Nick Mercer

london heatwave

Tonight from the 23 bus moving through warm soup down the edgware road no relief 'cept the rare occasions when it makes over 15mph and the diagonal blades of the open windows cut through the viscous air with enough energy to approximate the ghost of a chill factor. These glass flaps much like the gills of a shark and like a shark i muse if we don't move forward we die. Suddenly I'm caught by a sight so incongruous i think its a mirage. A guy stands proudly outside his luggage emporium, suit and tie, moustache - but heres the bit that doesn't compute, his jacket his trouser legs his moustache even the awnings of his shop are flapping wildly in a refreshing breeze so powerful i swear hes leaning into it. Passers by stare amazed, the guys in the local cafe salute him with the mouthpieces of their pipes. i eventually see the big electric fan on its stand there right under the lea of the bus and the world becomes congruent again - for a nanosecond. then i see its plug and cable hanging loose - unconnected ..to anything. Then the bus moves off The whole scene extrudes into an elongated diamond then is lost to me - shuts like scissors. have i just witnessed the contemporary equivalent of the indian rope trick or was a disappointingly mundane solution just out of sight? i'll never know. More of these matters later.

Hilbre Island 1965

We met at the Pierhead at 7 o clock. First me and Roddy my cousin. Then Paul Massey. Then Bobby Blundell, preceded by his gravity defying blonde quiff. Modest by today’s standards I’m sure but in the black and white world of grammar schoolboy Liverpool in 1965 a sight to behold. Indeed, to the teachers, a clear declaration of independence, an incendiary device to be extinguished only with an overwhelming response of sarcasm and physical violence – a ready marriage of verbal and physical brutality.

As I was saying - Bobby came first, emerging out of the gap between two ‘buses, one a bafflingly named Atlantean – still a rare sight in Liverpool in 1965 – and strode towards us his blonde quiff nodding and swaying majestically before him and combining with the clip clop of his Cuban heel boots to lend him the likeness of the Minotaur or some pan like figure emerging from the old greenwood, in this case represented by the green wall of the double decker buses. Paul Massey followed immediately upon him his hair in contrast hanging in limp blonde strings his shoulders hunched and his thick national health glasses magnifying his pale blue grey eyes.

Earnest study of that essential bible of all sea fishermen the national tide tables for 1965 had convinced us that we had no time to lose so, giving up on the stragglers most pertinently Bo Camo aka Kenneth Cameron a school bully of no mean accomplishment in the 3 years we had been at the school … the school in this case always being the or should I say The Liverpool Institute … but alas a reign soon to grow to an ignominious ending: but at this halcyon stage no shadow yet encroached on the at this moment Mycenaean blue skies that covered us. As I was saying before educational asides - there will be many of these in this our early association - we had no time to lose if we were to reach our destination before the tide turned and the waters came sweeping back in from the Irish Sea funnelled into the bottleneck of Liverpool bay and roared crept meandered insinuated convoluted and climbed over the deceptively dry terra firma of the Dee estuary and proved once more that for for at least half the time Hilbre Island was correctly called an island.

Thus, from the Pierhead we descended onto the ferry crossed the mile of the Mersey in a great loping loop against the current eventually allowing it to sweep us in under the lea of the landing stage at Wallasey watch the deft handling of the ropes by the wizened iron-muscled deckhand as he followed the perfectly cast leader rope the thickness of a washing line with the great hemp woven rope thicker than a mans thigh that was expert guided by his opposite number on the shore in a figure of eight down around the great iron capstan with such precise light effortless ease that it appeared for all the world that the rope coiled there in that fashion by its own volition – of its own choice. Such sly art almost gone now but still seen up there though the landing stages are all concrete now though still floating still dependent 0on the vagaries of the rising falling flood.

Then on to the bus strange leaden blue or green vehicles of ancient and uncertain pedigree faded like the town they served the whole peninsula in fact a land of former glory… their destinations diverse and none of them disappointing to the reaching romanticism of teenage schoolboys escaping from the grim deprivation of secondary school classrooms which had found themselves at a loss to understand the world they were in theory preparing these boys for… Thurstaston Hill – sandstone outcrops and sandy heath Clwyd mountain range looming across the river Dee, Frodsham – some boys found a hobby’s nest there once, marshes, Parkgate – once a riverside resort, a pleasant sandy spa teashops and shrimp boats in Victorian and Edwardian times then the river wandered in its broad bed and the silt settled and became brackish marsh home to lapwings and rough marran grass took hold and flourished hence now two miles from the life giving trade-route of the fickle river.

