Author: jim clayton

horrorshow

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

Of course, I can only talk about horror films as a consumer, not a creator. I have no idea about the practical difficulties of producing a script, finding the right location, hiring actors, where to park the catering wagon and so on. I’ve no idea about the business side of it, the financing, distribution, marketing, the handshakes in boardrooms and backrooms.

And if I didn’t know that making a film was complicated, I could guess by the matryoshka of logos at the beginning. At least it gives you time to bet what the opening shot’s going to be, though. Aerial shot of a city? Children in a playground? Or (worst case scenario), a car pulling up at night and the headlights going off?

Not that I particularly watch horror films. I’m not a genrist (if that’s even a word, and if it is, it shouldn’t be). I mean, if you were invited back to someone’s house, and they said make yourself at home, and went off into the kitchen to fix some drinks, and you glanced around the shelves, and noticed box sets of Saw and Human Centipede and the like, you’d really start to wonder why he was taking so long in the kitchen.

Anyway, I’ve always thought the idea of genres was odd. For example, I recommended Annihilation to someone at work, and they said they wouldn’t watch it because they didn’t like Sci-Fi. They might just as well say they wouldn’t watch The Witch because it was shot in Pennsylvania (which might be justified, I don’t know). The thing is, Jaws and Babe are both good films in the same way (animal husbandry aside). They both have characters you care about, solid, dramatic scenarios, and a through-line that draws you from the beginning to the end in a satisfying way. I’ll get as much of a kick watching Oslo, August 31st as I will High School Musical, although I’ll feel less like singing after Oslo.

By the way, I can’t help blushing at the mention of High School Musical, because of something that happened to me in New York.

As a family we’d won some flights there (which was embarrassing in itself, as Kath helped organise the raffle). One of the things we did was visit Times Square, to see if we could get tickets for a show. Whilst we were standing in the middle of it all, looking round, a guy came over.
‘Hey!’ he said. ‘Have you seen High School Musical?’
‘Yeah! We love that show!’
He knelt down and pointed across the square.
‘You see that guy over there’, he said, lowering his voice in a stagey, confidential way. ‘D’you know who that is?’
The guy he was pointing to nodded and waved back.
‘That’s Corbin Bleu! Wanna go meet him?’
We said sure. He led us over.
Corbin was in a khaki combat jacket and jeans, his hair cropped short, looking uncomfortable, like someone whose cover had been blown.
‘Hi!’ he said. ‘Great to meet you.’
‘I thought you were great in High School Musical’ I said.
‘Wow! Thank you so much!’
‘Yeah. Really good.’
‘Do you like musicals?’
‘I do. I’ve seen a lot.’
‘Well I’m in one now. It’s called Godspell. D’you know it?’

There are moments in these interactions – markers, if you will – bobbing up and down in the choppy conversational waters, red and white stripes, flashing lights on top. Maybe a bell. The point is, you can’t miss them. And you really don’t need to be a maritime expert to know they mean danger. Pass by here and get wrecked. Something like that.

I mean – I’d heard of Godspell. It made me think of David Essex, for some reason, although maybe that was Evita. Time was passing and the bell was clanging. All I had to do was say I’d heard of it, for Godspell’s sake! But I hesitated. You see – in my defence – I didn’t think Corbin was having such a great time. I couldn’t bring myself to make it all worse by saying that I didn’t know Godspell – although, in retrospect, it would’ve given him the opportunity to say that I’d probably like it because of this or that. Whatever the reason, in the heat of the moment, instead of coming clean, I lied.

‘Yeah, I know Godspell.’
‘Have you seen a production?’
‘Yeah! It was great.’
‘When was that?’
‘Oh – a while ago now. In London.’
‘Wow! That’s fantastic! Who played Jesus?’
‘It was a long time ago now. I can’t – really – remember.’
‘Oh. Okay.’

Corbin’s minder was moving in again, no doubt already having pegged us as no-buy schmucks, and ready with the next couple of punters. We shook hands. Corbin posed for a selfie with the girls. And that was that.

A digression from the opening topic of horror films – but is it?

I mean – The Witch was pretty unsettling, I’ll admit. Particularly when the spooky rabbit stops chewing and stares directly at the lens.

If you ever see the film, take a good look at that rabbit. Because THAT was my expression when Corbin Bleu asked me about Godspell.

