Читать книгу Sex & Bowls & Rock and Roll: How I Swapped My Rock Dreams for Village Greens - Alex Marsh - Страница 6

‘Excuse me?’

There is a voice. I turn, surprised, from the post box to locate its source.

A man is ambling over from a small four-by-four thing. He is demonstrably from a town somewhere – it is one of those designer jobs that no genuine country-dweller from round here would dream of possessing. The engine chugs over, chug chug chug chug chug. He is clearly the source of the ‘Excuse me.’ I allow my letter to fall from my hand into the post box’s receptive womb, easing my wrist from its slot and giving my new acquaintance my full attention.

Silver-haired, he is wearing immaculate cream pressed slacks, which reveal that he is comfortably off and retired, and probably has a wife named Pat.

‘I don’t suppose you know where these agents are based?’ He gesticulates towards the ‘For Sale’ sign on the bungalow over the road.

A number of houses around mine are for sale – I do not know whether to take this personally or not. This particular one right opposite has been on the market since about Wednesday, 14th March at 11.32 a.m., and I am excited that I might be meeting a potential new neighbour. New people! I study his face closely. I will need to remember, so that I can report the details back to everybody at the village pub.

I give him the information he requires, waving my hand in the general direction of the coast. He asks me what living in the village is like, and I offer him long examples of how we all know what each other is doing and just pop into each other’s houses to say hello at any time of day or night, sometimes when we have been drinking heavily. It is a neighbourly community like that. He looks a bit less enthusiastic after this, and glances over his shoulder several times as he retreats to his car before accelerating off at some speed, doubtless to catch the estate agents before the shops close for the evening.

He did seem like a pleasant chap, and I am determined to stick by my parting words to him: that I would be quite happy to give him a hand with carrying all his stuff from the van when he eventually moves in.

Before he disappears around the corner, I make sure to take the number of his car. He is not from round here, after all, and he could have been looking at houses for sale with a view to committing some crime. I remember it all the way across the road, all up the path and into the kitchen, where I scribble it on the corner of some newspaper, along with ‘Old bloke. Silver hair. McJeep.’

There is no more excitement, but it will be good to have something extra-interesting to tell the LTLP when she gets home. Time is getting on – I need a bath and something to eat before I go.

I can’t remember exactly when I gave up.

It was probably on a platform at Harringay Station. Perhaps and probably it was raining. Harringay Station in the rain, fighting with hundreds of others for a modicum of shelter under the narrow footbridge, the loudspeaker broadcasting crackling messages of doom from a British Rail announcer based hundreds of miles away in a secret bunker buried deep beneath the Cairngorm mountains.

‘We apologise for the delay to the seven forty-four service to London Moorgate. This service is running approximately fifty-two minutes late. The first train to arrive will be the eight fourteen service, also to London Moorgate. Due to a short train, this service will consist of half a coach only, which will be of convertible open-top design, have no seats, and will be powered by passenger-manned oars. We apologise for any inconvenience that this might possibly cause you. To cheer you up, here is some music by the Stereophonics.’

When I say ‘a platform’, that implies a multitude of the things. In fact, there are but two platforms at Harringay Station. Standing, boxed in, elbow to arse with frustrated Key Account Executives and Change Implementation Managers and Human Resource Officers. Waiting, worrying if the tingly electricness of the rain is a genuine cause for concern as it drips from the overhead power lines onto your face. Pacing, irresistibly tempted to bolt for that footbridge, to leap aboard one of the frequent empty and invariably on-time trains returning north from the City, and head for the overwhelming excitement and vibrancy of Enfield Chase, New Southgate or, at a pinch, even Potter’s Bar. But of course you don’t. The train arrives and you fight for any form of nook, stuffing yourself frantically up against your fellow passengers like a veal calf undergoing sardine-replacement therapy.

Yes, it must have been then that I gave up. Then.

I’ve never given up on the music, however.

OK, I’m a bit older now. But Debbie Harry was already thirty when Blondie was formed; she was thirty-five when they released ‘Atomic’, which would have made her almost as old as I am. And yet she was famous and successful the world over at this late age, becoming an icon and achieving sales in the millions of millions, with men becoming physically sexually aroused – literally sexually aroused – whenever she sang or appeared on Top of the Pops. I’ve almost got there once, having supported the Sultans of Ping on one key date of their seminal 1992 UK tour. But Debbie Harry is one hell of an inspiration, and a lesson to anybody who thinks that exciting popular music can only be made by teenagers. Given just one small lucky break, there really is no reason whatsoever why I should not be the next Debbie Harry, but with women.

