I can lose myself in Chinese art and American girls

Originally posted 6/8/2012

The Cure, girls, and Cure girls

So… I was at work and I’m going to be off for a week so I asked my huge fan, the lovely Kate, what should be the subject of my next blog?  Kate, with hardly a pause for breath, suggested I write about my ex-girlfriends because I’m always so funny when I talk about them.  Eh?  I didn’t know I did that!  I then started to wonder in which ways I spoke about my exes and hoped that it wasn’t in an excessively bitter way (I assume not as there is little a woman would find amusing about another woman being slagged off by a man, I’m sure).  So, I had a think about it. 

Basically, I can’t write a blog about exes as I am still on speaking terms with so many of them.  Well, some of them.  And I want to keep it that way.  I still talk to these people because I like them and generally one or other of us (usually the other) decided for whatever reason it wasn’t working out and we should be friends and somehow we still are, though after gaps of years mended by the wonder of social media networking.  So, I’m not going to write specifically about my previous relationships and I’m certainly not going to write about my sex life, all you need to know is that I am VERY good.  But I am going to write about girls and girlfriends, sort of.  In that insular, self-regarding way that is fast becoming my trade mark… and with a theme.  The theme being one of the things that defines me as a person; in the same way as Nick Hornby felt he was defined as an Arsenal Fan in Fever Pitch I am, or I suppose was, defined as a Cure fan.  And I like girls who are Cure fans, who look a bit goth but not too much, dark hair, pale skin, perhaps a bit of red lippy, dark clothes…(hey Kate, how you doin’?).  You see I used to be a massive fan of The Cure.  And it was all because of a girl.

Without saying too much, Lucretia (the names will be changed to protect the innocent but not very imaginatively) was at my school and we are still in touch via Facebook and she is married with children and I have no wish to embarrass her.  Not that I have much to embarrass her with as this was such an innocent time.  It started out with a bit of joshing at school, in that way that awkward boys who like girls but don’t know how to deal with it still do.  There was nothing nasty, just gentle mickey taking.  We talked about music, as being such a big Simple Minds and U2 fan obviously I was really serious about music and had started to denigrate music I felt was beneath me in the snide and insidious way that was to make me such a massive tool for the next few years.  But we had a few things in common, I forget what now, probably liking Siouxsie and the Banshees or something like that, so I started to take an interest in other bands she liked.  I initially dismissed The Cure as a pop group that wrote love songs, clearly I did not know anything about them at all, but as my crush on her grew I decided to seek them out.

This was 1988.  There was no Spotify or You Tube and it was not easy living in a village even to go out and buy an LP or cassette and making that commitment to a band you hadn’t heard was a ridiculous notion.  I honestly didn’t know any Cure songs at this stage, I must have heard some on Top of the Pops or the chart show on Radio One, Sunday evening, which I would listen to, fingers poised over the “record” button on my stereo for anything I liked.  Evidently anything I’d heard by The Cure never made it on to my chart show tapes.  As luck would have it my sister had a compilation album, I think it was a Smash Hits collection of some sort, which had The Lovecats on it.  So Lovecats was the first Cure song I am aware of hearing and I just thought it was mental.  No Poe faced seriousness with a message like Jim Kerr et al were knocking in to my ears on a regular basis, just fun and zany, mad-cap, don’t give a crap about the rules fun.  I think if I’d seen the video at that stage I’d have gone in to apoplexy with the silliness of it all.  I was hooked.  By the summer holidays, after I’d taken my exams, I had a Saturday job at Waitrose and could afford to buy myself a few records.  My first Cure album was Japanese Whispers which wasn’t really an album but a collection of three singles and (most of) their B-sides.  It was of a similar sound to Lovecats; upbeat, disaffected pop music, a bit psychedelic in parts, proper music despite the throw-away fun nature of these particular songs. By now Lucretia had become my girlfriend, in a very sweet, hardly ever saw each other kind of way.

A 17 year old me with one of my first Cure albums... the T'Pau poster belonged to my brother!

