Cold Fish Soup
It is a gem of a book, an unflinching look at Withernsea, the lure of the seaside town for the hopeless: ‘People whose lives have crumbled often move to the seaside in the hope of recapturing their lives when they were at their best. They remember cliches of day trips, potent sense memories. Uncomplicated, sun-soaked family times’. The reality is ‘poverty, economic uncertainty and lack of opportunities were driving people to substance abuse and depression…’. He describes the future of Withernsea as ‘tightening like a noose’. A certain type of writer, myself included, is pulled to all that is defective, unloved, hopeless, seeing in these things a truer sense of the world; believing that those parts doomed to be forgotten and passed over hold the larger truths of our lives. The mundane fabric that writes white; the unseen work of life whose fate is to be forgotten.
Alison Armstrong reviews Adam Farrer‘s Cold Fish Soup.
Orpington to London Victoria #6 – George Berger Column
When I was young & innocent, my first window into the world was the Roberts transistor radio. Learning language was closely followed by hearing song lyrics. Words that swept me away from the banality of the living room and into magical worlds that would inform my life’s hopes, dreams and ambitions.
The New Seekers promise intrigued me: “there’s a new world out there, they call the Promised Land”. Scott Mackenzie’s musical travelogue informed me that if I made it to San Francisco “you’re gonna meet some gentle people there”. The cornucopia of other songs filled with late 60s peace-loving optimism gave me a great sense of a better future on the way.
Beckenham Junction. Being the sixth in a series of psychogeographical memories of the trainline that took George Berger from nowhere and nothing to somewhere and …something. Or other.