Tag Archives: barricades of heaven

Saturday 6th January 2024 – I AM ABSOLUTELY…

… wasted. i4ve had a horrible day today, probably the worst that I have ever had.

You’ll remember the perfusions that I had and the hallucinations that went with it. Well, the story continues.

At 23:30 or thereabouts two guys brought a stretcher here and I clambered aboard, to be whisked off to another building here for an echograph on my lower stomach and kidneys.

When the echographist had finished, the ambulance brought me back here.

When I was tucked up in my nice little bed a nurse came round and coupled me up to another perfusion, and we started again with the hallucinations.

At first I tried to dictate them as they happened but I was totally overwhelmed. I managed so many and then that was that.

Unfortunately none of my favourite characters appeared to calm me down. Things were completely and utterly out of control. Every time I closed my eyes that was that – I was off again. It took hours for me to go to sleep.

It was quite early when I awoke too and I had to wait around ages for breakfast. I was starving.

But today, I’ve been totally out of it. This perfusion, which is a mixture of sodium chloride and calcium chloride, has finished me off.

The doctor came round to see me too. I have a critical level of creatine in the kidneys and a critical level of potassium in the bloodstream. The perfusion is intended to counteract the potassium.

When I told him about the side effects he didn’t really say very much, which surprised me.

And the side-effects are the hallucinations and the fact that I have been out of it all all day, as if someone has slipped me a Micky Finn. I’ve hardly been able to function at all and for much of the day I’ve been asleep. The rest of the day, I’ve not been able to concentrate at all on anything.

To transcribe the dictaphone notes it took ages – firstly because I was in no fit state to do it and secondly there were so many of them. And as usual, they are shown here exactly as I dictated them, with no apologies or explanations. There was a lot of noise during the night and a lot of dreams too. I dreamt once that they were making really loud noises removing some kind of perfusions out of the way of everyone whom I knew, including people like TOTGA, Castor etc but I couldn’t really see who they were. It turned out that they were nurses here tidying up. One of them awoke me to give me a perfusion in the arm.

Almost immediately going back to sleep I dreamt of being pushed around on a stretcher by a couple of young people, one of whom was playing the accordion with a lot of traditional folk melodies playing on it.

While I was awake having this perfusion I had a hallucination again. This time I was being pushed by someone in a wheelchair. They said that they were going to take me to somewhere where they would put me in a sitting position. Once they’d done that they’d take me to a place where I could sit which was much more exciting than where I was at the moment.

Also 2 women pushing me in a wheelchair to a Renault Espace but it looked nothing like a Renault Espace at all and was all glass so that everyone could see everything that was going on inside it. I was taken in this wheelchair by these 2 girls, put inside the Renault Espace which was driven to another part of the hospital where a couple of guys were waiting. Once our car arrived and unloaded me these 2 guys took over and began to push me. But I was actually awake and conscious and lying in my bed in the hospital when I was having this hallucination. It certainly wasn’t me being asleep and dreaming

Later on I was in an Indian Restaurant with a couple of people. We were chatting away. I went over to a drawer, pulled out a cheque book from there and wrote a cheque for £95:00 to the bank. One of the people watching asked me why. I said that I had debts to pay. He said something like “don’t we all”. He wondered how much it was o I showed him. It was £495:00. He said “you’ll pay that quickly paying it at that rate”. I said “it should only be £75:00 but I’m paying it in advance”. He actually shook my hand. Then a server came to see us but but was actually someone with the head of a cash machine so I fed the cheque into it. We began to talk about soup so me, the man and his young daughter sat down at a table where there were already several people sitting – it was a long bench-type table with benches either side. The guy said “you’d better go and ask the chef – he mentioned the chef by name but I’ve forgotten – because he’ll have soup that he’ll want to get rid of at the end of the night.

Then someone asked me to raise my pelvis so that they could close the ambulance doors – while I was still awake. These hallucinations are incredible.

I closed my eyes and I was immediately in a taxi queue, still in my wheelchair. There was all folk music going around. Even now as I’m dictating this I can hear folk music played on a violin. It really is strange because there’s nothing happening outside at all – it’s all in my head, whatever it is that’s going on. I’m wide awake and I’m just hallucinating like this every time I close my eyes.

