Live from 'Beach' Break Live... #1

For the first time I'm going to blog here 'ad hoc' and in brief, rather then agonizing for a week on theme, structure, etc...

John Teedge (guest blogger and cameraman) and I are down here in a safari park in Kent, where the UKs only 'student' festival has been relocated (from a stunning beach in Cornwall...) due to some grumpy councilors. They've thrown it all together with about two days to go so kudos for that.

Thus far the sun is egging us on - it's rather like an egg yolk actually - as we make our soon-to-be-posted-on-samparker.org video diary. My presenting skills aren't quite going to have the producers of T4 knocking on my door but I think we're getting the jist over fairly well...

Later on we'll be allowed to stand on stage and film a few songs - going to try my best not to accidently pull out a guitar lead or trip up one of Dizzee Rascal's entourage.

Haven't seen any lions, tigers or monkeys yet. Certainly haven't seen any giraffes which, as some of you may know, I refuse to believe actually exist until I witness with my own two eyes. They're too ridiculous - I think it's all a scam.

Will pop back later with more.

Squatters.

Introducing samparker.org's first ever 'guest blogger', Mr. John Teedge...

Normal service shall be resumed shortly. For now, enjoy JT's account of what happens when squatters move in next door...

Midnight, Friday. Eyeballing a weeping crack user out of my bedroom window who looked like a cross between Willow and Jonas Gutierrez, I had to wonder where it all went wrong.

It all started a few months ago with a fairly innocuous three foot hole in the front window of the empty house two doors down. Then the drum and bass started. Pimped-up alloy rides came and went and then we noticed the cleaning products in the kitchen window. The squatters had undoubtedly moved in.

Seasons came and seasons uneventfully passed bar the odd vacuous disco glare at the bus stop.
Then the night of my twenty-fifth birthday arrived. Friends talking party shite over break beats and swapping jokes, jibes and amateur cocktails. The next morning, as we basked in the afterglow of the party, Rich came back from his van to report it had been ‘’pimped’’ with a six-inch gash to the back off-side tyre.

Ignoring the obvious and blaming the pavement, we left it at that and carried on with our sardined existence in a terrace house designed for a miner and his stunted chimney sweep kids, not five fecktrosexual twentysomething Geordies.

Last week the first summer sun drew our sofas into the yard and we toasted ourselves in what felt like the presence of an old friend. The capricious kind, inspiring and full of tales from lands afar that you promised yourself you would emulate when you eventually pay off that credit card.
A pleasant delusion that was soon shattered by the squatters fending off a brick-wielding assailant, probably irked by some scrawny bag of rat poison or vitamin C, come-on-thens and hes-not-worth-its rapping over our soundtrack from ‘The Harder they Come.’

Like the shark in ‘The Beach’ it was a precursor of further bad shit.

This is where we came in.

As I sat smoking out of the window of my basement room trying to look cool, getting to know an exciting and beautiful woman over half a bottle of Strongbow I became aware of an intermittent scuttling noise. At first I thought it was a rat, then my dickhead flatmate. But this was much worse.

As I stuck my head out to investigate I disturbed the midget Jonas on his hands and knees in the litter I hadn’t been arsed to tidy up. Startled, the exchange went something like this:

‘’What the F*CKING HELL are you doing?’’

‘’Ah..erm…sorry mate…there’s been a raid…’’

‘’Get the F*CK out of my yard, right now.’’

‘’Mate, you don’t understand…I’m a drug user…there’s been a raid-‘’

‘’Get out of here!’’

‘’But…I chucked it down here somewhere…I’ve got to get it back. I need a torch…’’

Midget Jonas was eye to eye with me in the darkness, the romance burning out with the fag-end, me controlling the situation like Gordon Brown, as my fingers hovered over the hammer in the drawer. Midget Jonas started to cry. The stand-off was like a nurse-patient argument over dinnertime gruel in the psychiatric wing. He evidently wasn’t going anywhere though. So I passed him a lighter and he ducked back out of sight. Seconds later he returned, his street-hardened grimy mits brandishing a crack-rock the size of the blood diamond.

