Random Access Memories

Cornwall is that other Eden. It’s that elongated thin sliver of land at the end of the country. Although my mother was born in Sri Lanka, she grew up in Cornwall. I’ve lived here now for over half of my adult life. I’ve lived here for all but one year of this current millennium. I don’t claim to be Cornish because I am not. I was not born here. I am not the son of someone who was born here. None of that matters. Cornwall is my home. For seventeen years I lived in Penzance. The end of the line. I didn’t fall asleep on a Great Western train and find myself there, but there are surely worse ways to lead your life. Beyond Penzance are the moors of Penwith. Beyond Penzance are small villages and remote communities. Wide empty spaces. Farms. Stone circles. Megalithic sites. Out on the moors the winds blow strong. At the top of Carn Kenidjack (the hooting carn) you can see across to three separate coastlines. In summer when every square inch of beach is taken by visiting tourists, there...

In the song I Love A Man In Uniform  The Gang of Four sang: ‘To have ambitions was my ambition’, but for the most part I've lacked even that. For me it was always, ‘The path of least resistance.’   as sung by The Human League on their song of the same name. When I went to be interviewed for a job at the tax office in Southend, the candidate before me came out and disclosed that the job wasn’t suitable for him as he needed hours that fitted around his college course. He then proceeded to share all the questions he’d been asked, enabling me to go into the interview fully prepared. The job was part time (two weeks on/ two weeks off – hence the wrong type of part time for the college guy) and at the lowest paygrade. I was more than qualified academically for a higher position but I didn’t want the extra responsibilities. (I think they even asked if I’d applied for the wrong position when they saw my educational record). I moved to Bristol because my sister lived there, so ...

I started writing this blog in winter and I’m reaching the conclusion in late spring. If the story it tells has not been linear, then neither has the weather. Winter 2026 was cold and extraordinarily wet. Spring signified itself by a change to drier and more temperate conditions. April days were often bright and warm. May is different. Temperatures regressed. Wind has aided in modifying how warm it’s felt. Rain has, to a lesser degree, returned. Weather is a mood signifier for me. I hate the cold. Therefore I hate the wind. I’m not a fan of rain. I thrive in the warmth and the sun, in the longer daylight hours of summer. I connect on a primeval level to our ancestors, getting up when the sun comes up. I choose to read outside, utilising the natural light. Talk of the weather is a cliché for the British, but the truth is simply that we experience more of it. It’s a fact of geography, our position as a small island surrounded by sea on all sides. In Montreal the weather is more extre...

Memory is pliable. Memory is unreliable. Less than a week ago there is fighting and a stand off between rival swans, who are highly territorial creatures. Then yesterday I see a group of five waiting underneath the café for feeding time. Although as all swans tend to look alike, who can truly tell which group is which. Today there are only two again, two as normal. So much so that I wonder if I made up the group of five the day before. As you age, so your grasp of everything becomes looser. The internet is aging too, and remembering less. Or it is changing. LLMs (large language models) are trained on data that is often false. These falsehoods are taken on board by humans and they become accepted truths. A feedback loop is formed and as time passes, we all move further away from reality. That’s the crux of it as I see it. To change the world you no longer have to do something, perhaps all you have to do is convince the world that you did something. In my high school days I to...

Reggae and particularly dub music have played such a rich part in my life that they feel like old friends, fellow travellers to place next to Philip K Dick and Charles M Schulz and that great US sitcom Barney Miller . Friends that you don’t write to for ages, because you know they’ll still be there for you years later when you choose to reconnect. In the meantime there are other less solid relationships that require your attention. If I had to trace it back to a specific point in time (although there is rarely a specific point in time, love at first sight etc.), then it would be Christmas 1980. The Clash had just released Sandinista! , their triple album masterpiece (or ultimate act of self-indulgence – you could pick sides back then) and I’m guessing it had come back to Southend with its owner (my brother) and become the currency of the season. It sprawled. It grabbed your attention. Not just the music – so much of it, so varied and so loose – but the accompanying tri-fold lyric...

The band’s name was Erebus (although confusingly Bristol also had a stalwart heavy metal band who went by the name Airbus, a local equivalent of Dumpy’s Rusty Nuts, who were a band you often saw advertised in the music press but you never listened to). But this was Erebus and they were an alternative indie band with a striking lead singer called Ari. (Ari is not her real name, but I've forgotten that and I can’t tell this tale if I have to keep writing ‘the singer’ every third sentence. Forgive me, particularly if you were that singer…) This was in the middle of the 1990s when anything Bristol-related threatened to be the next big thing (NBT). Massive Attack. Portishead. Roni Size. Tricky. (I’d seen the same thing in the 1980s with Iceland and its music scene). The singer from Erebus – potentially the next big thing to come out of Bristol (although obviously 99% of NBTs don’t make it) – was about to be featured on Channel 4. This was a big deal. Satellite and cable TV were s...

