Category Archives: podcast

Rochester

There’s the wreck of a Soviet submarine on the Medway near Rochester – and, in the BBC’s 1966 drama documentary ‘The War Game’ Rochester is one of the targets of a nuclear bomb. But it wasn’t a Soviet submarine, nor a bomb that destroyed the city of Rochester – this was achieved by a council oversight in 1998, when, during local government reorganisation, the city, accidentally, was abolished. That is, Rochester lost its city status. Rochester is now just a town.

Rochester has a magnificent Norman castle, it towers into the clouds. Next to the castle is a beautiful cathedral. There’s a pleasant town centre, numerous Charles Dickens themed businesses: a gift shop, ‘Sweet Expectations’, there’s ‘Little Dorritt’, (which describes itself as a metaphysical supply shop) ‘Jaggers Tapas Bar’, ‘Oliver’s’ – a restaurant, and a fresh fruit and veg place called ‘Food Glorious Food’. While the names of these businesses come straight out of Dickens, nearby place names could be lifted from Lord of the Rings: Strood, Snodland, the Hoo peninsular.

Charles Dickens spent his early years in nearby Chatham, and, in his later years, returned to live in nearby Higham. Restoration House in Rochester became the model for Miss Havisham’s house in Great Expectations. In that novel Dickens renamed it Satis House, taking the name from another building in Rochester. And maybe the name Havisham is a reworking of Faversham, a town just a few miles away. JK Rowling named Harry Potter’s stuffy relatives the Dursleys after the town of Dursley in Gloucestershire, close to where she grew up. So let’s imagine Charlotte Bronte came up with Mr Rochester after the city that is now a town. I like to imagine Dickens wandering the Rochester, staring at buildings, his imagination working and reworking reality into his stories. One building becomes another, one name another, shapes shift, faces appear in the clouds, Magwich leaps out from behind gravestone in a foggy cemetery, and the fog, yes the fog – read the first page of Bleak House, the word fog appears ten times and more, fog on the Medway, fog on the Kent coast, this is the fog of the imagination shapeshifting faces and figures, place names, buildings.

Do you want fog or facts? Facts says Mr Gradgrind in Hard Times, now what I want is facts. Well, let’s not bother too much with Mr Gradgrind, even if he would approve of the UK’s tired examination system. Here are some Dickens facts: born in Portsmouth 1812, and he died 1870, in Higham, a few miles outside of Rochester. 1812, the year the USA declared war on Britain, Spencer Perceval, the British Prime Minister, was assassinated. From the ages of four to eleven, Dickens lived in Chatham, just down the road from Rochester. Here his childhood mind, emerging from the fog of infancy, differentiated one thing from another, the docks, the bridges, the river, place names, people, faces.

Dickens’ novels expose the harsh conditions of life during the early years of the industrial revolution in England. Oliver Twist describes the horror of workhouses, Nicholas Nickleby the exploitation of workers and Bleak House the inequities of the justice system. He uses the fog of his imagination to explore the facts of the world. Just a walk from Rochester town centre is the village of Borstal, a name which, in the UK, was once synonymous with youth detention centres. The system was abolished in 1982, exactly 80 years after its creation. Although Borstals had a reputation for tough discipline its origins were enlightened – aiming not to punish the young, but to rehabilitate. Borstal schools still exist in India, despite their abolition in the UK. I walked from Snodland to Birling, the footpath circumnavigating a vast Tesco distribution centre. From Birling it was a just a short distance to Coldrum Long barrow, somewhere around six thousand years old, early neolithic, or new stone age, just before the dawn of agriculture. In Rochester, the next day, I found the Man O’Kent, a pub not far from the centre of town. There was a music session going on, participants took it in turns to sing, or lead. I was there just to observe, but was asked if I wanted to sing, so I did. It was a wonderful evening. I found it a very friendly place, which, despite being a town that was once a city, didn’t seem to harbour any grudges. All that it harboured was the rusty old Soviet submarine.

(This is a transcription from my podcast ‘These Weird Isles’, available on most platforms.)

Comments Off on Rochester

Filed under blogs, podcast, These Weird Isles, writers

The Cul-de-Sac

Cul-de-sac, from the French, bottom of the bag, or bottom of the sack, a dead end street. If you care to look at a cul-de-sac on a map, it looks like a crude drawing of a cock, so the sack is an appropriate word for that bulbous, often circular space at the end of many British cul-de-sacs that exploded (and I use that word explicitly) after World War 2.

