Hay Fever Days of June

The hay fever days of June and don’t I just love them? Rubbing my eyes in the early evening before another sneezing fit. Yes, that is really what life is all about. Still there are millions of other poor sufferers just like me at the moment so I am sure that I am not alone in making these type of observations. London is going through a hot spell at the moment, a very hot one but who knows how long it will last? Could be until the end of the weekend or until the end of time. As far as this current patch is concerned the temperatures rose at the beginning of the week and at present show no sign of coming down. There is a heat haze on the streets, the sky is blue in the mornings before the accumulation of the day’s pollution turns it a milky white by the late afternoon, but the heat is always there and when we go to be the room is warm enough for us to have to lie on the duvet rather than under it. This means that I wake up in the middle of the night when the temperature has dropped and crawl under the covers, and that is a nice feeling.

Just finished reading a rather harsh biography of Van Morrison called No Surrender by Johnny Rogan. Apart from reading books and listening to music there is not a hell of a lot that I do at the moment, apart from worry like hell over what has become of my life. Work on the allotment is not happening this year because we have got a new car and I don’t want to mess it up carrying garden tools in the back of it. Oh no, not my Toyota Avensis which I paid the best part of 13 grand for when it only had 14,000 miles on the clock. If we were allowed to have sheds on the allotment ground it would be a different matter I guess, but the fact is that we can’t and that means everything has to go there and back by car every time that you want to do some work on it. Plus the fact that it is exactly 7 miles through Epping Forest which on a bad day traffic wise can take a good 20 minutes makes it suddenly seem distinctly unattractive. So all in all after 4 years of growing and harvesting I think the time has come to pull the plug. Let the weeds have their day until someone else comes along and carries on from where the Ghost left off. There are council allotments close by to where we live and I have called the London Borough of Redbridge enquiring about the possibility of taking a plot there but typically I have had no response. I will probably call again soon and leave another message on the eternal answer machine from which messages are probably picked up only once every 6 months.

Anyway back to the point and I have to say the Van Morrison biography was a good read in the sense that you get a clear overview of his recording career and it is especially good in the early stages as it charts the progress of Van the struggling Irish show band musician working his way out of the Province. But as the book progresses it is also very negative towards Van as a person, the author seems to chose to talk to people who have hardly a good word to say about him and the longer this goes on the more the author’s true feelings towards his subject are displayed, by the end of which painting a fairly dismal picture. The later Van Morrison works are hardly analysed at all, for example Rogan hardly bothers to review a single cut from 2003’s What’s Wrong With This Picture? This and other albums post 2000 are just dismissed and placed in the context of the behaviour of an awkward personality who listens to no one and is unlikely to change now. This is a serious disservice as there has been a lot of fine material produced by Van over the last few years.

A few ridiculous comparisons are thrown in as well, purely for the purpose of belittling Van and they reflect badly on the author who at certain points is just getting stuck in. Rogan writes for example that the idea of Bob Dylan supporting Van Morrison (which is what happened on a brief UK tour in the ‘90s) is like having the Beatles as the warm up act for Freddy and the Dreamers. Well I know that if you put the two performers together Dylan is clearly going to emerge as the more significant but really the difference is neither as great or as extreme as the author would have us believe. When Rogan writes things like this it is going to be dismissed by out of hand by virtually anyone who knows anything about either Morrison or Dylan. Then what we are left with is a clear picture of the author’s real feelings and intentions towards his subject and the obvious conclusion to draw is that they are not friendly. This is a shame as there is no doubt that Van Morrison is not the easiest person in the world to get along with, but at the same time it is equally true that his has made and continues to make some wonderful music. Therefore an interesting project would be to try to work out how this happens when the gulf between some aspects of his personality and the work he produces is so marked.

So there you go, this is what has been occupying my mind over the last few days as I continue to live this wonderful life in East London 2006, well not East London in the sense of the old East End but rather Woodford, a place on the cusp of the hard materialism of Essex country where flash is all that counts.