50

Fifty years old.

For the first time since I was about twelve I celebrated a birthday with parties of a sort. On the Saturday prior I invited seven local friends and their families to join me and remarkably all said yes... there was me with a whole line up of substitutes and none got the call. Now, clearly, if I didn't invite you and you're fairly local then you were eighth on my list, promise.

Anyway, since my sister moved back to the UK we've travelled over numerous times to see her in South Wimbledon / Raynes Park, and driven past Fish! Kingston every time. I love fish, and having looked at the website it was a no-brainer.. top quality fish and chips plus other fishy dishes, mmm. As it was the food was exceptional, even better than I had dreamed! And the company, wow, wonderful, a lovely collection of people that I would spend the rest of my days with, thank you for coming out!

The following Saturday it was back to Suffolk to celebrate with my mum, Cheryl's mum and sister plus two. Tilly's, Halesworth is a 1920's themed tea shop. They recently started serving Friday and Saturday dinners and these were just as incredible. Brilliant grub and it looks like we'll be returning for mum's 80th in the new year: result!

As part of the celebrations I did some drawing:

I also tried to find 50 things I love but went slightly over..

Board Games	Books	Film	Food & Drink	Miscellaneous	Music	Music (cont.)	Places
Agricola	The Archbishop’s Children	Woody Allen	Beef Brisket	Apple Mac	4AD	Stephen Jones	Alte Lohnhalle
Andean Abyss	S T Coleridge	Luc Besson	Bread	Arsenal	‘A User’s Guide’	Jay Jay Johanson	Berlin
Boggle	Norman Collins	The Big Blue	Cauliflower	Badminton	Barry Adamson	‘Love My Way’	Bracken
Bruges	Dictionaries	The Billion Dollar Hotel	Champagne	Kevin Beattie	And Also The Trees	Billy MacKenzie	Bushey Park
Carcassonne	The End of the Affair	Blue Velvet	Cheddar	Blessings Roses	‘As Requested’ / ‘Mean Streak’	‘Making Plans For Nigel’	Dresden
The Castles of Mad King Ludwig	Richard Ford	Caos Calmo	Cheesecake	Blossom	Belasco	’Malicious Love’	Firenze
Codenames	Frederick Forsyth	Frank Capra	Chick Peas	Cricket	The Beloved	‘Mesopotamia’	Forests
Stefan Feld	Gabriel Garcia Marquez	Double Indemnity	Chocolate	Driving	Bjork	Mew	Fuchsias
Glass Road	Jean Genet	L’Enfer	Crumble	Gerbils	Broken Family Band	Morrissey	Hills
Le Havre	Graham Greene	Foreign Land	Epoises	Hedgehogs	The Cure	Conor Oberst	Lakes
Hawaii	Samantha Harvey	The Hairdresser’s Husband	Fish & Chips	David Hockney	‘Damaged Goods’	The Passage	Le Havre
Hive	Susan Hill	Alfred Hitchcock	Gruyere	Ikea	’Dear Heart’	John Peel	London
Kiesling & Kramer	Babs Horton	Jim Jarmusch	Jacket Potatoes	Ipswich Town	‘East St O’Neill’	Placebo	Lugano
Lewis & Clark	In The Springtime of the Year	Kitchen Stories	Kleftiko	Just One Sentence	David Eugene Edwards	‘Postcard’	Normandie
Memoir 44	John Keats	Fritz Lang	Lemon Sole	Charles Rennie MacIntosh	Dead Kennedys	Silversun Pickups	Otranto
Ora & Labora	The Last Letter From Your Lover	Leaving	Malbec	Margaret Merrell Roses	Annie Eve	‘Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others’	Portman Road
Railways of the World	Henning Mankel	My Life As A Dog	Panna Cotta	Claude Monet	Gene	‘The Song From Under The Floorboards’	Soldeu
Rialto	Moscow 2042	Paris	Pasta	August Rodin	Vic Godard	Spearmint	Stockholm
Uwe Rosenberg	Jojo Moyes	Manuel Poirier	Rice	Scottish Terriers	‘Headache (for Michelle)’	David Sylvian	Streams
Splendor	Haruki Murakami	Jean Renoir	Rosemary	Alfred Sisley	'Heaven Sent’	Tracey Thorn	Suffolk
Ticket to Ride	Ivan Turgenev	Russian Ark	Rib Eye Steak	Snow	Kristen Hersh	Tricky	Tarn Hows
Tinner’s Trail	Mario Vargas Llosa	Trop Belle Pour Toi	Salice Salentino	Swatch	‘I Don’t Even Know If I Should Call You Baby’	The Unthanks	Trees
Tzolk’in, the Mayan Calendar	William Shakespeare	Western	Scallops	Swimming	Idlewild	The Villagers	Worlingham
Twilight Struggle	The Wilderness	Young and Innocent	Whisky	Frans Thijssen	The Incredible Shrinking Dickies	M Ward	Zurich

the passage

for all and none. It’s the title of an album from the passage. lower case is important. The first group I really obsessed over. They were relatively so obscure that I felt that they were mine and mine alone. Dick Witts was the man behind the group, a former percussionist with the Manchester Philharmonic Orchestra he worked with Tony Friel, later involved with Mark E. Smith and The Fall, to release two singles on an obscure label. I guess the first song I ever heard by the band would have been ‘Do the Bastinado’ and my Peel tape from them has him explaining that it was a torture being hit on the underpart of the feet. Next up was definitely ‘Shave Your Head’ with a brilliant bass synth line and the lyric, ‘take it out on your friends, shave your head’. I was hooked.

As was my thing at the time I wrote to the passage at the address given out and Dick replied. His writing was striking, neat, odd. He was very interesting too. We swapped a good eight or nine letters over a couple of years and the music they released continued to be experimental electronica with some great guitar chords over the top, superb drumming, and the lyrics of someone evidently very intelligent. I was completely in love with them, and always will be. Their four albums will always feature in my top 50, and certain songs will be with me forever. I never understood why they weren’t more popular, but then that seems to have been the case for a lot of bands I fell head over heels with. 

taboos - sleeve art

Bizarrely, around 2004 I was travelling back from Brighton on the train and this chap looked so like Dick I was awestruck. I didn’t what to do, whether to say anything or just let it go. We’d never met, he’d never remember me and yet, yet I must say something surely? He was writing for quite some time so I decided to get up and walk past, see if I could check out the hand writing. It was him, no doubt. So, how the hell was I was going to approach him? I was still trying to figure that out when he started gathering his possessions together, as if he was getting out at the next stop, Gatwick. No turning back. ‘Hi Dick, I used to write to write to you when you were in the passage, thank you so much for writing back and giving me so much pleasure with all your albums.’ He was so nice. So polite, telling me about a recent website set up by another fan Keith Nuttall. I’d sent Keith some info on a cassette I had in my collection. The discussion was short but wow, another hero I’d met. How brilliant was that?

The passage remain one of the more obscure bands I have liked and yet their music is as fresh and as relevant as any of it. Their commentary was profound, genius to an impressionable lad back in the day. I loved all of their songs. Quirky, experimental, brilliant. I love that their artwork was so consistent over all of their releases. I was annoyed that Cherry Red released a sort of ‘best of’ without informing the band. I wrote to Cherry Red to complain about that but never received a reply. One of the novels i am working am is titled after another passage song, and the chapter titles similarly so. That my tutor doesn’t think it’s appropriate is difficult for me, it means so much you see. I guess time will tell whether I stick with that plan or not. Whatever happens I will still love the passage, their ‘difficult’ music, their opinionated lyrics, the genius of Dick Witts.