‘’I’ve got it! I’ve fucking got it mate! Look I wasn’t lying! Awww I could hug you!’’

‘’Don’t.’’

‘’Matematematemate how can I pay you back?!’’

‘’Give me my lighter and f*ck off.’’

And with that he skipped away giggling with all the poise and psychosis of Wastey, the ostracised eighth dwarf who stole Doc’s silver pieces while the rest were out down the quarry, leaving me to ponder being able to listen to Tupac’s ‘’Changes’’ with that bit more moral authority.

I didn’t realise that our area of Leeds is colloquially known as the ‘War Zone’ by my social worker colleagues and with three more weeks to go on the tenancy from hell, I’m beginning to get it. If heaven is a place on earth, then surely hell must be too. Either that or the state of mind that finds you in Burley, on purpose, at night-time, scratching around desperately in a stranger’s beer cans and fag-ends risking everything for that crystalline relief.

As for the squatters, I suppose stealing a house so easily must give you a feeling of invulnerability. But to paraphrase Homer Simpson, there’s such a fine line between invulnerable and stupid.

John Teedge helps run a charity that supports disadvantaged people in Uganda: check out his blog for more information www.spoweuganda.org/

Glastonbury: The Prelude

I was on the front cover of the Guardian once.

I’d love to say it was in the by-line of an article that brought down the government, or in a photo linking arms with Scarlett Johansson, but alas: it was the tip of my £20 tent peering above a sea of sewage and shit, 3 inches of material cowering beneath the lashing rain, bewildered as a camel on an ice-cap.

The location was Glastonbury festival and the year was 2005: the one where the rain ‘really’ came. June’s entire average annual rainfall burst from the heavens that morning like the impossible tears of a cuckolded teenager, coating Pilton in grief inside one small hour. The images were beamed out across the nation of the worst affected corner of the camp sites: the school-boy-error spot at the bottom of a hill we had chosen in the previous day’s deceitful sunlight. In the foreground of the shots, someone with a comic’s sense of preparation was captured floating by in a canoe.

I remember being coaxed in and out of sleep that morning by the thudding pitter-patter above, brain reeling from excess and vaguely registering the water seeping the in the edges of my hot little hovel, body curling into a smaller and smaller ball in meek defiance. I suppose for the hour or so it took me to realise what was going on it was a little like regressing back to the womb. If so, my subsequent ‘birth’ was the kind mothers must have nightmares about.

We all emerged from our tents and stood dumbly for a second, mouths open like sallow fish as the rising tide of sewage swallowed our festival from the feet up. I remember my friend Kimmy fumbling down for his car keys, shoulder-length hair floating in the water like dead weeds along a river bank. The source of the smell became apparent: the nearby toilets were over-flowing and carrying with it the unspeakable detritus of drug-addled arseholes, casually coating what in a blink of an eye ago was a scene of pastoral innocence: guitars poised on backpacks, disposable barbeques dying gracefully in the sun, polite bags of rubbish nestled between cans of lager…

It felt biblical. Unreal. We trudged to the edge of the flood with what little we could salvage and watched chaos lick its way through the narrow passageways between our tents, consuming our entire Glastonbury - my first - like a snake. Shivering, soaking, stunned, we slapped our way through the mud to the nearest shelter and stood sharing cigarettes. For about half an hour of teeth-chattering, it seemed the only option was probably to go home.

Then someone threw on ‘Nice Weather For Ducks’ by Lemon Jelly. Suddenly, a crumb of sunlight landed obscenely on a puddle a few feet away. We all began to laugh. Someone began to dance. What followed, via a trip to an emergency refugee camp set up by the Eavies farmhouse, free jam sandwiches, cups of tea and second-hand clothes provided by the good people at Oxfam, were three of the best days of my life. Being stripped of your possessions, it transpired, was the best possible preparation for Glastonbury. For me at least, it meant racing through the next few days feeling more care-free than an adult has any right to.

