Life can be fine, in a simple way, and when you remind yourself not to expect too much, so when symmetries and reassurances come to you at any time, like this morning and quite by accident and no matter how small, then things are fine enough.

Last night just before going to bed I was reading recipes for American breakfast sausage patties. I’ve always liked these when eaten in a diner on the rare occasions I now get back to the States. I’ve also been trying to make these here, now and then, but not having great emulating success. It seems easy: pork mince and lots of pepper. I found out last night there are more spices needed, and these should marinate over night. So I’ll be trying that soon. And all of this makes me hungry for an American breakfast.

I’ve got a poem being published soon about my working in a diner. I wrote it some time ago – a diner as a metaphor for memory and writing – and it was titled Easy Over. I used this expression recently here in England with some friends and was reminded that it’s over easy. I’m the American and I got that wrong. It’s a bit like drawing Freddy Flypogger back to front, I guess. I changed the title before submitting.

My absolute favourite American breakfast at a diner is biscuits and gravy, link sausages and/or sausage patties [that’s too much meat already, I know] and eggs over easy. Then loads of maple syrup on the sausages and patties. Hash browns as well, real ones of course. I made these recently and learned the key is to squeeze out the starch from the grated potatoes through a cloth before frying. There will be variations and additionals to this selection.

The American breakfast I most like when I am making it at home is SOS. That’s quite simple: minced beef fried in a pan, a tin of mushroom soup added to this, and once heated through, scooped onto toast. Many years ago I organised a breakfast for my sixth form students at the school where I worked. They brought in things they liked/wanted which obviously included eggs and sausages. I remember telling one girl she couldn’t just fry frozen pork sausages before they’d thawed as this was dangerous. I think this same girl also made French toast, but she called it ‘eggy bread’, and that’s the first time I had heard it called that. No one, to my recollection, liked the SOS I made. Not a single person.

Some English teaching friends and I organised a school exchange visit to Oregon years ago where my family lived. I took three of the colleagues to my parents’ house one morning where my dad made SOS for breakfast. They didn’t like it either, and they still refer disparagingly to it all these years later. They still think it’s funny to do so.

So this morning I am reading more stories from Larry Brown’s Big Bad Love collection. I started a while ago and had a break whilst exam marking, but having finished that yesterday, I’ve now returned to the book and just read the very short story Sleep.

In this, a guy and his wife are in bed. Neither of them sleep well, but especially the woman. It is cold outside and in the house, but the guy is warm in bed, especially underneath the recently bought electric blanket which is controlled perfectly by a thermostat. His wife hears a noise downstairs and she wakes him to go and investigate. As we find out, this is a daily, early morning ritual, and the story evolves around the husband’s mixed feelings about this but especially two things: how cold it will be when he does eventually get out of bed to inspect the certain empty house, but also his recurring thoughts about breakfast. All kinds of foods are thought about – all classic American breakfast foodstuffs – including T-bone steak. I’ve had steak for breakfast. And a huge slab of ham. American breakfasts are big, and meaty.

Then I read this wonderful segment:

The thermostat clicks on and off, with a small reassuring sound, keeping us warm. I think about hash browns, and toast, and shit on a shingle. I think about cold places I have been in. It’s wonderful to do that, and then feel the warm spaces between my toes.

The symmetry of going to bed reading about breakfast sausage patties, and then reading this morning about someone else’s breakfast with shit on a shingle. That’s my SOS, though I’ve always called it simply ‘shit on shingle’, but it was reassuring to hear someone else express such a mutual fondness for this.

The last in a trio of Freddy-inspired postings, this was originally shared in November, 2012, and links to the immediate previous.

Baseball

I played third base
pitched once
and hit a home run that
won me a dollar.

Little League stuff
sure
but a fleeting hero
in maroon uniform
planting roots.

