I’ve seen him do stuff and I think I know how he does it.

I really wonder if it’s magic or dust. I really wonder and then he starts playing bloody Waltzing Matilda all the time. I really wonder and then he finishes every song by going plung, pling, plang….pling….pliiiiing…

And that’s when I think he’s a robber.

But as robbers go he’s a fucking good one.

When I first met, or came across, Tom Waits I was hitching on the A3 in the late seventies. A car stopped and it was a little sports car, an MG. I got in and the driver said ‘Oh don’t mind him’.

He thumbed towards the back and there was a cassette player belting out some weird jazz shit.

‘He thinks it’s the fifties’ said my driver and off we went.

The seat in this car was bust in that the ratchet on the seat didn’t work. It skidded back and forth on the seat rails. We came away from the main road and started on the long and swooping hills between Milford and Haslemere….

He opened up and I was lying on my back listening to Tom Waits and enjoying the summer light. He hit the brakes coming into a low bend and I was crunched forward with my knee in one ear and Tom Waits in the other.

My fave album is probably ‘Closing Time’.

Don’t get me wrong: there is a lot of guts here. There is meat like a slaughterhouse and whiskey like a distillery. There’s the Buk and there is Carver. There’s the tender and the raw. The tough.

Amidst all the smoke and mirrors I feel that I might have seen the trick but I so hope that I haven’t. I want to pray ‘No! Don’t let this not be true!’

If Tom Waits is a con trick then I am the silly old pensioner that fell for it. BUT! (and this is a big but), if it’s true, if it really is true, that Tom Waits is the drunk poet that lives in my dreams then I know that there is a God and the Winos on the Nickel can hold up their heads and that Martha really should meet Tom Frost.

Got to hand it to him - it’s Poetry.

The ESSENTIAL album is ‘Closing Time’.

And as I press ‘publish’ I’m listening to ‘Flower’s Grave’

Must book some piano lessons.

This is Ted.

I know, I can hardly have stayed up all night, scratching my head over that one, can I?

But that’s how Ted is. When I sleep he goes on top of my little, rabbity, childish breast with his blue laser eyes staring out for burglars. His loving arms are always there for me and only me because Ted can’t love anyone else, ever, and never will be able to. I reckon he’s about 50 now because he must be a little older than I am. You might think he looks grumpy or a bit dumb but that’s because he never speaks to you.

Today I was thinking about what a brilliant game ‘Robin Hood in Space’ is. I’m nearly fifty and it’s taken the word of a child, relayed by a complutational wirificational netwoik , to kick my brain into thinking about Robin Hood in Space.

Cheers, Jess! I owe you several large gins!

It’s got Robin Hood AND it’s got IN SPACE!

So today I feel I had CLARIFICATION.

What if (I wondered), I just MADE BOOKS.

A hundred, I figure, at a time - no more and no less. Each with a hundred pages. Each page to be filled just how I wanted it to be filled. Each leaf mine. And as I thought about this idea I could sense Ted’s laser-blue eyes light up. I could feel the voice that told me ‘IT’S IN YOU’ all them years ago in Bunch Lane nodding approval. The picture of The Drowned Man smiled down from his frame.

The pieces of the jigsaw are dropping down from the sky and falling into place and now I really see what I am supposed to be doing. The CLARIFICATION that I have been waiting half a century for has arrived.

What happened to me - and I don’t tell many people about this - was about thirty years ago in Haslemere when I was walking up Bunch Lane near Inval Hill. I dropped to my knees and the power that commanded me to do so was irresistable. A voice spoke to me but it wasn’t a voice at all, it was more like a tumbler (me) being filled rapidly from a great big jug. Glup, glup, filled up.

The voice that wasn’t a voice said to me, IT’S IN YOU.

And that was that.

When I got back to the little cottage where i was living I said ‘Er, I think God just spoke to me’ and Jim’s girlfriend, Jane, burst into tears because she was religious and she was happy for me. I just felt puzzled.

What kind of message is that? IT’S IN YOU.

I went back there, of course. I’ve made a video of where I think it happened if anyone wants to see it. I go back and ask for part two or some kind of clarification but I never get any. I kneel in the road and pretend I’ve dropped something just to try and channel a result - just a little word more, please, oh please…

NOTHING.

But all the time a nagging voice in my head saying, ‘Ahem, I already told you, dopey.’

And I never knew what it meant and I would cry, when I was alone and abandoned and so lost and there was only Ted who ever understood me and would look after me. He had the laser-blue eyes and he could kill all burglars. But then it was me who chased real burglars out into the Brixton rooftops. It was me who forgot the ’seek and search’ flashlight out of the wireless car and it was me who forgot the bullet-proof clipboard (I kid you not) when I faced down an armed robber at the bottom of Atlantic Road. When I saw his hands dip into the long pockets of his coat all in slow-mo it was me that faced it all and STILL I never got it. I just never got it.

IT’S IN YOU

Come on dopey, how long is it going to take you?

I think what it took is Jess playing Robin Hood in Space.

