…
MY SCHOOL UNIFORM
...
At my middle school
There was a school uniform
But no-one wore the school uniform
Because no-one owned the school uniform
Because you couldn’t buy the school uniform
Because none of the shops in town would stock the school uniform
Because they didn’t want the
Kind of parents
Of the kind of kids
Who went to my school
In their shop
…
…
Cordwalles Middle School was and is on the Old Dead Estate
in Camberley
where i’m from
a place i did, do, and will, hate
...
People are often saying
“The world is divided into two kinds of people”
which is an old line
and perhaps an uninterestingly obvious line
most used by uninteresting people...
...
Where my pseudo-divide of our Human Race would be
“there are two kinds of people
those who like where they come from
and those who don’t”
...
And me
i fall very much into the latter
i don’t
...
I’m always meeting Scousers, Mancs, Weegies...
and folk from Montreal, Bristol, Vancouver, Oxford, New York, Boulder, Toronto, San Francisco, etc, etc...
Melbourne, Aberdeen, Leeds, Brighton, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Budapest, etc, etc...
from Alberqueue, Valencia, Perth, Galway, Boston, etc, etc...
who love where they come from.
...
Well me, i envy them
because i’m not like that
because i come from Camberley in Surrey.
and blimey it was crap.
...
People have said to me things like
“Camberley, that’s a really lousy place to be from.”
And its hard to disagree.
I certainly have no pride in the place.
Zero.
Nada.
In fact i always hated it when i was growing up…
super-conservative,
proto-Thatcherite,
small-minded,
70s working-class aspirational,
and, most unnotably, with nothing to do
...
Its the kind of place punk rock was made for.
Made to blow up.
Made to give some hope
yes hope
to the kids who lived there,
were stranded there.
...
Me and my brother Chris did pretty well in our school exams.
Because we worked extra hard at school.
Where much of our incentive was that we worked out, fairly young
that college was going to be the easiest way out of Camberley.
So we got good results.
And we left.
...
I always said,
“the only nice thing about Camberley is my parents”
who lived there almost fifty years
in the house of my youth.
and died there.
...
It was a rather non-place
depending, of course, on what you want in life.
And me, i never wanted that…
Home-Counties quiet suburban life.
A lot of people like it,
my Mum and Dad liked it,
a probable majority of the human race who ever lived would like it,
would probably swap their lives
for that comfortable existence
at the drop of a hat.
But not me.
...
I would say on stage
“I like to think there’s been a few achievements in my life
and the main one is not being in Camberley anymore.”
...
So its in Surrey, by the Hants-Berks border.
Guildford, Reading, Farnham, ish.
Camberley.
Tory.
Very.
Large conservative majorities
ad infinitum,
ad nauseam,
[until 2024]
...
Surrey is, if you don’t know, the wealthiest county in Britain.
Its very stockbroker belt.
While Camberley itself is very military.
Its Sandhurst Army College, Camberley Army College,
the home of the officers of the British Army
So it was retired colonels writing disgusted letters to the local newspaper.
You know, the Empire’s dead, but they’re not.
...
Where the Army would train in our woods
the woods i spent much of my youth in
roaming around the bracken the heather the straw
...
And there would be the sound of gunfire
so, yes
I Grew Up To The Sound Of Gunfire
But They Were Only Blanks
though as there was a rifle-range there
they wouldn’t all have been blanks
...
It was the kind of place where you can be in the woods,
reading a book in the straw or the heather or the bracken,
and a couple of bushes walk past,
but you don’t ask any questions of those bushes,
because those bushes contain members of the SAS,
or the Gurkhas,
or even, maybe, at times, the British Royal family.
...
More than once I saw a couple of bushes consult each other,
trying to work out if this boho reading Bukowski in the straw
[i.e. me]
is part of the exercise or not.
and then they decide that I’m not and they ...
drift on slowly...
into the undergrowth.
…
Its that kind of place.
...
I used to do the short poem at the top about it.
O yes.
I’m a comprehensive peasant.
While my secondary school was Collingwood Comprehensive,
and, like all my three schools,
it was on the Old Dean in Camberley,
then the roughest estate for miles.
It was a hard school,
and you know when i say “hard” the “ar” is long... arrr...
A lot of the boys in my year ended up in jail…
...
And my middle-school was Cordwalles,
also on the Old Dean,
where no-one wore the school uniform.
...
O yes.
...
Isn’t that crap.
Isn’t that hideous?
Isn’t that crappy-arsed English snobbery at its worst?
...
Yes it is.
...
Like I said, I’m superglad I’m gone,
I’m out,
I’m else.
…
…
i reckon my first venture into poetry
of any kind
would have been at Cordwalles
at aged ten
when i renamed School
“Schoolditz”
…
Colditz being a new 1972 BBC TV series
set in the infamous Prisoner of War Castle
...
they put high wire fence around the tennis court that was our playground
so i thought
“Schoolditz”
and got everyone to start calling school Schoolditz
...
this
if my memory serves me
is actually true
and this neologism would likely be my first poetic creation
...
...
so i come from the wrong side of the tracks…
the old Roman road, the A 30
being the “tracks” we were on the wrong side of
...
...
...
in other news
...
next step the next step
and the next step brought me here
Pela
...
so am currently sat drinking tea
that tastes like honey
on some wooden steps
in front of my wooden longhouse homestay
by the kilometre-long wooden boardwalk
that is the stilted village of Pela
on the Pela River
which stretches between Danau Selangat
that’s Lake Selangat
and the mighty Mahakam River
...
where the Pela is host to
the entire River Dolphin population of this part of Indonesia
and where there are 66 left
though i haven’t seen one yet
...
Pela is pretty lovely
and so
after eight days in the country
I finally found somewhere nice
after some good days in the lively
but rather unattractive
cities of Balikpapan and Samarinda
and after two hovels in Kota Bagung
one a proper unvarnishedly shitty hovel
here i am
in a comfortable longhouse
by the boardwalk
all on five or twenty foot or so of stilts
...
and where its extremely hot
…
Lake Selangat… I thought i was going to the jungle…
…
more about Pela later
this post is about Camberley
...
Pela in the flesh is more together than photos make it look…