Change:

Promise me you'll always remember: You're braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.

-AA Milne

Retox.  Detox.  Repeat ad infinitum. 

So, I came through the festive season relatively unscathed.  I had the proverbial ‘good Christmas’, which Scouse readers will know is a euphemism for ‘you fat bastard’.  It had gotten to the point where if I had one more Celebration, I could have joined Kool And The Gang.  My mental health, after several counselling sessions was slowly improving.  The physical health was not being dragged along in its slipstream.

Therefore, something had to give.  I saw a picture of myself, on that great leveller Facebook.  I’m playing video games with my stepson.  I’m wearing an Arran sweater, and I look like a fat fisherman, mystified by this little box of delights.  I therefore decided that, something had to give. 

The mental health is slowly recovering.  And sometimes, this new sense of clarity is a struggle.  Sometimes, it’s easy.  I’m starting each day with stretching and breathing exercises. It makes my mind settle; birdlike in the tree of my soul.  I also do this before I start writing.  I’ve always seen this as a ritualistic process, maybe this is another iteration of the same thing, but it seems to get results.  I recognise an honesty in my writing, that I didn’t have five years ago.

I’m still walking, but going in a different direction.  Rather than downhill, towards the lurid lights and fleshpots of what most people call ‘the garage’.  But uphill, with the sheep and cattle wondering who the Scouser in the Star Wars hat and Liverpool FC gloves is.  The farm animals are the only thing out there; the valley dips and settles itself into the land.  The walks are longer, quieter, more reflective.  Occasionally, I stop to let the hourly bus pass me by.  More often, I pull myself into the bushes; as someone flies past – driving like Ed Sheeran, ninety miles an hour down country lanes.

 

I’ll stop at the signpost that points back to the village; or to the nearest market town of Tiverton.  It all helps with the weight loss, let alone the mental de-cluttering.

As readers will now, I am a stepfather to a ten year old boy.  Who never stops talking, never stops moving, never stops eating.  I have to take him to play football once a week, running around the long grass and pot holes, of what is laughably called ‘ the village park’ is much easier.  I’m still, eagerly awaiting the call from Jürgen Klopp, telling me that Mo Salah is injured.  Can I get up to Liverpool this afternoon? 

Boom. 

My boy is also growing up to be a thrillseeker.  He went zip wiring a few months ago and Papa had to come with him.  Now, that I am much lighter I am genuinely looking forward to the experience.  He’s also planning our trip to the one at The Eden Project, where you fly across the bio domes.  As he gets older, I have a feeling he’s going to be an extreme sports nutter, throwing himself out of planes listening to Soundgarden.  Maybe, I’ll join him.  Maybe, I’ll join him. 

I’ve fallen in love with books again.  I’m actually greedy for them, fascinated by them, spending in general a fortnight over them, dealing with deep, crisp, even prose. And then I want the next one.  I recently finished (and heartily recommend) Anthony Beevor’s book on Arnhem.  I’m going to start Detroit ‘67 by Stuart Cosgrove next, which looks an equally weighty, well-researched, luxuriant read.

That’s not to say, I’m going to read everything or experience everything to feel something.  I’ve taken a load of books and DVD’s to the charity shop.  It was a detox of negativity, the darkest books imaginable; the most harrowing films I had.    I don’t need to watch It’s A Wonderful Life for the umpteenth time, to make myself feel better.  I also did a digital detox, deleting the last four episodes of S2 of The Handmaid’s Tale I hadn’t seen from the TV box.  I recognise its craft, but at the same time what is going on is much darker, much more relevant, and more important.

If you look at this way: I live in a country, where my leader is an opportunist.  Her Plan A was shite; Plan B was an even shittier version of Plan A.  I’m seeing more RAF plans flying low, presumably practising for food drops.  Over in America, we have a toddler in fake tan, who has unleashed several kinds of hatred upon the world.  What’s going on in Gilead is a little less important. 

So, it’s a symbiotic process, making the mind and body a little better.  It’s the same process everyone goes through, at this time of the year.  Everyone in the universe, even those in distant, alien civilisations, light years away; wakes up on New Year’s Day and goes ‘What the fuck?’ I’m not a lifestyle guru.  I’m not Marie Kordo, who recently advocated getting rid of books that you’ve read.  In a book.  I’m not saying follow me.  I’m suspicious of people who need followers.  I’m just saying, in the words of a great Indian philosopher: ‘Is this the real life?  Is this just fantasy?’  If you want 2019, to be a year in which you make changes, change the world, change a habit… anything is possible.