Karlsruhe American High School, Paul Revere Village, Germany: 1965-67

After yesterday’s posting I have continued to think of my past living as a young boy in Karlsruhe, Germany, actually finding and emailing and making contact with a good friend from then. Incredible. This piece that follows, with some revisions, was originally posted in December, 2012:

In writing recently about my Little League baseball career, I was reminded of my time in Karlsruhe, Germany, where I played at the American base there, the Paul Revere Village. It is also where I attended school, and I have been looking through my one yearbook from that time, Der Kavalier ’67.

I am by nature obsessively nostalgic, and I think this is largely because I had an interesting time growing up. In the past few days I have actually been on a few ‘Karlsruhe AHS’ or similar sites, posting a comment on one, and emailing a hopeful acquaintance from the past through another. This acquaintance was one of a number who wrote messages in my yearbook – the tradition at the end of an academic year – and she was an older student who used to hang out with me and others at the ‘yellow building’: one of the Army apartment blocks opposite the school where we all used to meet in the morning and smoke. I was 12 and hung out with the older students, by and large. I was also a ‘cool-head’, an appellation I even autographed on my own photo and which was applied to me, I am nostalgically proud to say, in a number of those wonderful messages.

I say ‘wonderful’ because I was struck by the thoughtful, hopeful and articulate thoughts for my future, especially those from friends my age. More articulate I’m sure than I was at that time. Again, it was a tradition, but one which on reflection I read now as very positive, purposeful – and intelligent. There are many references to the ‘yellow building’, being a ‘cool-head’ [obviously a group of us concerned with our appearance] and ‘purple day’. I was into fashion and wanting to dress differently to others, especially the many Ivy League Americans at school [I would read magazines focusing on London hippie/psychedelic fashion, very much in vogue, as well as English slang – and this is hilarious: I do recall a magazine printing a glossary of ‘Beatles’ words, and one was narked, which was damned unusual if you were a yank, and so a few of us used this for a time, feeling now genuinely ‘cool’…..].

American schools do not have school uniform, but on ‘purple day’ there must have been a relaxation on what was allowed to be reasonably worn because I went to school in the most amazing purple corduroy flared trousers with a fluorescent yellow nylon shirt, both bought in Karlsruhe [I have no idea how my conventional American parents will have allowed that, but they did]. On that day at least, I was more than cool – I was far out!

In the photo above, I am with my friend Bob, both members of the Pep Club, and note he is wearing a Beatles hat – now that was damn cool in those days, trust me! Damn cool. Ironically, I appear quite Ivy League in my turtle-neck and sweater, so I hadn’t quite made the sartorial shift…..

One of my favourite teachers at that time was my English teacher, Ronald R Voeller, and he signed my yearbook with the following: May you continue to explore the newest in fashions and suaveness. Now how special is that?! Naturally, I had to look up the word ‘suave’ in the dictionary, but I thought that was the neatest thing to say at the time, and I now fully appreciate what he was doing with that expression way back then. Indeed, another teacher also wrote a fascinating comment in my yearbook. This was my German Language teacher Gertraud Schlegel, and I spent a lot of time standing outside her class for my talkativeness [not in German either….] and she wrote, with considerable foresight for my ability to appreciate this in the future, these lines from Goethe: What is the best government? That which teaches us to govern ourselves. It could seem a sarcastic comment on my lack of discipline, and there may have been a minute element of that, but here was a teacher who I’d like to think saw I had some ability to progress and mature and understand important ideas in the future. As with later teachers, these two and others at this quite ordinary but also excellent High School, clearly had their positive influence on my future career as a teacher.

I have always loved music and have written elsewhere about probably my earliest genuine appreciation which was my own second-hand hearing of my older sister’s listening to rock’n’roll [Orbison, Presley, Vincent, Mineo et al] as well as for me just after, The Beatles. Living in Germany was a time of musical transition [personally and globally] and therefore the development of my own tastes. I first learned to play the guitar whilst in Karlsruhe. A friend whose brother had his own band had an electric guitar himself and taught me my first two routines: the bass line for The House of the Rising Sun over which he would play the chord sequence and sing, and then as I progressed – a relative term – the chord sequence to Gloria [EAC] which was quite tricky as it was a quick run.

In fact I lie: the first chord I learnt to play was G – that’s with the thumb and middle finger on respectively the bottom and top E strings on the third fret. That was easy!