And finally Hoylake our destination our jumping off point onto the sometimes treacherous sands that appeared to stretch solid and uninterrupted six miles to the base of the Point of Ayr – could easily deceive you into thinking you could set off on a sedate stroll to North Wales without more peril than an mild burning from the jolly sun. In fact each year despite all the signs and cautionary tales of previous years the unwary were deceived into attempting the crossing only to realise too late that the main channel of the river half a mile of moving water lay hidden under the lea of the Welsh point unseen behind the intervening sandbanks themselves also on closer acquaintance discovered as not level firm and dry as they appeared from the promenade but cut with a baffling maze of meandering channels some ten feet deep and accompanied by pockets of sinking sand.

Without a compass or a rudimentary knowledge of direction finding from the sun one quickly became disorientated in these deep rutted quagmires where all sight of landmarks on either shore was lost behind hills of sand and mud made mournful by the streamers of bladder wrack and kelp and other flotsam and jetsam of the deep sea that carved them. These signs also reminded one that the absence of water was temporary and that any minute these dry riverbeds would begin to fill. This is the point where one would be hard pressed not to panic. I know because I’ve done it returning from the island at night and suddenly finding myself somehow heading towards the open sea the comforting lights of the shore magically receding and imagining in the same minute that I’d misread the tide tables forgot to subtract an hour for Greenwich meantime or been given the previous years figures or … and immediately awash with unadulterated terror my heart pounding convinced I’d never set eyes on home or loved ones again and wishing I’d paid more attention. Almost hearing the distant lisping approach of the ocean come to surround me and claim me.

We rode the bus all the way to West Kirby climbing over the sandstone spine of the peninsula and rocking and rolling through the leafy lanes dappled sun lighting the cool upstairs interior in a green mist of excitement and pleasure at the unaccustomed riot of vegetation and the clearness of the roads. We alighted in a quiet bus station already breathing the proximity of the sea, shouldered our rods and bags and strode down to the seafront and followed the worn green steps onto the sand. Somewhere in the distance, barely visible in the morning mist other than as a faint glimpsed half-doubted mirage, was Hilbre Island our destination then our home for the next nine hours. In that time millions of tons of water would roll across the intervening sands sweep up to the ancient walls of Chester and return.

Even now I still remember the apprehension as we began to head down the beach towards a vague heat-hazed mirage horizon of endless sea somehow through the curvature of the earth seeming to rise ever higher above us as the land receded. The marine e lake with its flotilla of sailing dinghies the constant whine and cow bell rattle of their masts and rigging as the constant offshore wind sang through them, the shops and teahouses with their ice cream signs and their weathered peeling paint on the front – all flattened and fell as hills grew behind them and a lighthouse rose on the top of the peninsula and before us the bulk of the great Orme clarified out of the formless void and deepened in shade and substance as the world behind us the world we’d left behind – faded.

A point would come as we well knew when turning back would be too late to beat the incoming tide and like Macbeth after the murder of Duncan and Banquo we would have no choice but to go on. Despite all the checking of times of tides of hours subtracted or added on despite all this there still lurked the fear of having made some dreadful error over the date or the day or even the area. Maybe these times only applied to London Bridge or Southampton (which incidentally had 2 tides every 24 hours!). Maybe we’d stray off-course in the half-mist and miss the island outflank it and find ourselves bound for the unreachable bulk of the Welsh dragon land slumbering low in the green soft shining magical old waters gleaming and streaming – meanwhile at back of us the sandbanks submerging beneath the incoming tide. Our way back gone erased from memory.

So, out on a vague diagonal straggle the boys across the changing sands firm-packed on the low ridges ranging longitudinal along the river bed then soft ooze in the bottoms streams ceased to flow remain grey residue blowing with lugworms casts razor fish and those strange armoured chimneys that protrude above the mud an inch or so like broken branches but up close manufactured by the beast that dwells from stuff like shells hardened salivate that ventilate the who knows what below.

Eventually the low archipelago of islands of which Hilbre was the dominant itself divided by a channel that filled at spring tide. First in sight was the slight bump of Bird Island, a hump of sand covered in maran grass that rose some 20 feet above the sandbank on which it sat itself part of a low tongue of ancient soft sedimentary rock that stretched intermittently in a crescent to Hilbre.