They were waiting outside there questioning, joking, reduced to a question about pyjamas. I was ….. unintelligible … that was my job for the evening. Those projectiles on the bed ….. unintelligible … The room of mine was downgraded from mid-dangerous to less dangerous from a security point of view after a security patrol had been to inspect it. Someone could fire into the room but they wouldn’t be able to actually hit anyone so it was considered to be a very low risk at all.

There was a song rather similar to THE BARRICADES OF HEAVEN. I’d recorded it twice and wanted to dictate one. The thing was that one of them was in really perfect condition and sounded really well but there was only threequarters of it but the other one which was complete, the quality wasn’t as good so I was trying my hardest to figure out a way to make a complete one using the quality of the best one. But in the end I ended up deleting one of them, the one with the best quality because it was incomplete. Then I had second thoughts of re -recording it. I was sitting there scratching my head puzzling over what I was going to do

Despite being in the kind of condition in which I find myself, I’ve had some nice chats with my neighbour from Granville, with Liz and with Tina over the internet and that was really nice. The nursing staff here are nice to and bring me extra coffee, bread and fruit to make up for the food that I can’t eat.

They have bandaged up my leg where I have skin issues and done all they can to help me. One of them was very interested in my story about hallucinations too.

We have rock music fans amongst them too and I’ve had a couple of interesting chats. Apart from the perfusions I seem to have struck lucky with this hospital. Castle Anthrax was nice of course but things seem to be much more urgent here in The Land Of Yellow And Orange

Anyway, tonight there are no perfusions planned so I’m hoping to have a good, deep sleep and see what tomorrow might bring. And if it’s any more calcium chloride I’ll go spare.

But they are doing their best to treat me and if they think that something is necessary, who am I to complain? I’ll just have to take the side effects in my stride and suffer accordingly.

"SO PLACE YOUR TRUST IN SCIENCE
FOR IT HAS COME SO FAR
WHERE NECROMANCY LIVES FOR EVER
PRESERVED WITHIN A JAR"

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Saturday 30th December 2023 – IT DOESN’T TAKE …

… much for me to descend into the pit of darkness and despair, and here I am again after hauling myself out yesterday.

That’s right – someone has sent me a soundtrack of the final Lindisfarne concert at Newcastle upon Tyne City Hall in 2003. “Here – play with this” – all 2 hours and 21 minutes of it.

So in a short while I’ll have a message – “can you do a 57-minute concert for me, with a 3-minute commentary in German?”. My German isn’t what it ought to be unfortunately but I’ll do my best. After all, I do owe someone a few favours, especially as rather a large amount of concert soundtracks have appeared in this way.

However, I have another idea for my purposes. Many of Lindisfarne’s songs were written by “Jimmy” Alan Hull, alas no longer with us, and many others were written by Rod Clements. Now if I were to go through the soundtrack and pick out the songs from each of the two, I might be able to make up a couple of concerts, one for each musician, and play it on their birthday or something.

But Lindisfarne …

If ever there were two groups that shaped my teenage years between 1970 and 1972, it would be Jethro Tull and Lindisfarne. Jethro Tull’s BENEFIT, STAND UP,AQUALUNG, THICK AS A BRICK and A PASSION PLAY have been on my playlist since they first came out, and witll always be there.

But then again, so will Lindisfarne’s NICELY OUT OF TUNE? FOG ON THE TYNE and DINGLY DELL

These were the groups that were played non-stop by my friends and me during that period but Lindisfarne were special. There was quite a big Lindisfarne fan club at my school and one of them follows this blog from the Shetland Islands (hello, Robert).

At Christmas 1971 I actually saw Lindisfarne. They played at a private members’ club in Crewe and I remember it very well, and for several reasons too.

Firstly, this was the occasion when Ray Jackson did his harmonica solo in the middle of WE CAN SWING TOGETHER, which usually lasted about 10-12 minutes.

However at “Up The Junction” in Crewe that night it went on, and on, and on, and was probably about 25 minutes long.

The story was that the rest of the band nipped out and went across the road to “The Barrel” for a quick pint. While they were out there, it was 23:00 and being a private members’ club, no-one was allowed in after that time, so the door was locked. The rest of the group was thus locked outside and they were banging on the door for 10 minutes trying to catch the attention of someone to let them back in.