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live well for less

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

I get to the trolley park just in front of an elderly woman. She’s wearing a Russian style hat pulled as far down as her black and blockish sunglasses will allow, a fuschia red overcoat and grey furry boots, the whole outfit making her look like a well-dressed celebrity bear who doesn’t want any pictures.
I pull out a trolley and pass it to her.
‘There you go!’ I say.
She sighs, takes the trolley, and then stands there fussing with her bags whilst I wait to pull a trolley out for myself. Eventually she finds what she’s looking for – a shopping list written on the back of a utility bill. She hangs her shopping bags on the back of the trolley and then holds the list up to the end of her nose.
‘D’you mind if I just….?’ I say, slowly manoeuvring a trolley out.
She sighs, and shuffles off to the side.

A man and a woman are standing together in condiments.
‘We’re good for Tabasco’
‘Then why’s it on the list?’

A woman pushes a trolley with a baby girl only just old enough to sit upright in the trolley seat. The girl is singing la la la as loudly as she can, and slapping the handle of the trolley. The woman is singing la la la, too, but in a distracted way, as she scans the shelves and tosses things into the trolley.
‘Don’t you just love to hear babies sing!’ says an older woman nearby, but not directly to the woman, more in the way you do sometimes when you absent-mindedly speak a thought out loud. Actually, it looks as if she’s talking to a four pack of plum tomatoes.

I’ve made it as far as rice and pasta. A middle-aged woman strides up, stands next to me, and points with a straight arm and finger to a packet of quinoa on the shelf just above my head. She holds that position, looking off to her right. It reminds me of Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, at the end, when he points and screams.
‘Ah-ha!’ says another woman, breathlessly catching up. ‘You found it! Good!’

There’s a clear plastic rack at the checkout, pretty much empty, with just one copy left of a celebrity gossip magazine. Whilst I wait for my turn to pay, I glance over the front cover. All the insert photos are of celebrities looking depressed. Jennifer Aniston – too upset to go out; Victoria Beckham’s birthday – ruined; Cheryl Cole – devastated to find something out; Louise Redknapp – can’t believe the same thing happened again. The belt moves on. I move with it.
‘How are we today?’ says the guy at the till.
‘I’m okay, thanks! How are you?’
‘Well – it’s Friday!’ he says. ‘Mind you – what does Friday really mean these days…?’

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families, eh?

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

This is the situation. Deidre is a ninety year old woman blessed with good health, for the most part, living independently in a warden controlled flat, with only a domestic to run the vacuum over and have a bit of a tidy up on a Monday, and one or other of her sons to go shopping with her every Wednesday and the occasional days out. Unfortunately, Deidre suffered a series of falls over the last few weeks, the first almost inevitably leading to the second, and then a third, and although she escaped with nothing more serious than extensive bruising, her confidence is shot. She’s taken to her chair. There’s been something of a decline.

Deidre’s been referred to us by her GP for the usual interventions, the physiotherapy to get her strength back, the equipment to help with mobility, pharmacist to review meds, social worker to look at care needs and even a mental health nurse to test her cognitive function and chat about how she’s feeling. It’s all pretty comprehensive.

The trouble is, if the patient doesn’t want any of these things, and they’ve got the mental capacity to make that decision, there’s not much you can do about it.

And of course, Deidre doesn’t want any of these things. She won’t even consider changing her chair.

I’m not saying Deidre’s chair doesn’t look comfortable. It’s a low, luxurious, thickly-padded affair, more like a giant baseball glove than a piece of furniture. It’s the kind of chair you drop back into from a height, and land in a fixed position, and then face as much of a struggle to get out again as a breech-birth baby lamb.

Deidre’s two sons, Derek and Ian, are both here. We’ve all tried to persuade Deidre to sit somewhere more suitable. There are sensitive and subtle issues at stake, though. I’m sure it’s less about a chair and more about what it stands for, a loss of self-determination, increased vulnerability and dependence – even just an acceptance of her own mortality. It would be easy to make the chair into a symbol and lose the battle, like those stories you hear about regiments being sacrificed just to hold on to a tattered flag.

I retreat, and let the sons have a go.

Watching them, you’d never guess they were brothers.

Derek is thin, measured, quietly economical. He moves like an ascetic community monk in jeans and sweater, patiently hearing what everyone has to say, and then considering his response, hugging his knee, gently rocking backwards and forwards.