9th June 2004 (to be continued…forever)

Giving Up Smoking

First the rock bottom. I was four years clean and I was almost chain smoking. My chest hurt, my hips hurt, my legs hurt, my hands hurt. I wheezed when I moved, spoke or drew breath and, like a latter day Dante by the banks of the Thames, was continually assailed by a disquieting orchestra of squeaks, sighs, moans and whistles. Images of waterlogged accordions and threadbare tar-logged bagpipes feebly played by a dying race in the sucking depths of a cooling tar pit beneath the dim yellow light of an exhausted star in some far-off forgotten universe loomed pointlessly, constantly, in my weary imagination. Why? I have no idea. (Nor have I any idea why I’ve included this sentence in this article. Forgive me. Delete it.)

If I ran even for a few paces it took me half an hour to recover. Any time spent lying in a horizontal position such as a nights sleep required a reciprocate feat of the magnitude of Lazarus’ rising merely to regain the vertical – I’m talking about getting up. Naturally, this would be punctuated by racking bouts of painful coughing and a rather unpleasant sensation of imminent death by drowning in a viscous ocean of phlegm. My clothes stank. My breath stank. My yellow teeth lent contrast and colour to the otherwise grey lunar landscape of my face – itself frozen in a rictus of anxiety beneath a permanently furrowed brow. The theatre, the cinema, restaurants, going out at all, relationships, children, trains, boats, planes, sex, in fact the whole of existence, life as we know it, seemed to me little more than an inconvenience, a cruel device of a malevolent power to separate me from smoking. Every thought or deed, every action or contemplation of same required the lighting of a ciggie. Even the lighting of a cigarette required the lighting of a cigarette.

So far so good. That is - all this amounted to little more than business as usual for an addict but recently retired from active service. In fact, almost the upside. I could have carried on that way for years if the nicoteine had continued to do its job of successfully suppressing any outbreaks of feelings. But of course, it didn’t. It stopped working. I used to dream of taping half a dozen Senior Service together in a vain attempt to recover that one satisfying whiff/drag/ blast/toke whatever that would make all the not-dissimiliar-to-forty-years-down-a-Welsh-mine-breathing-firedamp-and-coal-dust side-effects palatable.

But it was not to be. I had to give up but I could only do so when there was absolutely nothing left for me in that particular addiction. And even after that initial realisation it still took me two years. Two years marked by relapse sparked firstly by a friends generous Marlborough stumps left in the ashtray (obviously not a real nicoteine addict, man) smoked surreptitiously after he’d gone, six months on snuff (a massive nicoteine high lasting approximately point nought recurring of a nanosecond accompanied by the kind of pain known only to those rare souls who’ve had the misfortune and supreme unmanageability to snort citric acid by mistake in the dark confines of an elderly relative’s candlelit lavatory and had to explain the ensuing headstands performed in a stone sink beneath a Niagara-force cold tap as an obscure form of Crowleyan yoga – oh yes, and lest we forget, the ensuing nasal incontinence with its socially challenging tendency to produce sudden torrents of brown lava that cascade unheralded down the planes and slopes of the face usually in company under bright lights - something to do with the tension and the temperature)

and finally a year on nicorette – much like methadone once acclimatized to - which ended only in the Sahara desert when the incredible temperatures made it impossible to remove from its packaging ( like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly) and I eventually, finally surrendered. It was an incredible relief. That was eight years ago and I still marvel at the fact that I’m nicoteine free. It was and remains one of the clearest lessons – after the successful relinquishment of my primary addiction – in the efficacy of this programme. And also the humanity. I was told early on to give up smoking when I was ready and not before and that proved to be good advice.

Eventually, it seems, we all of us go everywhere in this journey of recovery but we do so to a beat that isn’t ours – to a clock we can’t control, thank God.

