair by then, and was very much enduring my last year of studies. In my year out, I had been infected with the excitement of a big city and Oxford, a small provincial town resolutely mired up its own arse, wasn’t going to cut it any more, if it ever had. Luckily, I had friends in London.
I should back out a moment here and say that for many years I have had a particular image in my head of where I want to live. It is a city, with a large green park, and I am walking with a certain kind of person in a certain kind of conversation. Let’s say a bookish, artistic conversation. I am in early middle age, and it is invariably Sunday, and I have a study with a view across the park. Where I live now, view aside, is close to that, and indeed I am geographically near once again to where I was visiting then, southwest London and Richmond Park. I’d head over to London on the Oxford Tube (this a bus) and pick up various bedraggled rail services to London’s southwest. I’d inevitably dawdle my way over to my friends, sending various apologetic text messages along the way for my undergraduate delay and eventually showing up at our customary meeting spot of a riverside pub. At that time, my friends were living in a large house near the park that they were renting at mates’ rates from a friend. They’d lucked out, as it were, and my friend described that as the only luck he’d ever had in London.
These trips became the highlight of my life. There’d be food, lots of conversation, and booze. A considerable amount of booze. We’d make brandy coffees in the afternoon, pouring a black-filled cafetiere into diverse mugs, and I remember the warm alcoholic burn as we walked around the park on late Sunday mornings. A moment comes back to me now of my great friend telling me, ‘The Iraq war was wrong, Jim’, or him laughing at me when I said Swedish was widely spoken in ‘Swedish-speaking countries.’ After a pause, he asked: ‘Such as?’ I could really drink back then, vodka, wine and beer, and we all smoked cigarettes too; I would bring back Roth Hӓndle (Little Red Hand) cigarettes from Germany, where I also still kept a room.
The other thing that really sticks in the mind was the record player in the dining room. It only had about ten LPs, and I remember most of them; Neil Diamond’s ‘Hot August Night’ live double, a couple of Frank Sinatra albums, and a Roy Orbison odds- and-ends compilation marked out by a song with a very flatulent bassline. When that track came on it would inevitably attract the comment ‘This has a very flatulent bassline.’ In addition there was the Dr Zhivago soundtrack, which I remember one night drunkenly waltzing with one of my friends to. Later, on a Germany trip, I picked up a couple of army drinking song LPs, mainly on the basis of their intensely homoerotic covers, which showed muscular German officers radiating an intense preparedness to sing. I’m not sure how much these got played.
We’d eat and drink, and go to bed late, and the conviviality kept me going in a barren and wounded time. I was going through a heartbreak, I remember, and one night I read some poems I’d written about my sadness to my friends. One of them – which I can’t find now, or I’d insert it below – ended with the line ‘under that is rubble, and beneath that is more.’
‘That one’s a bit dark, Jim,’ one of my friends said.
It was the kind of break-up where you were trying to convince yourself you’d lost something good rather than admitting to yourself that the disappointment was the general bother of having to keep on looking. But I was soon seeing someone else, a relationship which came to an end when I moved to Berlin the next summer. Looking back, I think one reason that that time seems so special was that I had made up my mind to go and live abroad, and so I knew that this was the last of England I’d be getting for some time, and it was a good last of England that I was getting too. My friends would also soon be moving on, going down to Brighton, where they worked hard and saved up to buy a small flat. Over the years, I visited them there many times, before they finally moved back up north themselves, where I now see them less.
Still, we will always have those mid-2000s nights, laughing and listening to those same few LPs. I can remember more moments; a plumber arriving one Saturday morning and being offered tea; the cold toilet outside, which prompted a discussion of Phillip Larkin’s verse; one friend saying ‘I’m amazed you can drink that much’ – that was on the night of the drunken waltz to Dr Zhivago. The final memory in the batch is that, at the peak of my exams, it was my friend’s 40th, so I broke off from a late spurt of revision to go down there and visit them in the house. In an Oxford charity shop, I had found a balalaika for £20 which I decided to gift my friend for his birthday. When I got there he was sitting there in the living room stunned, as if amazed to be in this situation, and I came in and presented my balalaika. They never could get it in tune afterwards, but they hung it on the wall of their new Brighton flat; my friends always did understand the importance of a nice touch.
James ... I can relate to your introspection on life changes. Mine has changed dramatically over the past three years. First, I retired in Dec., 2018. One year later, my wife died of a drug overdose after a long history of addiction and mental illness. Six month later, my oldest son died suddenly ... an indirect result of following the same path as his mother. But I have responded and rebounded and found both relief and peace in changing my own life ... all for the better. I'll someday document my journey in writing.
But I wanted to acknowledge your story. I enjoyed it. And I recognize and respect your ability to write your story so gracefully. -- James (Jim)
Beautifully written, elegant without trying. Thanks for remembering it for us. I envy your recall abilities! And great to see you at the weekend and making me laugh until i choked!