I call her ‘the LTLP’ for the purposes of the narrative.

I don’t want to upset her by using her real name. The WAGs are generally lower-key than their football equivalents; more down-to-earth and less publicity-hungry. She is my life-partner and has been for a long time; one of the very few people who have been both WAG and rock-chick wife. Every bowls player needs their Yoko Ono figure. She gives me an airy wave as I leave the house.

The canvas bag is weighty, betraying my relative novice status with its clean newness. It contains my four bowls (or ‘woods’, as we bowls people know them), an old beer towel for wiping purposes and some deeply, deeply unfashionable shoes. You have to have four woods, even though you only ever use two, as otherwise the other bowlers will laugh at you and think that you are some sort of idiot amateur without all the proper equipment. I lug it down the drive, across the road, and then sprint to Big Andy’s as fast as an unfit fat bloke carrying a rigid square bag of heavy bowls implements can sprint. He is jangling car keys impatiently; Mrs Big Andy stands hands-on-hips in their doorway, shaking her head and making ‘have a good evening, if this is really the way you want to spend your Friday night’ noises. I leap into the passenger seat and we are away in a haze of dust and sporting expectation.

In my pocket: house keys, some small change, a mobile phone. A mobile phone! Why do I bother with a mobile phone these days? I do not have important people to call any more; there is no reason why anybody would need to get hold of me. I get the odd text message from Short Tony that simply reads ‘pub?’, but seeing that he lives in the cottage next door you cannot really count the mobile connection as a vital communications lifeline. My mum and dad have a mobile phone but do not know how to use it; the LTLP knows where I’ll be all day. My friend Unlucky John, the only other person in the world whom I speak to, tends to prefer mobile to landline. But he’s in London, where such status is important.

It is a comfort thing, however. I will have it to hand should there be an emergency at bowls. The LTLP’s employers have given her a BlackBerry, which means that half the emails that pop up in my inbox with a cheerful ‘bing!’, causing such excitement and anticipation, turn out to be mundane and uninteresting things like ‘get the dinner on and don’t burn it this time you idiot’. So I took her old phone when my one finally gave up the ghost. It is a bright lurid pink Motorola, small and dainty, and adorned with girlish graphics.

But who cares? Once, this pink phone would have been a shameful accessory for me, as I wandered amidst the Neanderthal plains of people in chequered suits and wanky black-rimmed spectacles, of braying rah rah me me me idiots, of money-and-status-obsessed bottled-beer-drinking, testosteroned pre-Dibley clowns. That’s one of the big advantages of living in a tiny village in Norfolk. Nobody is particularly bothered about the superficial. Just one more stupid unnecessary mental weight that disappears when you leave the world of commuter trains and Strategic HR Initiatives.

It’s an easy-going game; none of the other bowlers really mind if you leave your phone on through the evening. Aside from that one time when it escalated a bit, and people ended up shouting ‘Well fuck you then! Fuck you!’ at each other, across the green. That was an exception.

Personally, I have a system. I keep my mobile phone switched on just in case there is an emergency or somebody important does call – but I make sure that I leave it in the pocket of my anorak which hangs in the clubhouse. That way nobody will hear it ringing and be disturbed during a crucial end. It seems a reasonable compromise.

Yes, my name is Alex Marsh and I play bowls.

I am thirty-thing years old, and I play bowls. Bowls is what I play. I am not ashamed of it; I do not seek to apologise or be defensive. I play bowls. It is not as if I am Mrs Karen Matthews, or have been exposed having sex with livestock on YouTube, or wrote and produced ‘There’s No One Quite Like Grandma’. I play my bowls with pride. I would shout it from the rooftops, but I am afraid of heights.

My name is Alex Marsh and I play bowls. And so does Eddie, and Nigel, and Big Andy, and even John Twonil’s been persuaded to give it a try. We are the exciting new faces of the sport. It sits oddly with the guitar hero status, I know. But there have been stranger combinations. Rock and roll, bowls; bowls, rock and roll. There’s nothing mutually exclusive – it does not need to be an either/or. One does not preclude the other. It is perfectly possible to both jack, and to Fleetwood Mac.

Barry Hearn knows.

