The Many Worlds of Cosmic Tigger

Lines for My Creative Writing Pals

Steve O'Gorman — Fri, 21 May 2010 11:50:18 +0000

This was just a bit of fun I put together over the Easter break. Given my deep loathing of poetry, this surprised everyone when I presented it for our final get-together. It got a few laughs, and rounded off the year nicely. It was purely an omission on my part that I neglected to write limericks for Shaun, Holly and Kate. I racked my brain all weekend but couldn’t remember their names. After she’d read them Catherine suggested (I hope jokingly) that everyone should try writing a limerick for me as revenge. So far nothing’s come my way…

While doing her writing degree
Erica tried to make time for TV
Her life was nocturnal,
She wrote in her journal,
In between reruns of Glee.

While battling her way through King Lear
Danielle screamed ‘I must perservere!
I’m lost in confusion,
There’s no bloody conclusion.
Why couldn’t the Bard make things clear?’

Stopped by coppers in Cardiff, young Craig
Said, ‘Officers, my memory’s quite vague.
But my mate was a victim
When security nicked ‘im –
We avoid potted plants like the plague.’

A Welsh girl named Naomi Preston
Booked a holiday with First Great Western.
She arrived at Heathrow,
After three feet of snow,
And said ‘I’m glad I kept my vest on.’

An American student named Sam
Read back through her work and cried ,’Damn!
I hope Webster’s in Hell!
It his fault I can’t spell,
And now I’ll fail this freaking exam!’

In her outfit of black pvc,
Anna cried, ‘Everyone, look at me!
I’m no fashion designer,
It’s just a bin-liner,
But it’s cheaper than rubber, you see.’

At the course reps’ social event
Charlotte left with a hunky young gent
She dropped her defences
But tangled her tenses
And rather than coming, she went!

For the end of term panto, Tom Sankey
Volunteered to play Widow Twankey.
After acting quite camp,
Aladdin rubbed on his lamp,
Which led to backstage hanky-panky.

An Early Years student named Danni
(That’s enough limericks – Ed.)

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Time Between

Steve O'Gorman — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 16:30:21 +0000

