Shiny, dead good work.
Thought I’d check in as an excuse to stop, collapse in a chair, mop my brow, beg a cuppa, and fain looking dead busy and important. ..Any of this worked so far?
In the week running up to a little Momo show, everything does inevitably get a little telescoped into too little time, and Momo does tend to dish out various other random creative things to deal with at the same time. So that I have to pause carefully every ten minutes to think of my name.
Typical would be this afternoon’s itinerary, I suppose. Starting with a precursory website design analysis for a possibly nice new client running a successful art gallery business, I am now prepping mixes for the show on Saturday. I shall then be popping to good ink management partners The Print Room to stroke some extremely, almost absurdly, nicely-specced print for a high profile international (no-pressure) mailer, before wandering the industrial estates of Walisdown to find The Bay 102.8 to possibly boob about on air for ten minutes aroud 6.00pm, talking about myself annoyingly. And at undoubtedly great odds with their normal playlist. Before then wandering the same industrial estates looking for tonight’s rehearsal rooms I secured only this morning for a bash through with the beats boys tonight.
Don’t think I’ll get time to finish sanding that hall wall we stripped in a wild-eyed, unplanned frenzy at the weekend.
Of course, blogging out a list of pretty tediously small-time chores in an attempt to look busy and important so feeble that you might actually want to hold me and cry for me and then hold me out at arms length and look at me squarely and then through tears and with a shake of the head ask what happened to me and then hold me again MIGHT appear to be an un-smart choice on my part. Even reaching the FOOTHILLS of credibility has taken, like, SOOOOO LOOOOONG, Tim; stop acting like such a desperate loser. Which is sweet of you.
But have you stopped to think, eh, that MAYBE, just MAYBE, yeah, I couldn’t help myself and then took such a long time to type it all out as I thought it / think it all through out loud on the keyboard here that by the time it’s obvious and incriminating I have not only lost the time to go back and correct it and fabricate indifference but also the will and the memory of where this was going and of how to use punctuation Oh, >?<

Huh?
Well look. So I’m on the radio apparently. And then we’re doing a live music show on Saturday or something and someone’s told me that we’re actually sharing a BRAND RUDDY NEW RUDDY TUNE at it and some very nice chums are actually traveling half way around the planet to be there and to fill our home and the little Momo studio with merriment at it all so, y’know… I’m just trying to keep up and keep enjoying it. Fnaffle condescendingly all you want. You can still come along. Like you have anything better to do.
But while you’re there, could you confirm that ‘condescending’ does actually mean ‘ascending’? Because it should, come to think of it, shouldn’t it?
But yes. A new piece from Momo if you make it down to Sixty Million Postcards this Saturday and are actually prepared to stay up for it. This is actually true. You WILL hear it and it WON’T be online any time soon afterwards.
The usefulness and scale of my creative career may be unbelievably limited, but I can at least promise something on Saturday night that will be dead good.
Especially if you’re there.
Momo:tempo’s Electro Pops Orchestra ride again
No Fun vs Momo at Sixty Million Postcards, Facebook event
PS: And all the more because some nice man has just delivered a very shiny new pair of classic Oxfords for my get-up. Good work.

—

Red, white and blue.

I saw them twice this week. The Royal Air Force Aerobatic Team, The Red Arrows. I must have seen them nearly fifty times in my life, of course.

I can picture a much littler me waiting on the clifftop somewhere along the long sweeping coastline of Bournemouth’s Poole Bay, perhaps holding dad’s hand or watching mum scan the skies impatiently – as least as much a child as her offspring in such moments. Waiting. Waiting for the minute-perfect arrival of the nine Gnats, then Hawks – WHAM! – suddenly streaking overhead in awsome precision and control, as their engines scream unrestrained excitement.

Or standing in the rain at one of the Hurn air shows, hoping the clouds would clear just enough for the chaps to do their magical stuff, hanging off eachother’s wings with the most exacting trust, to show faithful crowds what human skill can do.

It’s been said that the Red Arrows team have always enjoyed flying at Bournemouth. They’re very polite chaps, so I doubt they’d tell us it was high time we got them a new portacabin to sleep in at the airport anyway, but still. I can say from various experiences that, at least from very very low aeronautical speeds and from the more reassuring vantage point of Always The Right Way Up, this neck of the woods is a pretty one from the air.

And this weekend it seemed to be a perfect amphitheatre for aerial action as ever it was. Unprecidented rain and flooding and terrible visibility broke dramatically after Bournemouth Air Festival’s first apocalyptically washed-out day on Thursday, and Friday dawned bright and clear and warm – the bay twinkling blue from Needles to Old Harry’s, and clouds receding to the very roof.