Radio:

‘TV gives everyone an image, but radio gives birth to a million images in a million brains;

-        Peggy Noonan

If I can remember my first radio, it was among my late grandma’s possessions.  It was a weird beast, a mix of red leather and battered chrome.  On reflection now, it resembles the kind of thing that could be bought from a steampunk branch of Ann Summers.  It certainly gave me pleasure in bed, anyway.   I used to lay there, listening to late night Radio City, surreptitously beyond my bedtime. 

Radio City, was a glamourous name for the local station based in a dingy Liverpool backstreet.  It’s owned by the multimedia monster that is Bauer.  Its home now is what used to be St John’s Beacon, a Liverpool landmark and like all Bauer stations; playing Taylor Swift twelve times a day.  Back in the late 1970’s, it featured Alan Bleasdale doing a whole show as his creation; Franny Scully.  Social satire, with pop music in-between. 

It was followed by Keith Chegwin, so maybe nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.

Radio, is a reflection of personality.  I moved onto wunnerful Radio One, soon enough.  To my shame, I enjoyed the laddish bollocks of Chris Evans/Moyles.  Perhaps the two were interchangeable, like a Lego figure, where the head can be removed at the neck and what I can now recognise as men, behaving like teenage pricks and getting paid for it.  Your taste in all things, from religion to radio evolves as you get older.  Peel was always there.  Urbane, laconic and playing music that ranged from the Damascene; to the wildly uncommercial. 

Now, a quick clarification: I’m not one of these people who claim to have listened to Peel every night.  I don’t believe anyone actually did.  When I did, it was a metaphysical sound of someone wilfully setting their own boundaries; inviting us to the edge of what is sonically possible – let alone acceptable.  He continued this one week when he sat in for Jakki Brambles (again, ask Alexa); terrifying the populace by playing The Fall(uh) during daylight hours and taking off Chris Issak (Alexa, why did Chris Issak get a record deal?) midway through a plaintive/solipsistic ballad called Can’t Do A Thing (To Stop Me).

Maybe, radio is all down to personality.  Maybe you have to listen to something that suits your personality, reflects back your very soul.  Maybe that’s why I listen to 6Music so much, since I discovered it in the dim and distant past (or ‘2005’, as historians now call it), it’s been my go-to station. I’m a critical listener though.  I don’t like everything they play: there’s far too much Shenzhen Northern Soul and records that are both mentally and tonally stuck in 1984. I also find Mary Anne Hobbs massively pretentious.  Let’s see how her predilection for telling us about the sun rising over Salford Quays plays out mid-mornings. 

The converse is the grumpy wit of Shaun Keavney, now shifted from sunrise to lunchtime.  And there is that thread of DNA to Peel in Tom Ravenscroft.  He’s just as obstinate as his Dad, displaying the grit and steel of the Liverpool midfielder he’s named after.  Maybe as you get older, you develop your own taste, filtered through the tongues and speech of those around you.  You sort of notice the common threads of radio, the same nifty feature idea that everyone else had.  As we travel the country a lot, I can tell you that originality is in short supply.

For instance, everyone does a local radio phone-in.  That safety valve for the mentally distressed/Daily Mail readers.  They don’t incite debate or good radio; they just raise my blood pressure.  Particularly those with an hourly theme for calls.  We heard a BBC Somerset Phone-in where the theme was ‘If a vegetable was hidden under your mattress, would you know what it was?’  No, I’m not making this up.  See also: The Golden Hour.  Radio and TV signals travel into space.  I guarantee you in a star swept, dark corner of the galaxy; an alien civilisation can guess the year where these records were hits. 

Then again, Popmaster is the best quiz on the radio.  I also used to love Brain Of Devon (a crossword on the radio) on BBC Radio Devon.  I recently found out it has came to an end and I mourn its passing.  It’s replacement (yet to be announced at the time of writing), won’t be as good. I guarantee you.   

I have the radio on constantly, whether it’s on a bus, writing this blog  or doing the dishes.  It’s a constant friend and like a constant friend, it has an alternating current of joy/annoyance.  I love football, but hate listening to on the radio.  It’s one person’s opinions, spread thinly for ninety minutes, the mispronunciation of player names and a poor substitute for being there/watching it on telly.  It may well have been the origin of the phrase ‘back to square one’;  but it remains one of the things that boil my piss, to use a great Scouse phrase. 

How I listen to it, will change.  What I listen to… is never fixed in stone.  But the weird beast is still there, singing its siren songs.  Informing, educating and entertaining.  Turn it on. Now. You might learn something; you might hear yourself reflected back in a way you never knew.