Very Expert Vandalism
10 February 1990, Saturday, Glasgow
Barras.
In the evening I went along to the Transmission gallery (7.30) to the opening of an exhibition of work by Czechoslovakian photographers. One of them may have been an installationist who took photos to preserve their work. They were very bad photos. The other photographer was using negative exposures of statues, Indians and Aborigines and naked woman. This was a bit better although they were arranged in rather pointless groups.
On the way to the gallery, through the rain, I saw some kids smashing up a phonebox. It was really one kid being braved into doing it by a group of others. He was quite expert at it and obviously had brought a hammer or something similarly percussive along for the job. It only took one little tap for the whole pane to frost up, webbed with cracks with only a little hole at the centre where the impact had occurred. He did one, ran back to confer with his friends and they, obviously being dissatisfied with just one petty piece of vandalism, sent him back to smash all the other panes in the box. This he did with evident glee. It would be nice to think they were making a comment on the recent announcement of BT’s massive profits and the fact that it costs £154 to get a phone reconnected but I doubt they had any motive.
At the gallery I spoke to Glenn and Nancy, to the gallery treasurer (a man with a beard) and a woman whose son was called Jamie.
I had a brief conversation with an English Art Student, up from Chelsea, who had a long fringe/ponytail of blonde hair. Whilst walking home from the gallery I met him again. I decided to go along with him to ‘The Odeon’. This I’d seen from the outside as a very expensive, yuppie place, but on the very-inside there was a sort of ur-pub where people in less ostentatiously costly clothes were sitting on the floor. There were several other students from Chelsea and a sculptor whose sister was doing the course. He genned me up on the Enterprise Allowance1 which I think I’ll apply for. It’s £40 a week instead of £28. I’m getting a bit more used to introducing myself as a writer. Saying I was a student was always a bit of a disguise. I enjoyed talking to the guy with blonde hair, wished I was speaking to the sister and, when we eventually got thrown out of the bar, invited them all for coffee in my room. They accepted. When I asked what they thought of the room the sister said I needed to put up some fabrics on the wall. Another girl, dark haired, heavy eyed, objected to the rubbish. When you live on your own you tend to forget messes like that. I think I do need something on the wall. Not so much for my own sake — I can live with bare walls — but so that visitors think I actually live here.
Note in tiny diary —
A woman with a book she’s just begun stands in the doorway. Chapter One.
Undated Poem.
Toby writes doggerel2.
Lorca was a corker
at age of seventeen
you see the photo I have
and you’ll see what I mean.
Rimbaud had the sort of looks
girls fight eachother for
but by the time the scrap was over
he’d left with a monsieur.
Here my memory was faulty. I believed, and have said since, that I headed to Glasgow because I knew the Enterprise Allowance Scheme was more liberal there. That they — the DHSS — allowed you to go on it if you were starting a band, or writing a novel, whereas in Bedford you needed to be opening a shop selling chocolates or setting up as a painter-decorator. It seems that this wasn’t my reason for choosing Glasgow as the place to go after I was given a month to leave home. If it had been, I’d have started trying to get on the Scheme from day one. To get more money. Looking back, I see I’d rewritten myself as more of a sorted out planner than I was; evidence shows, I was a pantser, just as I am now.
In the introduction to his edition of Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems (1981, Faber), Ted Hughes wrote. ‘To my knowledge, she never scrapped any of her poetic efforts. With one or two exceptions, she brought every piece she worked on to some final form acceptable to her, rejecting at most the odd verse, or a false head or a false tail. Her attitude to verse was artisan-like: if she couldn’t get a table out of the material, she was quite happy to get a chair, or even a toy.’ I always admired this attitude, but I wasn’t able to keep up that level of commitment. Some writings, I knew, were for the notebook alone.