Not Ready To Shut The Book - From The Vault - 2010

I found this while trawling through old work and... well, it felt pretty relevant. It was actually written as 'homework' for a creative writing class I did some years ago. The idea was to get out of one's usual writing comfort zone (specific branches of Costa Coffee, in my case) and see how it went.

Writing Somewhere New

I am doomed to failure.

I probably know it from the moment I slouch into Barbican Library. I love libraries but I don't spend much time in them because I get too easily distracted from any purpose I might have had on entering. I am doomed, utterly doomed, to failure from the moment I walk aimlessly through the stacks and find myself in the Irish History section.

I spend an hour with a book about political cartoons of the Irish Question/Troubles/War and then resolve to find somewhere to sit with my computer so as to actually write. I avoid the London Collection for the same reason I should never have gone near Irish History, and have a narrow escape in the Arts Library when I skirt dangerously close to books about Flynn, Errol. Down the stairs to the Music Library in search of a table, I realise I am doomed, utterly doomed, to failure when behind the table I have staked out, I see a shelf of old rock music encyclopaedias.

Caught in the Death Star Tractor Beam, I check all the books for references to the usual suspects: Gallagher, William Rory. Lynott, Philip Parris. Morrison, James Douglas. The laptop resting in a bag slung over my shoulder is forgotten: it is not heavy enough. With viciously grotesque, simianised Irish faces still dancing in my short term memory, after an hour flicking through three hundred years of hatred towards me and my people, I am looking for love.

The Illustrated New Musical Express Encyclopaedia of ROCK proves to be the specific tool of my downfall. It is from 1977. Opening the pages is the closest I can get to a dream I once had. In its pages, Rory and Philip live. More than that, they are at the height of their powers. Calling Card and Jailbreak are new, contemporary, popular.

A reference to Rory being the butt of cynicism and jokes surprises me. Much too much time and understanding has passed since then for this to be at all true now, and anyway, who speaks ill of the dead? Three entries later, Marvin Gaye hasn't been yet shot by his dad. On the next page, Gary Glitter has already staged the first of countless comebacks, but he's not the country's most notorious paedophile, not yet...

Jerry Garcia on page 96, most loved George Harrison on page 103, moustachioed Steve Marriott on page 112... they live. They are gorgeously alive. Then, my heart stops.

Oh dear God: page 139, where John Lennon lives. He lives. I will not write here, I know it. Not in a place where I am distracted into a world when Lennon lives.

Still, I know of a man...

I flick back to page 68... Morrison is already dead in the column inches for the Doors. He is in his first renaissance, and has only been gone for six years. It feels like nothing compared to thirty-nine. I am seduced right back into the dangerous daydream, but I have at least turned my computer on.

Pages 54-55 give Clapton far more attention than he deserves, the soulless old *cough*. He is with Patti Boyd by now. I know what pain there is in store for him, and I am sorry for it. Yet I know what a hypocritical bastard he is, and for a moment I am overcome by the 20-20 vision that being from the future provides.

On page 231, my Philo lives, but once I close the book he will be dead almost twenty-five years. Richard and Linda Thompson have already divorced, but on p 234, Ike and Tina are still going. I know what he does to her behind the velvet curtain, and I despise him.

Between the covers of The Illustrated New Musical Express Encyclopaedia of ROCK, my heroes live. I will not write here. I am too lost in a dangerous daydream of the impossible, and I am not ready to shut the book… not just yet...

CW 2010.