The second reason was that I was 17 and my girlfriend at the time was … errr … not quite 14. Ordinarily, being under the age of 18 we wouldn’t be allowed in but my elder sister and her husband were both members and had cards of admission, and they weren’t photo-ids in those days of course.

Anyway, to cut a long story short … "thank God" – ed … my girlfriend hadn’t ever drunk alcohol before, as I found out far too late to do any good. And it’s no use, you can’t take it out once it’s gone in.

Taking a girl of … errr … not quite 14 home steaming drunk a long way after her curfew time did not go down at all well with her parents as you can imagine and so as far as that relationship went, that was regrettably that.

Funnily enough, whenever I went out with a girl during that kind of period, something always went wrong and incited the ire of a set of parents. I never seemed to have any luck in that respect.

But as you can see, Lindisfarne has a special place in my heart and brings back quite a lot of memories from the period 1970-72 when I was finding my feet as a young proto-adult. It certainly did today.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … bed, when the alarm went off this morning I was reminiscing about my stag night before my wedding. And I’ve no idea why because it wasn’t anything earth-shattering.

In fact, all that happened was that a group of friends (yes, I did have friends in those days) and I went on a tour of the decent pubs in Crewe (I used to drink in those days) and finished up in an Indian restaurant on Nantwich Road for a curry after kicking-out time at the pubs.

There were a few pubs in Crewe that were what I call decent – an old-world type of atmosphere and served proper beer.

iI’s 31 years since I left the UK so of course I can’t remember many of them now but we had the Horseshoe up in Coppenhall and the Crown in Earle Street that served Robinsons’s beer, the Lion and Swan in West Street that served Boddington’s and the Express in Mill Street that served real Tetley’s.

However the Express was a pub where you had to be careful. It was a pub frequented by a certain type of person and a friend of mine had an uncomfortable 5 minutes in there when he went to pick up a passenger when he was driving a taxi for me.

It reminded me of the time that I was in Berlin with a coach on my way to Moscow. I decided to go for a walk that evening and one of the passengers decided to accompany me – a young Canadian guy.

At one moment we went into a bar for a beer and after a couple of minutes the guy with me asked “what do you notice about the customers here?”

“Well” I replied, “there are plenty of couples in here but I don’t see any women at all”.

And so in the best traditions of the News of the Screws, we “made our excuses and left”.

The Crown was another pub that I only visited on rare occasions even though it was one of the best pubs in the town.

That was because there were some customers in there who used my taxis. They were always in there every evening and there was something not quite right about what was going on with them, their friend and their children. And they were the clingy type.

There were a couple of other pubs in Crewe too that were worth a visit but I can’t remember them now. It was all such a long time ago.

So after taking the blood pressure I went for all of my medication – 15 tablets of it and then back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. One of my dreams about dreaming, a really long, involved one with about 8 or 9 different phases in it, part of which involved a school. I’d come to the attention of the local newspaper and in collaboration with the local radio station they wanted to broadcast it with me reading it, explaining it as I went along and could copy it into the newspaper. But of course, how do you explain dreams? How do you interpret them as you go along? Regardless of what Freud and these other people said, there’s absolutely no connection at all between the dreams and anything in particular so it was totally impossible, but they were insisting so I went to read it but I couldn’t remember what had happened, I couldn’t remember what went on and I couldn’t remember what I was going through at that particular time when I dreamt it. They were still harping on about this flaming dream and I was totally lost and submerged in all kinds of problems associated with trying to repeat it and interpret it.

And I’m impressed that I can come out with all of that during a dream when I’m asleep.

Later on I read somewhere in some kind of paper that there was going to be a dance at the school on Friday evening next week starting at 16:00 to celebrate the death of the headmaster Mr. Morris. I knew nothing about this and no-one had said anything so I didn’t know what was happening. Usually someone would mention something about a school dance to me because of obtaining all the PA equipment, disco deck etc but nothing had been said. So on the way back to class after lunch I was with my classmate who now lives in Munich. He had his satchel draped over his shoulder but not actually fastened but extremely casual and pale grey trousers instead of dark grey ones. I went and found one of the teachers whom I know organised a lot of events for the school and asked her when she was going to let me know about the dance on Friday week. She gave a very non-committal answer and someone else shouted at my friend to go and organise himself and dress properly, put his satchel on etc. Anyway, not knowing what to do I left and thought that the simplest thing to do of course is to force their hand. I went into my form room and quite a lot of my form-mates were there and I just announced “by the way, there will be a school dance a week on Friday” and gave them all the details as far as I could. I asked them if they could spread the word around their classes this afternoon. I thought that that is going to be the easiest way to deal with this situation – to take charge of it straight away anyway rather than leaving it until the last minute.

