(no subject)
Why do I do this to myself?
"I'm off to a jam," says Tom. "Raspberry?" I ask, "St Neots," he says. "OK!" I go, like some kind of special needs child, "I'll come with you."
So now here I am in St Neots, a town with two large car parks and enough roads to drive from one to the other, plus a pub. We are in the pub. I wish I was in the car park. Because this is where I grew up, this sort of place. Not pubs, I hasten to add, I wasn't born in Eastenders - or in St Neots actually, so all this car park malarky is very new and exciting to me. But there's something achingly familiar, right down in my bones, about this room. It's got Small Town written all over it. It's the Real Ales, maybe. Or the grimy christmas decorations, rationed since the war at one twinkle per foot, with the rest made up of grinning paper santas extolling the virtues of not throwing up in the car park. Or the newspaper clippings proudly drawing-pinned over the bar, of local entrepreneurs entering their plucky trampolining pig into Britain's Got Talent. (PORKY PIGS BRING HOME THE BACON, exclams one. OUR PIG'S GOT TALENT, SIMON, insists another, over the bleak snaps of a patently stationary piglet, poised frightened and bewildered on a saggy trampoline.)
The place is called The Pig & Falcon, now I look more carefully, with the decor running heavy on pigs and justifiably, amid two hundred acres of dense pig farmland, light on falcons. There's a whole mantle filled with pig-themed beermats sent back from jet-setting St Neotites around the world, which due to the tragic global lack of pig-themed advertising means the same two images repeated over and over, country-specific exports of the same two marketting campaigns, different fonts and different languages but the same two beers, both of which are brewed in England. I am unsure why this makes me so sad. (They're probably based in one of the car parks.) On the blackboard, scribbled pigs decorate the adverts - well, the mentions - well, the names - of upcoming events. Well, I say events... Last week it was 'Music'. Tonight it's 'Alan's jam'.
Oh yeah, that's why I'm so sad. We're here for a jam, a powerful and highly creative form of musical expression devised by professionals extemporising at the top of their game. And doing it, we have Alan. Who is sort of... droopy. I mean, I have no doubt he's at the top of his game. It's just I think he's playing Sorry.
Around him, and around us, are a multitude of terrifying locals. No-one is under 50. No-one looks like they've ever been under 50. There is a frighteningly high man-to-moustache ratio, if anything buoyed up still further by the women. Any moment I expect to be told they don't like strangers round these parts, and perhaps encouraged not to go poking my nose into things that don't concern me. Frankly, Tom's musical exploits don't concern me, I don't know why I came, and the bloke growling "This is the gents, mate" when I try to go the loo bloody well does concern me (I've got a beard, how much more entitled can I be? Mind you, so has his wife), but it's too late for that now, by the end of the night we're all going to be burned in wicker and that's an end to it.
Our bassist asks what I want to drink. Start as you mean to go on, I think, and ask for some milk. This is not me taking the piss, I've forgotten to take some medication and I've got acid heartburn, it is remedial, and therefore not gay. The barman goes all squint-eyed when he's asked, and clearly wishes tonight was 'Music' night so he had a piano-player who could abruptly stop playing, but I get my wish. (Well, not that one, I'm still in St Neots.) I sip at it, under the glare of many, many hairy men eyeing me suspiciously, all armed with moustaches and rurual accents. I persuade Tom to try it and perform a sort of 'cor blimey that's strong how can you drink that stuff' reaction, thus effortlessly telegraphing to the watching murderers that I am not drinking milk, I am drinking a cocktail, and therefore not just gay but gay and rich. It's like a sort of Diet Baileys, I try to indicate with my posture. Ah, they indicate back with theirs, not just gay and rich, but gay and rich and a twat.
The jam starts. Or rather it stops for a bit, making me finally realise it had already started, and wasn't just the noise of nearby machinery. Our lot - Tom, singer Anne, and bassist Rob, and rich gay twattish onlooker Me - make our presence known: Tom, Anne and Rob by means of secret signals only other musicians can see and hear, and me by knocking over someone's pint. Luckily it turns out to be Rob's and I remain for the moment unstabbed, and they settle into place by the speakers while I get handed a bar-towel by a painfully mute barman, whose rage, I sense, cannot adequately be put into mortal words. I sop it around a bit in the beer and hand it back, and he looks at it. I don't know what to do, so I look at it as well. Perhaps he is wondering, given that I have come in here, sashayed around like a poofter, drunk some milk and knocked over a drink, why it is that I am still alive. I don't know what to do, so I wonder that as well.
I am frightened of small towns, did I say? And frightened of pubs. And deeply, deeply frightened of moustaches. I am now, thanks to this traumatic evening, frightened of jam.
But then I hear a whisper. Not the ones I've been waiting for all night, "Who's this twat?", or "What do you mean, milk?" or "Let's stab him and feed him to a pig!". This one goes "They've got a fucking bird singing!".
Because Anne's up in front of the microphone, and Rob's on his bass, and Tom's at the drums, and suddenly all's right with the world, 'cos they launch into Son of a Preacher Man and there's no amount of pigs or car parks can stand in the way of the fact that they really are extraordinarily good. And, yes, maybe a little bit posh and gay with it, but suddenly all that's forgotten because, oh, you know the sort of thing, music is a universal language, class is no restraint, uniting people across all creeds and colours and it can cure alzeimers too you know, and I had a little dance in the end and no-one minded.
I'd explain more poetically, only now it's tomorrow and Tom's nagging at me to come out and play Dungeons & Dragons in Little Ditton. If you don't hear back from me, it's because we've been burnt in a giant wicker pig.