Next I got hold of Standing On A Beach, their singles compilation, on vinyl so I only got to hear the singles and not the extra tracks on the cassette.  I’m fairly sure the next album I bought was Faith, one of their austere works from the early eighties which was probably because I wanted to impress Lucretia with how serious I was.  Though this would become one of my favourite albums of all time it was quite a leap of… er… faith at the time because it was so bloody melancholy.  At least The Smiths had tunes?  I’m not convinced that the sublime beauty of the album really appealed to me at the time but I carried on buying up their back catalogue.  The first time I heard “One Hundred Years” was actually on the Concert live album and I remember, it was a grey dreary day at college and I was caught up in the guitar line.  Then I bought Pornography (the album, I didn’t buy porn at this time at all) and the ferocity of the track on its studio form was the final part of the jigsaw.  I was a Cure fan.

My friend Mark and my brother Chris (their real names as I’ve never kissed them) had also started to get in to The Cure and we were all toying with the image but once I’d heard Pornography I started to grow and back comb my hair.  Not long after I went to a party with Mark, kissed his ex-girlfriend while I was drunk and got found out and dumped.  Now I had some real angst to pin my music to and my love for The Cure became focused around their trilogy of Seventeen Seconds/ Faith/ Pornography.  What a miserable little git I became. 

By the following May I was still single, still a miserable little git and still mad on The Cure (and had started to listen to a lot of what we then called gothic music; Sisters Of Mercy, Mission, All About Eve and so on).  And the biggest thing in the world, ever, was about to happen.  In May 1989 The Cure released the Disintegration album.  This marked not only a change in status for the band who truly became megastars after this but it was the first album released as a new Cure album for me!  I bought it on the day of release on cassette so I could listen to it straight away on my crappy personal stereo.  I also bought tickets to go and see them at Wembley Arena.  One thing was missing though, I wanted to have a Cure girlfriend to share the experience.  As it was, my brother was now friends with my ex, Lucretia, who wouldn’t talk to me.  His friend was going out with her friend, who I also know through Facebook… hello Clare!  I went to see The Cure with Mark, Chris and James on July 23^rd 1989.  Lucretia and her gang went the day before. 

My ticket for my first Cure show

Drummer Boris Williams signed my pound note!

It was October before I did get another girlfriend, by now my hair had grown somewhat and in its back-combed glory I had a certain cool look to me.  I was also quite pretty by then.  This girlfriend was called Katie and though I did more than kiss her I have used her real name as we are not in touch, very much my decision.  Katie was very much in to her music, more so than me.  She was a year older, much more confident as a person and did things like going to Marxist conferences in London and smoking cannabis.  She introduced me to a lot of other music, Throwing Muses for example are still one of my favourite acts of all time, and she taught me a few things and I got to see her naked so I’m grateful to her but frankly we were from very different backgrounds and I eventually my immaturity got too much for her and she dumped me.  On Christmas Day. 

Me, December 1989 in Chichester

She wasn’t much in to The Cure so that is pretty much her part in the tale apart from…

A few days after Christmas I went in to Chichester to see her so she could explain things and that day I saw Teresa for the first time.

I then went out with a girl called Sarah who was lovely and liked The Cure a bit but not excessively but I was very much on the rebound and then a girl called Helen who only went out with me because Reuben Pope didn’t want to go out with her and I was the next cool thing.  She was tall and pretty and quite nice and liked The Cure a bit but not excessively.  Then I dumped her to go out with Teresa. 

Teresa is not her real name and we are still in touch and I like her (as a human being) enormously so I am going to truncate this part, far shorter than the importance in my life would really merit.  Teresa liked The Cure a bit but not excessively.  During my time with her we went to see The Cure at Crystal Palace for The Garden Party, a mini one day festival also featuring All About Eve, Lush and James.  We had an argument during The Cure’s opening number but the day ended OK.  The Mixed UP album also came out, shortly after we moved in together.  There were bad times but many more good times.  It didn’t work out.  It was very sad but it was a long time ago.   I had two more girlfriends quickly after her and it all went a bit awry.  Neither of them liked The Cure.