And there’s the point. The need to save money looks set to keep me from attending any music festivals this summer, and yet my year will be poorer for it. There is something Wordsworth says in The Prelude about looking over the countryside where he once roamed as a boy, knowing that he can never rediscover the essential and instinctive rhythms of freedom that propelled him at that age to explore, climb and leap through the woodlands. In adulthood it is not possible, he says, to enjoy the world in same carefree way again.

Perhaps if Wordsworth had been able to convince Coleridge to split the petrol and drive to a field somewhere that summer, struggle through the gates of a music festival with three crates of Strongbow and plonk down in a field for four days of drinking, wandering, listening, learning to play the bongos and taking free yoga classes, chatting to strangers and stumbling between burger vans, he’d have forgotten for a moment the pressures of iambic pentameter, the Lake District rent and Dorothy’s gout and relaxed.

There has to be a good reason that thousands of us spent hundreds and hundreds of pounds each year simply to be allowed to sit in a muddle of our own rubbish, unable to wash or defecate comfortably, rain poised like the sword of Damocles above our heads. Put simply: it unshackles us from everything that makes the rest of year so wearisome. It allows us to be children again.

Glastonbury 2005 demonstrated to me like no other festival quite how true this is. In relative terms, our homes were completely destroyed, and in real terms, we woke up in a river made up party of sewage and human waste. Yet still the good times rolled. So to those people lucky enough to be off watching Springsteen and Blur while I’m glumly counting out my £200 – good luck to you.

I hope it absolutely pisses down.

for a review of Newcastle's very own answer to Glastonbury by yours truly, check this out: http://www.thecrackmagazine.com/index.php?section=1&category=7&page=1658

and for an interview with Dizzee Rascal in which I try my best to be cool, see here: http://www.thecrackmagazine.com/index.php?section=1&category=9&page=1659

Michael White, PMQs and the Gordon-gasp: a day in Westminster

The sky was generously clear as I strode out of Westminster tube station on Wednesday morning, a slightly-too-large suit on my back and a pleasant soup of anticipation and nerves in my stomach. I was on my way to meet a true heavyweight of British journalism, the man whose stern face has looked out at the nation from pages of The Guardian for the past 30 years - former political editor and CiF blogger, Mr. Michael White.

Even more exciting was where Mike had proposed to take me - into the heart of power, the Houses of Parliament, to witness the weekly Punch and Judy show that is Prime Minister’s Questions.

There has always been something about Gordon Brown that puts the creeps up me, and perched up in the press gallery of the House of Commons (it’s rather like being in the upper reaches of a church, complete with intermittent sunlight cascading through ornate glass-work), I finally figured out what it is.

It’s the ‘Gordon-gasp’ – an unhelpful mannerism that in all but our most high-profile of public servants would be indecorous to mention, an open-mouthed chin-wobble that appears at the end of his every sentence as though the man is momentarily aghast at the very words that have tumbled out of his mouth.

Opposite, of course, was Cameron – a man-child with whom I share a poverty of facial hair (if precious little else). It’s hard to be taken seriously when your complexion is like the inside of an egg-shell.

Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed when the leader of the opposition used up his entire quota of questions to make the same futile request:

“Will the right honourable gentlemen please explain what he meant, when he said calling a general election now would bring about ‘chaos’?!”

The Gordon-gasp centred its self so the PM could counter: “Well a Tory government in power would certainly bring about chaos for this country!”

That familiar Commons laughter – not false exactly, but putting unnecessary strain on the diaphragm – rippled through the backbenches.

“Ah-ha!” retorted the shimmering chin, “So the right honourable gentleman finally admits he would probably lose a general election!”

As Mr. White informed me, this sort of baiting is the standard behaviour from an opposition on the front foot. Certainly of all the main leaders, Cameron has emerged the slightly-less sullied of the three having last week been first to strongly condemn his own MPs for their roles in the ongoing expenses scandal.

Nick Clegg on the other hand had led the mob in sharpening their pitch-forks for Michael Martin, the now lame-duck Speaker – making his Q to the PM something of a dramatic highlight. His attempt to pay tribute to the beleaguered Scot (Martin, not Brown) was met with a predictable chorus of jeers. In either a demonstration of the incompetency many feel has characterised his stewardship or a wily sense of revenge, the Speaker then appeared to forget to allow Clegg his supplementary question, much to everyone’s amusement. It helped break some of the tension that seemed to grip the House, rather like the affectionate teasing a parent might indulge in to rescue the atmosphere after a family row.