Ian is red-faced. I want to put my hands on his shoulders, take a breath, and then undo the top button of his red checked shirt, because otherwise I’m worried his head will explode. He’s so hot his glasses keep steaming up, and he wipes them clear with a handkerchief he whips out of his pocket. He even has angry feet. For some reason Ian’s not wearing any socks, and I have to say I’ve never seen such wild and livid toes, the kind you might expect to see on the feet of a devil, stomping about the cinders in Hell’s front room.

‘Will you listen to the guy?’ he says, shoving his glasses back on and then waving the hankie in my general direction. ‘That’s why he’s here, Mum! To help get you better.’
‘I’m not getting rid of this chair!’
‘But it’s not suitable, Mum! I wouldn’t be able to get out of that thing, and I’m not ninety.’
‘No. You’re not.’
‘Why won’t you sit in the other chair?’
‘Because it’s not mine.’
‘You can’t spend your whole life down there.’
‘We’ll see.’
‘Aaargh!’

He storms off into the kitchen.

Derek considers for a moment.

‘It mightn’t be for long, you know,’ he says. ‘Just until you get the strength back in your legs.’
‘I’m not getting rid of this chair.’
‘No-one’s suggesting you get rid of it, Mum. We’re just saying it’s a good idea if you use Dad’s old chair for a while. It’s easier to get in and out of.’
‘This is my chair.’

Derek smiles at me.
‘Mum’s always been very – how shall I put it? – sure of her own mind,’ he says.
‘I can see that.’

It’s always interesting to see the differences between siblings, the roles they’ve been allotted to play. Derek the calm, Ian the furious. I wonder if it’s conditioning, or simply down to genetic luck. Was there a point back in time when the young Deidre and her husband decided in some unconscious and unspoken way, that Derek was fundamentally like this, and Ian essentially like that? Or is it all down to the pull of a handle on a genetic fruit machine? The spinning of ancestral drums, the lining up of chromosomes, flashing lights, oohs, aahs, and a baby with angry feet spilling out.

‘I’m amazed you can keep your cool!’ says Ian when I go into the kitchen to ask him something.
‘It’s easier when it’s work,’ I say. ‘You should see me with my mum.’

la force de l’age

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

Christopher’s wing-back armchair is floodlit by the low sun – so much so, that every wispy strand of his white beard and short-cropped hair stands out around his head like the flux lines around a graven, magnetic rock. The whole effect is intensified by the way Christopher restlessly bobs up and down as he talks, as if all the things he’s ever read and written and thought about are violently buffeting the chair, and only the wings on the side of it are stopping him from being pitched out onto the carpet.

To his right is a tall bookcase crammed with old books, famous writers of philosophy, history, economics and so on, and then a selection devoted to T.S. Eliot; to his left is a plastic garden chair with his meds, a magnifying glass and a packet of extra strong mints.

Christopher’s been speaking without interruption now for five minutes straight – or possibly fifteen, it’s hard to keep track. The level of detail is overwhelming, from the slave colonies of Martinique to the Nanking massacre, via Stalingrad, Putin, the Mau Mau in Kenya and the perceived indiscretions of certain members of the cabinet – everything merging into a great flood of ideas, whose focus seems to be (as far as I can tell), the deep and pernicious roots of the establishment. What makes things even more difficult is that he often slips into French, his second language, quoting from writers and social movements I’ve never heard of, in particular, Aimé Césaire. But eventually his monologue slows enough for me to ask him whether after all he’s read he considers himself to be an optimist or a pessimist.

‘Oh, optimist, most definitely optimist. How could you be anything else? It’s merely a question of perspective. As a species we’ve only just begun!’ he says, grasping the arms of the chair, rocking from side to side. ‘You see, infinity is a jolly long time! You only need ask yourself – what will life be like in a million years time? A billion! Quadzillion? Especially with all the developments in robotics and artificial intelligence. I’m absolutely convinced humans will eventually live for ten thousand, FORTY thousand years! And they’ll be fluent in every language. Geniuses, all!’

He pauses for breath, and relaxes back in the chair.

‘Although I’m not sure I’d want to live much past forty thousand,’ he says. ‘I’d probably have had quite enough by then. But you see, that being the case, I could get together with all my friends and have a Socrates party, and we could all take poison!’