Over the next few years I embarked on a series of short term relationships, none of which were very serious with various girls who weren’t especially interested in The Cure though some of them had the look I liked.  I saw the band again in 1992 as a single man, presumably hoping I’d meet some ravishing, goth-ish Cure obsessed girl. It never happened.  I lost interest in them for a couple of years but when Wild Mood Swings came out in 1996 I was back in to them in a big way, going to see them twice with Mark and Chris and not meeting any Cure girls.  I had, to be fair, stopped looking the part for some time.  My hair was always short, my clothes much more casual. I didn’t stand out in any way, I was bland, vanilla.  Normal.  It was not a good look for me, a very small fish in a very big pond, I made no impression on anyone, not even people I knew at the time remember me much from this era.

It was in the mid-nineties I met the person who has most kept me off the straight and narrow regarding music.  It is true that I’d started to listen to some of the more mainstream “alternative” music, having gone through grunge I quite enjoyed the more upbeat sensibilities of Brit-Pop and was listening to a lot of Blur, Oasis, Pulp, Sleeper and so on.  I also started to take more of an interest in techno and dance music but have never been very knowledgeable about such matters, despite my half-hearted attempts to get in to clubbing which mainly involved going to Thursdays (a club near Chichester) or occasionally to a club in Portsmouth.  In 1996 I even went on holiday to Ibiza but realised whilst there that a clubber I am not! Now that is a blog worth telling.  

Charlie was and still is a big fan of Depeche Mode.  His taste in music was still developing when I met him and he is these days much more of an anorak, more of an extremist when it comes to music but back then I possibly had a slight edge on him.  I was of course already aware of Depeche Mode and I introduced him to the Cure and then we kinda introduced each other to various types of non-mainstream music.   I’m sure if either of us had been a cute chick then we’d have made a lovely couple.  But neither of us are.  Charlie shared my fondness for Cure-ish girls though but so far I don’t think he has found one either.  Anyhoo, as my tastes in music realigned with the left-field I again started to find my own identity in my image. 

What I did have around this time were penfriends.  Several of them, from The Cure’s unofficial newsletter, Curenews, all of them female, mostly from Europe and the USA.  Most of them very lovely to know and more than easy on the eye.  Yes, there were a few crushes.  One of these almost resulted in a trip to San Fransisco to meet a Polish/American girl called Ania but it all went wrong at the last moment and I was left crushed.  Still, some lasting friendships resulted, I am still in touch with Karmen and Marlo.  I know Karmen is still a big Cure fan, Marlo possible less so.  Both are still very cute.  I’m very glad to call them friends still.

Before the last Century ended I had time for one more on-off and semi disastrous relationship with a girl that Charlie once snogged when I was in the toilets while we were all out at the pub together.  Such was my strength of feeling towards this girl that I didn’t really care much at all when I found out, it was in actual fact far funnier that the guy who blurted out what had happened had mistaken my erstwhile girlfriend for another woman who we were out with one night and gave Charlie away in front of her husband for snogging his wife, which he hadn’t.  The husband was none too pleased until I figured out what had happened and put his mind at rest.  What I didn’t know was… no, I can’t repeat that.  Let’s just say for a while Charlie had his Cure girl.  The dirty dog.

