Chapter 76: Assorted EOL's - Patti Smith/ man on plane/man in pond/my aunt's silver cutlery

All served on a bed of fresh sciatica

Started Tuesday 21st October 2024, 01.23, front room bedsit, Parkway Camden. Finished Tuesday 26th November 2024, 02.54, same location.

Patti Smith & Robert Mapplethorpe

This morning at around 5.30am listened to the end of Patti Smith’s autobiography Only Kids. I enjoyed the book and her reading a lot. Her description of Robert Mapplethorpe ’s death moving with being mawkish - she and Robert being the only kids of the title. By way of brief stories of their times together (and apart) she captured the length and depth of the bond between her and the boy she’d fallen in love with 20 plus years before. The boy who’d been her muse as much as she’d been his.

In the early days of writing of this mess of pottage I railed against any tendency to dwell too long on the 1960’s as pointless nostalgia. But PS’s account was so endearing that I gave into that wayward era’s lush seduction.

Bits that stick: her description of CBGB’s when it was just a rough old bar; that she never heard Lou Reed and the Velvets play until they opened upstairs at Max’s Kansas; bumping into her lover Sam Shepherd with shoplifted steaks in her pocket… The description of Bobby’s (Bob Dylan) arrival at her band’s opening night at the Other End is epic “I could feel another presence…he was there. I suddenly understood the nature of the electric air, Bob Dylan had entered the club…I felt a power, perhaps his, but I also felt my own worth and the worth of my band..”

Man on a plane

[ok - so this is outrageously forced but I’m trying to start writing after a long break - so be gentle with me..]

January 1974 while Patti Smith was carving out her career as a rock star I (at the time nil glamorously manager of the card department at Mowbray’s Bookshop) made my first trip to New York. Minutes after the Laker Skytrain landed came the classic announcement…’If there is a doctor on board would they please…

It turned out that as the plane landed a man sitting two rows in front of me had died from a heart attack…I remember wondering was it fear or excitement that got him.

But bathetic though it now seems what made the whole thing memorable for me was the arrival of three of NYPD’s finest. The sight of those guys was a moment for me - to see those toothpaste top caps in the flesh…. exactly as portrayed in Stuart Little… forever etched.

Man in a pond

30 years on in 2003 (I am now a out of work ex TV exec living on a smallholding in Devon) one chilly spring Sunday morning my 7 year old daughter and I went hand in hand to collect some eggs from next door. The neighbours had gone on holiday, leaving an elderly father in charge.

As we pottered back carrying our little whicker basket full of eggs I said ‘lets go and look at the po…’ I had been heading towards the little ornamental pond when I saw that the old man was lying face down in it. ‘Actually no’ I said ‘let’s go and see mummy…’ and taking her very firmly in my now shaky hand whisked her out of the garden and upstairs to our bedroom where my wife and son were reading a book together. ‘ I need to speak to you’ I said trying to sound normal but clearly far from.

‘What’s the matter?’ said my wife, ‘I need to speak to you privately’ I said through gritted teeth. She sighed and we went into the bathroom ‘He’s dead - drowned - face down in the pond! I blurted ‘I didnt want H to see...’ She said well you know we’re all ok about death…why are you making such a fuss?’

She was right of course and maybe I should have let my daughter see the old man - but I didn’t.

My aunt's silver cutlery

My father’s sister Gytha lived the last years of her life in a genteel old people’s home in Torquay. Though it was only 40 minutes drive from where we haf moved to I can only remember visiting her a handful of times. My sister, who lived in Scotland probably saw her more often than I did.

When she died my sister came back from the funeral with a small cardboard box pf Gytha’s things. I was supposed to send them to her but never did. Eventually I opened the box and found among other bits and pieces a battered after dinner mint box with some old cutlery in it. The box came to Camden with me and a month or so ago I decided to use the old silverware in my bedsit. Having only glanced at it I’d assumed the spoons and forks were all cheap silver plated stuff but then saw it was hallmarked and discovered they were all solid sterling silver…

Now I’m in awe of solid silver cutlery…the odd teaspoon yes, I’d inherited some of those from my Auntie Jean. But solid silver spoons and forks that was something else altogether - that seemed tremendously swish and grand. And that my aunt had eaten with this at the end of her life lead me into all kinds of melancholic wonderings about her life and how sad it was that I had neglected her etc etc.

But now as I sit in my increasingly messy and mucky bedsit I do very much enjoy the eating 3 am meusli and my microwaved beans on toast with a sterling silver spoon and fork.

Ok so not my strongest piece but at least I’ve finished the bugger and without any reference to the fucking P beast.

Randon lyric #404

Always stays the same, nothing ever changes
English summer rain seems to last for ages
Always stays the same, nothing ever changes
English summer rain seems to last for ages

I'm in the basement, you're in the sky
I'm in the basement baby, drop on by
I'm in the basement, you're in the sky
I'm in the basement baby, drop on by

Hold your breath and count to ten
Then fall apart and start again
Hold your breath and count to ten
Start again, start again
Hold your breath and count to ten
Then fall apart and start again

Placebo, English Summer Rain, 2004, Brian Molko, Stefan Olsdal, Steven Hewitt, William Lloyd