It’s tricky saying goodbye to Christopher, like disentangling myself from a giant, conversational octopus. I think I must have shaken his hands a dozen times but only made it halfway to the door. I’ve tried every gambit I can think of, from subtle changes of position to explicit statements of fact, but nothing stops him from talking. Eventually I’m forced to say goodbye and open the door whilst he’s still in full flow – except, as soon as there’s a sudden rush of cool air from outside, he does stop, and nods his head affirmatively a couple of times.

‘Ah! La force de l’age!’ he says. ‘A bientôt!’

 

portraits of people & their pets

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

1. Rita, 88. Leaky heart valve. Anemia of uncertain origin, possibly Heyde’s syndrome. Too frail for the op.

Sitting in the window with a heavy marmalade cat called Moo Moo on the arm of the chair. The cat makes no movement at all when I unpack my kit, resting its blue and level eyes on me.

‘Moo Moo appeared from nowhere,’ says Rita. ‘She was completely feral. I really don’t think she’s frightened of anything.’

2. Sally, 91. History of unexplained weaknesses, falls, labile blood pressure, poorly controlled diabetes.

Sally is sitting on the sofa with one white Westie sprawled on the backrest, and one in a dog crate in the alcove. Sally bunches up her sleeve and then stretches out her arm for me to take blood, propping it up one of the dog’s teddy bears. The Westie sprawled on the backrest appears to be asleep, but the one in the crate growls.

‘It’s not you, it’s me,’ says Sally. ‘He doesn’t like me using his bear.’

3. Katherine, 76. Recovering from a chest infection, general debilitation. Poor E&D.

Katherine is sitting on a two-seater sofa, bathed in a sudden wash of sunlight from the bay window. Either side of the sofa are two tall, dark wood jardinieres, each one topped with a giant palm and supported on tripod of carved lions’ feet. A Sphynx cat appears from nowhere and lands so lightly on the folder in my lap it’s hardly like an animal of substance at all, but some ethereal creature conjured from the papers and letters on Katherine’s writing desk, with half a dozen strands of fuse wire for whiskers, and two thimble-sized drops of rainwater for eyes.

‘She likes you,’ says Katherine.

 

the waiting room

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

It’s one of those houses that opens out in a surprising way, like ducking through the tiny arched doorway of a church and finding yourself in a great vaulted space. The sitting room is positively sepulchral, filled with a honeyed and dusty light from the casement windows at the far end. In the corner of the room there’s a hospital bed, a zimmer frame and commode, and then spreading out from there, a selection of easy chairs set along the walls, giving the place a sombre, waiting room feel. Around the walls there’s a patchwork of family portraits, all of them with such eager and fixed expressions, it wouldn’t surprise me if their eyes lit up when the actual person approached to take up their spot in the chair immediately beneath.
‘In some ways we were fortunate,’ whispers Raymond. ‘in that we had a lot of this equipment for grandma’s last months.’
‘That was lucky,’ I say, feeling uncomfortable about using the word luck in this context, the mother’s decline segueing neatly into the son’s.
‘By the way,’ says Raymond, leaning towards me. ‘Please don’t mention the C word.’
He taps the discharge summary on my lap, and the phrase Bladder TCC / declining further investigation, and then raises his eyebrows, to emphasise the point.
His father, Geoffrey, is surprisingly chipper, given the circumstances. He’s lying in the hospital bed, propped up with pillows, reading the paper. He’s so blasted by illness his flesh has fallen away – so much so that his glasses have slid to the end of his nose, because there’s only the vomer to keep them in place. It feels like I’ve been invited into a mausoleum and found a man prematurely set to rest there, filling the time as best he can, current affairs, quick crosswords, sudoku and so on.
‘Don’t mind me,’ he says, raising his chin to keep the glasses in place as he flips the page.
The family are doing a fine job looking after him, though. Raymond is the focal point of the whole operation, living in the house, putting in most of the work and efficiently co-ordinating the rest. In fact, Raymond is such a palpable force, it’s hard to resist the idea that he’s keeping his father alive by a conservative power of will.
‘We definitely do not want daddy going back to hospickle’ he whispers.
‘‘What are you saying now?’ says Geoffrey, laying the paper and his glasses aside.
‘Nothing, daddy. Nothing,’ says Raymond, standing up. ‘Would you like some more tea?’