Come the year 2000 and I’d given up on finding any kind of girl who’d stay with me, let alone one that was a Cure girl.  So of course I met somebody, asked them out, she never got round to dumping me (Joke!  If you are reading this wifey I was joking!) and we are still together and married.  My wife is not much in to The Cure, in fact our musical tastes don’t often cross, but she knows that they are the biggest influence on me musically and has learned to tolerate them, as opposed to, say, Smashing Pumpkins which she considers to be an appalling cacophony, if I ever want to get her out of the room I just slip Gish on and she’s off.  She has been with me to see P J Harvey and Kristin Hersh, partly because I wanted her to see women that I thought were talented and iconic but mainly because she can drive and has a car.  She also came with me to see Jeff Beck so I accidentally introduced her to Trombone Shorty, the support act who she likes very much.  I have seen The Cure several times since we met but there has never been any question that I’d ask her to come along.  My love of The Cure has changed, they are now like old friends who I’ll always love no matter what tripe they put out (half of 4:13 Dream, for example).  It is a thing I do with Mark and Chris and Charlie but not with a girl or my wife.  I’m sure she is not too worried that she hasn’t seen them, if she had tickets to see Billy Joel I’d certainly not expect her to offer me one of them, in fact I’d beg her not to.  The Cure is just one of the things about me, not all of me, and there are many things now that are us.  The trips to Crete and Paris and to China, the naturist evenings, plays and movies, our cats, our home. 

Fancy dress on my 80s themed 40th birthday party..

I’m sure I’ll continue to buy anything The Cure release.  I’ve seen them ten times now so I’m not desperate to see them again but pending ease of getting tickets, travel et cetera I would certainly consider it again.  I’m never going to be as obsessed as I was when I was buying up their back catalogue and watching the videos excessively to get Robert Smith’s hairstyle right back in 1988, of course not.  I was 16 then, I’m 40 now and not nearly as mental as I may appear.  In the same way I’ve long stopped wanting for a Cure girl as I found a girl that cured me.  I still think it is a cute look and would possibly make a great niche porn site but beyond that, it is a part of my life that has long passed. 

However, should Cure bassist Simon Gallup ever make me an offer…

I Miss The Comfort in Being Sad

Originally posted 14/7/2012.

Yesterday I was a sad panda. 

It started when I had to cycle to work because I had no money for train fare, a mere 13 days in to the month.  Then, when I had started work I looked at the diary for next week and found I’ll doing a few things I’d rather not be doing.  Then I had to sit through a meeting taken by my insufferable buffoon of a manager who, like many managers, has no ears to hear when we are telling him why shit aint working. Then I had too much to do and lost my temper and swore at a colleague who, though being a knob at the time, really didn’t deserve it.

In the greater scheme of things I have absolutely no “right” to be sad.  I have a roof over my head and food in the house.  I’m not seriously ill and neither are any of those who are dearest to me.  I am married to a woman who has lovely breasts and still lets me see them.  I have two lovely cats who give me lots of love and I get to play on the internet a lot when I can’t afford to go out, which is most of the time.  I get Sky, Spotify, have a Kindle Touch and am a Planet Rock subscriber so most of my media wants are taken care of.  I’ve repaired the relationships that I damaged in my past, or at least the ones that matter.  So why so sad, Glad?

First of all, when people say things like “you’ve got no right to be miserable” they are talking utter pig-poo.  Of course one has the right, we live in a relatively free country where despite what the right-on may think thought control has not gone as far as telling people how to feel “or else”.  If I want to be fucked off then I bloody well will be.  If you win £100 million on the Euro lottery thingy you still have the RIGHT to be pissed off if you choose to though you will of course look like a total dickhead.

Secondly and most pertinently, people who are depressed don’t generally choose to be and on the whole would rather not be.  I got past the idea of being withdrawn and insular as a way to impress girls when I was 18 and even then I never thought it was a generally good approach to life in general.  Depression is an illness that many are prone and have little choice in, notwithstanding medical treatment.  Can you imagine a world where we say to people “what right do you have to get asthma?” or “how dare that millionaire football player say they suffer with Ulcerative Colitis”?  Yet change either ailment for depression and it seems to be fair comment.  Stan Collymore is a fairly reprehensible person by most standards but I when he announced he was suffering from depression his manager at the time insinuated he was some sort of fairy, as if depression was a made up illness for weak and lazy people.  In his case, mental health issues would explain a lot of his subsequent behaviour. Sadly, mine too.

