For whom the bell tolls….

Though new life can bloom in the darkest of winter nights, flames that burnt so brightly suddenly burn so pale….

On monday night, as samson drove me to rack and ruin gallivanting around the spaceship like a demented puppy setting up my new mac, I realised that for the first time in eons I hadn’t been on the internet all day.

I’d been ‘shopping’. I’d been lying on the beach until a hobo came and did strange things to me. Borrowing software from gunter. Drinking cwaffee.

I visited mr fish in his studio to do his tarot. On the way there I walked through the busy tourist area, and by the church - usually full of frustrated misunderstood buskers - time stood still.

A coffin.

Made from wicker. Right in the middle of town. I caught the exact minute the undertakers started to shoulder it in.

Compelled, I went to follow them in. I wanted to see, wanted to know. Who was time standing still for?

Genuinely moved by this experience, I shared it with mr fish, who immediately premoniced that the death card would appear. He hadn’t had the tarot before. In his back room, amongst fish plastercasts and seaside visionscapes, we cleared room for the cards.

He picked strength.

Reversed. (of course).

And still he was convinced it meant death.

My day continued, and I found myself at nightfall kiltering out of control - with samson rearranging me circuits and the realisation that drinking neat vodka and climbing into a cauldron of mulled wine the night before probably wasn’t the most congenial course of action for getting my shit on.





And then I said I’d better check my mail.

Very rare of me to be slack-alicing about the beach and idly enjoying myself of a daytime. Very rare of me not to have been stuck on my decrepid laptop for hours on end working up a nervous breakdown over my imminent choral downfall…

And there was a message.

Inviting me to a funeral.

The messenger had only written the first names of the deceased. A recently married couple, killed in a car crash on the final leg of their road trip through canada before returning to london to settle.

Panicked, I tumble, jaundice-faced onto the love rug. What do I do now? My mac’s asking me what language I want it to speak, but all I want it to tell me is….who’s dead?

It’s not zed.

Nor does the news compute. Can it be who I think it is? A kindred soul, long departed from my life, but doing his bit for the universe in worldly corners? A man who meant the world to me because he was a prolific being. Better to burn out than fade away?

Someone I had met fifteen years ago when I stole his take that fan mail that he never collected from his pigeon-hole?

No- please, the powers that be, no.

There’s a flickr account set up for us to post our photos of them on. I go to it. This will show me who is no more.

I get the photos up.

I have NO IDEA who the man in the photo is.

I breathe. IT’S NOT HIM! IT’S NOT HIM!

I’m so relieved. It’s some other fucker I vaguely knew. Sad, but okay. Samson is helping me. But he says that I’d better reply to the message and find out who the hell is no more.

I message the reaper back and wait for the answer. We eat dinner, we talk it through. I decide it’s almost definitely another member of the band. Shame, but not going to break my back.

Then I get the dreaded reply.

“I’m afraid you guessed right”. What?! But the photos?! He can’t have changed THAT much?! WE looked at flickr. I’d clicked on some random bird’s link. And imagined all of her friends were dead. Glory be.

Samson continues setting up my new beast of burden, whilst flirting on his iphone. Not one for multitasking, I suddenly feel the need to uproot him, turf him out -

“EITHER HELP ME, TALK TO ME, OR GET OUT! I NEED TO MOURN FOR A MAN I LOVED!”

I am distraught. I shake and I rattle. Though often one to smugly think she’s beaten death’s grizzly sickle, (I’m used to suicide – their choice, or illness – their body’s choice). I am not prepared for the advent of someone I fundamentally loved being whisked off the planet.

It’s a new one. I’m broken.

I light a candle. I film myself distraught. The candle goes out on camera.

I drag myself to work the next day. I take my hat off. The light above me goes out.

Has my angel found time to visit me? Everyone else has known for two weeks, has he had time from his busy haunting schedule to come and show me he cares?

I can’t begin to think how to say goodbye. But I can’t go to the funeral. For the brave and sullen-faced family and close friends would coop-up together, but I would act despicably. I would cry. I would throw myself onto the floor.

