Letter from London: The Poet, the Leader, the Bishop, and the Post-Punk Maker
Photograph Source: gnomonic – CC BY 2.0
An early love of poetry kicked in after listening to Bob Dylan and reading Wilfred Owen. But there was always the Penguin Modern Poets series in which three poets were banded together in each of its 27 books. I actually rescued a copy of Penguin Modern Poets 25 with Gavin Ewart, Zulfikar Ghose and B. S. Johnson from a charity shop once, immediately enjoying Gavin Ewart’s line, ‘I drove the hearse back at 70 m.p.h. / My worries flew away.’ A capacity for loss, I thought, reading it. Capacity for Loss just so happens to be the title of friend Adrian Dannatt’s new book of poetry launched last week at Miguel Abreu Gallery on Eldridge Street in New York. Didn’t Dylan say we should take what we can gather from coincidence?
Sudan’s former prime minister Dr Abdalla Hamdok was in London. ‘Sure we can arrange to meet,’ he texted back generously. We had been in discussion for over a year since my interest in his country was piqued next to a giant pelican of all things in St James’s Park. (I was walking with a friend who had been working in and out of Khartoum.) Dr Hamdok is for me a true man of peace. As president of the Sudan civilian movement Tagadum, which most see as the only route out of the continued fighting between SAF (Sudanese Armed Forces) and the RSF (Rapid Support Forces), there appears to be no ego to the man. With Dr Hamdok in London were fellow Taqadum delegates Ahmed Tud, Omar Manis, and Khalid Omer, one of whom I had already met in East Africa and another I since met on this trip.
A clever Brit I know who lives abroad shows no sign of returning here. He is so despondent about Blighty I begin to feel sympathy for him, which is unacceptably patronising of me. ‘The UK is at thirty five thousand feet in the middle of the Atlantic and one engine has failed,’ he wrote to me. I noted the continued ‘we’. ‘Can the other engine keep us aloft or are we going to start a decline?’ he continued, later saying: ‘Remember, it isn’t the prime minister or the King or the armed forces who are the ultimate power in this country. It’s the bond market. If the bond market doesn’t want to cooperate, it’s game over.’ To be fair, the bond market was not cooperating. So antagonistic is he at times about the present state of the country of his birth that I find myself as a result oddly protective of it. After the recent budget, he said: ‘So what has happened today is gasoline on the fire and leaves the country totally uncompetitive. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of business and finance knows how this movie ends.’ He may be right. I do not know. But I will work hard at keeping our amicability intact.
Friendship was my father-in-law’s theme at a memorial service for his oldest and closest friend in a suitably autumnal Warwickshire at the beginning of last week. ‘Keep thy friend under thy own life’s key,’ as Warwickshire’s own William Shakespeare once wrote. It was an emotional occasion. As it happened, friendship was also a theme in a fascinating one-to-one at the House of Lords with a senior Bishop the following day. A huge Liverpool football fan, he stood at the entrance like a goalkeeper. After stringent security checks, we walked to a room full of impossibly tall cupboards containing the garments of the Lords Spiritual of the House of Lords. From there we crossed a red carpet to chat over coffee, a storm-tossed sea hanging over us in the form of a seasoned oil painting. Elderly voices rose like smoke from the other tables. (‘It is, I think, good evidence of life after death,’ said Lord Soper—who I used to watch regularly at Speakers Corner—of the House of Lords.) The Bishop is a surprisingly radical man who works in some of the most dangerous parts of the world. This January he travels to the Middle East. The degree to which pragmatism has to work in order for faith to work always surprises me.
I was grateful to be in touch with musician Gareth Sagar who I first met when I followed his avant-garde post-punk journey with bands Rip Rig + Panic and Float Up CP in the early 80s. (Gareth also founded post-punk, dub and free jazz combo The Pop Group.) First time I saw Rip Rig + Panic was the first time I heard their singer Neneh Cherry. I have mentioned Gareth here before. He would prowl the stage like a London Scots tiger, keeping everyone tight and progressive. Bassist Sean Oliver, who became another friend, was one of the coolest dudes on the planet. Tireless drummer Bruce Smith was also in The Pop Group, while viola-playing Sarah Sarhandi I heard play solo not so long ago at the O2. Pianist Mark Springer I worked with on a one-off revue at Norrie McLaren’s studios in Brixton. Saxophonist David ‘Flash’ Wright I caught up with again during the dying days of the Colony Room (Gareth did Ghost Ship Trance Lamentations with Flash last year), and singer Andi Oliver, Sean’s sister, is now a successful TV chef and endearing book reviewer. How did and does Gareth do it? An under-celebrated Master of Ceremonies with a real talent for talent, if ever there was one, he was even responsible for some of late poet Jock Scot’s best work, and I am a big fan of Gareth’s solo piano work 88 Tuned Dreams.
I attended Dr Abdalla Hamdok’s main talk in the end. ‘Stopping the war is what is driving me,’ he told the room. ‘Nothing else. My mission ends on the day we stop this war.’ Independent policy institutes in the West are very good at providing important platforms deserving of visiting dignitaries whose countries are in flames. Western governments, I am afraid, less so. Not unless you consider squirrelling them away to large country houses in the middle of nowhere as advantageous. Let’s see how the UNSC fares this month chaired by the UK. It must be said that Dr Hamdok’s talk was held on a suitably autumnal day. Boots on the ground and a no-fly zone was even mooted. But the mood remained one of missed opportunities and fallen leaves. One of the reasons I have wanted to make a film on Sudan is to fill the huge vacuum created by an almost total lack of information on the viability of a civilian alternative to the bloodshed, but people are not interested in Sudan. They say they are, but there is no evidence of this. Supporters of one warring party meanwhile had gathered outside the talk with their expensively printed banners when I left. I squeezed through their many green camouflage shirts. Online that same day, a Sudanese militiaman was holding a gun to someone’s head while ordering that person to read to camera their demand. If this person’s family did not meet it, the captors were going to kill this person. And so it goes.
Finally, I revisited my rescued copy of Penguin Modern Poets 25 and was in the middle of examining the 1978 handwritten dedication on the inside front page when I suddenly realised it was penned by none other than poet Gavin Ewart himself, one of the book’s three poets. He had personally dedicated this particular copy to someone called ‘Charlotte’. I wondered if ‘Charlotte’ was still with us as I knew the poet died in 1995. In fact, studying his edgy, life-riddled handwriting, I felt for a moment like I was driving a hearse back at 70 m.p.h.
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