To paraphrase Alun Lewis, all month it has rained. I’m between buses in a small town in the South Wales valleys, which is threatening to stop being a backwater and become an underwater instead. With nearly an hour to wait and the still-warm corpse of my umbrella lying in the litter bin a few feet away, I decide to seek shelter and refreshment. I leave the bus station, head up the fast-flowing stream running along the lane, and emerge into what locals boast as their high street.
I am the only person brave enough or foolish enough to be outside in the downpour. A few shoppers are huddled in the doorway of the supermarket, psyching themselves up for the sprint to the car park. On either side of the street, rows of whitewashed windows mark the graves of fallen businesses. The local newspaper office is closed; its staff are missing, presumed relocated. The remains of a pizza restaurant, a furniture shop, a coal merchant’s and a ladies’ clothes shop lie among these inglorious dead. There’s even an empty charity shop.
Warm orange light draws me, moth-like, towards the pub, the only other survivor of the economic battle which has devastated the high street. I’m not spoilt for choice – the town’s other pub is near the bus station, a mass-produced horror of plastic beer mugs, plastic menus, plastic food and plastic staff. There used to be a café here. Now it’s a kebab shop, only open in the evenings. It’s understandable. You can’t eat a kebab without having a shedful of beer first. That’s a peer-reviewed scientific fact.
Inside, the pub is large and almost empty. A few guys are teasing the barmaid with smutty banter. Occasionally she occasionally explodes into filthy laughter, giving as good as she gets. All eyes turn to regard me as I approach the bar, and she comes upstage in answer to her cue. I survey the pumps while her hand hovers over regimented rows of glasses awaiting the call to arms.
‘I’ll have a pint of Foster’s, please,’ I decide finally. The regulars have returned to their conversation. I’m not a copper, a dole snooper, a God-botherer, a charity collector or a travelling salesman. The ‘all-clear’ has sounded in their heads and they can go about their business unhindered. I watch the glass fill slowly, and she flicks the handle of the pump a few times, trying in vain to inject some life into the lager. I pay her, test a sample of the moribund brew, and make my way to a table by the window. From here I can watch the rain bounce off the pavement, and chuckle at the few intrepid school-kids trudging past on their way home.
I take out my Netbook, although I’m pretty sure that Wi-Fi would be impossibly advanced technology in this place. As I’d expected, the New Connection Wizard fails to work its magic. Instead I content myself with looking at the photos I’ve taken so far.
I’ve only been here a few minutes when a surprised voice announces, ‘That’s where I was born!’ I look round. Standing behind me, a pint of Guinness in his hand, is a stocky chap in his late sixties. He is wearing an grey windcheater over dark slacks and a white shirt, and a fringe of grey hair sticks out from under his cloth cap. ‘Mind if I have a peek?’ His blue eyes are bright and intelligent, and a humorous expression plays over his round, ruddy face. Something about him reminds me of my late grandfather. I like him immediately.
‘Be my guest.’ I gesture to an empty chair and the man sits down, regarding the little computer with obvious suspicion.
‘There’s dinky, that. My grandson’s the boy for computers, mind. I haven’t got a bloody clue…’ He smiles and focuses on the screen again. His hand sweeps over a sprawling estate of executive-style houses, perched in a prime position on the hillside above the long Victorian terraces. ‘That’s all new.’ He points to a large and imposing chapel in the middle of a terrace. ‘My house was just on the end by there, an’ I went to school just over there.’ He points again, to a structure which couldn’t be anything but a school. The public buildings of the valleys are as distinctive in their architecture as the parish churches of English villages – an odd mixture of austere functionality and status symbol. The working classes of the coalfield declared their radicalism to the world in mute monoliths of stone and slate. How he can tell one from the other is beyond me.
‘I was over there this morning,’ I explain. ‘The sun actually came out for a couple of hours.’
‘Aye, it does every so often.’ He laughs and sips his pint. He removes his cap to reveal a shiny pink scalp, and puts it down next to his glass. ‘Keeps the draught out of the attic.’ He grins. If he were to light a pipe and puff contentedly at it, the resemblance to my granddad would be complete – although my granddad would never have believed that he’d be exiled to the pub doorway in order to indulge his habit.
Reading his mind, I switch the display to Slide Show. My companion proceeds to give me a running commentary as the pictures scroll by. By the time it returns to our starting point, he’s given me a potted history of his home town, far more quickly and in much greater detail than I’d have gleaned from the local library. I show him some of the other folders – the products of my recent trips to Pontypridd, Merthyr, Bargoed, and Ebbw Vale all reside in my hard drive. He asks me what I’ve got in mind for my collection.
