Free Love for Now by Anthony Wilson Page A

Chelsea. He was, of course, Peter Osgood, the great and now, alas and so suddenly, the late. But imperishably, the smiling Old Corinthian.
    Elsewhere, a nice piece on Ivor Cutler, another hero who died last week. I went to see him once, at the Bloomsbury theatre, with Dale and Mart, in our shorts and string vest phase. The gig was in support of
Gruts
, which I still have somewhere. It made me glad that I’d finally bought
Life in a Scotch Sitting Room, Vol. 2
on CD, which I think will go down as his masterpiece.
    When the kids were little I used to make tapes for the car with titles like ‘Everyone Happy’. The format would go something like: Smiths Song, Nursery Rhyme, Jackson 5 Song, Magic Roundabout Song, Blondie Song and so on. Once, on a whim, I included ‘Episode 2’ from
Life in a Scotch Sitting Room
. It became an instant family favourite, not least because it allowed us to shout ‘Look! A tree!’ whenever we were driving through countryside. To this day I have not seen it written down, but know large chunks by heart.
    Bendy and I quoted lines of it to each other over Di’s marvellous roast chicken and plum pudding meals on wheels supper:
    ‘Down The River Clyde,’ I added.
For which impertinence I received a mighty buffet, bleeding my tender nose with his vast white knuckle. How was I to know I was mouthing obscenity? But the blood soon dried and I had the pleasure of picking the clots.
    What’s great, on the live recording we’ve got, is that you can hear him losing the plot and corpsing in the pauses. Marvellous. One of my greatest achievements as a father is that Bendy has the whole album in her Ipod, and also knows mostof it by heart: ‘Grandma came round and scraped a lump of coarse salt onto each girl’s tongue. If a fleck of spit hit you, the illusion was complete.’
    Mark Radcliffe said today that Cutler’s popularity make a mockery of ‘youth programming’, championed as he was by John Peel on late-night Radio 1. Apparently on one of his first sessions for Richard Skinner he was told to ‘Take it away, Ivor!’ by the DJ, only for Cutler to reply ‘Take what away?’ Radcliffe says, eloquently, that he was no more or less eccentric than the rest of us, only more focussed. ‘He realised that you don’t need to be a Renaissance man, that mastery of one thing was enough.’
     
    Overheard on the way back from dropping Shim off today at the school gate: ‘Dishwasher tablets are like gold-dust in our house.’
Thursday 9 March
    A day of sudden showers, wild sunshine and breezes.
    I went into work to hand in my sick note, and saw Cate and Sasha, then David in School Office. He was charming and solicitous and kept it off work and on me from the word go. He’s very keen for me to carry on writing:
    ‘If I had a diagnosis such as yours I’d be out of here. I mean, this is what I do when I’m well. I do hope you’re pursuing your own work, in terms of a journal perhaps, to keep you going.’
    ‘That’s exactly what I’m doing, yes, partly as a record, partly as an act of resistance.’
    ‘That’s a huge advantage I think you have. For many in your position, and I don’t mean this pejoratively, filling the time must be the most alarming aspect of the whole business because
there is nothing else
. Whereas you have a hinterland, a rich inner life which goes on. If I were you I’d be logging the progress of the journey at every opportunity.’
    He almost looked jealous.
    At one point he mentioned his friendship with the poet Jane Beeson. We’ve talked about her many times before, most recently her long 1000 line poem for the millennium in iambic pentameter. Almost as a throwaway he said he’d sent her some poems fifteen years ago, but nothing since. Recently he’d got a note from her – she has cancer too – encouraging him to send her some more. ‘When are you going to get back to your writing?’ she said. I left mulling on the fact that we all make choices. Even when some ghastly