Sadly, I can’t remember my guitar friend’s name [NB This is an important additional: researching last night, 9/8/16, I found a photo of his older brother’s band the Mojos, with that brother’s name printed on this – Silvio Bowler – but sadly I can’t recall my friend’s first name]. The Mojos would play at the AA Club [I think that’s what it was called, standing for the American Association] and it was a youth club where we would also eat our school lunch which was, naturally, hamburgers! The coolest song to play then, which his band did, was the Kingsmen’s Louie Louie, and that was because apart from its cool garage riff it had the dirtiest lyrics [the subject of an FBI investigation no less] – well, they are indecipherable on the record and certainly sound lewd, especially to the aural appreciation and reinvention of adolescent youth. Amazingly, I can’t recall any other covers his or other bands at that time played, though I’m sure The House of the Rising Sun had to be one of them.

I bought my first personal music at the PX [Post Exchange] on the army base – this was the Sears and Roebucks equivalent when residing away from the States. These were all singles. I’m sure I didn’t buy any albums until I moved to England later in 1967.  I will end by listing the singles I’m confident I bought there, though I will just now mention The Electric Prunes I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night, because it does have a real significance: it was the psychedelic record that altered forever the music I and many others would gravitate to; it led to the second of the two fights I had as a teenager, both of which I lost badly, but thankfully quickly [I wasn’t a tough guy – hell, I wore purple flared corduroy trousers with a yellow shirt], and it is the basis for a poem I wrote about the music and that experience which will follow this list of singles. In compiling, I worked on the principle that any singles without a centrepiece were the earliest and therefore from Germany: then I realised some with the donut hole were early purchases from England. The surest evidence is that they had to be 1967 or before, but I haven’t checked to be absolutely sure. They are listed as they came out of the singles box, unless more than one by the same artist/s in which case I have grouped them [as well as a long posting, this really is a nerd’s exercise!]:

Germany Singles [and Collectibles]

The Marketts – Out of Limits
The Pyramids – Penetration
The Platters – With This Ring
Manfred Mann – Do Wah Diddy Diddy
Johnny Rivers – Seventh Son
The Kinks – All Day and All of the Night/I Gotta Move
The Kinks – I Need You/Set Me Free
The Kinks – Tired of Waiting For You/Come On Now
The Righteous Brothers – A Man Without a Dream
Nini Rosso – Der Clown [!]
Walter Wanderley – Call Me [and immediate above, genesis of my eclectic tastes….]
The Beatles – Yellow Submarine/Eleanor Rigby
The Beatles – Paperback Writer/Rain
The Music Machine – Talk Talk [hugely influential garage]
Bobby Herb – Sunny
Freddy Cannon – Beachwood City
Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich – Hold Tight!
The Box Tops – The Letter
The Buckinghams – Don’t You Care [gorgeous]
The Buffalo Springfield – For What It’s Worth [first protest/political song]
Simon & Garfunkel – A Hazy Shade of Winter/For Emily Whenever I Can Find Her [15 cents]
The Mamas & The Pappas – Look Through My Window
The Mamas & The Pappas – Dedicated To The One I Love
The Mamas & The Pappas – Monday, Monday
Syndicate of Sound – Little Girl
Charlie Ryan – Hot Rod Lincoln
The Outsiders – Respectable
Tommy James and The Shondells – I Think We’re Alone Now
Shadows of Knight – Gloria
The Spencer Davis Group – I’m A Man [what a bass line]
Blues Magoos – (We Ain’t Got) Nothing Yet/Gotta Get Away
The Turtles – Happy Together
The Silkie – You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away [great Beatles cover]
The Impressions – I’m So Proud/I Made a Mistake [three African-American GIs sang ISP a cappella, and brilliantly, to my older sister at the local swimming pool in Karlsruhe. She was wearing a black bikini with a net join in the middle. Very risqué at the time. And she had/has red hair. I used to have so much fun being taken around as a chaperon/little-kid-brother-safety-net for her in those days!]
The Electric Prunes – I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night [hugely influential psychedelia]

The following poem is one of a set I wrote years later, using musical influences, and the time of their making and impact on me at that time, as prompts:

I Had Too Much To Drink Last Night -1966
(Karlsruhe, Germany)

1.
I was in Karlsruhe
when Lenny and
Walt Disney died

but with England winning the World Cup
the Germans seemed
otherwise preoccupied.

