31 Postcodes - Poem 26

 

Endgame

 

I am back to my own devices,

and honestly, they are terrible.

 

Here there’s no heating to speak of.

The shower is in a cupboard.

 

I sleep in hats, dwell on the past.

You can’t eat vinyl, more's the pity.

 

I’ve no chairs, no fire escape;

this slot is dangerous - high and dry.

 

Neighbours compete downstairs,

a guitarist, a U2 fan,

 

and a sleepy young woman

who sets her place alight,

 

mine too, one afternoon.

Smoke signals to golfers down at the park,

 

doors smashed, rooms fully gutted.

It’s the end of a road, move on.

RF 2021

Video/audio for this one here.

It was time to live on my own again so in 1996 (aged 29) it was goodbye to home comforts and stylish décor and back to woodchip walls and piles of records and very little else. This home was a small one bedroom ‘flat’ (barely) – the attic floor of a giant terraced house in a different (cheaper) part of town (Armley). In the google photo at the top of the post that blurry bit is the flat in question and, as you'll read, the image fits perfectly There were a lot of stairs up to the flat and, as usual for rented places like this, no form of fire escape (there weren’t even smoke alarms when I first moved in). Luckily by the time there was a fire in the flat below there were smoke alarms (thanks to Mark). And I wasn’t at home.

I was still DJing with D but in fewer and fewer clubs as other stuff happened that made it tricky and I guess I knew change was going to have to come in terms of work. My anxieties were now pretty dominant and at one point in this flat I was both agoraphobic and claustrophobic (fun times). The claustrophobic feelings meant anything busy was almost impossible now (clubs, shops, trains, buses) and my driving fell to pieces too (it started feeling like an out-of-body experience – which is hard to coordinate with driving, especially at any speed). I had to walk pretty much everywhere (sometimes along the canal into the city centre and you didn’t, in those days, see many women on their own walking there). I suppose I was in the middle of a nervous breakdown but it’s hard to know when it started (or finished) and it was really hard work (for me and those around me). I tried the breakdown theory out on my Mum (on the phone) to which she answered “well, most writers have at least one nervous breakdown, dear”. That made me laugh ... a bit (she was still waiting for me to do something brilliant – one of the problems with showing early promise). I should add that she was always very supportive of whatever nonsense I was up to (many reasons for this including her own life’s path, my Dad’s, her background in children’s social work). When D and I made a dance track called Sit on my Bass and a pretty adult music video for it (breasts/primula cheese – mine, dildos/cucumbers – not mine) I gave her a copy (on VHS) and as far as I know she showed it to friends and family without so much as a raised eyebrow (and she was in her 70s). God knows what any of them thought (I wasn’t in touch with much family during this period). Someone put the video on youtube a while back (though excuse me if I don’t link to it here).

I also had a 30^th birthday whilst living in this flat and took a fairly bizarre cheap January holiday to Gran Canaria with two uni friends (too much drinking, some arguing, some of it definitely best left to the imagination). I was very confused, quite despairing, got great counselling from the Mind charity in Headingley, wrote a lot of poetry. I had written the odd poem when I was younger but it was in this flat that I started writing them regularly. I suppose I’ve always written about emotions (even with this project my intent was to concentrate on remembered details of the physical places but the emotions and relationships have been impossible, for me at least, to avoid). One of my Mum’s sayings was “I’m interested in people, dear” and I guess that applies to me too. I’m more interested in why someone chooses to paint the floor green than what paint they used, how they sanded the floor first, where they hired the sander from etc. This does mean I’m not very good at DIY (terrible in fact) but I suppose I do know a thing or two about people, what makes them tick, how to get them ticking again when they’re running low on ticks and maybe this ticking idea is running out of legs, let’s move on.

It was towards the end of my first year in this flat that I somehow, once again with the miracles, got together with the person who is still my partner now in 2021 (he used to come the weekly quiz we ran in a Leeds city centre bar, see last entry). Other than the quiz (which was in a pub hence liquid courage), I was at a point living here when going out to work was very difficult (the phobias) and one of my jobs (that somehow I’ve omitted to mention up to now) was in a second hand record shop run by friends. When I couldn’t manage this job anymore, Mark, for it is he, took over this job (like me he was in a transition period, careerwise). In return I learned to cook again so he didn’t have to do all the work everywhere (I had some basics from school). Cooking can be a challenge on a Baby Belling* but I guess it was something that gave me a focus and it started what you could call the housewife period (I didn’t really choose that path, and some of it’s been a squash and a squeeze to be honest, but I just wasn’t fit for the workplace for quite some years, if ever, so I did what I could at home).

But back to the theme (postcodes, people, postcodes!). I had some happy times there but this flat was cold, dangerous, and some of the neighbours were just impossibly aggressive so soon enough (1998) Mark and I hunted down a place of our own. It was still in Yorkshire but not in Leeds so time for a change!

*One of several of my acquaintance – I have quite a fondness for them really.

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.