Howl With Monk

Creativity and recovery - oxymoron or not? Can the two words live in the same sentence? First, the creativity of users…

The wild shamanic utterances, the flung oaths, the heroic stories, the complex lies pouring forth from wild eyed sweating men and women at street corners, their clothing filthy and dishevelled.
- Why, when you're smartly dressed, does no one ever refer to it as hevelled? 'Oh wow, man, you look really hevelled!' -
Crack harpies shrieking poetic prophecies of doom at fresh-faced coppers (trust me; this morning, Portobello). Fabulous stories of impossible delays and miraculous diversions roared out in dole offices and doctors surgeries at closing time into the incredulous ears of cowering norms. Chalk in the hearts, steel in the veins, foil in the lungs, soot on the face like a stoned Dick van dyke chim chimenying across the treacherous rooftops of old London town with a bunch of kids, faces shimmering in the foil shouting for "more!" The terrible eloquence of diconal. The wild song of the hep seamen.


So - Is all this lost? Is this golden age of poetry and outright lies gone? Does an age of intoxication leave nothing to posterity? Our children's birthright swapped for a mess of recovery pottage - a set of self-help books, Feel the fear and do it anyway - not recommended for those inclined to suicide or murder - The road less travelled (often wrongly assumed by the ignorant to be a treatise on the merits of anal sex) read this book and do what you where going to do anyway, but that’s all right, etc. The thin line between self-help and self-delusion.

Does invention and creativity cease? Or does it simply become re-deployed in the generation of resentments for conscientious addicts to write down and unpack?




I'm in Angola late September walking through the streets of Luanda, a sprawling wild dusty red city set upon a hill over the ocean, strange constellations winking and floating overhead, a soft yellow half moon balanced on the tiled rooftops, a fresh breeze off the sea to dispel the fecund pall of human sewage that occasionally wrinkles the nostrils. A man approaches me with a chimpanzee in his arms. In response to my smile he speaks to the chimp in Portuguese and it stretches out its antediluvian impossible black leather parchment hand lined like an ancient map of a fabulous kingdom and we touch across the evolutionary divide. I savour the moment and fondly imagine it feels itself in the presence of a magnanimous god; I unconditionally love it…

Without warning it discards my hand with a contemptuous flourish, sneers at me with theatrical disdain, waves its companion forward and they walk on - my last glimpse of it grinning malevolently over the shoulder of its demonic servant thumbing its nose at me. After checking my wallet I smile and walk away amused. After all, it’s only a chimp. Its opinion of me is irrelevant; no-one would consider its views so why should I? Yes, I think later, mildly irritated, who gives a fuck what chimps think? If my self-esteem depended on the goodwill of monkeys I'd be in a sorry state.

However, though I sit in idyllic surroundings in good company, for the rest of the evening the face of the chimp remains gloating over some secret knowledge of me. I begin to regret not punching it in the face or at least twisting its arm but deep inside I'm uncomfortably aware that in a straight contest, without the assistance of tranquilliser darts and dogs - chimphunds, I would have been soundly battered. Like everyone else I've seen them on the telly tearing apart their lesser capuchin brethren (the ones that favour hats and frequent organs) like pitta bread. In short, any punitive action on my part, however just, would have led to a public beating and humiliation. It is generally understood that chimp/men contests are an unequal affair - geometry or general knowledge, yes, I'd be in with a chance, but fighting… no.

I comfort myself by chuckling over its ill-fitting clothes and its unkempt appearance (unlike me both kempt and hevelled) - then shudder at the meanness of my own soul and the fragility of my self esteem - dissed by a monkey and it all falls down (they're primates actually, corrects my son). Yes, I conclude, there's enough cause for potential resentment amongst human beings without going inter-species on it. There are no easy victories in recovery.

The First Chemist

The first chemist I remember was the timothy whites next to the Adelphi it sat wide open on the corner of mount pleasant like a confident woman lights flooding the pavement wares on show great glass bottles full of green blue and red liquid unfathomable contents but warm promise – love.

This when Liverpool then looked like London now smart people smart clothes confidence power and purpose brought by big ships from everywhere.
Glittering rain-washed streets – romance the excitement of childhood days.
Even writing about it now makes me feel warm

20 years on same street the futurist the scala the gaumont the big house managed by Sadie famous Liverpool sailor hard man and transvestite followed by Alan rudkin world champion boxer and alcoholic.

When you go into addiction its like another country its like England in the 1830s incredibly high mortality rates short lives tragedy accidents suicides odd illnesses fires and you name it … but hidden by denial the unspoken landscape of fairy tale ice and fire.

Anyway, 20 years on this same place 1970 me Paul Massey and Dave vose hippies heads freaks lost boys nerds whatever coming up to the same crossing from the Adelphi side the 2 star hotel we thought was grand when kids like we thought quality street were posh -this the great crossing place for foot routes into the various districts of the city, everything hedged in close like a compact forest, this a city you feel inside.

