Witness: More Diary Extracts 1976-1982 Transformaction, Sidmouth, 1982
25th December 1980
Christmas, Wales
In the evening: on the television screen is the epic film The Towering Inferno. The multi-storey tower block is engulfed in roaring flames and wracked by deafening explosions which blast the trapped inhabitants through the plate-glass windows into space to crash to their deaths on the pavements far below. On the other side of the living room an open fire burns merrily within the grate, slightly larger than the inferno contained within the television screen.
9th January 1982
London. In the pub
It was freezing cold. A priest sat in front of the fire, blocking off the heat. He was recounting his car crash and how he went through the car roof and landed exactly 39 feet further up the road. God saved him from certain death. He kept talking and talking and then began to sing. I couldn't take any more. "Shut up will you!" I shouted "for Christ's sake!" The priest smiled benignly. A man walked past on his way to the Gents and sneezed. "Bless you my son," said the priest.
25th January 1982
Back home to Derbyshire
In the pub the same people in the same chairs at the same tables having the same argument. As if time had stood still.
"Hello Uncle Norman."
"Eyup Ian, pint of Pedigree is it? Your Pete's only this minute gone, you just missed him. Ey, but he's a right one, he don't improve. Have I seen you since he brought them chickens, round? I was sitting watching Coronation Street, I was just dozing off when there was a knock on the window. Rap-rap-rap! I said to our Phil, who the bloody hell's that at this time of night? It were your Pete. He says, "Norman you know you said you wouldn't mind a chicken if I ever had one spare, well I've got 2,000 in the lorry outside, how many do you want?" Bogger me if they weren't all alive, and there's me still with my slippers on neck-holing them in the dark while Pete holds the flashlight. Thought I was going to have a quiet night and there I was strangling chickens on the pavement. You never heard such a row. So after a bit I said to Pete that's enough, there'll be no more room in the pantry. Took me a month to pluck the boggers."
The same story every time. Third year of telling. I know every word. Man at the next table staring at his pint: "My beer at home's not ready, else I'd have stayed in."
13th February 1982
London. Butts Café, St John Street, EC1
A man carrying a polythene bag full of tongues sits down at the café table alongside a woman who is scratching her leg. A man walks past the window with the headless carcase of a deer on his shoulders. On the other side of the street the second-floor window of the Dream City Massage Parlour For Men is raised and a slender hand with long red fingernails slips through the gap between the curtains and flicks the ash from a cigarette out onto the street below where a man with his trousers round his ankles is shitting in a doorway.
16th April 1982
London
Two young girls on the tube train sniffing glue out of plastic bags. They try to talk to each other but give up and sit side by side picking their noses.
A girl sitting on a street bench with a fibre-tipped pen stuck up her nose.
Glue-heads stumbling round the fruit market, sniffing out of plastic bags and eating peaches, juice running down their chins. The taste of summer: peaches and glue.
22nd April 1982
London. In the Sports Centre
Men and women perspiring freely, batted shuttlecocks back and forth over the nets, jogged up and down, bounced on trampolines, climbed steep walls, with crampons and ice-picks. Scowling white-skinned men in boxing-gloves and satin shorts shuffled backwards and forwards in front of full-length mirrors. 18 adolescent youths hung from the wall-bars on one side of the gymnasium. Young girls in little pleated skirts glided on skates, their thighs smooth as cream against the dull white of the ice. A big fat man drenched in sweat sullenly belaboured a punch-bag. Another large man lay prone on a mat. In the Projectile Hall two teams were hard at it.