2.
In Girl on a Motorcycle
Marianne Faithfull unzipped the front
of her black leather top
half-way down her bare chest
and drove a motorcycle along
the main street of Karlsruhe, the
wind sneaking in on her breasts
like me into the film underage
but overwrought with thoughts
of sexual unrest.

3.
I’d just pushed the jukebox buttons and
I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night began to play
when the weedy guy with glasses kept yapping
and I told him to go away
but he wouldn’t
so I threw him over the table and he
challenged me to a fight.

Once outside he put up his fists like a boxer
and kept hitting me in the mouth
and my head began to sway
but when I gave up he shook my hand
like we were gentleman
this ugly kid who was taught boxing by his dad
or Cassius Clay.

This is unexpected.

In another nostalgic impulse, I thought I would – and have just done so – draw a picture of the Big Daddy Ed Roth cartoon character Freddy Flypogger that I began drawing in the mid ’60s when I was around 10-11 years old, and have drawn occasionally ever since, though less so in recent years for reasons I shouldn’t have to explain.

It was the thing to do back then, especially for young boys interested in hot rod cars, as my memory is that Freddy was usually in one, albeit in a freaky way, obviously. I think ‘we’ all drew these at the time. I was living in Germany, Karlsruhe, and attending an American military school [no, not me learning to be a soldier, but on an American Army base] and it was a very American fad. There was an older student at the same High School, Jack, who I recall drew these cartoons extremely well, cars/other transport usually included. I don’t know why I stuck to the singular character. No talent for the extended versions, presumably.

I haven’t been able to find images from that time which suggest my version, though this next one includes the spit and flies:

This is the unexpected bit. Freddy here is to the left, so to speak. I’m sure I have always drawn my Freddy to the left – for over 50 years [though as I say, much less so than in the 60s! And I don’t mean my 60s]. So why is my version at the top of this posting with Freddy to the right? Weird. It was the placing of the pupils in the eyes that did it. There was no choice after that – Freddy clearly looking to the right.

The next images provide the transportation elements which seem such a strong original feature from my recollections:

There is a 2012 Freddy Flypogger Facebook page, but this seems short-lived, and models can still be bought as far as I can work out.

I don’t think I’d want one, as nostalgic as I am for such artifacts. I’m happy with still being able to draw, even if memory – or the fortuity of the moment – has turned my Freddy through 180 degrees.

And I know: he is looking to his left. As if he could.

It has been a peculiar day education-wise. The announcement that Teresa May is considering the re-introduction of grammar schools did/does not surprise, and though this hasn’t come from her directly [reported instead through the Telegraph] it is perhaps inevitable considering her previous statements on encouraging social mobility and her own grammar school education. The trouble with this personal background is that, like Michael Gove, such singular educational and other experiences are used as prompts to define national policy. I don’t imagine there would be much discussion or consultation should she decide that is what is wanted.

The more peculiar aspect of this news story today was Sky interviewing Labour MP Lucy Powell to offer her/the Party’s view on this. Described correctly as the former Shadow Secretary of State for Education, this seemed an odd decision and, I suspect, purposely contrived. Where was Angela Rayner? This wasn’t mentioned, and the interview seemed a slight at best on the actual Shadow Secretary, and most likely a further press dig at Labour.

Lucy Powell spoke well and convincingly about the lack of evidence that grammar schools do actually in any way promote social mobility amongst those from working class/poor [free school meal] backgrounds. Indeed, she spoke far more meaningfully and persuasively than she ever seemed to when actually in the Shadow position, or as in a bland email response to a query from me. Peculiar.

