Talking with the taxman about poetry (1/2/14)

So. Let's take stock for a moment shall we?

On Tuesday afternoon, post removal of what little stock remained (an hour and a half for the guys to box it all up while I counted bags of coin in the cash office), post useful unitary being loaded onto a van headed for an Irish ferry for use in the stores that have reopened over there and all non useful unitary basically having....well the shit kicked out of it if we're honest and throwing up a quantity of dust that turned the confines of the shop into the interior of a particularly inclement cloud, post brushing and wiping and tidying and emptying, I handed over my keys for one last time and left the building that I had spent nine of the last eleven years inside.

(An aside - apologies for the lack of full stops in the above sentence, take a moment or two to draw breath if you feel the need)

But before I left I took one last photo. Imagine a slightly greying bloke stood in front of a large empty space, it's not exactly dramatic.

It was one of the more emotional moments of the day (not that there were many in all honesty - I'm not doing the nostalgia thing, I'm doing the looking forward thing instead) - a touch of moistness edging the eyes, I'm not ashamed to admit it.

But it wasn't the emotional moment. That came much earlier. It came in the car. And it came, as ever, with a song.

I've banged on and on and on about the fact that the last album that I bought before starting with Revolver/HMV was 'The Queen is Dead' but what, you could ask, was the last single?

Funny that you should enquire about that. I would tell you quite happily that it was Billy Bragg's 'Between The Wars' E.P.

And I would have told you this quite happily at any point in the last 27 years. But I would have been lying. Not consciously you understand, not deliberately. Lying to myself then rather than to anybody else. I know this because I've just checked the release date for Between The Wars. February 1985. An entire year before I would have needed it to be on the shelves for me to buy. So it wasn't that then. I don't know what it was but it clearly wasn't that.

Which doesn't alter the fact that, believing my previous conviction, I felt the need to play Billy's 'greatest hits' on the way to what remained of work on my final day. And as I hit Speke Road for (please God let it be) one last time, the song itself started;


I was a miner, I was a docker
I was a railway man between the wars
I raised a family in times of austerity
With sweat at the foundry between the wars

I paid the union and as times got harder
I looked to the government to help the working man
But they brought prosperity down at the armoury
We're arming for peace, me boys between the wars

I kept the faith and I kept voting
Not for the iron fist but for the helping hand
For theirs is a land with a wall around it
And mine is a faith in my fellow man

Theirs is a land of hope and glory
Mine is the green field and the factory floor
Theirs are the skies all dark with bombers
And mine is the peace we knew between the wars

Call up the craftsmen, bring me the draftsmen
Build me a path from cradle to grave
And I'll give my consent to any government
That does not deny a man a living wage

Go find the young men never to fight again
Bring up the banners from the days gone by
Sweet moderation, heart of this nation
Desert us not, we are between the wars

And there you have it; that, right there, is my politics. That song defines all that I believe in. That's the gap between the beauty of socialism - the need to help your fellow man, the belief that 'our one great purpose is to help those less fortunate than ourselves' as the brilliant Michael Foot put it while the Tory media were expending their energies on ridiculing the coat that he wore at the cenotaph - and the filth that this vile Conservative government inflicts on us in keeping with the traditions of the ruling classes that the song discusses. "Theirs is a land with a wall around it and mine is a faith in my fellow man"

But the moment that I started to well up, the moment that the emotions kicked in? "Build me a path from cradle to grave and I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage" - it's not about party politics (it just happens that party politics splits itself across the lines of right and wrong; left is ironically right, right is always wrong) it's about caring for people other than yourself and we live, once again, in a time when our government care about themselves, their backers and the profit  that can be made with the sacrifice of any class that doesn't fit their vision. It's a government that is again selling the assets that we own as a nation and watching their investors profit from them. We are, once again/still between the wars.

And that's where it sits; I'm not complaining about losing my job - I'm not unemployed, I'm freelance, I'm finally where I'm supposed to be, starting to do what I'm supposed to do - I'm concerned about those that can't make their own way due to the circumstances that are imposed on them, those that need help and are increasingly denied it.

Everybody needs a value system, everybody needs that value system to be vocalised and reinforced in some way. As ever, I find all that in music.