Life Less Literary

Well well well… what a football trip that turned out to be.

I came down to London on Friday, mainly so that I could watch the England-Argentina match with Mark, but I also managed to engineer a slew of secondary reasons. Our accountants, Elman Wall, had invited us to Corks bar to soak up some match atmosphere. Kick off was at 12.30pm, I caught the 8.30am train which should get me into London about 11, with time to find the bar and get a drink in first.

Not long after I boarded the train at Sheffield, two middle-aged chaps came strolling down the aisle towards me. One plonked himself on the other side of the table from me, and his friend just across the carriage. They carried on chatting for the rest of the journey. I was busy wrestling with a Perl script behind my laptop, and so wasn’t exactly listening in, but I couldn’t help hearing the odd snippet of conversation… stuff about agents and comedians and appearances, it seemed obvious that they were in some ways connected with showbusiness.

Then I heard the guy opposite me say ’so I called her up and I said “it’s Emlyn Hughes here”…’. My mind started churning…. Emlyn Hughes, not the Emlyn Hughes, surely? It was a name that meant a lot to me. Despite the fact that I was on a football-related journey, I’m not really very interested in football (I just like watching the odd match), and I cann’t name you very many footballing names. When I was 7 it was a very different matter… (in fact, only 6 posts ago I was getting all nostalgic about 1970s football). From the years of about 1976 to 1979 I was a Liverpool fanatic (I think most kids were - Liverpool were to us what Man Utd are to so many people now, the undisputed champions of everything). Of course, there was only one player and one number that we were interested in those days… the number 7 of Kevin Keegan (and later Kenny Dalglish), but if you’d asked me to name one other player from that era then I would only be able to name Emlyn Hughes (in fact… looking through the records now… yup, Ray Clemence I remember, Graham Souness too… but Alan Hansen! Jesus, I don’t remember him playing for them!)

Anyway, I digress. Turns out it was that Emlyn Hughes (crikey! I never realised he was England captain!). And, try as I might to write my Perl script, I couldn’t help thinking back to my 1978 Panini world cup sticker album, and other football-related memories. I also remembered that Hannah, my sister, is a big Liverpool fan (she lives in Aigburth) and her husband Jon bumped into John Barnes on a train and got her his autograph. Well, it would be a laugh to get Emlyn’s autograph so she could really kick-start a collection of famous Liverpool players from days gone by. So I asked and he gave it to me.

So, the football excitement had started before I even got there. The game itself was… well, if you don’t already know what happened then no point me telling you as you obviously aren’t interested. Suffice it to say that the atmosphere in the bar was great, and after the match it got greater - I managed to down about 6 bottles of Stella during the match, so this may have helped. Jonathan was walking around with a mini-football, so Mark and I grabbed it and had a kick-about in a reasonably empty area of the bar - various people joined and left, but for most of the time it was just the two of us being silly and kicking and blocking and tackling ineffectively. It all came to an untimely end when I decided to chip a shot past Mark - ’twas a glorious shot, and so close to being a goal, but as so often happens even to world-class players, I hit the crossbar. Quite literally. That is, I hit the shelf that goes across the bar, the one where they stack all the glasses. There was a loud crash as about 20 wine glasses came tumbling to the floor. I rushed over and offered to help with the cleaning, but no need - respect to the bar staff at Corks for being so friendly and helpful.

My football-related incident did little to dampen my spirits for kicking things about. We got the tube to Liverpool street and then headed towards Ed’s studio, and on the way every tin can, cigarette packet, or ball of paper became a legitimate football for Mark and I to knock about. Highly embarassing in normal circumstances, no doubt, but to two very drunk people on a day when England had just beaten Argentina this was nothing to worry about.

OK, now the day starts to get distinctly fuzzy. We met Ed at his flat, bought a bottle of wine (wine + beer - ouch! Oh, + Jack Daniels too. Ouch ouch!) and went to the studio. Mark and Ed talked business (arranging a fashion event for The Invisibles) while I took silly photos. Mark and I adjourned to the Watermark Club for a while (more Jack Daniels) before Mark went home and I headed back to Ed’s. Oh yeah, we went to a gig as well, but we didn’t stay long enough to see any bands. And we met Jan too.

At Ed’s things just went from good to worse. I have so little memory of events that it’s almost pointless writing about it, not that that’s likely to stop me. Jim was there - it was great to see him, as it’s been about 10 years since we last met. Apparently he’s getting over alcoholism, and is being helped greatly in doing so by some drugs which basically will kill him if he touches a drop of the stuff. Nice. I also met Kirsten from Project Dark, who’s running the Meltdown festival, and it looks like she’s gonna be getting us in to see the Legendary Stardust Cowboy next week - YAY!

Things got even fuzzier after that, and so I started taking photos. Beautiful, little, macro-photos. Small things and very small things and jumbles of stuff from wierd angles. Somehow I ended up with 300 of them when I checked my hard disk the next morning. Even more amazing, they looked quite good. And some of them didn’t even need contrast masking. Now I’ve just gotta find a few spare hours (days?) to put them online. They look quite a bit like this lot, only I like them better.

I finally crashed out around 3 or 4am, I guess, on the floor of Ed’s studio. I listened to Medeski, Martin & Wood on the laptop as I was drifted off, and snatches of music, and snatches of conversation between Jim and Ed, brought picture-perfect photo compositions into my head. It’s really wierd and hard to explain, but suddenly I felt like I could compose images, like this artistic talent that I always knew had, but had never been able to dig deep enough to find, had suddenly sprung to the forefront of my mind, and become quite effortless. I spent about 30 minutes on the edge of sleep taking photos in my head, and loving it.

Woke up about 9 with a back ache, spent the day with Simon trying to set up Bartech’s Internet connection, and had a mellow train journey back (no celebrities, lots of newspaper reading) at about 5pm.

Back to London next week to catch the Stardust Cowboy! Can’t wait!