Back to Teresa May: when becoming Prime Minister, her mission statement about being committed to social justice certainly rang hollow and risible on delivery, and this reported weary return to a ‘golden age’, grammar school panacea in support of such a blatant personal lie seems therefore both apt as well as miserably predictable. Nothing peculiar in this.

By shadows
and a world full

of more darkness,
hidden meanings

are shaken –
not askance not askew –

as light
poll-axed

by noises in
the night

when the next line
would have used rhyme

for comfort

Talking about this blog to an examiner colleague recently, I mentioned that I have posted a number of writing ideas over its 2+ years [poetry, creative and other], but it has subsequently occurred to me that these are hard to find if having to search through all the varied postings.

I have therefore gone through these today and titled any writing idea resource that isn’t already tagged as such with ‘Writing Ideas’ and will post this link here. The first three pages will present most if not all of these, and subsequent pages bring up other references to any mentions of writing within this blog – so there are many! Any specific resource, for example work for National Poetry Day/s, can still be used as a writing prompt. I hope this is helpful for those searching:

Writing Ideas

So tonight I did the ol’ ringround, the gumshoe phone ‘em shuffle just to sound them out. Let them know who’s boss. I’m a good boss. I’ve got kindness for those who deserve my strokes and nurtures. I’ll walk them over the hot coals if they agree to take my hand. Any of them want to go it alone, they can burn. There are always those who want to tell you they’ve walked the coals for years. Well, I want to see the scars. If they’ve got the scars they didn’t walk the right way. I’ve got enough of my own and I’m not a goddamn cosmetic surgeon.

I’m Marker Mike. I’m a Dick on this Spec. I gave them the dial tonight to sound them all out. Got eight dames and one guy. That’s the way I like it. The first was out, unavailable, but she’s the one I really want to get to know. Sam Beam – Miss Sam Beam – but I’ve already given her the pillow-talk name. Luther’s the guy’s name and he sounds like he’s been there and done a few. We’ll see. He was out too. Hope it wasn’t with Sam because that may be the last two straws they share at the milk bar.

Then there’s Grassaby. That’s a strange name. She’s got rawhide in her lineage. Tough woman I would figure with all those kids screaming in the background and her being gruff with me. Well I’m not one of those brats she’s doing the marking just to feed and we’ll see who smacks ass over the coming days. She’ll be face down in those coals if I get any more of that kinda nonchalance and sass.

Amanda plays jazz. A musician and I could tell she liked the music in my voice. I confess I went a little singsong for her, guessing she’d warm to that warmth: real empathy in the aural arena. I can hear her playing there. She told me close to my ear how much she appreciated the call. That’s what they all say but I could tell this was real. Bluegrass too. Jazz and bluegrass. I think she knew I was going to ring tonight.

And as I was writing all of that down Ruth gave me a call. Sweet Ruth. Ruth and her two babies. Four weeks old and two years old. Sweet Ruth and her sweet two babies. I suppose when you are that young and innocent and sweet you think you can suckle and examine at the same time. Here’s to Ruth and her optimism and her enthusiasm and her commitment. I’ll hold her hand. I’ll walk her wherever she needs to go. But I’m not burping that baby for her. I’ve done my time and moved on.

Speaking of sweet I also talked to Natalie, one of my old dames. Natalie has bathed her scrolls in red ink to the caress of my coaxing for many years now and I have to confess it was comforting to speak with her again. To have her under my wing. I’ll spread my wing again and let her fly there feeling the freedom of flight. I’ll protect again. I’ll have her recall those earlier days. To have her recall that vest as she reminded me tonight, a nostalgic and energised tone in her voice. I imagine how she still sees me wearing it. I imagine seeing myself still wearing it. Only one of us knows the truth.

I haven’t been able to shine the light in all their faces tonight, but I’ve got the lowdown on most. There’s still Luther and Sam. I’ll get to them. Sometimes a Dick just has to wait and savour. Expectation and imagining. It’s like standing at that night-time street corner, the cars going by in just a flash of lights, the rain coming down to make an argument, lovers kissing in an alleyway but you guess they only met today, and you wait for someone to walk by and ask you too if you want to find out all there is to know, or all you know you can discover by just listening.