So… Lewis’s rises massive, white stone to confront same stone wall of Adelphi. Halfway up that great Dover looking cliff a bronze ships prow complete with raised anchors a naked bronze colossus in commanding attitude arms stretched from the bow and at the bottom of the canyon … Dave.

Dave Vose out of speke reading Leary hearing Stockhausen somehow separated from us hurrying ahead to the busy junction eyes focussed on the green man of the pelican crossing whole being betraying concentration. I turn to say something to Paul and he stops me “ay, watch Dave" sotto voce "look right look left look right again that’s it look nonchalant that’s it keep calm one last look to be sure and cross confidently yes that’s it" shouts "Dave!!!" Dave jumping as though electrified an instant marooned in the middle of the road a panicked glance back at us realisation a struggle for composure molecular reintegration then on. "You bastard" to Paul as we catch up "what for?" from me. Paul “Well, Dave was knocked down there last year by a car that came through when the man was green so since then… ah aye Dave come on don’t be like that wait for us!"

Paul Massey alive? I’d be surprised. Dave vose - despite all his aspirations to get to big sur India Mexico Paris, made Torquay once loved it - Dave died in the bath in his mothers council house in speke after injecting two diconal and nodding out. Paul, who knows? this guy had a dike script back in 73 so the prognosis is poor but lets say he’s alive because you know something I had a dike script from dr meldrum round about 1973 an I’m still here. And it’s a beautiful bright clean late November day in 2003 and me and my wife sue of 25 years also clean like me 15 years are about to go out and walk along the New river. Dave I hope you got there – cause you left your mark as a loving guy

The end

Dave vose; musings of…

When tripping on particularly strong liquid acid off Nigel Hand in Manchester he described waving to a woman driving past and feeling superhuman like he could run alongside at 40 mph then smiling at women walking past on the pavement and them smiling back then doubting his reality “where they 19 yrs old or 9?”

Oh you’re really bourgeoisie! Dave to two Liverpool girls in hip disguise who laughed at his exposition of freak town hippiedom and his long hair. Paul Massey “what did you say that for Dave – they’ve fucked off now you’ve blown it!” That’s why we liked them, because they were really bourgeois.

When asked by me what he had been doing with himself years later, by now on a injectable methadone script, he replied “just learning how to turn on, Nicky” like it was a full time occupation.

in the beginning

Our Cat Tom

Sue was woken by the persistent lisp of another breathing insidiously stealthy cunnilingally near her. Nick lay stertorously wheezing in an aura of sewage. She shook him but the strange insistent noises continued. A debilitating wave of fear swept through her. In her minds eye the image of a great long tongued demon performing on itself on her dresser – and watching her.

Summoning up all her courage she tried to rise to face her fears but found herself unable to move pinned to the bed by a great weight that drove the air from her lungs and seemed to increase in a crescendo of pressure in response to her feeble stirrings. A strange primeval terror rose within her and realising she was powerless unable even to cry out she surrendered to her fate. She felt the unrolling of some huge supernatural being as it gathered itself above her then a breeze of warm foetid air awash with memories of the slaughter of innocents hellish scenes in flickering lamplight – a shadow fell across the rictus of her terror gripped face – and a great brown marmalade head appeared over the horizon of the bedspread, ears like steeples a furrowed brow like ozymandias broad as the Pennine mountains that bore him.

He cast one reproachful glance upon the amazed creature beneath him then drew back his mottled lips from his great white felines lifted his head and as the world stood still awaiting the word produced a boneshattering miaow of such plaintive sorrow such disappointment heightened by the pre lapsarian nuances implied in such heartrending loss that a great vista opened in the awestruck consciousness of the poor amazed wretch beneath – a window showing sylvan scenes of loss unearthed from the collective unconscious the anima mundi of all mankind – the dejected exit from Eden, Krishna’s sorrow for radha on the edge of the underworld where his lack of faith lost her, Nigel tufnel leaving spinal tap, the death of chatterton, the Elgin marbles, Jesus, the last pair of great auks sailing into the seamist out of loch Neagh seen by a wildfowler later admonished by the royal society of natural history for not shooting them for posterity, bonfire night. Maybe i'd better feed him thought nick reluctantly.