I have been prone to bouts of depression since my teens and it has no doubt affected many areas of my life; a crippling lack of confidence at such a vital stage of my mental and emotional development has had long term repercussions on my “success” in life.  It may sound big headed of me but I have underachieved academically and in vocationally; most people that know me well would probably agree.  Most of this is down to self-confidence.  True confidence makes up for so much else.  I don’t mean that superficial, wear-it-on-the-sleeve kind of confidence that so many young people like to announce they have because clearly they don’t.  I mean that deep, ingrained belief in oneself, that idea that anything truly is possible with enough application.  I’d very much like to be more handsome, slimmer, more stylish and so on in many, many regards but with enough confidence one can more than compensate for any lacking in those areas.  Sadly, I am not that confident.  It varies from day to day but my opinion of myself varies from thinking that I’m an ok guy with some good points to utter disgust.

Some years back now, when the brown stuff hit the ventilator and I went to see the mental health nurse for a diagnosis I was in such a state and so alarmed at my unpredictable behaviour that I thought I was bi-polar.  I was not.  Most people who think they are bi-polar do so due to extreme mood swings, like the ones I was having that lost me so many friends but like me most of those people are not bi-polar.  People with bi-polarity disorder are effectively crippled by the intensity of their lows and a danger to their own well-being when high.  I was not suicidally low and though my highs led to some foolish behaviour, particularly regarding spending, I was not going out and trying to buy aircraft carriers on credit.  It sounds interesting to say “Oh yes, I’m bi-polar” but believe me, you don’t want to be.  So I got diagnosed which was actually quite a relief.

You know those cards you can get for your desk that say “You don’t have to be mad to work here… but it helps” or some similar banality?  I want to get one made up that says:

“You don’t have to have traits of a borderline personality disorder to work here but if you do you’ll fit in fairly well”.

There, I can’t even be mental properly.  “Traits of”!  Effectively I have some elements but not all of a Borderline Personality Disorder with underlying depression; coupled together this causes anxiety that I shouldn’t really have as I have little to be anxious about!  The “borderline” part of the diagnosis needs to be understood.  It does not mean that this is almost a proper disorder (though in my case it is almost a proper disorder).  Borderline means pretty much on the border between different behaviours; manic, depressive, disorganised, compulsive, obsessive and so on.  This is where the wild mood swings come in.  Though my “traits of” diagnosis did in part make me feel I was making much ado about nothing it was also a relief in that the actual process of being diagnosed had made me write down how I thought of my own behaviour in many different aspects, thus helping me recognise what was fairly normal and what was, frankly, just a bit odd. As a consequence I can in most situations now tell when my feelings, which used to overwhelm me, need to be controlled and my disorder taken in to account.  As an example, I used to often feel bitterness towards groups of friends if I felt that I was being left out in some way, now if I start to feel that way I can talk myself up again, make myself realise that I am entering a destructive cycle of withdrawal that will alienate me further if I am indeed alienated at all.  The thoughts still come but now I can step back from them, analyse them and tell them to fuck off.

As for fitting in fairly well in my work place, I can think of at least three people in my office who are considerably more mental than me, who appear to have quite serious defects in their personality but appear to be oblivious to how they are perceived by others.  Another colleague is quite open about having depression, indeed has it much worse than I ever had, yet her behaviour is a lot more normal than my own, at least to my eyes.  Ultimately it is far too easy to pin how we behave to some medical or psychological reason rather than admitting we are at fault in other ways.  I could say I snapped at my colleague yesterday because I have traits of a Borderline Personality Disorder, depression and anxiety but it is more likely I snapped because I was pissed off and didn’t want to deal with the ‘phone call I was dealing with.  The increasingly bizarre behaviour of some of my colleagues could be down to a personality disorder or they may just be oddballs with no sense of self-awareness.  And I may have lost friends, got in to debt, flirted and got drunk for mental health reasons but it may just be that I was an arsehole.  Either way, I am reapplying for admittance to the human race so please bear with me.