After PMQs, my first work experience experience (unless you count a week photocopying at Morpeth Council aged 13) continued apace. At one point I sat in The Guardian’s backstage office with several of Mr. White’s colleagues (listening to the equally formidable Simon Hoggart lampoon senior politicians live felt rather like seeing David Beckham practise his free-kicks in his backyard) attempting to strike that fine balance between being helpful and not getting in the way. It reminded me of our own little newspaper office here at The Courier, only I wasn’t in charge and no one was blasting rap music from youtube on any of the computers.

In the afternoon I was whisked off to the House of Lords – a rather more opulent and sedate version of the Commons, in which rows and rows of elderly politicians (average age: 69) are cocooned in preparation for retirement. They were caught up in the same rare moment of contrite introspection that had subdued the green benches next door, but the real thrill for me was in following Mike through the corridors of power on the way there, watching him navigate the labyrinth of Westminster like it was his home, stopping occasionally to exact details from lobbyists or subtly mine MPs for their insights. It was surreally reminiscent of the scenes in the West Wing in which one of the characters storms through the hallways of the White House firing on all cylinders with their secretary taking notes by their side, only rather than engaging him in witty banter I focused squarely on trying not to trip over or accidently shut any door behind me in some Right Honourable face.

To round the day off I accompanied Mike to the studios of Sky News where, with barely a glance at the briefing, he went live on air to millions in order to answer questions about the day’s events. While the public and journalists alike are losing their heads a little about the ‘quiet revolution’ currently taking place in British politics (Jonathan Freeland ought to have worn a beret for his comment piece in The Guardian earlier this week), Mike is consistently less excitable about what I guess after thirty years in the game doesn’t seem quite as extraordinary as it may to the rest of us. He quickly dispensed of a colleague Sky had drafted in from another studio who got a bit carried away about Labour ‘losing one MP for every day the election is delayed’, as I, inches off-shot to his right, could only really look on and marvel.

Back outside, and after a handshake and a goodbye, I was left strolling along the Thames reflecting on a day in which I had glimpsed both professional heroes (personally speaking) and professional villains (nationally speaking) in the bowels of building that has dictated life in Britain since the Middle Ages.

The Times politely rejected me today for a place on their graduate scheme so my own route into ‘proper journalism’ remains stubbornly, exhilaratingly, obscured. What a day in Westminster has ensured is that no matter how arduous the next few years prove to be, the motivation to carry on will be that bit easier to find. It was a vision of what I am striving for rendered in real time, rather than abstraction.

For very different reasons indeed, I expect aspiring politicians (if there are any left) can look at this week of accumulating scandal and say the exact same thing. Whether inspired to emulate or antithesize, let's hope we all get to where we're trying to go - and do a good job, once we do.

Chanting from the Brink

As I sit here on the precipice of the unthinkable, 90 minutes away from football’s equivalent of the Armageddon, the peak of St. James Park is only a brief shard woven into my view of the sky-line. I can see a single glistening jut of its metallic upper tendons, but like the tip of an iceberg, the sight betrays far more than that.

Built beneath is an endangered colossus that first took my breath away 15 years ago. Walking out into the belly of football, I expected to see it first but you never do – you feel it, a smack in the face. Air-shorn lungs bellowing tides of anticipation, rippling across and through you from every angle as you take dizzily to your seat. The awesome spectacle of uniformity, and in those days, Keegan’s heroes appearing as an echo of them all, minature men you’d pretended to be in the park.

A girlfriend asked me once: why do you bother with something that makes you so upset? She’d come along after the golden years, after The Entertainers, after even Sir Bobby’s fleeting renaissance. And I could see it through her eyes: the dejected slump, the bitter rebukes, the Sunday spoilt by melodrama. What a futile cause.

