ANDREW DARLINGTON

A Letter to the Editor Hello Bruce,
time is a strange thing, sometimes Considered As A Helix Of Semi-Precious Stones. I turned on BBC2 to watch ‘Mock The Week’ without realizing it was a repeat. It gradually became apparent that it was from last December, before Xmas, before the election, in a bizarrely disorientating sense of timeshift. It seemed like an eternity ago, although in fact it’s just a little over six weeks ago. We did a postal vote because we were going down to Colliers Wood to stay over with my son Stephen and his family. I stayed up long enough to see the exit polls. The following morning Stephen came in at breakfast and said ‘Wakefield has a Conservative MP!’ I assumed he was joking. I was wrong to think that. It already feels like forever ago. Fast-forward to now, I went into Wakefield this weekend to the ‘Jackanory’ Lit-event. There were sketches and artwork on the walls from classes held in the venue during the week. Some of them were quite good. Others not so good. Nick Toczek was reading. It was good to see him again. He seemed really pleased that I’d turned up to see him. It was a relaxed informal reading. After the event we went for a coffee – he’s doing a ‘dry’ January so we didn’t go near alcohol! And we did a lot of catching up. He was wearing a Ramones T-shirt. I said ‘I see your Ramones T-shirt, and raise you...’, I was wearing a Thirteenth-Floor Elevators T-shirt. So we instantly began trading music stories, almost as if we’d been doing it yesterday and forever. More timeshifts, when I first met Nick, in an Art Gallery as I recall, we both had long hair. No more. We’ve done joint readings since, published each other and appeared in the same magazines – ‘Little Word Machine’, ‘Wool City Rocker’, and in fact we still do, we both write for ‘R’N’R: Rock ‘n’ Reel’ today. He got to see Allen Ginsberg. I never saw Allen Ginsberg. But I got to see William Burroughs. He never saw William Burroughs. We both got to see the Ramones, albeit separately. We compare tinnitus-levels, ‘it’s always there, even in the quietest silence.’ And when he tells about eating fried-scorpion in Thailand, I call him out about his vegetarian phase. I remember him doing a thing about turning veggie, yet being tempted by the aroma of burgers from McDonald’s. And bacon. Always bacon. Now he says black pudding too, which is hard-core even for carnivores. I was never tempted that way. The one thing I missed, the one thing I used to enjoy, was Sweet-&-Sour chicken. But the ‘Pagoda’ in Wakefield do a great Sweet-&-Sour tofu instead. Another timeshift, three of us once turned up for what we assumed was a Poetry Booking in a Wakefield Alternative Cabaret, only to see the poster outside the venue announcing us as ‘Three Comedians’! Which was not exactly what we had in mind. I simply drop all my serious poems and just do the humorous ones. Nick did a long rambling thing about haemorrhoids. It was a kind of X-Factor with a prize for the most popular voted set. The third person onstage was a lady poet from Horbury who had stacked the audience with her friends, work-colleagues and family with the intention of swaying the vote. Which made it all the sweeter when Nick actually won. Then we talk about those we’ve lost on the way. Steve Sneyd. And Richard Mason. Nick says the Wakefield cabaret was one of Richard’s promotions. I don’t think it was. But he could be right. Richard blasted into the Leeds poetry scene, took it and shook it by the scruff of the neck, an activist who set up readings and Alternative Cabarets. We did lots of wild events together, me and Rich, including stoned trips down to Dorset. Then he vanished. Nick told me he’d retreated back to Cowling, and died five years ago. I didn’t even know. Until that moment. As we part, Nick gives me a CD he’s done. I give him a copy of my ‘Tweak Vision’. With all manner of vague promises to do more. But time is a strange thing, considering... I was going to write more, and different, but I got sidetracked… next time, maybe
Cin Cin
-Andy-