All the hotels I sleep in
overlook a railway line.
It doesn’t matter what town,
or what dream I’m having:
when the lumbering locomotives roll in,
hauling a howling, retarded,
mournful mile of coal cars,
stencilled “CP Rail”,
bound for Chicago or Montreal,
I turn in my dream and call
your name, Nancy Lynn,
and yours, Esmé.
I am dragged from a distressing sleep, in which I dream that my daughter’s real middle names are Doug and Grant, by the static-laced rasp of the radio. The local station is pretty much a one-man band. The space in between the torturous bursts of country music is filled by the presenter’s voice, which, gnarled as dry oak bark, is suggestive of some kind of Desperate Dan-style gnathic deformity. When I wake up the voice is in the middle of a movie review. It’s a no-nonsense voice which deals its listeners only the straightest of hands. It gives the movie four stars, then fires off a weather report and a fishing report, growling and crackling like a forest fire, charring the ear. I lose contact with the words themselves in the midst of a gravelly skid of sports headlines. The voice plucks at the air in my hotel room like a calloused hand, gropes for me and holds me painfully by the jaw. It rubs my face vigourously until smooth, then slaps me on each cheek. Then it forms itself into chopsticks and, click-clacking, grabs atoms out of nowhere, structures a rough outfit for me, a pair of jeans, a beige golf shirt, work boots, and at spearpoint jabs me towards the door.
Boffins are breathless about a new species, the chameleon snake. Looking at the article, though, I wonder if I’m the only one whose suspicions are not merely aroused, but positively rampant, when I read the words “when I retrieved it a few minutes later” (my emphasis). What price one smirking junior boffin and one oblivious reddish-brown snake keeping a very low profile just now?
When I think about it, my memories aren’t as vivid or as clear as I’d like to believe. They’re laid out well enough, in classic photo-album style, each one correct, in its own laminate pocket on the backlit glass surface of my hippocampus. But this civilised arrangement doesn’t bear scrutiny. When I peer closer, and try to bring a particular one into focus - a daytrip, a breakup, a person I knew - it wobbles and warps and dissolves into an abstract smudge of sensations, and the harder I squint my mind’s eye, the more unyielding and mendacious the memory becomes. And early childhood is no different from the recent past in this respect. A yellow toy backhoe from when I was four years old is as precise (or as vague) in my mind, when it comes down to it, as the birth of my daughter. This isn’t to say that I don’t hold the second of these dearer than the first, but that the emotion with which I invest each recollection has no bearing at all, it seems, on the clarity, or even, I suspect, the tenure thereof.
I can’t say that I’m especially bothered about this, although it makes me wish I had taken more photographs instead of telling anyone who would listen that if you can’t remember it, it’s not worth photographing, anyway.
“You might wonder how on earth people would make a journey from Ecuador, in South America, to Germany, but several thousand have done” says John Helm during a quiet moment in the England vs. Ecuador game.
By plane, John?
Wikipedia’s last four “featured articles” have been ‘Canada’, ‘Ku Klux Klan’, ‘Global Warming’ and ‘Absinthe’. I would rank these four things in the following order:
1. Global Warming. The whole world getting warmer, that’s incredible isn’t it. And what’s even more incredible is some people are saying it could be humans who are causing it. When I think about global warming I feel like I’m part of something greater than myself, yet at the same time I feel humble, because no matter how many fridges I dump in my local pond, I know I can’t do anything about global warming. But as part of the Brotherhood of Man, not the pop band, all of us dumping fridges into ponds and rivers as though our lives depended on it, I can make a difference. And that’s humbling.
2. Canada. I live in Canada and it’s a really nice country to live in. The trouble is it’s also an enormous motherfucker of a country, so in terms of niceness per square kilometer I’m not sure, it might be behind a horrible little island like Fiji, which would only need a couple of nice things, say a really friendly dog and a nice cafe, to boost the niceness ratio over Canada. But Canada’s still a nice enough place to live.
3. The KKK are at 3. I don’t know any KKK members; the closest I can come is probably this bloke at work with ratty little eyes and whose name is Lynch. I can’t see him as a grandmaster dragon or whatever they’re called but I can see him making racist remarks in his bathrobe.
4. Absinthe. I hate absinthe. It’s a disgusting drink, drunk by pretentious people who spend all night telling you that Jim Morrison was a poet, even after you’ve agreed with them that yes, they’re right, he certainly was a cunt of the highest order, but what’s their point? These people call absinthe “the green fairy” but they’d drink fairy liquid if they thought it woud compensate for their offputting obsession with French symbolists.
On every block stands a crane, or more than one crane - cranes creating cranes, cranes raising or bringing down larger cranes. Cranes grazing like lugubrious brachiosaurs. Cranes communing in the morning sun, practising t’ai chi and ballet. Cranes delicate as honeycomb and strong as bone. A cantilevered crane looking north over the glittering blue of the inlet, drinking in the enormity of its own potential and the giddy joy of the perpendicular. The dust and metal smells of construction everywhere, the calls of the foremen and the sounds of hammering and welding and pouring and drilling like a jungle’s worth of birds at the dawn of the first day of the end of the world.
Yesterday afternoon I strapped my ridiculously heavy baby daughter to my chest and hip-swivelled along the west end of Robson St, through Vancouver’s putative Korea-town, where euphoric waves of red-clad Korean 20-somethings were cataracting out of Korean eateries, chanting “Korea” and waving Korean flags. I got a bit carried away and started shouting “Park Ji-Sung!” and high-fiving them as they flowed around me on either side. The lateness of their national team’s equaliser against the French over-50 team made it seem like a victory, and the jubilation continued as horn-honking Hyundais zoomed up and down the street with sunroofs agape. It was a good game, although on a personal level it was marred slightly by Korean defender Ho Lee not having the decency to score a hat-trick of own goals and get sent off.
Now I think about it there was another headline in the offing if the French had lost. Something about it being an eat-dog beat frog world.
Or, erm… No.
Evening; a cloud of tan-coloured dust hangs by the side of the highway where kids on trailbikes and quads have recently ridden along the dirt shoulder. Two horses walk North into town, one of them bearing a gaucho who has on a big fuck off hat.
“I’m not going to change my game, although I may have to adapt it a bit” - Peter Crouch.
I’m not going to ridicule that quote, although I might have to mock it a bit.