 

ohio jack

~ jim clayton ~ 2 Comments

let me tell you a thing or two about ohio jack
jack was a guy who knew the way to market and back

and if it were true he couldn’t tell ya exactly what a cow’s worth
he knew full well what a bean could do if you stamped it in the earth

so when his ma finally lost it & tossed it in the garden
Jack didn’t waste time with a sorry ma’am, beggin yer parden

he jes’ lay a’bed all day, tuggin’ on a bottle o’bourbon
making spooky goosey shapes with his hands upon the curtain

and when the moon had finally risen, nice n’ full n’ round
he staggered out onto the porch n’seen a beanstalk in the ground

about where them ol’ beans’d got chucked, so high there weren’t no end to it
straight n’wide as a turnpike ride, without a single bend to it

so he took a sack, a coil a’rope, n’ wha’ d’he say? A axe?
put the rope in the sack, the axe in his belt, and slung the sack on his back

& he started there a’climbin’ – and he climbed & climbed all night
a thousand feet or more, till he climbed clean outta sight

up into this fairyland, with a cloudy kinda spring to it
an a castle with a goose, an a harp that plucked itself when he sing’d to it

well – Jack bein’ Jack, a man o’renown, he didn’t need no second telling
he stuffed the goose n’ the harp in his sack, the harp a’bitchin’ and a’yellin’

enough to wake the giant buckeye what owned that piece o’real estate
and he chased young Jack with the bulging sack clean out the castle gate

an’ they ran like that, Jack swearin’ and a sweatin’, the giant mean as a hawk
till Jack saw a leaf poking up thru’ the cloud and he knew he’d reached the stalk

Jack hurried down, hand over boots, the giant close behind
with nothing but a fire of hate to his face and a twist of revenge to his mind

but Jack landed first, he turned with his axe
and he cut through that plant in a coupla whacks

and the giant crashed down in one trailin’, pitchin’ ladder of plant
and lay there dead as anything, deader than Ulysses S. Grant

turned out the goose Jack took was worth considerable more than a parrot
lay medium sized eggs of pretty fine gold, if not twenty-four carat

so Jack and his mum were fixed for life, of that there weren’t no question
and the giant was left to rot where he fell, quite the tourist attraction

so let this be a lesson to ya – quite what, I ain’t too sure
even yer’ cloud-based buckeye needs a decent lock for the door

dogs vs. aliens

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

I don’t understand dogs.

I mean, we’ve had them for years. You’d think by now I’d be some kind of expert. And to be fair, there are plenty of things I do know. I’m pretty much the world expert on picking-up, any time of year. Leaves, snow, baked mud, deep grass, roadside – no worries. If Lola dumps five hundred yards ahead of me on the rec, I can fix the place by walking in a line using trees and molehills as orientation points, and come exactly to the spot, bag-handed and ready. I’d as soon go for a dog walk without my trousers as a good supply of poo bags (and I’d only realise I didn’t have my trousers when I went to pull out a poo bag).

So it’s not all bad news. I’m pretty good at cleaning dogs, too. Me and Lola, we’ve got it all worked out. You should see us when we get back from our walks, Lola with her legs black up to the elbow just exactly as if she’s wearing four velvet evening gloves. The whole thing’s as choreographed as Swan Lake (where the lake is a bucket of soapy water, and the swan is a nine year old lurcher): Bucket to the left; and front left paw into first position; and dip; and hold; and up; and a rub to the chest; and then bucket to the right – and so on, all the way round, finishing with a vigorous towelling and a sprint for the food bowl (Lola, not me).

It’s not that I don’t get the day-to-day stuff about dogs. It’s more the psychology of the beast, what makes a dog tick (and scratch, and twitch, and sprawl the way they do sometimes). I know a little bit about the theories behind all these things. C’mon! I know who Cesar Millan is. But the truth is, I still don’t get why they do what they do.

For example. I took Lola over the woods the other day. The moment she ran ahead she was surrounded by a pack of dogs, all of them barking, whipped on by a particularly mad beagle, running circles round the mob like a teenager doing doughnuts on a moped. I thought Lola would lose her shit and there’d be one hell of a scrap. Instead, and against all odds, she kept her cool. She was poised and statesman-like, Abraham Lincoln on the stump, letting all the fuss and excitement whirl harmlessly around her whilst she smiled benignly at the centre, radiating humanity and intelligence. I’m so, so sorry said the embarrassed woman who owned the pack, striding across to call them off. That’s quite alright, my good woman Lola seemed to say, right paw hooked in her waistcoat. No harm done. Vote Lola.