That Friday afternoon I watched the team from Chris and Laura’s splendidly front-row vantage point in town, close to the very cross-over of the Lunatic Flying Straight At Each Other that they do, to bottom-twinging applause every time, and directly under the heart they draw a mile high in the sky for everyone with their smoke trails. Never else does burnt diesel bring a tear to the eye quite like this.

Then on Saturday, we took my aeronutty but currently house-bound mother out to our collective back garden on Southbourne Cliffs – on another day of impossible meteorological changearounds from miserable low cloud to glorious summer skies. And seeing the exact same display from the Arrows as the day before but from the edge of it was even more thrilling; when they peeled off across the town at the end of a wide manoeuvre, they were roaring right over our heads. Seeing the lead four start their Strip The Willow, or whatever country dance thing it is they do, from underneath was a lesson in flight precision – those chaps moved in such harmony it looked like CG. Unbelievable. Inspiring. Thrilling. Every time.

—

Someone behind us received a phone call. She was not the sort to hold in news, it seemed, and she leaned into our little gathering as we played festival radio and said simply: “One’s crashed.”

We looked at eachother. Then up at the clear blue sky again.

—

By now, you know the story. As much as we do. Red Four, Flight Lieutenant Jon Egging, came down in the pretty riverside fields along the Stour, just south of the airfield. Turning back off the runway as he peeled away in a final sunburst for the hardcore fans waiting to see the team land, his Hawk T1 just didn’t stay in the air, losing altitude fast as it arced towards the ground. Jon didn’t eject. He did put out a mayday, so he knew something was wrong. He appears to have instinctively stayed with his aircraft to ensure it went down safely away from the houses of Throop and Castle Lane.

The Red Arrows don’t do crashes. Flying since 1965, there have been only a handful of fatalities – and only in 1971 was that in an actual display. The loss of a pilot at the controls of a Red Arrow display aircraft is a shocking piece of news. Across the UK people are feeling it, and here in Bournemouth, flowers have been left piling up against the lion outside the town hall. Up the slope in the entrance of the old hotel building, the council has had to double the number of books of condolence opened to Flt Lt Egging’s family and to the Arrows’ wider family. People care about these people.

And it’s because they aren’t simply entertaining, of course, they’re inspiring.

What they do is about endeavor – about the pinnacle of human skills. We can’t imagine ourselves doing what they do, even as we daydream about it. And, as the primary marketing front end of the Royal Air Force, they are impressively effective brand ambassadors – those red white and blue trails do more to make people feel quietly proud to be British than almost anything these days. They are, in short, a comfort.

What comfort there is for Flt Lt Egging’s widow, Dr Emma Egging, must surely be partly found somewhere in that – in her husband’s skill, professionalism and bravery. In his service.

Every time you hear of another young life lost in the front line of our armed forces’ work, you probably find yourself thinking the same as me – why did we have to lose another life of that calibre? Of that self-control. Of that knowledge. Of that commitment to service. We need these people in society. Some might be tempted to say now more than ever.

We do need them. And no matter how bloody unjust their premature loss when it happens, nothing can stop them doing one of the most important things they do and can’t help but do. Because it’s precisely that calibre of person that will put themselves in harm’s way in order to serve, and in order to live life to the full. And in so doing, they do indeed inspire.

It’s cruelly ironic. Paying such a high price for being prepared to step up. But it’s these people who we will remember.

Red Four, you have certainly made your mark. On the sky, and on the mind’s eye.

Amazing. x

—

Back to real life, please.

How are you feeling? Back to the same old routine? The comfortable numbness slowly warming back through you? Me too. Great, isn’t it?

Only, I’m now not sure if you get it from keeping your telly box on or turning it off.

..I think maybe I’m a dispassion native now; I can Not Really Care About Stuff all on my own, with or without headphones in or TV blaring. Look at me, a media age child all grown up.

For a few nights last week, however, I fear I may have caught a glimpse of real life.

I know! Me! ..I confess it here because I trust that you’re broad-minded and will understand; better out than festering away in, eh. But I did. Even as Twitter blazed away with hysterical headlines about London burning and I instinctively poured the cold water of anti-hysterical scorn on the dramatic language, I could not tear my attention from the live pictures of what appeared very much to be homes and livelihoods actually burning to the ground in London. For no apparent proper reason at all. Other than that we appeared to be all suddenly climbing into that handcart that we’d all been repeatedly told we would be taking to hell one day – like some prearranged geno-suicide signal had finally gone out. ..But, I mean, who sent that memo? Or tweet. I didn’t get it. DId you? I’ll bet you did. You get everything.