‘I’m not sure yet. I’ve been thinking of setting up a website.’ He looks intrigued. Like most people his age, he’s heard of websites, but the word is just a word, with no referent for it to point at. ‘If I could get hold of old pictures, and take the same shot now, we’d have a “before-and-after” view.’
‘I’ve got you,’ he muses. ‘Before and after Thatcher.’ He leans back in his chair, a pensive expression on his face. ‘The thing is, everythin’s changed so much, you’ve missed most of the good stuff.’ He laughs and swallows a mouthful of the black stuff. ‘The ol’ shops, an’ the pubs, an’ the cafés – they’re all gone.’
And as we sit in our shelter from the storm, he tells me how he left the village in his twenties to work in London.
There was a Welshman, a Scotsman, and an Irishman… Living in digs together in Kentish Town, they travelled to the Isle of Dogs every day in a works van, helping to build the sprawling impersonal estates which replaced the bomb-sites and slums of the East End, when Britain was booming and London was swinging. On Saturday nights they’d walk into Camden Town and visit the nightclubs, watching the strippers and the go-go dancers, all lads together in a men-only world.
Other times they’d go into the centre of town, or out to the suburbs of Middlesex and Surrey, and watch the latest beat groups. He reels off a list of names as I listen in fascination: The Yardbirds, The Kinks, The Small Faces, The Who, The Move, Traffic, The Spencer Davis Group… He saw The Rolling Stones twice – once at Eel Pie Island, when they were starting out, and again at Hyde Park, two days after Brian Jones’s death, when the good times were fading like the last few millimetres of a badly-rolled joint. He saw John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers dozens of times, when his roster of up-and-coming musicians included Eric Clapton, Mick Taylor, and most of the founder members of Fleetwood Mac, amongst others. He saw The Mannish Boys before their singer, David Jones of Brixton, changed his surname to Bowie. He saw The Pink Floyd, The Jimi Hendrix Experience and The Soft Machine as well, but he didn’t like them. They were too way-out for his tastes. His big regret is that he never saw The Beatles perform live. A friend of mine did. She mitched off school the afternoon they played in Cardiff, and changed her clothes in the toilets of David Morgan’s department store. I tell him that and he almost chokes on his Guinness.
When the lean times returned, in the mid-seventies, so did he – back to the valley, and marriage, and fatherhood. Work was either the odd hobble on a building site for cash-in-hand, or else the legitimate contracts sewn up when property developers and their cronies on the local authorities decided to extend Cardiff as far as the Heads of the Valleys Road.
Retired now, and divorced, he lives across the mountain in the former marital home, a few miles from where he grew up, close to his in-laws. His wife insisted on staying near her parents when they settled down. He had to go along with her wishes. Ironically, when they split up she was the one who insisted on moving out. His children are grown-up and he sees his grandchildren at Christmas and birthdays. He doesn’t like his ex-wife’s home town.
‘Why don’t you move back down?’
‘Don’t be daft – I don’t want to go movin’ at my time of life. Anyway, my pals are all over here. I get the bus every day. I’ve got my free pass. I have a couple of pints, a chat with the boys, and go back on the last bus.’
His words bring me back to reality. I check the time on my phone and realise that my own bus is due to leave shortly. I apologise to him, finish my drink, close my Netbook and shove it back into my bag.
‘You off?’ He drains his glass as well.
‘Yeah. Things to see, people to do.’ I tell him where I’m heading next and he laughs.
‘Well, don’t get carried away – it’s all go over there.’ He puts his cap back on. ‘I’ll head up the Con Club for one, I think.’
‘A Conservative Club still open? Round here?’
‘Aye – it’s cheap enough, and there’s a good crowd usually. The Workies’ up the road shut last year, mind. If that Cameron bloke came down here, he’d think he was in a safe Tory seat!’ He utters a cynical laugh.
It occurs to me then that this man, whose friends are ‘all over here’, is as alone as I am. I imagine him drifting aimlessly from the pub to the club and on again, searching for a friendly face to sit and chat with for a while.
I put my jacket on, bid him farewell, and head for the door. As I open it, letting the wind and rain inside, he smiles up at me.
‘Thanks for showin’ me those pictures, mate. Took me right back, they did.’ He smiles my granddad’s smile again. ‘See you again!’
‘You’re welcome. It’s been great chatting to you. See you round.’
Evening has settled over the town like a great grey damp blanket. I raise a hand to the landlady and head out into the deluge. He and I both know full well we’ll never cross paths again, but we’ve both said it nonetheless. It’s the little touches which makes us human, after all.