The guy who broke the news has asked us all for poems and songs for the funeral.

What would I give the mourners? Some shite poem from four weddings and a funeral? No, he’d covered the poetry bit neatly before he left us.

In an email he asked a few friends to design him a tattoo using a quote from the beginning of hemingway’s for whom the bell tolls. Which is actually an excerpt from donne’s meditations.

Along with the above picture, he wrote in his request,

“as an artist your work will be displayed for as long as I’m around, which I hope will be for many more years.”

I didn’t end up putting crayon to paper for his body art, but I did consider sending ‘the up the bum song’ to be played at the funeral. They’d better not play his band’s music at the funeral – although John Peel liked it, the deceased thought it was shite. He was a drummer. He liked reggae, not wispy electropop…..

I would want to tell the wakers just how much this man meant to me. Means to me.

From the moment we met - him carrying a toothbrush in his lunchbox, to the gig where he said “THANK GOD YOU’RE ERE!” when I turned up late, in his amazingly endearing bexleyheath twang.

To the time we went to a party years later and he mused upon my buttocks whilst copping a feel,

“your arse isn’t that great, really, it’s just that YOU fink it is!”

Singing the stones and dancing the jagger as only true believers can.

I’d tell them about the time I sent him the only valentines I’ve ever sent in my life.

A simple message inside. A beat poem he’d appreciate.

‘sometimes I feel like a priest in a fish and chip queue,
quietly wondering as the vinegar runs through,
what it would be like to buy supper for two’. (mcgough)

The only valentines I have ever sent.

But now I’d like to tell you, my understanders, my favourite story about him……

The surprize….

I’d organised a rave. I was supposed to be the compere. My job was to co-ordinate a massive ‘stick it on’ in a farmer’s field, (yes, the police did shut us down at 9 in the morning).

Well compere I was not. I slacked off work that night…..

I had messaged loads of random londoners and south coasters inviting them to this chemical happening, and didn’t get much response, which was fine.

But whilst warming up for the grandiose event, I received a text:

‘see you there in twenty – walking from haywards heath. SMx’.

Haywards fricking heath? That was miles away….

And who the hell was SM?

He did it purposefully. A tease. I was too busy hoovering up daisy dust to get quizzical, but there was a surprise waiting for me, (well, stuck up the arse end of haywards heath somewhere).

About an hour and twenty minutes later, a sweaty be-cowboyed figure could be seen staggering up the mud track towards us urban hippy twats.

The birthday girl frantically waddled to get to him first, hoping it was a random raver she could bloodsuck as maiden of dishonour. A prize pig for the suckling.

But I strode before her, greeting him and welcoming him into this hazy muckfest, this sweaty breast of oblivion. My sir-prize.

We spend the night together, partying with wild abandon like unleashed zoocreatures. We stuck it on a massive sound system by a roaring fire and danced our tits off.

In a tent we did other things.

Yes, dear readers, my lifted angel stays with me in my behazed memory for good reason.

I have wanked over it regularly.

I realised with horror I have done it very recently. I was going to write a love song, but I thought this was more fitting:

His hard bones saved in my memory bank
But no more a-wanking shall I go-.
Ain’t nothing worse than a dead-man’s wank.
Something I wish I didn't know….

Sorry, it just slipped out….

And now never shall I gaze upon him no more. Truth be told, the chances were fairly slight before he died.

And I don’t really know when it happened, or anything about his life since we left the rave and my house caught fire. That was the end of our road together.

Already having grieved our passing relationship when living, on angel wings must I steal away to him now, just to catch a glimpse, just to get some way of seeing him.X

I envy not in any moods
The captive void of noble rage,
The linnet born within the cage,
That never knew the summer woods:
I envy not the beast that takes

His license in the field of time,
Unfetter’d by the sense of crime,
To whom a conscience never wakes;

Nor, what may count itself as blest,
The heart that never plighted troth
But stagnates in the weeds of sloth;
Nor any want-begotten rest.

I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
’Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

there is a light that never goes out….


Or Espagnola! (he spoke it very well)