That latter dream was another one of those comfortable, warm dreams that I have occasionally that sound so real. No girl involved in it this time though, which is always a shame.

For the rest of the morning I’ve been doing something that I haven’t done since before I went to Canada at the end of September last year, and that is that I’ve been playing the 5-string fretless bass.

It’s complicated to play because it’s quite heavy, so I can’t play it standing up, and with it being a standard scale bass rather than a short-scale bass like my Gibson EB3 or the Fender in Canada, everything gets in the way, my arms and fingers aren’t long enough and of course my finger fall into different places because of the extra length and width, and there are no frets to guide me.

The 5th string is actually lower than the low E. It’s a low B but I had plans to take off the B string, move the others down one and add a low E guitar string to the top and tune it as I would the lower 5 strings on a 6-string guitar.

Back 20 or so years ago I played (briefly) with a female acoustic folk guitarist and so if there was a solo to play, I had to play it on the bass. And quite often, I would run out of frets so a bass with an additional upper string would have been perfect for that.

So on the bass I’ve been working through my running list and also trying to work my way through the bass lines for THE BARRICADES OF HEAVEN – including the organ riff – and Jethro Tull’s CROSS EYED MARY.

But imagine trying to play “Cross-Eyed Mary” in today’s PC sanitised world. That’s a song that, along with songs like Ted Nugent’s JAILBAIT, Grand Funk Railroad’s SHE GOTTA MOVE ME and Led Zeppelin’s SICK AGAIN, has been consigned to the dustbin of history and we aren’t allowed to mention them any more.

It all reminds me of the book-burning of the 1930s or the smashing up of alcohol in the USA in the 1920s by the Temperance movement.

Seeing as we were talking about Lindisfarne just now … "well, one of us was" – ed … there are plenty of their numbers on my playlist too and I enjoy playing them and singing along. We did a few with the aforementioned young lady acoustic guitar.

Of course, we have to have NO TIME TO LOSE

"Had more than my share of people giving advice
on the way that my life it should be
But look at the country man it’s looking so nice
it’s feeling so good to be free
No time, no time to lose"

Yes, that’s a verse that really strikes a chord with me. “Been there, done that” you might say.

So this afternoon I’ve been playing around with a Lindisfarne concert trying to make some kind of sense of it – a running order or set list would be a good idea for a start – and then I’ve been out gallivanting.

Yes, me socialising! One of my neighbours, the President of the Residents’ Committee, invited me for a chat and to my own surprise I was there for almost 2.5 hours chatting. That’s not like me at all, is it?

Back here I had chips (some were sweet potato too) vegan salad and one of those breadcrumbed soya fillets that I like. And it was delicious as usual.

Now that I’ve finished everything, I’ll dictate the radio notes ready for tomorrow when I’ll edit them and assemble the programme

But there’s a lot to do tomorrow. I’ve run out of pizza dough so I’ll have to make some more. There’s some bread to make too and also that bread-and-butter pudding so I’m going to be busy.

There won’t be much time to play the bass so I might have a go at that tonight. Walls of solid granite 1.2 metres thick have their advantages when it comes to soundproofing.

So I’d better clear off if I want to play the bass "I have no one to call my friend
The road I travel has no end
And so I turn my face up to the sun
And walk on down the road to kingdom come"

Yes, I’m certainly heading that way – sooner rather than later if I don’t cheer myself up.

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Thursday 28th December 2023 – IN WHAT CAN ONLY …

… be described as a new, rather regrettable record, I was actually up and about, taking my medicine and preparing to start work at 03:20 this morning.

Feeling absolutely wretched and totally washed out, I was in bed early – at about 22:30. And I must have fallen into a deep sleep almost immediately because there was something on the dictaphone with a timestamp of not much later.

