The Edge of the Forest.

"From 6 April people in England, Wales and Scotland will be able to work beyond the age of 65, without their employers having the right to force them out of their job." BBC News, 6 April, 2011.



THE EDGE OF THE FOREST.

The edge of the forest, hard smoke beyond the paddocks
frays back and is there. Cutters go out through it,
come in again on the ringbarked slopes, down the fence lines.

- You have to send the flooded gum quick. It don't stay flooded -
ironbark's a bugger to bark if it comes dry weather -
the man sitting next to me knows inside the forest.

He has his praise out there. Two taps on a trunk
and he can tell you its life. Steering the chainsaw
he can drop a tree on a cigarette paper. His billets

bumped, loading, ring like gongs; they win prizes.
Tallowwood's lovely: it has a deep like fat.
He has raised trucks out of swamp with his quick chain-cunning.

He loves praise, hoards it. The tic's become hereditary.
His arts are the waltz, cards, company, ripostes:
Easy see you're not two-faced. You wouldn't wear that one.

But at sixty-five, they take your life away.
If work has been shelter, they let in the winter
if work has been drudgery, night mocks the late-freed man
if work has been proof they take the glass away.

At four years old, he was milking easy cows
and was put to the plough at fourteen, the day after school.
Hauling timber with the teams, trusted in cattle dealing

he worked, then and always - long in lieu of pay -
for a sign of love from his irritable father,
the planter of flasks. His nightmare, strawed with praise.

The years hurry by. He was facing the bad birthday.
Neighbours talked heart. They tell you when to die
in a community. Thus when the Company, in person,

told him Stay on: you're our best man, some custom
and cliche were bent. It was a commutation.
Life. Life given back. Almost a father speaking.

He will come and go for years through the edge of the forest.




(Copyright Les Murray, from Lunch and Counter-Lunch, 1974.)

Shrimps.

Foam shrimps, yesterday.

I had two brushes with the many-headed beast that is the internet in as many days. Both came through Twitter, and both were reminders that Twitter is a very public place, regardless of how much you think you're mumbling away in private.

Yesterday I posted a comment about Robbie Savage, footballer, dull pundit and missing BeeGee, currently engaged in a three-way battle with God and Colin Murray to achieve omnipresence. It was something to the effect that Savage's punditry certainly involves a fair amount of self-deprecation; barely a minute of a match goes by without him managing to engineer a self-deprecating reference to himself.

It's not the worst thing that someone on Twitter has said about Robbie Savage. What I wasn't expecting was that Robbie Savage himself would re-tweet it, which meant I got a couple of Sav is da man wat u evn no abt ftball u r a jock u r all shit up there if u met him u wd prbly lick his hoop-type comments in retaliation.

Fair dos, I suppose. It was unpleasant, but if you're going to make a public utterance about somebody, there's a chance they're going to hear it, particularly if they spend as much time as Robbie Savage apparently does looking themselves up on Twitter.

Then today, I posted after listening to the new series of 'Fags Mags and Bags' on Radio 4. It's very funny; there's a real joy in the use of language, it's beautifully performed, and creates a perfect world of its own, which is what makes the best comedies successful.

I was particularly pleased to hear Ramesh refer twice to the 'foam shrimp', because 'foam shrimp' is funny in itself, and I enjoy hearing Sanjeev Kohli saying 'foam shrimp.' (Stop saying foam shrimp.)

I said as much, and I was absurdly pleased when this then happened:

Music on Monday: "A Hard Man To Follow."

You're given a CD and a little Subbuteo figure of Davy Graham and told to put him in his chronological place in the Subbuteo folk music line-up.

He's got to have absorbed the work done by Bert Jansch, Wizz Jones, John Renbourne, the Martins Carthy and Simpson, not to mention Jimmy Page. They all played exploratory, open-to-the-world interpretations of traditional music, drawing in sounds and tunings from outside the western tradition. No-one could be that accomplished, fully formed, have gone so far and been the first to do it.

But, yes, like a Big Bang, Dav(e)y Graham exploded uniquely into life* and all of those musicians followed in his dazzling wake. John Renbourne said of him, "Back in the sixties he was so far ahead of just about any would-be picker that it was practically miraculous. I can't think of any of my contemporaries from those days who weren't completely knocked over by his playing, and we all owe him a huge debt." Despite this, he never made the same leap into the public consciousness as the likes of Renbourne or Jansch; just as music in the late sixties seemed to be rolling around to being recepetive to what he was doing, his path curved the other way and he faded off the scene. It's illuminating to put Graham's She Moves Through the Fair and Mustapha back to back and compare them with Jimmy Page's White Summer. Quite - cough - similar.

Genius (and Graham was one) doesn't necessarily have to be troubled, but Davy Graham was a spiky and complex character all of his life. A heroin addict for many years (deliberately, some said, an attempt to follow in the footsteps of Charlie Parker and the like.) He died in December 2008; obituaries here and here.

There isn't a lot of Graham footage about, but I found a snippet from the Folk Britannia programme on YouTube (thanks to jrowe2k) which puts him in the context of those - somewhat awestruck - musicians who were his contemporaries.

The second clip is an audio track, from the After Hours CD, and it's jaw-dropping.

*Well, no. No-one comes out of nothing, and Davey Graham cited guitarist Steve Benbow as an influence. And so on.

Heart of Darkness, with a Snooker Table.

It's often said that the BBC displays a left-leaning bias.

Not true.

The heart of the BBC leans not left, not even right, but beyond both to some nightmare ethos of victimisation before which even Kafka would have paled. I mean, of course, Desert Island Discs.