"I'm off to a jam," says Tom. "Raspberry?" I ask, "St Neots," he says. "OK!" I go, like some kind of special needs child, "I'll come with you."
So now here I am in St Neots, a town with two large car parks and enough roads to drive from one to the other, plus a pub. We are in the pub. I wish I was in the car park. Because this is where I grew up, this sort of place. Not pubs, I hasten to add, I wasn't born in Eastenders - or in St Neots actually, so all this car park malarky is very new and exciting to me. But there's something achingly familiar, right down in my bones, about this room. It's got Small Town written all over it. It's the Real Ales, maybe. Or the grimy christmas decorations, rationed since the war at one twinkle per foot, with the rest made up of grinning paper santas extolling the virtues of not throwing up in the car park. Or the newspaper clippings proudly drawing-pinned over the bar, of local entrepreneurs entering their plucky trampolining pig into Britain's Got Talent. (PORKY PIGS BRING HOME THE BACON, exclams one. OUR PIG'S GOT TALENT, SIMON, insists another, over the bleak snaps of a patently stationary piglet, poised frightened and bewildered on a saggy trampoline.)
The place is called The Pig & Falcon, now I look more carefully, with the decor running heavy on pigs and justifiably, amid two hundred acres of dense pig farmland, light on falcons. There's a whole mantle filled with pig-themed beermats sent back from jet-setting St Neotites around the world, which due to the tragic global lack of pig-themed advertising means the same two images repeated over and over, country-specific exports of the same two marketting campaigns, different fonts and different languages but the same two beers, both of which are brewed in England. I am unsure why this makes me so sad. (They're probably based in one of the car parks.) On the blackboard, scribbled pigs decorate the adverts - well, the mentions - well, the names - of upcoming events. Well, I say events... Last week it was 'Music'. Tonight it's 'Alan's jam'.
Oh yeah, that's why I'm so sad. We're here for a jam, a powerful and highly creative form of musical expression devised by professionals extemporising at the top of their game. And doing it, we have Alan. Who is sort of... droopy. I mean, I have no doubt he's at the top of his game. It's just I think he's playing Sorry.
Around him, and around us, are a multitude of terrifying locals. No-one is under 50. No-one looks like they've ever been under 50. There is a frighteningly high man-to-moustache ratio, if anything buoyed up still further by the women. Any moment I expect to be told they don't like strangers round these parts, and perhaps encouraged not to go poking my nose into things that don't concern me. Frankly, Tom's musical exploits don't concern me, I don't know why I came, and the bloke growling "This is the gents, mate" when I try to go the loo bloody well does concern me (I've got a beard, how much more entitled can I be? Mind you, so has his wife), but it's too late for that now, by the end of the night we're all going to be burned in wicker and that's an end to it.
Our bassist asks what I want to drink. Start as you mean to go on, I think, and ask for some milk. This is not me taking the piss, I've forgotten to take some medication and I've got acid heartburn, it is remedial, and therefore not gay. The barman goes all squint-eyed when he's asked, and clearly wishes tonight was 'Music' night so he had a piano-player who could abruptly stop playing, but I get my wish. (Well, not that one, I'm still in St Neots.) I sip at it, under the glare of many, many hairy men eyeing me suspiciously, all armed with moustaches and rurual accents. I persuade Tom to try it and perform a sort of 'cor blimey that's strong how can you drink that stuff' reaction, thus effortlessly telegraphing to the watching murderers that I am not drinking milk, I am drinking a cocktail, and therefore not just gay but gay and rich. It's like a sort of Diet Baileys, I try to indicate with my posture. Ah, they indicate back with theirs, not just gay and rich, but gay and rich and a twat.
The jam starts. Or rather it stops for a bit, making me finally realise it had already started, and wasn't just the noise of nearby machinery. Our lot - Tom, singer Anne, and bassist Rob, and rich gay twattish onlooker Me - make our presence known: Tom, Anne and Rob by means of secret signals only other musicians can see and hear, and me by knocking over someone's pint. Luckily it turns out to be Rob's and I remain for the moment unstabbed, and they settle into place by the speakers while I get handed a bar-towel by a painfully mute barman, whose rage, I sense, cannot adequately be put into mortal words. I sop it around a bit in the beer and hand it back, and he looks at it. I don't know what to do, so I look at it as well. Perhaps he is wondering, given that I have come in here, sashayed around like a poofter, drunk some milk and knocked over a drink, why it is that I am still alive. I don't know what to do, so I wonder that as well.
I am frightened of small towns, did I say? And frightened of pubs. And deeply, deeply frightened of moustaches. I am now, thanks to this traumatic evening, frightened of jam.
But then I hear a whisper. Not the ones I've been waiting for all night, "Who's this twat?", or "What do you mean, milk?" or "Let's stab him and feed him to a pig!". This one goes "They've got a fucking bird singing!".
Because Anne's up in front of the microphone, and Rob's on his bass, and Tom's at the drums, and suddenly all's right with the world, 'cos they launch into Son of a Preacher Man and there's no amount of pigs or car parks can stand in the way of the fact that they really are extraordinarily good. And, yes, maybe a little bit posh and gay with it, but suddenly all that's forgotten because, oh, you know the sort of thing, music is a universal language, class is no restraint, uniting people across all creeds and colours and it can cure alzeimers too you know, and I had a little dance in the end and no-one minded.
I'd explain more poetically, only now it's tomorrow and Tom's nagging at me to come out and play Dungeons & Dragons in Little Ditton. If you don't hear back from me, it's because we've been burnt in a giant wicker pig.