But then there were all kinds of strange things happening during the night and I ended up awakening at about 02:15. Try as I might, I simply couldn’t go back to sleep after that and in the end gave it up as a bad job.

Firstly, there was a strange entry on the dictaphone that I have absolutely no recollection of dictating. “All that seemed to be missing from last night’s adventures was a visit from TOTGA but we’ll just have to make do without that” was what I recorded.

And that was early on too. The one that I’d had almost as soon as I’d gone to bed went “we started off with a very long complicated and involved dream that I can’t remember now. It all seems to have disappeared from my mind but at one point there was a young girl in Nantwich waiting for a load of other girls for the local dance hall to open so that they could all go in. This would be in the early 60s when beehive hair and all of that was in fashion. Some older man came and began to talk to her, to chat her up. Another girl in the queue accosted the man and told him what she thought of him, and generally made him feel uncomfortable until he left. That girl was actually a very young Marilyn Munroe who had come to Nantwich for some kind or other of show promotion but was standing in the queue at the dance hall just like any other young girl of that particular age and behaviour at that particular time. There was nothing special about her at all” which has absolutely nothing whatever with what came after it.

However, I do have a vague kind of ethereal feeling that at some point during the night not only Zero but also Castor came to see me. And if that’s the case I’m surprised that I didn’t dictate it. Maybe it’s my subconscious blocking them out for reasons that I can only speculate, or else it’s simply that I don’t want to share my experiences with anyone else. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, with coming from a large family where nothing was ever my own, I don’t “do” sharing if it’s something nice like one of Liz’s vegan cakes, and I can’t think of anything very much nicer than having Zero and Castor around.

Zero as we know drifts in and out of my nocturnal rambles, doing her own thing and going her own way, what around here they call son bonhomme de chemin but as for Castor, I haven’t seen her in the flesh since that morning in early September 2019 when she turned her back on me and walked to her ‘plane to Ottawa on that windswept airstrip at the Coppermine River, just a short walk from where in 1771 Samuel Hearne had stood helpless and horrified as his Dene guides fell on and butchered an Inuit hunting party.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, it puzzled and bewildered me for quite a while as to why she left me as she did. And it wasn’t until I had to say “goodbye” to someone in similar circumstances a year or two ago that I realised that sometimes, goodbyes have to be done like that.

Castor has been back during the night a few times since then, but not for quite a while. If indeed it really was she (and Zero) last night and I missed it, I’ll be helpless and horrified too.

However, it was what happened next that was the killer.

There was another dance taking place at Wistaston. There was a group of kids and I was going but I was going to buy a big motorbike and hopefully turn up on it to arrive there. Then I had a think about first of all, it wouldn’t be registered, then it won’t be taxed. And where would I leave it because there would be no burglar alarm or anti-theft device fitted on it. Much as I wanted to have it and take it there it would cause quite a few problems. I was listening to a couple of bikers talking. One was actually knitting while he was talking. he was talking about his travels out in the USA as a road racer around a lot of circuits in California. They were talking about his bike, how it would still pass an MoT in the UK after that. Their conversation was extremely interesting. They wanted to know about the amount of Marshall Aid that would be applicable to importing over something that they’ve had in the USA but I wasn’t able to give any help. This question of this big motorbike was something eating away at me – how was I going to bring it to this dance with all of the problems that I had to face? Many of them were insurmountable because they required a lot of input from a lot of other people in a short space of time.

“Another dance” indeed because there had been a dance at the Wistaston Memorial Hall on the Saturday night of August Bank Holiday weekend in 1973 and every moment of it is etched onto my brain as if it was yesterday.

At that time I was sharing an apartment with a guy who played synthesiser in a rock band and his group had been invited to play at the Windsor Free Festival on the Sunday.

Everyone was stony broke in those days and they couldn’t afford the fuel so they arranged the dance where they would play, as a way of raising some petrol money.

My friend from the Wirral had been to school with one of the musicians so I invited him along and he turned up on his motorbike, a 350cc Triumph.

It was at that dance that he met a girl called Jane, and I met Jane’s friend Sheila, someone who has appeared in these pages on a few occasions. There was nothing particularly serious about any of this, except that my friend fell rather badly, but I imagine for the two girls is was more of a case as Al Steward described in SWISS COTTAGE MANOEUVRES as "I could see myself nailed to a dormitory tale as a holiday night’s escapade".