Fast forward a week. We’re just approaching the park when we see George and Ann with their golden retriever, Barney.

Let me introduce you to Barney.

Barney’s as big and woolly as a cut & shut llama without the neck.

Barney’s slow. I’ve never seen him run, or even trot, particularly. He’s happy to pad along at an even pace, sniffing his way through life, occasionally looking up with those deeply sad, llama-brown eyes, and saying: Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner, (because if Barney could speak, I’m convinced it would be in a soft, French accent)

Anyway – the most important thing to take from this is that Monsieur Barné is without any question at all a nice dog. In fact, I’d go as far as saying he’s essentially benign. You could send him off into a colony of monstrous, predatory aliens and even they would end up roffling his hair, hugging his neck and posing for selfies (then annihilating the marines and keeping a couple for incubation purposes, because hey! they’ve got an image to maintain).

So here we have a dog who may as well be wearing one of those t-shirts that says Hi! How can I help?

So what does Lola do? She curls her lip.

Why?

I have no idea. I mean, I can’t imagine it’s just a lead thing, although that’s the excuse I use when I apologise to George and Ann.

‘It’s just a lead thing. I think she’s just looking forward to her walk and she wants to get on with it.’
‘Don’t worry! Barney’s the same with a Jack Russell,’ says George. ‘Sometimes dogs just don’t get along.’

It’s such an unpleasant look, though, that lip curl. An expression of profound animosity, a hundred shades darker than simply not getting along. It’s the kind of lip curl I imagine those aliens using when they see another ship of marines coming in to land.

(NOTE TO SELF: I should totally watch Aliens tonight)

I was told once that a dog’s lead is like an aerial, a direct line between you and their brain. If you tense up, they’ll feel it immediately and go on alert, scanning the environment, trying to figure out where and what the danger is. So it’s vital to keep the lead slack, and not precipitate the very thing you hope not to happen, whether it’s lip curl, lunge, snap, bark or any other mortifying evidence of social incivility.

Dogs are incredibly sensitive, though. When they’re on the lead they’re like spiders, super-reading the tiniest vibration coming down the signal line. And I’m absolutely convinced they’ll feel those signals even if the line is slack, and even if the signal is merely a thought.

So I’m sorry, Barney.

Pas de tout! Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner. (Sorry – I just love hearing him say that).

But I’m trying, Barné. Okay? After all, it’s only been nine years…

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return to el crapado

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

There are two places everyone should visit regularly to get modern life in perspective. One is a museum, the other’s a dump.

IMG_8087Especially an old dump. There’s something haunting about this profligate scattering of old paste jars, fragments of pottery with words like award-winning, warmest and proven treatment; something resolute yet pathetic about that old tin bucket with its handle still up, or that chunk of iron machinery with the cogs fixed by rust. And there’s definitely something deluded about that grinning porcelain cat.

My mission today is not to get the world and its problems in perspective, though. I’m simply here to collect as many old Shippam’s paste jars as I can, so we can use them as candle holders.

IMG_8117It’s another craft experiment. Fad wouldn’t be too harsh. For one thing, I’ve never made candles before. For another, I’m not sure the necks will be wide enough. They’ll probably explode when the wick burns down. But it’s worth a go. There’s something pleasing about these little ribbed pots, with their embossed name across the middle like they’ve just won first prize in the paste pageant. I can imagine them in the middle of a table, scented with an essential oil. And it feels good to do some independent recycling, some re-purposing. I want to prove to them – and to me – that all the fuss of that production process in the fifties, from the fishing fleet to the glass factory, the packaging plant to the vans driving up and down the country – that great and energy consuming enterprise could lead to something more than just a limp sandwich on a soggy Saturday afternoon, and then seventy years in a dump.

There must have been a lot of sandwiches, because these paste bottles are everywhere. It’s like a paste bottle plague, lying around in large numbers on the surface, along with bigger, more alluring bottles, Lung Tonic, Sanival, Califig, and look! The leg from an old bisque doll.

I’ve gone prepared with a messenger bag and gardening gloves. (I’d thought about taking a trowel, too, but it would only have slowed me down.) As it is, I fill the bag in five minutes.

