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(Background noise might make this episode a challenging listen.)
Episode image is a detail from the cover of Ring Of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell, published in 1961 by Longmans; cover photograph is ‘A bay near Camusfeàrna’ by Gavin Maxwell.
This is a second attempt to record the third edition of Page One. The first version included a hilarious interview with the talented Phil Burgers (aka Dr Brown). Alas, no more.
As it stands, this third edition has something from a wonderful new anthology of Hackney-related poems and stories, something from New Yoik, a story about an otter and THE ABORTION. Plus some great music. As ever.
Incidentally, there is a lot of popping of plosives in this recording, which is because of technical things like microphone volume. Charles Adrian writes: “I did go through the whole thing and fix it, but then something went wrong and all the pops came back. I didn’t have time to do it all again. I can only apologise.”
You can buy Acquired For Development By… at the Influx Press website here.
You can find the first of Dr Brown’s Comedy Blaps (made for Channel 4) on YouTube here. (Incidentally, in 2016, Dr Brown also made an episode for the Neflix series The Characters, which you can find a detailed write-up of here.)
The Vera Chok who is mentioned is a very good friend of Page One. Her first appearance on the podcast, Page One 6, can be found here.
More information about the wonderful Dinefwr Literature Festival can be found here.
Another novel by Richard Brautigan, In Watermelon Sugar, is discussed in Page One 6.
This episode was recorded at the Wilton Way Cafe for London Fields Radio.
This episode has been edited to remove music that is no longer covered by licence for this podcast.
A transcript of this episode is below.
Episode released: June, 2012.
Book listing:
A Dream Life Of Hackney Marshes by Gareth Rees (from Acquired For Development By… ed. Kit Caless & Gary Budden)
The Equalizer by David Deutsch
Ring Of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell
The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 by Richard Brautigan
Links:
Acquired For Development By… at Influx Press
Dr Brown’s Comedy Blaps on YouTube
Episode transcript:
Jingle
You're listening... you're listening to London Fields Radio.
Charles Adrian
Hello and welcome to the third edition proper of Page One. I am Charles Adrian and I'm broadcasting, or recording, perhaps, from or in the Wilton Way Cafe in Hackney for London Fields Radio.
After all the excitement of the Jubilee special - did I say Golden? I meant... I meant Diamond, of course - we are back to normal now. Or almost. Because I'm going to start with a kind of ‘message from our sponsor’. Not that... not that I have a sponsor - this is community radio, after all - but I have been sent an edition of a book called Acquired For Development By..., subtitled A Hackney Anthology. It came out, I think, this month - ie June - and is a collection of stories, essays and poems edited by Gary Budden and Kit Caless, both of whom have contributed to it.
The book is full of wonderful things and... well, I know I shouldn't single anything out but I did love Molly Naylor's poem Pavel's Smokes so check that out if you buy a copy. Essentially, though, the whole book is bursting with ideas and images and information and it's all inspired by, and relating to, this lucky borough of Hackney. For a West London like myself, it's like reading Paul Theroux.
Let me read the first part of the first story for you. It's called A Dream Life of Hackney Marshes and it's by Gareth Rees. I would do some kind of Hackney accident for this but I don't want to get beaten up.
A Dream Life of Hackney Marshes
By Gareth Rees
1. THE BIG BANG
There was a time before I fell in love with a pylon on Hackney Marshes.
Back then I lived with my girlfriend Ruth in a converted clothes factory in Dalston. I was doing okay writing radio ads, brochures and guide books. I was sent checks. I laughed on a wobbly bicycle all the way to the bank. We drank the profits and partied all weekend.
One summer day I got married to Ruth in a black lame suit and a cowboy hat. She wore a pretty dress. The sun blazed. A psyche rock band played. We got on a plane to Colombia. The party moved to South America. Bingo bango bosh. Life was still okay.
Then we came back and everything changed.
We bought our own place, the way grownups do. A small flat in Clapton. On the day after we moved in, Ruth discovered she was pregnant. She gave up the drink and I cut down. There were no more parties. I started to watch Saturday night television. For the first time in my life I bought a lawnmower. I listened to radio 4. There was an apple tree in our garden. How strange, I thought, to own a source of fruit.
When I stepped off the hedonistic treadmill, everything began to ache. My back, my knee, my wrists, my bones. Pain flashed through my fingers when I typed. Sure signs of repetitive strain injury. I spent hours in quiet despair, eating cheese and thinking about death. I grew a big fat Buddha belly.
A physiotherapist told me to spend less time at the computer, lose weight and do more exercise. I ignored her. Another physiotherapist told me the same.
‘Just cure my pain.’ I requested.
I tried acupuncture. I tried Pilates. I went for a swim at the London Fields Lido. I did everything the experts told me. Nothing helped.