Cul-de-sacs and dead end streets are not unique to these weird isles, of course. But there is something distinct about their status.

Cul-de-sacs differ from dead end streets, the former occur in more affluent British housing estates. A dead end street has been abandoned, given up on, or overwhelmed by what shuts it off – maybe a railway line or a motorway, a supermarket car park. Drive your car up and dead end street and you probably have to reverse out. Whereas a cul-sac-sac is genteel, your car can be turned to face the opposite direction gracefully, if not in one smooth manoeuvre, then maybe only two or three. A cul-de-sac will not embarrass you.

Sit in your car, or just hang around at the end of a cul-de-sac for too long and you will be noticed and surreptitiously eyed with suspicion.

A dead end street is very different. It’s a cliché in TV crime. You will sense danger, and, if you are fleeing from a gang, a hit man, the police, there’s a wall at the end, or a rusty eight foot fence. You have to scramble over, the enemy at your heels, only to find, on the other side, a canal or an allotment, and your fall will take through a greenhouse roof.

The British cul-de-sac is a haven, an enclave of lawns, hydrangeas, roses, Sunday dinners and blokes washing their cars, whistling, or listening to Radio Two.

President George W Bush did not say ‘the French have no word for entrepreneur’, but he did say ‘I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully’ and ‘Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?’ but he looks like man of calm rationality compared to that tangerine fact-mangler.

But the English do have no word for ‘cul-de-sac’ and it’s this: ‘close’, the ‘close’ being a road that offers no route through. To live in a close on a relatively modern estate in the UK is know that you don’t live on a rat run, a short cut, a route for the scary and screaming acceleration of, usually, young men in Fiestas, Civics or Clios.

The word clos, the same word without the e, means, in French, a walled garden, usually a vineyard. And the etymology of the word Paradise is a from the Persian for walled garden. A close is a paradise. A cul de sac is the Garden of Eden.

Roman Polanski’s 1966 film Cul-de-Sac was shot on the island of Lindisfarne, Northumberland, off the the north east coast of England. The cul-de-sac here is the rising tide. Lindisfarne hs a causeway allowing access at low tide, but leave it too long and you can be cut off, stranded.

And at this point I am stranded, I have reached the end of the cul-de-sac and cannot spin the story around or reverse. I have no option but to wind the window down, listen to the song of the suburbs, the happy lives of those cut off from the modern world, living in a paradise of bungalows, birdfeeders and budgerigars.

(The above is a transcript from my podcast ‘These Weird Isles’ – available via Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Soundcloud etc).

Leave a Comment

Filed under history, ideas, language, podcast, These Weird Isles

These Weird Isles

After coming down from my ten performances of ‘A Robinson Crusoe of the Soul’ I launched into looking into ways of staging it in south Wales. This has proved frustrating and glacially slow. I could grow carrots, cabbages and onions, breed and milk my own cows, make and market my own cole slaw, it would be easier and quicker than getting someone, anyone, in the Welsh arts world to give me even the tiniest leg up. I don’t blame individuals, it’s not a great time for the arts anywhere. Austerity, and all that. Brexit, blah blah blah. People have other things on their mind. Frustrated, and trying to keep the Robinson plate spinning, I came up with the thought that I could use the style of that show to create a series of podcasts. The last few years have been very depressing – the UK seems to have become a nation of boring, ultra-conservative, vitriolic, xenophobic philistines in gullible awe of privileged self-serving bullshitters like Rees-Mogg and Johnson. I needed to turn away from it, face a different direction, it was destroying my soul. I wanted to look at this country and find something I love. So I’ve started on a series of podcasts ‘These Weird Isles’ – a journey around less well known parts of the UK, layering memory, landscape, and the work of others who have passed the same way. There’s Batman and Gwen John in Haverfordwest, Peter Cushing in Whitstable, there are curlews and plenty of cheese. Search ‘These Weird Isles’ on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher or Soundcloud. Or, if you can’t find them there, they’re here.

Leave a Comment

Filed under A Robinson Crusoe of the Soul, podcast, Wales