Barry Hearn is the legendary sporting Svengali who does the snooker, and boxing, and darts. The man who made Steve Davis. The Don King of Romford. The Billy Graham of the baize. What Barry Hearn doesn’t know about marketing sport isn’t worth knowing. And he thinks bowls is going to be the next thing – which is why he has put it on Sky TV, during peak morning viewing. So scoff at the beautiful sport at your peril.

I suppose I have mixed feelings about this. It is like when you discover a new band – you want them to be your own special band all to yourself. You do not want them to become popular and mainstream and put on by consensus as background music at dinner parties. And whilst wishing your special band all the goodwill in the world, you would rather that they starved in the gutter than enjoyed any form of commercial success, as this would spoil it for you.

Something a bit like that happened to my own band. However, more of that later.

Will bowls as we know it survive the Sky TV experience? Will it retain its unique nature, or will it sell out to the forces of Evil Marketing? Will the money grow and nurture it, or will it corrupt it? Will it retain the nobility of sport, or will it descend into a new WWF pantomime?

The television camera itself is a great distortion pedal, a two-dimensional screen that loses the subtleties and many of the unsubtleties also. When you watch cricket, it’s impossible to judge how fast the bowler’s letting the ball go – you have to work it out from where the wicket keeper’s standing. Football is robbed of the intense physical aspect, horse racing is sterile without the flying hooves and mud; long pots on the snooker table appear easy and unmissable. I would not want the casual Sky TV viewer to see what I do every week and to dismiss it casually as some gentle meandering pastime. That would be crushing. But I think Barry Hearn and I are on the same wavelength.

Barry Hearn knows that it’s the new rock and roll.

‘Here you go.’

Nigel strides like a parade sergeant before the row of benches, where we are sitting changing into our deeply, deeply unfashionable shoes. He stops at each player and hands out new kit from a plastic bag – a brand-new, pristine, never-been-used, soft and lovely Stella Artois beer towel.

‘Thanks!’ I say in surprise.

‘I got them from work,’ he explains, moving on to Glen. ‘Given to me.’

Along the line, people take their towels and beam in gratitude, holding them up to look closer. Matching beer towels! The whole thing looks bloody professional, in tune with the new image of bowls, a co-ordinated wave of red that will raise pride and morale in the team, aside from providing more efficient wiping.

That’s us. The village bowls team. Sponsored by Wifebeater Lager.

It’s just a roll-up tonight. No opposition – merely a friendly opportunity to get together and to have a bit of practice before the league starts in earnest. But there is still a buzz of excitement in the air. The dawn of a new season – the first date on my headlining UK tour. The bowling green is my raised stage; the woods are my guitar, and the mat represents my effects pedals. I have not actually ever been on a headlining UK tour, but the parallel is there. The scoreboard is my set list; the beer towel is my guitar lead. Nigel, skipper of our block, is my bass player; Big Andy is my drummer. We don’t have a screaming hysterical audience of teenage girls – our most loyal and regular supporter has been unable to turn out to spectate since he got his foot amputated – although Eileen is here, and she sometimes likes to sit and watch, chucking in the odd heckle, in lieu of playing. But the parallel is definitely there.

I am pleased with my analogy. Songwriting is all about analogies – good songwriting is all about unexpected, hidden ones. ‘There She Goes’ by the La’s is about heroin, not a lady who is going. Really, playing bowls is just like being in a successful rock band. I can’t really see many differences.

Big Andy, Nigel and I do play like a well-drilled trio. We are comfortable in each other’s presence; there is a telepathy between the three of us, like Cream (featuring Eric Clapton). We don’t feel under pressure in front of each other; we barrack and praise each other in equal measure, and we go to the village pub afterwards. That’s the difference between a ‘side’ and a ‘team’, although just to be confusing, in bowls it is called a ‘block’. We are settled together this year – I have high hopes that our near-telepathic understanding will give us a big advantage. There is mutual respect and support there.

There are moments in making music when it all comes together. When you’re rehearsing a new song, the band hits a new chord change, someone drops in a phrase, hits a particular note and it’s just – right. You catch the eye of the bass player, of the drummer, and you know. That’s a magic moment. The tension resolved; the song opens out into perfection.

It’s the same when the skip bowls and you can see the wood coming towards the pack – slowing and arcing for the gap you pointed out, running out its weight perfectly, nudging past the short woods, skipping the bare patch, squeezing through the narrowest of spaces and finally falling to a halt touching the cott itself. It’s magic, it’s perfect. It’s like the big piano chord at the end of ‘A Day in the Life’.

It’s time to start playing again.