7th July, 2005
The Week That Time Forgot
Time has decided that it will do its own thing this week. I think it has grown bored of all that dull division of seconds, minutes, hours, and the like, so it has decided to become playful and inventive.
Right now it is late on Wednesday, but it seems like no time ago that it was 9.30am on Sunday morning, and I was heading for the train, walking down the hill with legs wobbling beneath the strain of my backpack, and my head jangling with nerves at the thought of the journey ahead. That’s three and a half days that have simply flown by. And yet the supposed hour and three quarters I spent at Peterborough fucking Train Station felt like I’d been led to purgatory and left there for at least eternity if not longer.
That has continued. There have been interminable hours, and yet the overall impression is that time is absolutely racing by.
The days here have been busy in a sort of housekeeping, small task way. My dear host Pam is always happy to keep her houseguests busy, but to be fair it is a busy house that has a lot of guests. My friend Alan is a permanent lodger, and there are several more itinerants who pass through on a reasonably regular basis, being everything from teachers and trainers to musicians and jugglers and everything in-between, and indeed sometimes all things at once.
This being conference and festival time, it is the busiest time of year. It’s the time of fruition of all the year’s plans, so it’s exciting, but of course it’s stressed, frantic and hectic.
We’ve rehearsed a couple of times, at least enough so I can feel it in my arms. I’m so glad to know that I can still sit behind a drum kit and play it, even if my chops are nowhere near what they once were. I haven’t sat behind a kit and played with a band properly for going on 5 years. It is a bit like falling off a bike though. Uh, yeah, I mean riding a bike…!
Now, it’s important that I’m clear here. Despite all appearances of functioning, I’m basically being carried on the crest of events this week. It’s all getting to me. I’m creeping around the edge of anxiety, a frosted glaze over my thoughts, only numbness stilling my impulse to recoil before I do the next thing, meet the next person, take the next challenge. It seems everyone is so cheerful in the face of their own stress, what can I do? I simply have to muck in and smile. But there will be a price to pay for this. If you feel the fear and do it anyway, if the fear doesn’t recede, what then? The fear has been invited along, to sit upon your spine and slide its cold prehensile tail, coiled and quivering, down into your bowels. And an ongoing, sickening fear will take you down more roads less travelled than bravery ever could.
Yet this is only the warm-up. Things will be much more intense at the conference itself, because there will be a lot of people there, from around the world, with whom I’ll be doing team-building and co- operative working exercises. Many of these exercises demand that you make a complete and utter tit out of yourself. Now I know you might say, “But Neil, you’re not saying that’s a problem are you? You are a complete and utter tit!” Yes, and often it really wouldn’t be a problem. But, I could just as easily run off sobbing to my room.
But, there is the gig, after all. I’m so looking forward to THE GIG!!! In all my life, no matter what has going wrong with my health, my situation, whatever, my refuge has always been to drum in bands. It is a place where I need only to concentrate on my own playing, the other band members, and the sounds. It is escape, it is another dimension, like being underwater but able to breathe, like being in a lucid dream.
Drumming is like an organised form of dancing. Really it is. The limbs react and express in exactly the same way as when you are completely lost in a song and just dancing your fucking head off. If you can imagine that, but the hands and legs are bound and directed, extending and recoiling like springs timed to a pulse radiating a beat from the base of the spine outwards through the body. The expression becomes a sound, and in time, the practice of expressing that pulse becomes more intricate, more refined, more closely tuned to the primal in people everywhere who instantly and instinctively react to a drummer's beat. The simple, recursive sound of percussion is incredibly powerful, but a drummer would say that, right?
Just finally, some people mentioned the skin whacking references in the last post. Well, drums have skins, and I whack them with sticks. So, I whack skins with sticks. And yes of course I meant it to be a bit fnaar fnaar – a bit fwup! – a bit ooooh Mrs! – a bit rude!!
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