31 Postcodes - Poem 25

 

Art house

Here I relax and learn, for example,

to sit out on the step when the sun shines,

to drink a glass of easy wine,

some other things.

Two cats in a back-to-back,

we sleep in the attic and mix in the cellar.

We set out the questions every week – 

life’s quite the quiz.

We make a lot of fun and war,

live loud on show, quiet in the gallery,

cry out loud (and pretty regularly),

laugh all the more.

The fax machine can’t help but date us,

a time of great changes, some out of our hands.

The sun is our friend but it just gets hotter.

Long shadows lie.

RF 2021

Video/audio for this one here.

This next Leeds home was my friend and DJ partner’s house and, as I mentioned last time, I think I even lived here twice (maybe overlapping with the last place) but I’m not completely sure of the dates. For simplicity, let’s just say I moved here in September 1995 (when I was 28). The club night we worked at most in this period was called Vague and that word is applicable to much of this time for a whole list of reasons. As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, our DJ names were Daisy & Havoc, so I’ll call the owner of this house D for the purposes of this project (I’m not using anyone’s real name thus far, heck, Rachel isn’t even my real name, as many of you know). During this period people really did call me Havoc (certainly people who only knew me through clubs and stuff). I quite liked it – I never mind being called other things and have never felt very attached to my given first name.

D was a much better homemaker than I was (not difficult!) and this house was, for me, an unusually lovely living space (and I realise only now, doing this project, that this was possibly the first time I’d ever lived anywhere that you could describe in that way – my Mum’s furnishings taste tended to favour so-so velvet, brass and horse paintings and mine was just a lazy/disinterested ‘whatever was already there’ approach). As the years have passed I’ve had more and more friends who, like D, went to art school and I have found that they are generally better at making a home comfortable and beautiful than us mere mortals (others can do it too but my arty friends really excel at it). This house was another 2-bed back-to-back terrace (there are loads of these in Leeds, I’d lived in one back at poem 21) and it wasn’t far away, on the map, from the flat I wrote about last time. This new home was ideal in so many ways – it had clean floors, unpredictable art on the walls, soft bedding, sometimes even food in the cupboards and fridge. After years of minimal care, it was all a bit of a shock to me (and a joy). D and I were out a lot (still working in pubs and clubs and doing a lot of socialising out and about) but it was a lovely place to come back to. 

In this house we tried our best to earn our living as DJs and it worked out well a lot of the time. We had regular club work (we played lots of different kinds of music, started in ‘backrooms’, moved on to main rooms, but still kept a toe in the backrooms too). We got ‘guest spots’ DJing all over the country and sometimes even abroad (we played New Year’s Eve in Rimini one year in the mid ’90s and got paid in piles of lire, in a backroom, out of a briefcase). We also had a weekly Wednesday evening slot at a bar in the centre of Leeds and, because we fancied doing something other than just playing records mid-week, we ran a quiz there (‘with a twist’ – in that there were no usual pub quiz questions and instead just questions about music, art, fashion, adverts, TV, film and so on). It was a lot of fun and became very popular (great prizes donated by local businesses on the whole). The club we worked at was fashionable and this is certainly the closest I’ve ever been to being fashionable myself (someone else often told me what to wear around this time, or made suggestions anyway, and there is the odd bit of photographic evidence, some of it totally bizarre). It was an interesting experience and generally speaking a time of full-on hedonism and some pretty extreme highs.

This period was extreme in other ways too. As often happens when you’re working really closely with someone you get on really well with (and we had a GREAT time, top-of-the-world stuff) our relationship stretched to be something much bigger than just friendship. One problem though was this was my first (and only) experience that wasn’t heterosexual and I can’t say I managed it well in many ways (though we are still friends, great friends – another miracle). As in many relationships of my teens and twenties, I made a lot of classic mistakes (whilst, of course, not realising how ‘classic’ they were). Also, for me personally, the anxieties that had started to show themselves in 1991 were just growing and growing (and I had not, as a sensible person might have done, slowed down on the all-night party, drug-addled front) so time in this house was a mixture of ‘best night ever’ and ‘rivers of endless tears’. Was it a time of high drama? A bit. Is a full-on club lifestyle conducive for healthy relationships and good, kind, considerate choices generally speaking? No. Do we all make the best decisions when we are young? Well, absolutely not. Does any of this excuse hurting people and take away all the pain you both feel at the time? No. Not at all.

I haven’t written about this particular aspect of my story before (in poems or prose) but that’s not so much because it’s been a secret, more just that it’s so much someone else’s story too and whilst I don’t mind baring myself here, there and everywhere, not everybody feels that way all the time so I have been more guarded with that in mind. Most people in my life know about this relationship and certainly I was open with my Mum about it, my subsequent partner and my daughter too (right from her early days – at times such decisions seemed unusual to others but they always seemed right to me). I feel pretty strongly (for myself anyway) that hiding things rarely helps but I know that it’s not always easy nor my decision (plus where would soap operas, and indeed most drama, be without an unsaid story?). This chapter does mean I still have mixed feelings about things like the ‘tick your sexuality’ box (just ticking ‘heterosexual’ seems not quite right, like denying a chunk of my life and experience and putting me in a box that isn’t quite mine, ‘bisexual’ doesn’t seem quite it either). I often tick ‘prefer not to say’ and if there was ever a comment box for these things I’d probably ramble on in that too. The box (for this and other things) should probably be ‘how long have you got?’

As you might imagine, at some point this living arrangement got too complicated and I moved to a place of my own in a different (cheaper) part of town in September 1996. The DJing (and working together) continued for a while but my days in the palace of comfort and taste were over and it was back to an ugly flat and another Baby Belling (a fate I deserved perhaps). I even started cooking on the damn thing. New chapters awaited both of us (babies, breakdowns, other jobs, new homes) but next time (in terms of this project), will be my last Leeds stop.

This poem is part of the annual Fun A Day Dundee project where participants try to do something creative every day for the month of January. You don't have to be in Dundee to take part and there are other Fun A Day projects around the world. People post as much of their work online as they want to (largely on Instagram but it can be elsewhere too). This year I am posting a whole poem a day (one poem for each of the 31 addresses I have lived at, covering the period 1967-2021). Videos/photos of the poems show the places remembered in the poems but were mostly taken from recent Google Street View. The videos are on my Instagram, maybe elsewhere too. Use the hashtag #fadd2021 on social media to see other people's online contributions.