It was a lousy job but I took it all the same. Lousy pay and lousy commitments. But the guys down at City Hall said they needed someone with dirty hands who washed them just to get the water running for swelling out the next drink.

They needed a gumshoe to supervise other gumshoes, not that these patsies knew how to tie their own laces. What I didn’t know before I took their lousy job with its lousy pay and the lousy commitments is that some were raw recruits who’d never been trained. Or that they’d all be dames. I don’t mind dames. I’ve handled plenty, but that was with a different kind of dirty hands. And I don’t look down on broads, unless that’s where they’re lying. I’ve got plenty of time for broads, but in my line of business you had to be more than a pair of pretty lips, and taking a hit in the kisser goes with the territory. You couldn’t just pull these novices off the street, as that flunky Darren told a friend of mine who then told me like it was Chinese whispers from Claudius. That friend knew how to wind me up. But it was a lousy job and there was a lousy method of recruitment. My job was to knock them into shape whatever their contortions.

Sally was the one I worried about the most. She was clearly on the hooch. That or there’d been an accident like with that big guy Lennie: kicked in the head by a tall tale. Sally wanted to second guess every move a criminal made, even if he wrote a full confession down on a script, but I told her she had to follow lines of enquiry that others might recognise. You know the familiar score – when you bring your second-guessed assessments before a judge and he looks at you like you’re some kind of clueless teacher who couldn’t cope with a kindergarten class of five. Sally was high as a kite heading for the power-lines. She was going to be a handful, and I didn’t want to get electrocuted.

There was also a guy – only him – some fairy called Dean. But he was just one extra arc and an e away from being a dame. I was told he failed the gumshoe course the year before but got put through because he’d had a really hard time. It didn’t bother me that this would be his encore year of very hard times. I rang him up and he gave me all of this and that in his best cool-guy impersonation but I could tell he was a shyster. He screwed up on the first test case and when I gave him a heads up on what was to follow, he screwed that up even more. He was a spinning-top clown and out of control. More like pulled out of a gutter than off the street. The gutter of incompetence. Give me a dame any day. At least there’s something to look at when the despair sets in.

I’m not going to go through the whole team I was being paid a lousy salary to try and get through a lousy job that no one else wanted. It’s not like describing a chess game where there’s some sense of order and right and wrong. But I think the guys at City Hall had pulled a bum steer on me. They knew these dames – and that one other – weren’t going to make the grade no matter how hard I painted them in bright colours. It would soon rain and this would all wash back down into the drains and turn to brown. But it worried me. Not the guys who set me up – they could continue riding their train to nowhere for all I cared and I knew that some place down the line there would be a rickety bridge ready to fall just as they reached it. Guys who thought they were in control usually sat in the carriage with their eyes closed – some schmuck like the lackey Darren bringing them fancy drinks he paid for himself because he was too damn stupid to stand up to these suits. They could all die in the fall or drown in the river. I’m not choosy.

But a team full of dames. And Dean. There had to be something in this for me. Something good to find like a silver dollar stuck on the side of the road just before the grate and dried to a shine in the transient sun. There’s no use being a gumshoe brought in to instruct others if you couldn’t walk the streets and spot that small beacon stuck in the trough and then stoop down to pick it up hoping you wouldn’t pull a muscle in your back.

That’s when I decided to give Sally a call. Sometimes you had to walk off the cliff to see just how hard you could fall. She talked and talked and told me that if she failed it wouldn’t be my fault and I thought that was kind of her, like not blaming me when she drove us both down the road and crashed because she forgot to look forwards. She giggled and I hoped it was because of the jokes, but I knew it was all in her head where the other voices were telling their alternative stories. It’s then I also knew it wasn’t the hooch and something more like madness. But I remembered she was just another raw recruit and if they weren’t trained at the factory they got sent to my hospital. We all knew it was too late by then, and it was a lousy idea. A lousy job with lousy pay and lousy commitments.

But some poor sap had to do it.

[* Examiner training: ruing the demise of face-to-face]