I wasn’t ready at all. There was no orientation for this Armageddon team challenge – I had no idea it was scheduled for last week. Yet – bang! – last Saturday people were kicking things in in Tottenham and by the middle of the week England was apparently efficiently destroying itself, and dancing on the smoldering debris. All apparently gone like clockwork, just as in the practices. Which I’d also missed.

I felt like such a fool, not knowing what my tasks were. This is JUST why I always get voted off teams pretty soon after the jokes start to wear thin.

—

But ACTUALLY, it turns out that Mad Max: Beyond Millennium Dome is not reality after all. It is, apparently, too soon to tear the body panels off our cars and strap dead cats to our heads and start wheel-spinning in circles in the NCPs waving spears. Which seems a shame.

True, we can’t seem to get our economy to grow at all, perhaps slightly because the world economy is shaking apart with tremours that just won’t stop rumbling away underneath its current foundations. True, there is still a bigger gap between the wealthy and the poor here in the UK than anywhere else in the always-claiming-to-be-developed world. True, there are still groups of people all over the country that feel so disconnected from the idea of owning a part in the country’s life that it looks like they feel disconnected from owning their own lives. True, no politician in Westminster seems to have words to come anywhere close to connecting those people back to the rest of us. True, this is true in cities all over the world. True, poverty eventually degrades dignity and hope back to animal fears – especially when it is also of education and mental empowerment. True, some people get very used to pissing about and taking stuff sooner than making stuff.

And true, when you feel that you have nothing to lose and nothing to work for, you find a certain kind of bitter freedom lurking in the limbo of it – one that might enable you to give riotous thanks when that limbo is actually at long last broken when something – anything – kicks off down the street. The thrill of change can be intoxicating. Especially when it involves free stuff.

But it’s not the only truth.

What is hearteningly truthful is that most people in Britain do own their own lives. Of course they do. They do value their freedoms. Do pick up a broom to not just clear up and start again but to help each other clear up and start again. And you can bet your future on the truth that most young people get it too. In fact, an awful lot of them know the wisdom of the streets a lot more than you do. If you’re tempted to use phrases like ‘generational moral vacuum’ you’re not just a bit wordy, you’ve also been watching too much telly. It’s probably you that’s disconnected. And by you, I obviously mean me.

Because something else I’ve realised this week that seems to be unshakably true is that I am a reasonably useless arse who knows very little of the real world. It’s no revelation, you understand, but a reaffirmation.

—

You may have done your own version of this during last week, but I spent much of it expending emotional energy pacing in circles declaring things uselessly at the TV, the computer screen and the radio. The riots made me feel a lot of stuff and think a lot of stuff and shout a fair bit of stuff but not do a lot of stuff. Which at least involved not nicking a lot of stuff either.

I want to teach some kid to read. Some kid who could end up leaving school without the ability to analyse themselves and their world if someone outside the self-defeating bureaucracy of the education system didn’t step in and help. But who. And how? I’m no teacher. Teachers, I thought, would make excellent teachers.

I want to hug Tariq Jahan for appealing for calm mere hours after his son Haroon had been murdered by hit and run in the riots in Birmingham. And so do you, and so do so many people of all communities up and down the country – a fact that doesn’t just validate his inspirational courage, it illustrates it. He shouldn’t have had to demonstrate his character under these circumstances, it’s clearly just who he is – as a man, as a father and as a British citizen. We cheer him on because he represents values that are important to us. Which is why we want to sob for him and for the family of the two brothers killed with young Haroon that night. But he doesn’t need me echoing more empty praise when his son is dead. He needs the justice of free, peaceful streets where he lives.

I want to go to a police station and tell them they’re bloody heroes for stepping up to serve their communities in the most thankless of roles, doing it so often as they do with such heart and intelligence. Even as I want to beg them to not give in to the emotional pressure to feel that their job is some sort of military front line – a place with the strategic imperative of Them And Us. Tottenham’s gun crime might feel like the front line on some Tuesday nights I guess, same as Baltimore or who knows, but the army’s terrifying challenges under fire are fundamentally different to those of the civil police service, even when you have to wade into petrol bombs and bottles and fight – with your life and all your wits and discipline to protect our free streets. But why would your average experienced copper need a flimsy-limbed oaf like me to helpfully point out any of this to them?

I want to go to every kid in the nick after the weekend and drag them by their prison tag to a mirror and shout over their shoulder in their face: ‘Don’t you realise what you’re capable of? You’re a freaking human being – you’re amazing, you bloody idiot. You’re unique in the sodding universe. Stop acting like you don’t give a shit and that you’re not part of the rest of us – own your own life. Stop acting like a victim everyone wants to punch’. But, as they might politely point out, what the flying fuck-a-ding-dong do I know?