Back home, the jars washed and drying by the side of the sink, I go online to look up the whole Shippam’s paste phenomenon. There’s archive footage of the factory in Chichester, shot in 1954. Hundreds of women in white coats and hats, folding boxes, filling jars with a nozzle, packing jars, putting boxes of jars onto a conveyor belt. The voiceover is typical of the time – glassy, patrician, describing the whole procedure over a jaunty soundtrack, as if what we’re witnessing isn’t simply the production of sandwich paste, but the maintenance of the British Empire, the production of the grouting needed for all the building work, the salmon-flavoured gack to keep us all in the pink.

There are two chilling sequences.

One brand of paste is made from chickens, because we’re shown pyramid stacks of wishbones on the benches either side of the entrance. Some visitors are ushered through. We’re not told who they are. The last of them looks quite old and confused, happy to be going out somewhere – anywhere – even to a warehouse of death. For all we know this is Shippam R&D and these people are a trial ingredient. The commentator picks up the story:

‘…a feature of the factory which always appeals to visitors is the great pile of wishbones. There must be a quarter of a million of them, and twelve hundred new bones come in every day, so anyone who calls can take away a good luck token.’

Two points to be made here:
1. Why did they bring in so many bones? If they’re serious about handing out wishbones to visitors, wouldn’t a small tray suffice? Or do they have that many visitors?
2. It wasn’t such good luck for the chicken.

In the next sequence we’re introduced to one of the supervisors, a man who looks like he’s been fashioned with a palette knife out of crab paste:

‘Packing and despatch to all parts of the globe is under the guidance of Mr Twobit. He started work here 48 years ago, packing tongue. Now he has a grown up daughter in the factory.’

I don’t know what’s more unsettling. The thought of Mr Twobit packing tongue, or the thought of his daughter working there.

Still, a happy by-product of two hundred years of industrial sandwich paste making in the south east is me, scrambling around on this dump in a pair of green gardening gloves and a messenger bag filled with dirty paste jars.

I wonder what the commentator would say about that.

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el crapado

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

There’s an old rubbish dump in the woods just over the bypass. A furtive, scrag-end, hideaway kind of place. I’m guessing the last Shipman’s crab paste jar was scraped and tossed sometime in the sixties, judging by the depth of compressed leaf litter, and the age of the sycamores that have grown up on top. Maybe it’s because the ground is so steep and unstable here, or maybe it’s because the soil is flavoured by a century of oxidised metal, prussic acid and proprietary laxatives, but the sycamores have grown into contorted, high-stepping shapes, like alien scavengers scuttling over the pile, busily turning a brood of discoloured eggs with their roots.

IMG_8054I work quietly – partly because I don’t want to enrage the trees, and partly because I don’t want to attract the attention of those work operatives, whose fluorescent jackets and shouted conversations I catch periodically, just the other side of the fence.

Not that I think they’d mind me being here, unless there’s something other than bottles and broken dinner plates beneath my boots.

I’m not the only one to have stumbled on El Crapado, though. Here and there I find exploratory test pits, and bottles and jars that have been lined up on rotten tree limbs, little triage stations of value, perhaps, or photo ops.

IMG_8059I’m certainly no expert. I’ve no idea what it means when the glass seam goes all the way to the top or stops halfway. I’ve no understanding of the subtle differences between glass blowing and industrial presses, and it would take far too much research to establish whether or not any of these things are valuable. I’ve got better things to do with my time. So I concentrate on the jars I think might make an interesting container for a homemade candle, carefully picking through the strata of detritus, all the tarnished whites and greys and greens, bottles embossed with the names of cities, exotic coffees and beef drinks, poisonous blues and greens with perished caps, hunks of melted glass, fragments of pottery with ornamental writing, an old bullet casing, a plate stamped 1945, the lid of a flowery teapot, so pristine I wonder if I dug a little harder and deeper I might start to hear Moonlight Serenade, and find a table set for lunch, a family of four sat around it, frozen cup to lip.

It’s a hazardous operation. There are unexpected falls where the surface crumbles and gives way. Cavities open up. There are sharp fragments of glass everywhere. And at the bottom of it all, just the sudden roll of a hubcap beneath me, there’s a rock-filled stream, flowing as fully and freely as – I don’t know – regret?

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