I don’t think it would be unfair to describe my friend Paul as a bit of an Arthur Daley figure. All the wheeling and dealing at car boot fairs. The ever changing items that came and went at the unit on the industrial estate where he was acting as some sort of unofficial live in caretaker. In the upstairs studio area there were his suits and formal clothing hanging up from railings fixed high towards the ceiling – these were presumably remnants from his time as personal chauffeur to Edwin Starr, because I don’t recall often seeing him dressed in anything other than casual wear. On the other hand, I can’t imagine Arthur Daley spending autumn weekends foraging for mushrooms off in the Welsh hills, so there was also the old school hippy vibe to proceedings. Ken Kessey and his magic bus, personified by the repurposed ambulance parked in the forecourt with a bunch of musicians living inside. At one point Paul had signed up with the PRS (Performing Rights Society) and managed to wrangle h...

I must’ve been about nine or ten years old when I first started to go to football matches with my brother. He was a regular at Roots Hall, home of Southend United football club. They were a perennial third or fourth division club back then, bouncing between the two divisions. He had a bunch of friends who he went to the football with. They had their rituals, one of which involved counting the empty milk bottles in the street that led to the entrance to the south bank, which was the part of the stadium they stood in. These bottles acted as a prediction for the match result, but I forget the specific details of how that worked. Of course many people reading the above paragraphs might be asking themselves what the third and fourth divisions are, then wondering what milk bottles were and then questioning why people were standing at a football match. But none of that matters, trust me. One of those early matches I went to involved Millwall. Millwall are a London based team, famous for...

Punk rock was not quite the revolution some people might think it was. I mean culturally maybe it was, but not musically. The music wasn’t that different to what you might’ve encountered in dozens of dingy pubs and clubs across the land in the 1970s. Okay, maybe punk was faster and less proficient. There were more curse words. The audience dressed less conservatively. And for some reason people chose to spit a lot. (The pandemic would’ve loved 1977). The musical revolution came some months or years later. In the slipstream. The revolution was new wave and independent record labels. It was electronic music and dub. This golden era spanned the decades. From the late 70s to 1982. From the disintegration of the Labour government to the emerging stranglehold of Thatcherism. From the death of the hippies to the birth of the yuppie. This was the era of music I grew up in. There was so much happening it was hard to keep up. Much of it I only came to discover or fully appreciate many years ...

I’ve talked a lot about connections in this blog. Rubbing shoulders with genuine talents, either directly or tangentially. If you look for them, the connections are everywhere. My mum used to teach at the same Basildon school as Alison Moyet’s mum and they were close friends for a brief period. When I worked in the tax office in Southend one of my co-workers was the sister of Cocteau Twins singer Liz Fraser. Chalk and cheese as individuals it seemed, although I obviously never met Liz Fraser (but I couldn’t ever picture her married to a man from Basildon and processing tax returns for a living). At school I was in the same year (though not the same class) as Jake Shillingford. His band My Life Story had a minor chart hit during the Brit Pop era, ensuring him at least one appearance on Top of the Pops.  Jake definitely gave off the air of someone destined for minor fame, although I mostly remember one of his coterie of friends and hangers on who used to permanently carry around a co...

My love for the arts did not grow in a vacuum. Quite the opposite. You could say it was hot-housed or hardwired into me. My dad was a librarian. My mum was an English teacher. Our uncle Richard was a farmer, but also an accomplished actor. Two of our cousins staked out their own careers in the theatre. My great aunt was a famous author published in among other places the New Yorker . Closer to home, my brother was the musician in the family. My sister Christina became a published author many years before me – she has more stories published than me, in magazines and anthologies with higher reputations and larger circulations. My other sister, Mary, used to write plays that her and Chris and Tim would perform as children to an invited audience of friends and family. I was too young to do anything other than crawl around in the background. Tim and Chris recorded their own radio show – decades before I tried my hand at being a DJ   – which again I was too young to contribute anythi...

I’ve written two novels. One took me a month to write. I vowed not to shave until I was finished and then when I was finished I kind of liked the beard and it’s been there ever since. That was one November, just after my fortieth birthday. The novel doesn’t have a title. The lead character worked in the recycling business, so maybe I could’ve called it Trash . But that would’ve been too on the nose. I have a fondness for works of art where the title of the piece serves equally well as a review. The other novel is titled Seeds of Doubt and it was co-written with my friend Cath. We didn’t complete it in a month though, it was done in 3 days. Why? Why not? It was an entry for the 3 day novel contest. This was a thing back then, a famous endurance event that had started life as a bar room challenge and grown to become an international phenomenon. I could write about it in some detail now, but I can go one better than that and take you back to thirty-seven year old me and just how ...