Posted in Fiction

The Treasure Hunters

Steve O'Gorman — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 16:17:06 +0000

On the Roman road near Cowbridge
a man with a metal detector showed me
some old coins he’d unearthed. We chatted
while his friendly dog bounded around
chasing butterflies in the parched grass.

At Tinkinswood I took photographs
at the tomb of some unknown warrior
in a field of trees and stones. Birdsong
broke the silence. A blue butterfly blurred past
too fast for me to identify its species.

A yellow MG drew up at the bus stop
a man with a metal detector and a dog in the back.
Are you going back to Cardiff? Hop in!
We talked through the suburbs to the bus station.
We both found something precious that day.

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Posted in Poetry

Going Up in the World

Steve O'Gorman — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 15:52:43 +0000

On the day I was born, my grandparents went up in the world. The row of stone cottages where they had spent their married lives was being demolished, and the residents were moving into a new high-rise block on the other side of the village. While my mother was in labour, her sister Jean had to take regular breaks from moving furniture to phone my father for the latest news.

Their new home was on the sixth floor of a red-brick monolith, one of a pair which could be seen from all directions as one entered the village. The whole community was rehoused, and Mams and Dads found their new neighbours to be their old neighbours for the most part.

To get to the flat, one got off the bus near the former Palace Cinema and walked up the sideroad, past a seldom-used two-storey concrete car park, across a little green, up half a dozen wide steps, and across the foyer into the lift. The door to Number 64 was next to the lift door. On entering the tiny hallway, the visitor was met by an ornamental barometer with a carved wooden stag’s head. That the barometer was merely decorative (or possibly broken) didn’t occur to me for years, until I noticed that it was always SET FAIR, regardless of the weather.

From here, a short passage led into the living room. In opposite corners were Mams’s rocking chair, Dads’s armchair, and a Sony Trinitron TV set on a waist-high table. Next to the TV was a smaller armchair, and when I was younger I would perch on a pouffé in the middle of the floor while my mother sat in the guest chair. Also squashed into the room was a sideboard, which held the best china and cutlery, as well as important household paperwork, and topped with photos of their extensive and ever-growing family. If Dads had gone to the club for an afternoon, I was allowed to sit in his chair when I visited. He always had his ashtray perched on the arm, with a “seaside postcard” cartoon of a lecherous old boy goosing a pert young barmaid, and the words A man is as old as he feels, and when he stops feeling, HE’S OLD!

The colour scheme of the room changed several times over the years, but was always drawn from a basic palette of cream, pale yellows and light browns, while the swirly carpet remained unchanged. From the window one could just about see the Palace Cinema, its tall, narrow red-brick frontage standing out like an inland lighthouse amongst the houses and shops. Beyond the village, one could see all the way to the southern edge of the Brecon Beacons.

The passageway continued to the bedroom, which I think I entered twice in my life, when Mams was ill, and a small windowless bathroom.

Next to the living room was the best room, and it was exactly that: as children we were rarely allowed to play in there. I remember a three-piece suite, blocky and squat, covered in garish scarlet vinyl and almost buried beneath furry cushions in black and cream covers. There was a fluffy white rug like a polar bear’s pelt in the middle of the patterned carpet. Against one wall was a coal-effect electric fire, which was never used. Enough warmth made its way up from the floors below to make extra heating unnecessary. A glass-fronted cabinet against the other wall was crammed with plates and glasses, and topped with souvenirs of seaside holidays.

This room had French windows leading onto a small verandah, enclosed in waist-high black iron railings, where Mams grew a few plants. From here, you could watch the rugby or cricket matches on the miners’ welfare ground or listen to the constant rumble of traffic from the three-lane road below.

The kitchen was frozen in the 1970s, with a blue Formica-topped table near the window, yellow-fronted cupboards along one side, an electric cooker which I never felt safe around, and a big old fridge. The cupboards held household staples like Kardov flour, Glengettie tea, Birds Custard Powder, Leo dried peas, Borwick’s Baking Soda, and Corona pop. Mams’s motto was ‘fresh daily’, and she never bought any frozen food, cooking everything from scratch. It must have been the height of sophistication for someone who grew up with only a cold tap in a tiny scullery and a range on which to cook everything. The walls were also bright yellow, and above the cooker was a large poster of a Mediterranean seafront, as if one was looking from a hotel window on the Riviera. It seemed odd at the time, but the view from the window was a sprawling council estate and a few factories behind, so it was probably a wise choice.

Mams and her few surviving neighbours from Bethel Place moved again during the late 1990s, this time to sheltered accommodation in the shadow of the tower blocks. The flats had become a haven for crime and drug abuse over the years, and the decision had been taken to pull them down. That year, Mams forgot to send me a birthday card. It was the first time it had ever slipped her mind. It seemed as though the psychic link between moving to the flat and my birth had been severed.

Several hundred people gathered around the village on May 30, 2004, to watch the controlled demolition of the tower blocks. I was one of them. I watched as a chunk of my memories vanished in seconds behind a pall of smoke and dust. The car park was levelled years ago. The Palace Cinema has been pulled down as well, leaving a gap like a missing tooth in the high street. I haven’t been around the village for a long time. There’s nothing left there for me now.

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Posted in Memoir