However, Sheila and I went on for more than a night (not much more) and I’m glad that it did because apart from the fact that she was a nice girl, her father kept a pub, the Whore’s Bed in Walgherton and that was where I met Paul Elson, drummer of “Strife” and a big friend of her brother.

And not so long ago, Paul sent me a recording of a “Strife” concert that he’d found in all his old papers and I featured it on one of my rock shows.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … Wistaston Memorial Hall, at the end of the concert we loaded up all of their gear into the back of the old J4 van that they had and they they discovered that they were still short of money. And so for £1:00 per head they would take anyone who wanted to go to the Festival. You’ve no idea how many people piled into that van with all of the gear already in it.

My friend and I decided that we’d go down on the motorbike so we set off and went a different way to Windsor.

But those in the van had a nightmare. Going down the M1 a tyre burst and with all of the weight that was in the van they were all over the road until the driver could bring it to a halt. It was a miracle that it didn’t overturn.

Horrible thoughts of 12th May 1969 must have flashed through everyone’s mind – the night that Fairport Convention’s van overturned at almost the same spot killing drummer Martin Lambie and guitarist Richard Thompson’s girlfriend Jeannie “the tailor” Franklyn, to whom the Jack Bruce album SONGS FOR A TAILOR was dedicated.

We stayed down there all weekend, without any sleep whatsoever, and then came home on the Monday night. My friend fell asleep riding back so he asked me to ride the rest of the way home but when we hit a bump in the road he fell off the seat so in the end we had a couple of hours curled up leaning over a table in a Little Chef near Oxford.

That’s not my best memory of the Windsor Free Festival either.

When I was living at home a schoolfriend and I decided one summer that we’d go to one. Not wishing to let on to my parents where I was going I said that we were going camping, which was perfectly true.

All went well until I returned home to a pair of furious parents. The Festival had been on the news on the television and there on the 21:00 News on BBC that Sunday was Yours Truly staggering past the TV camera with a Watneys Party Seven can tucked under his arm, and all of the family, friends and neighbours had seen it.

Ahhh well. We all have memories of what and what might have been. Some more than most

"Childhood comes for me at night
Voices of my friends
Your face bathing me in light
A hope that never ends
Pages turning
Pages torn and pages burning
Faded pages, open in the sun
Better bring your own redemption when you come
TO THE BARRICADES OF HEAVEN WHERE I COME FROM
"

But anyway, after all that, I just couldn’t go back to sleep again.

So here I am, up and about, trying nicely and calmly to fit the blood pressure tester to my arm. And after several unsuccessful tries, Our Hero notes on the box that is says poignée. So put it around your wrist, you berk.

Going for a ride on the porcelain horse to calm down again, I come back and take my blood pressure.

"The aim is to have a blood pressure of below 14.0/9.0" and so with mine being 17.0/8.0, I can see that we are starting as we mean to go on.

And as for what it was at lunchtime, I forgot to take it. Start as we mean to go on indeed.

Then there were 15 pills to take and that was … errr … complicated. I earned my coffee and cornflakes after that.

So today I tidied up the kitchen area so it looks as if someone lives here, and in my spare time I made a start on the next radio programme – chosen the music, paired it off and written some of the notes. There have been a few visits and phone calls too.

But one unwelcome visitor was the taxi to take me to the Centre de Re-education. he came 20 minutes early today and I was as nature intended in the bathroom having a good scrub up

But they put me through my paces and I came back here for more spoonsful of cake and some hot chocolate.

Tea tonight was nothing complicated. Pasta and veg in a cheese sauce. Quick, simple and delicious.

With having an early start, I’ve had several moments where I’ve been away with the fairies but as usual, I’m now not tired enough to go to bed.

So which childhood voices of my friends will I hear tonight? And whose face will bathe me in light? If it really had been Zero and Castor last night, wouldn’t it be nice if they were to come back?

But it doesn’t happen like that, does it? I’ll take my blood pressure and go to bed, and probably meet some of my family heading my way. I’ve no idea why they keep on putting in an appearance like this but I wish that they’d clear off and leave room for people whom I really want to see.

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