As a last resort I bought a dog. I'd always wanted one, but worried about being tied down. Now I was tied down alright. Strapped to the earth by legions of shrieking responsibilities. The foetus was growing. My wife was vomiting. There was a living room to be painted and furniture to buy. House prices had crashed. And however painful my repetitive strain injury was, the mortgage needed to be paid. To pay it I needed to write more words. And to write, I needed a cure for my pain. A dog would give me enforced breaks from writing and a dose of exercise. If things got too much with the baby, I had an excuse to flee the house.
Besides, what harm could a dog do?
That book Acquired For Development By... is available from Foyles Online. But, as the reviewer from the Londonist says, try your local independent bookseller first. Those of you who still have one.
Now, after all that about the dog, I'm going to play you...
Stephen Fry
The Lady With The Dog by Anton Chekhov, translation by Constance Garnett.
Charles Adrian
No. Just a joke. I'm actually going to play you Doginabag by The Fratellis.
Music
[Doginabag by The Fratellis]
Charles Adrian
Back to business-as-usual now and perhaps this is a moment when I could explain to you that my love of second-hand books has nothing to do with the sexy middle aged people who sell them and everything to do with the fact that these books have - almost certainly - been read before. A pile of remaindered paperbacks does not make my heart beat any faster. It's the thought that someone has held this very book, has looked inside it, that he or she knows what is there, that, by reading it myself, I can share that knowledge. When I open one of these books, I am touching pages that someone else has touched, reading the actual printed words that someone else has read. And so my love extends even to books where all this is hard to believe.
My next book is called The Equalizer and is a novel, in inverted commas, by David Deutsch. “Based on,” as the cover tells us, “the electrifying TV series starring Edward Woodward”. Ah, let me say that again: Edward Woodward. Edward Woodward. Edward Woodward. Three sentences from the back of the book to summarise... summarise the story: “Odds against you? Got a problem? Call the Equalizer.” So there you go. That's... that's basically it. It's set in New Yoik [sic], so I'm going to read it in my best nonspecific, all-purpose Americanese.
1
To any seasoned, weary New Yorker in the vicinity of Park Avenue and 42nd Street that evening, there appeared to be nothing unusual about the rush hour chaos. Traffic jammed the crosswalks, causing gridlock despite the furious efforts and flailing hand signals of an NYPD cop trying to untangle the mess. Frenzied pedestrians, all seemingly late for something, squeezed between the bumpers to navigate from one side of the street to the other. Cab drivers yelled and everyone with a horn leaned on it. The cacophony flew in the face of traffic signs warning drivers of fines for honking and blocking the box.
Signs meant nothing in the streets of Manhattan. Here, it was survival of the fittest. The imposing modern glass and steel box-like tower of the Pan Am building, its checkerboard of lights blazing, was a mere backdrop to the early evening chaos. It was Grand Central Station, the massive brownstone, vaulted, 19th century monument which had survived all attempts at demolition, that persisted as the heart through which the life of the area flowed.
Refugees from office high...
Now, obviously at this point, I would have every reason to play you Simon and Garfunkel's Only Living Boy In New York or Sting's Englishman In New York or Norah Jones' syrupy New York City, subtitled [half sings] Such A Beautiful Disease... I do own that album... but, because the author is called David Deutsch, I'm going to play something German. This is Einstürzende Neubauten with the Prolog from their album Hans der Lüge. I love the sound of German. Oh, warning: you may have to protect your ears at moments.
Music
[Prolog by Einstürzende Neubauten]
Charles Adrian
Now, if this was Monday, or if this were Monday, rather than Wednesday, as it is, at this point in the show I would have an impromptu conversation with Phil Burgers, who's better known as television's Dr Brown. I say television's Dr Brown... he's done a couple of Comedy Blaps for Channel Four, which I'm going to put the link to... Wait, that sentence doesn't come out right... I'll put the link for Phil's Comedy Blaps on... on the London Fields website. He just happened to be in here on Monday and we had a wonderful conversation, which I... which I failed to record, along with the whole of the rest of the programme. If anybody ever felt like coming in and being my producer, I would be very grateful. By producer, I just means somebody to plug all the right wires into the right sockets.
Okay. Onwards. What is this, Kate?
Jingle
It's London Fields Radio.
Charles Adrian
Some of you, I suppose, may have read my next book, which is Ring Of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell. I read this as a young teenager and it may well be responsible for planting the seed of my ever-developing curiosity concerning the Scottish Highlands. I should confess that I haven't re-read the book before today but mostly because I'm worried that it might have a sad ending.