Because I really most want to stand in front of that mirror alone and shout in my own face: ‘And THIS is how you’re going to make a practical difference to the people around you’, and know what it is.

But I can’t, it seems. Not yet. Can you?

I’ll bet you can. You live in the real world. You’re already doing it. But feeling a bit useless when you’ve already been given all the essential tools you need for independence and confidence that so many youngsters are fighting to find is also part of real life across the UK. Loads of us feel uselessly disconnected from each other. We don’t know how to connect our values and hopes to people who appear to act so differently. So angeringly differently to us.

This feeling, in all its different expressions across the British classes, is something that unites our kingdom. But I think there may be a way out for every one of us from that entrapment of feeling:

True freedom is having the confidence to serve.

..I know this. I just don’t know where I could or should serve effectively.

When you appreciate the profound value of service – the ultimate respect that it is – you are likely to love the person you notice serving you. And when you demonstrate that gratitude with returned service, they may love you back. Because, after all, love is service. It’s something you do. Something you build society with. But it’s only real and true and effective when you do it as an instinct, or at least decision, and an end in itself, expecting nothing back directly.

The geniously simple truth, though, is that respect, service, love, all start with the conscious use of two very powerful everyday words – powerful precisely because of their easily-overlooked modesty – ‘please’ and ‘thankyou’. And don’t you dare laugh.

This is essentially all I learned from my parents, boiled down into two words. And, as the riots unfolded on the TV in the background, my mother was having her knee replaced for free by the UK’s National Health Service and was being calmly served by indefatigably caring professional medical staff, helping her to recover into a chapter of new freedom for her, after years of painful limitation. She spent most of her time in there saying thankyou.

The challenge modern Britain is really presenting us with, even as so many of us give thanks, is how to use our freedoms to serve eachother’s.

I shall ponder this some more as I slip back into the comfortable oblivion of responding to my own life’s little fires to fight.

—

Du vingt.

Content.

An interesting word to see written down; how do you imagine I’m saying it?

As a noun its meaning can, in one very specific context, be strangely at odds with the same word pronounced as an absolute adjective – for when it comes to internet marketing, content may be king but it’s also a killer for feeling content. Internet marketing is never content with the amount of content you feed it – it’s voracious.

Are you in any way at all still with me?

My convoluted point is simply that Momo’s marketing is basically starting to pile up an implied world of things I need to apparently start putting my back into creating. It’s daunting. And every current independent music artist feels it. There’s so much opportunity out there. But it is, as ever, opportunity to do, like, WAY more hard work.

I have most recently responded to this imperative in the only way I instinctively know how: By doing the opposite of that and clearing off – vacating the grid for a couple of weeks and creating very little content at all.

I have, in fact, been con-tent. Or avec tente, if you will – for we have been enjoying a few smooth roads, bon-marché campsites, and plus-swank hotel rooms of France.

—

The lovely first lady of Momo and I have been celebrating something special. But the ubiquity of modern news is such that we could not escape some awareness of events that were at the opposite pole of human experience to ours in that moment. Shocking, heartbreaking stories of tragedy. ..How are any of us to respond to such things? Ever. But especially when you are in mid-toast of something brilliant.

Perhaps, I think, with judicial use of sober reflection and mental compartmentalising.

If there is ever a time to give thanks it is the moment you are aware of just how good and how precious your current moment is. For wolves will steal it at any opportunity – even in apparently safe places. In the foothills of the Alps, or the island woods of Norway, or an expensive London flat.

—

We have been celebrating an anniversary. Ours. Twenty frankly gobsmackingly gone-fast years since our wedding day, on an August Saturday in 1991 in Sussex. Everything I do by Bryan Adams seemed to last as long that summer. And many of the friendships already so well underway then and showing support on the day, are still amazingly on-going today and supportive today.

I suppose a marriage is like any other business; you have to create the very best content you can for it. And guard it jealously. We reinforce the brand idea of our marriage all the time in countless goofy ways. Brands are, after all, built on behaviours. But we’ve mainly been very lucky. And the best thing I know to do in the face of another day of good luck is to be grateful. And to try to show it.

After twenty years of successfully convincing a frankly remarkable woman to keep living with me and being incredible nice to me, here at the little dawn of a new chapter of new opportunities for us both, I have felt okay about stealing a few moments together – to toast our current and past happinesses, to remember but keep at a sensible distance our sadnesses, and to feel, for at least a short while, something to be cherished indeed.

Content.

x

—