I’m stopping drinking again; it’s no good for me. I’m going to take Ted’s loving hand in mine and walk out into the light. It’s in me. The answer to every question I have ever asked was in me all the time but I never got it.

Maybe this is the kind of peace you are supposed to feel when you die. Maybe.

I want to make my books now. Every page will be mine and I can already see them in my head how they will look and all that.

My charabanc tour of religious sites in Haslemere is priced at seven shillings and sixpence.

Oh, and it’s in you, too, by the way.

It would be most unfair of me to start posting pictures of my son’s face on my preternaturally ‘grubby’ site so here’s a version that might be described as more ‘anon’.

Here we see Youngblood either headbutting a telegraph pole (great photography, myself!) or looking at a vintage Springer that was built in 1969 and has a custom top on it.

We had a great trip and we were going this way (< ) while all the boats that had been to the boat festival were coming back the other (>).

For me, the delights of the time we spent together were, well, simply spending time together, sharing a weirdly common sense of humour (although I have been absent from his life since forever) and a real sense of wonder and satisfaction that he really IS a boatman. He really gets it. He understands how it all works.

When he first got here I was playing some things that I like and that I thought and hoped that he might like. You know, how you do.

I pulled some Bukowski clips off YouTube including this one (which is NSFW and not suitable for minors or those of a sensitive disposition):

The poem is called ‘The Night I Killed Tommy’.

And over the time I spent with him the character of AMERICAN POET started to grow and to grow and I felt that the labour was equal; each of us producing lines and getting a ‘yup’, ‘no way’ or a ‘maybe’ in response. Some of these lines are killingly funny but they are still a work in progress.

Another work in progress is Youngblood’s own masterpiece, BRIGHTON TALES, which is linked up there on the top right.

He thinks I should be serious about studying Industrial Archaeology and I’d like him to realise that he can do anything he puts his mind to.

As long weekends go it would be very hard to beat.

I wonder what AMERICAN POET would have to say about it…

My guess is something along the lines of:

‘Perfect, like a…’

Ah, but if I told you all the punchlines you would never pay for a ticket to see the show.

Goodnight.

Not me, you big silly. Everyone knows that I don’t drink.

Ahem.

Anyway, moving smartly along, what I wanted to talk to you about today (or is that ‘talk about to you today?) is a subject most mysterious, ‘asteengs.

In the olden days, when I was a boy, there was a man who came from Ireland and he was a little god in the eyes of some. Just have a look at this clip which was made when he was young and beautiful. His name was Rory Gallagher…

I hope you watched that, otherwise you will get quite lost in here.

So, how come he wasn’t born a hundred years ago and black and up the Delta? Or maybe he was, because Rory had the blues right through him like a stick of rock. Rory made the activities of Slowhand look more like Standingstillwith yourgobopenhand.

For middle-class white boys, like me, he really said it. Look at this clip where he plays Bullfrog Blues and look at the audience. He came amongst them and all they could do was mash their heads and try to keep up. This clip moves me, quite literally, to tears…

Look, I know that the audience is French and knows no better. I saw the funny man in his best, Johnny ‘alliday Le Rock et le Roll jacket and that other bloke who looks like he got flown in from Scouserland… BUT…

Imagine BEING Rory Gallagher; putting on the trademark plaid shirt and walking out on to the stage with the most abused and distressed Strat in entertainment history in your hand. Imagine being able to make a guitar talk and laugh and sing and to be able to play the chords inside people them very selves. Imagine being a god and a poet and a warrior like he was; a man who could make the sun sing. He burned so brightly and he was Rory.

Come on you young people of today, all living in starter homes in modernland. I say throw down your skateboards and your EyePops and look to your own musical roots.

There was a man who lived here once and he actually did what it said on the tin. He did it with a guitar that looked like it had been used to dig holes in the road. He was Rory Gallagher and you had better never forget him.

Cheers!

100%

How boring.

A Daily Maily title that I was just thinking of as I pumped water from the bilge of the boat.

SO-DYU-KO

And the labour of the joke goes out onto the sun-beaten yards and dies under the wheels of the trains that stand like horses.

Well, that cunt stole your money just like the cunt before him and the cunt before that. Blah, blah, velodrome and blah. blah anything to do with the Olympics or any development come to that.

When will you pliant, plucky, Brits wake up and go, ‘Hang on! I appear to have been shafted right up the arse!’?

Call me mad and lock me away but I’m telling you, right now, yet again, that you are being done up the wossname time and time again.

Let’s ask questions. All my life I’ve tried it, turn up the eyes to laser factor 5 and question away.

Now then. Should anyone want something to go bang and it did not go bang although he had asked Jesus to make it go bang then he had better wonder about some things.

If he had asked all-powerful Jesus to make it go bang, and it had not, then maybe Jesus was not all powerful and, therefore, did not exist.

Or maybe Jesus really was all powerful and was trying to tell the man that he was wrong and that the thing would not go bang because the man was a cunt.

So that’s religion and the daftness of our Olympic bid put to bed.

Oh yeah, something else, and I wish France had got the curse of the Olympics and not us.

They probably haven’t stopped laughing; I know I wouldn’t have.