But football is and always has been a futile cause for all but the lucky few whose birth (or insincerity) gives them Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea or Arsenal. The Premier League is a microcosm of the fucked-up world we inhabit in which all the wealth, all the power and all the happiness has been distributed among a disproportionate few who have developed insurmountable methods of protecting it. Manchester United are America (quite literally now, of course): on top, out front, smug in their greatness and loathed for it across the world, while the remaining three might constitute the jostling superpowers of Europe. So what does that make Newcastle FC? A shell-seasoned and cowering corner of the Middle East, pulling its self to pieces while the rest of the world grows.

By the end of the day, relegation may have finally been all but conceded by the slowest, flattest, most dim-spirited Newcastle side of at least the last twenty years, in a stadium that is still the fourth biggest in the country. Another question bemused outsiders ask is simply: how did it get to this? Even they remember vaguely a period in the 90s when the club were England’s Girls Aloud rather than its Pete Docherty.

Pin-pointing the exact moment when we became an injured moth declining deliriously toward the relegation carpet is difficult: some would cite Bobby Robson’s unceremonious departure, some Kenny Daglish dismantling the squad before him, some would even go as far back to say it was King Kev himself doing away with our youth team and teasing us with false economy-glory.

For me, the rot truly set the moment, in the middle of a build-up toward the Aston Villa goal, Lee Bowyer’s fist connected with Keiron Dyer’s face in front of an astonished St. James’ Park in 2005. Two team mates brawling mid-match. The national press have been poking us in the ribs and laughing ever since, and who can blame them.

So why bother with an interest that for almost a decade has been a merry-go-round stopping alternately at shame, disappointment, anger and, at times, sheer horror?

Because your football club is, in many ways, your oldest friend. You’ve known it for longer than you can quite remember and you’re loyal to it, even when it’s acting like an insufferable twat. When something is so entwined with your sense of self and history, there’s very little it could actually do that would make you wash your hands of them. This is the humanity from which football’s vultures tear their lumps: loyalty vitiated by a £40 shirt.

But beyond that, football and sport in general offer humankind something wonderfully unique. It is a world in which we can revel in the excesses of irrational emotion, joys greater than joys and sorrows deeper than sorrows, because ultimately, it is a game with no real bearing on our health, our families, or our futures. It is a world in which a good result is a good result, plain and untainted by the grey tones of life in which both a blessing and a curse are manifest somewhere in every event. For every hammer blow like relegation, there is a moment even in a bad performance, a well-timed pass or a neat one-two, than momentarily illuminates the sublime, a fleck of art amidst a chaos of movement that reminds you precisely why you bother. And most importantly, even for those of us struggling in football’s developing world, there is hope. Against the odds, despite the run of play, in football you never quite lose that little part of you that believes that this could be our match, our season.

Bill Shankley is claimed to have said once that football isn’t a matter of life or death – it’s much more important than that. Perhaps his point was that what matters more than our mortality is what we do with our lives – the bit in between that is so easy to let pass us by. Strange though it might seem to the rational outsider, the dizzy heights and choking lows of football feed directly into an essential appetite for life, and make it taste, if not better, then stronger.

Let’s hope the boys manage to put on a spread for us tonight, and keep the hope alive a little longer.

St. Georges Day.

"Do ee kna what’s gan ern here?”

Asked a woman in the crowd as we looked out between the gang of rabid, Union Jack-waving white men and the five or six students nervously handing out Socialist Worker leaflets opposite them.

“I’ve got a rough idea, yeah.”

The woman frowned as the melodious mantras of the Glastonbury-survivors on one side continued to be drowned out by thundering chants of ‘EN-GER-LAND EN-GER-LAND’ of the Real Working Class TM on the other.

“Do them lot wanna ban St. Georges’ Day like?” she continued, pointing at the hippies.

Ah, St. George. Patron saint of Aragon, Catalonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Greece, Lithuania, Palestine, Portugal and Russia and the cities of Amersfoort, Beirut, Caceres, Genoa, Ferrara, Freiburg, Ljublijana, Gozo, Pomorie, Qormi and Moscow. Oh, and England.