This cosy institution, one of the pillars of Radio 4, hides behind its chintzy familiarity a sickening world where the individual is persecuted with a devious thoroughness unknown even to those regimes who chucked citizens out of helicopters.

The premise behind the show is that the BBC gets hold of a celebrity - by kidnap, presumably - and maroons them on a desert island. A bloody desert island. Wrenched, like hair pulled out by the roots, from their friends and family, and stranded on some godforsaken atoll with nothing but mangroves, coral and wild monkeys for company. 'How do you think you'd cope?' leers the presenter. 'Would you live? Would you sit weeping on the shore for the loss of all those dear to you? Which do you think would get you first, the loneliness, starvation, or simply thirst? Would you stage a bitter struggle for survival for which your effete urban life - unless you're Ray Mears - has miserably ill-equipped you, or would you simply one day just walk into the surf? Let's have your next record.'

The records. Records. You know it's not a CD player, it's not even a big silver hifi with giant wooden speakers like Other People's Parents had. There's no electricity. It's a hand-wound gramophone with a big horn. You're going to be mad as Klaus Kinsky, serenading the savage tribes and their implacable jungle with Caruso, but without the company, or the white suit.

Lifelong agnostics are mocked by a present of the Bible. Sportswomen whose childhoods are a best-forgotten boredom, spent trapped in a wooden cube of stuffy dreariness filled with the bluebottle drone of teachers and the impenetrable shrapnel rain of pentameter while outside the freedom of the track simmers under the sun - they get the complete works of Shakespeare.

One luxury object: it can be of no practical use. You cannot signal with it, shelter under it, set fire to it, set sail on it or suck some kind of sustenance from the glue holding the fretboard to the body. It can only serve as a stiletto-sharp reminder of everything you have left behind.

And then, as the victim, having related their whole life, meaningful, trite, eventful, scarred, triumphant as it was, now sees it has all shrunk to this point of abandonment and void on some coral speck in the blank blue universe of the Pacific; then, they engineer a wave and take all of your records away. Except one.

One record.

One record to play over and over, sitting bereft on the scorching white sands, listlessly cranking the handle of your Victrola as your sanity floats away like a paper boat, ultimately believing yourself King of the Monkeys with your crown of seaweed and a coconut orb, to the sound of Deep Purple's 'Black Night,' another fragile soul taken and crushed.

And join us next week, when the black Cadillac comes creeping for Gary Lineker.

NBC Broadcasts Cartoons.

Thanks to the hard work and dedication of Karol Wisniewski and his team, New British Comics Volume Three is out and about and roaming the planet. It's highly various, from winsome to weird to a bit disturbing, and tends to reinforce the idea that people who do comics are talented, if a bit odd.

I'm pleased to say that our collaboration, Here Comes The Neighbourhood, shuffles into line and doesn't look out of place, although as ever, going back to something so long after drawing it, I can see all kinds of infelicities and cackhandedness. But it's exciting to see it all lettered up and printed out so beautifully; it's a very, very professional looking publication, and if you like comics frankly for the high quality of artwork and writing you get, four quid is a bargain. Not to pick anyone out, but I have become very taken with Warwick Johnson Cadwell's artwork as a result of his Wild West/Vampire strip Von Trapp, and Lawrence Elwick's work is enviably clean and stylish but bloody hell, all the artwork throughout is excellent. Apart from my sloppier bits.

Featuring the collected talents of Dan White, Lawrence Elwick, John Miers, Paul O'Connell, Dave Thompson, Matt Craig, Craig Collins, Iain Laurie, Wilbur Dawbarn, Rob Miller, Van Nim, Warwick Johnson Cadwell and David Ziggy Greene.

NBC Vol. 3 is available to buy here, so you can stroke its physical loveliness. As some bloke on the internet says, "Really, this is a must buy and I’m not kidding," (Some Bloke on the Internet, 2011.)

And despite what you might read elsewhere, it doesn't smell.

Music on Monday: In The Grip of Bird Fancier's Lung

Cardiff's finest, Budgie. They had that analogue, valve-driven early-1970s texture to their music, but tunes such as Breadfan, Crash Course in Brain Surgery, both covered by irritating beard-wearers Metallica, and In the Grip of a Tyrefitter's Hand (they did good titles) sound years ahead of their time.

Lead singer, bassist, and Geddy Lee prototype Burke Shelley is very unwell at the moment, having had emergency surgery after falling ill in November last year, so all the best to him.

I particularly enjoy this footage because at one time -scrawny build, overmuch hair, inappropriately large glasses - that's what I used to look like. Apart from the singing voice, the songwriting ability and the musical talent, it's uncanny.

Rust Never Sleeps 6: St Amant.

St. Amant, oil on canvas, 16" x 20".

The St. Amant, registered in Ballantrae, and operating mostly out of Peterhead, I think. Less baroque than usual and more sternly industrial but I quite like the simplicity of this one.

St. Amant, a quick Wikipedia reveals, is patron saint of vinegrowers, innkeepers, brewers, vintners, bartenders, and , oddly, Boy Scouts. Pissed ones, presumably.

In some exciting rust-related news, I've had some paintings accepted for display in Number Four gallery in St. Abbs.

I had a quiet snout around while Laura was giving them some of her jewellery (out on display now, and looking very fine) and I'm both surprised and delighted to be accepted there. They have some very, very splendid work; glass, ceramics, paintings, bronzes, jewellery, and it's all beautiful. They're having a Spring re-hanging soon so some of my work will be up and visible then. Can't quite describe how happy it made me: I took along nine paintings, thinking they'd choose a couple, and they took the lot. I got treated like a Proper Artist. A little bit of validation goes a long way.

Number Four gallery's website can be found here, and again, a big thanks to them.