Here's a paragraph from the blurb on the front cover:
Mr. Maxwell writes movingly about his remote home, about the unspoiled landscape and the wild life he has encountered there. But the ‘hero’ of the book is perhaps his pet otter, Mijbil, who shared the cottage with him. After his dog had died, Gavin Maxwell brought this otter cub back from the Tigris marshes; it turned out to be a creature unknown to science, and was later christened by the scientific world with Maxwell's own name. The otter, as intelligent and affectionate as any dog, ran free at the cottage, always returning at night to sleep in the author's bed. The part this charming pet played in the author's life ended abruptly and tragically; Mijbil, trusting and confiding as always, was arbitrarily killed by a road-mender with a pickaxe.
This is not the end of the story, I think. There is at least one other otter mentioned. But, still, I am content to look at the beautiful, slightly dulled dust cover and to feel the pleasing heft, as they say, of this 1961 hardback.
Here's the first page:
1
and then there's a drawing of some kind of bird of prey.
I SIT in a pitch-pine panelled kitchen-living room, with an otter asleep upon its back among the cushions on the sofa, forepaws in the air, and with the expression of tightly shut concentration that very small babies wear in sleep. On the stone slab beneath the chimney piece are inscribed the words ‘Non fatuum huc persecutus ignem’ - ‘It is no will-o'-the-wisp that I have followed here.’ Beyond the door is the sea, whose waves break onto [sic] the beach no more than a stone's throw distant, and encircling, mist-hung mountains. A little group of Greylag geese sweep past the window and alight upon the small carpet of green turf; but for the soft, contented murmur of their voices and the sounds of the sea and the waterfall there is utter silence. This place has been my home now for ten years and more, and wherever the changes of my life may lead me in the future it will remain my spiritual home until I die, a house to which one returns not with the certainty of welcoming fellow human beings, nor with the expectation of comfort and ease, but to a long familiarity in which every lichen-coloured [sic] rock and rowan tree show known and reassuring faces.
I had not thought that I should ever come back to live in the West Highlands; when my earlier sojourn in the Hebrides had...
Here's Eric Carmen.
Music
[All By Myself by Eric Carmen]
Charles Adrian
Now is a good time, I think, for another plug. This is a show of plugs today. My... my friend and unofficial UK agent Vera Chok - a quite exceptional person whose website can be found at www.verachok.com - has, amongst other things, been organising The Brautigan Book Club this year. There's going to be a meeting at the Bethnal Green Working Men's Club at the end of this month, June, and then, that weekend, she's taking the Club to the Dinefwr Literature Festival, which is just dinefwrliteraturefestival.co.uk. Don't worry, I'll include the link in the text that goes with this recording on the London Fields Radio website, along with all the other links. It's going to be a great weekend. There's going to be a specially-created Please Plant This Book, there's going to be music from Gruff Rhys, Martin Carr and H Hawkline, a preview of Kim Ashton's new operatic scoring of Erik Patterson's play Tonseisha, and, on Sunday lunchtime, me, Charles Adrian, in conversation with Ianthe Brautigan. I can't wait. If you can get to Dinefwr, do.
I'm going to read from Richard Brautigan's The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 now. It's a book that Vera has lent to me. Don't worry, Vera, I am going to give it back. Eventually. This was originally published in 1970 and the copy that Vera's got hold of appears to be from 1971. It may once have belonged to someone called Hal Humphrey. Who knows? It is a fascinating read and has, I think, a beautiful opening.
The Library
This is a beautiful library, timed perfectly, lush, and American. The hour is midnight and the library is deep and carried like a dreaming child into the darkness of these pages. Though the library is closed, I don't have to go home because this is my home and has been for years. And, besides, I have to be here all the time. That's part of my position. I don't want to sound like a petty official but I'm afraid to think what would happen if somebody came and I wasn't here.
I have been sitting at this desk for hours, staring into the darkened shelves of books. I love their presence, the way they honor the wood they rest upon.
I know it's going to rain.
Clouds have been playing with the blue style of the sky all day long, moving their heavy black wardrobes in. But, so far, nothing rain has happened.
I ‘closed’ the library at nine but if somebody has a...
Here's Way Down from a Tori Amos collection called Tales Of A Librarian.
Music
[Way Down by Tori Amos]
Charles Adrian
And that's it. Pop the champagne! I've finished. I have been Charles Adrian, as ever, recording Page One from the Wilton Way Cafe in Hackney for London Fields Radio. Don't forget to listen to any of my shows that you may have missed to date - and, indeed, make sure that you check out some of the other shows on London Fields Radio. The Jubilee shows are awesome, as my aunt might say. Check out, also, the Dinefwr Literature Festival and Dr Brown's Comedy Blaps.
Here is... here is a jingle...
Jingle
London Fields Radio... it's London Fields Radio.
Charles Adrian
And here's something to wrap up this third edition of Page One. It's by Bob Dorough and it's called The Magic Number.
Music
[The Magic Number by Bob Dorough]
[Initial transcription by https://otter.ai]