“No no, I think they just object to the other lot, the National Front, on the grounds that they’re a bit racist.” I replied, but she’d gone.

Facebook was also alive that day with mentions of St. George, the Roman solider who never really killed a dragon (but if he did so today would almost certainly be locked up for hunting an endangered species). The status of many seemed to be calling for the introduction of a national holiday to mark St. Georges Day – a noble enough aim, getting an extra day off work – but then I wondered how many of them also shared the sentiments of the 365,642 members of the ‘STOP our Government from killing off ST Georges Day because it may offend!’ facebook group, the same sentiment peddled between belches and jeers by the intimating posse of sheared clichés that commandeered Grey’s Monument in Newcastle City Centre, April 23rd.

The question I ask of everyone who propagates this idea is simply: who? Who is ‘offended’ by St. Georges’ Day? The Left? The Attenboroughs? The Sci-Fi enthusiasts with a penchant for The Never Ending Story?

No no, of course we’re talking about immigrants. The ‘others’. The people who come to our country, take our jobs, resist our ways and refuse to flash any tit on a summers day. Them lot.

Has anyone ever actually heard an immigrant in this country say they’re object to St. Georges Day, or the English flag, or crumpets or Wimbledon or cups of tea or anything we’ve decided is ‘English’ for that matter? Obviously we can discount any that have came from Greece, Lithuania, Palestine, Russia et al because, hey, he’s their saint too, so why on earth would they object?

The answer is always no and that’s because it’s a myth, a tall-tale perpetuated by the far-right to stoke up the trembling nationalism that is their life-blood.

No body ‘objects’ to St. Georges Day, to the flag, or to the kind of innocent patriotism that - for example - the World Cup brings out in most people, it wouldn’t make any sense to. But what we should all object to is that St. Georges Day, the pride we want to feel in our place of birth, is being hi-jacked – not by immigrants who have probably never even thought about it but by fascists who want to exploit our disillusioned national self-image.

For me, it’s a symptom of post-colonial blues. England ruled the world and the seven seas once - we pillaged and pilfered from across the globe, constructing an identity that is at it’s very core multicultural, a good-old-cup-of-tea from China, a chicken tikka masala from India, three lions from the African plains – and now, in a blink of history’s weary eye, it has all gone. We aren’t England the Great anymore, we’re England the puny, the politically subservient, the lost empire. And with it, our sense of identity has evaporated.

Like a cuckolded man emerging from the debris of his once great romance, we are a sucker-punched nation, binge-drinking our way from one unprotected fumble to the next, reeling self-consciously around a diminished sense of worth. Some of us want to find reasons to object to the quiet, studious, self-respecting races of people who enter our shores and who, by any rational statistic, present no real threat to our way of life, because their behaviour shows us up as what we are: the drunken, STI-ridden, leary joke of Europe who once ruled the world.

For all I despair of (and contribute to) our social ills, I love England. I love our cultural brilliance, our contributions to art and music and literature. I love our national character: modest, resilient, good-humoured. I love our country-side in a way that, when I stop and look at it, overwhelms a place so innate I can’t touch it, something I can only suppose is my silly, simpering human soul.

But loving Britain is loving diversity. We’re a mongrel race and always have been, invaded more times than Paris Hilton’s knickers, a melting pot of Celts, Saxons, Vikings and Romans. By either accident or design, we are a nation that has absorbed its trademarks and traditions from other places and amalgamated them into something unique and this is our strength, not our weakness.

If St. George were alive today, and did indeed have to protect a princess of this country by slaying a dragon, the princess would be our tolerance and compassion, and the dragon would be the looming monster of fascism – each scale a freshy-suited skin-head – that inflames communities and takes as a sacrifice new, disillusioned youth each day. A dragon that, in the forth-coming European elections, could take a seat of real power to punish us for our apathy.

I didn’t see the woman again, but there were plenty there that day at Monument, trying to decipher whether they agreed with those shouting far out on the right or those shouting far out on the left.

All the while, in the space in the middle of them both, on their way to work or to the shops, from all manners of backgrounds and beliefs, passed the people of England.