Ali has had a bad morning – he found a rigged ewe in the lower field and, despite his best efforts, was too late to save it. Rigged, short for riggwelted, or sometimes cast. Locally it’s “couped” (pronounced “coped”). He’s exhausted and dejected, half-heartedly browsing crofting and farming websites for advice about the weeks ahead. He is out of his depth. I think we both are.

We have made some progress though. Preparing tea tonight Ali has remembered what “GLT” stands for: “Gillian liked this”. Me and my fussy ways. I am touched that he obviously listened to my feedback about our culinary efforts. I didn’t mention that it wasn’t quite the same after a freeze thaw cycle.

He does not, however, remember anything about the following email, sent by his Dad Curt Finks from his hospital chaplain exchange to Dallas, retrieved from the Bronwyn Gosling cache.

29 November 1994

Dear Alistair,

I cannot tell you how delighted I am that my E-mail message got through eventually – Chris brought through a laser printed copy of your reply, which I think he might have tried to decipher. He did not have much chance really did he!

I am glad your Mother was happy with her birthday card. Sounds as if you had a good time. I am also glad that you liked the reference to Hotel Cockroach.  I am writing down all such experiences in the notebook you gave me, all the way from the drunk man who talked to me on the outward leg of my marathon trip to pick up The Rolling Stones tickets, to the “Nightmare on Elm Street” experience of my first night’s exploration of downtown Dallas, and the misunderstanding about “junction” (I now practise the word “intersection” in my sleep).

I watched Oliver Stone’s JFK on TV a couple of weeks ago (it was put up against Scarlett, the sequel to Gone With The Wind in the ratings war). It was good to see all the familiar scenes, having explored them myself already.

The Bill Drummond thing is interesting. The Proclaimers. Why? But it’s good to see him back in the music industry. I went to an amazing shop called Bill’s on Sunday. It is the largest independent record shop in the USA, and it had 2 KLF remixes of other people’s material that I had never seen before as well as a Big in Japan 12”. I couldn’t afford them because they all cost $20+. Talking about money, I have almost run out. I have had to pay for the first month’s accommodation, tickets to New York and pots, pans and trips to Mexico, so I wonder if you could enquire about having another $1000 sent across. There’s no real hurry, but we could maybe look into the cheapest way of doing it. Americans want to charge you for everything.

So, what do you think about the book bound in reindeer leather? It might be worth it, but I can’t reaIly afford it. You could try writing to them at the Irish Tower, and do what I did with Astrid Kircher, and just write a good chatty letter with the intention of getting a free autographed picture. Maybe worth a try. Don’t worry about the Silver single – I just saw it mentioned in the NME and am not all that desperate to get it. The other things sound excellent though, and I am looking forward to the tape.

Last night I went to see “The Mask” in a cinema diner where they serve beer and food at tables throughout the film. You might enjoy the film more than I did. Are you still seeing Gillian? Tonight it is pints of Newcastle Brown ale at a half price night.

Yes, so enjoy your crispy pancakes, and send my love to your Mother.

Your Father

Ali is mystified. He has no memory of receiving this particular email. He did make recordings to send to his Dad, but his recollection is that they were of concerts broadcast on BBC Radio 3. And he kept newspaper cuttings. We do not have printouts of Ali’s emails. We have been through Bronwyn’s box twice without success.

So, seven and a half years after Curt Finks allegedly wrote “Brent Goose Rock” on the day of the release of The JAMs’ 1987 LP, we have evidence of him writing about Bill Drummond and The KLF again. What, indeed, is going on.

I speculate that the fingerprints of The Benefaktor are all over this. Ali disagrees. Bronwyn is not part of his circle. Ali has known her for ever. And he remembers other emails from the pages of printouts very clearly, from the hours spent in the library working on his thesis. We don’t always read everything carefully. Conversations with our parents – and indeed spouses or anybody else – are often on autopilot. Perhaps the ghost of Curt Finks will help with some insights in a future pamphlet.

That evening, Ali goes into one of his monologues. He splits life into thirds rather than the halves implied by a midlife crisis. He does not think that the two are incompatible though. If the midlife crisis goes on long enough it can become the middle third. He does not like to speculate on what it means that he became a crofter at the age of 55. Perhaps the midlife crisis started before the crofting. I wouldn’t be surprised.

He thinks that the “theory” applies across multiple aspects of life, and might help explain his father. Childhood/youth doesn’t end at 18, particularly nowadays; the working years are the biggest chunk, for better or worse; retirement could be a lot of fun if you have good health and enough savings. And as he mansplains: a woman’s life could be split into threes, demarcated by menarche and menopause.

Men, I point out, are different. Ali frowns at that, knowing what I will say next. I remind him about his failure to consent for a vasectomy. I have never got to the bottom of that: was it weakness, an inability to give up reproductive potential, or his usual excuse – disbelief about the physics/ biology of what happens to all the sperm? It’s all rather academic now of course.

“Do we ever really know other people – what goes on in their heads?”, I ask.

On the spot, counting syllables on fingers, he writes me a poem called Pause, before renaming it Thirds. He is delighted at his own output. He wonders about submitting it to a literary journal. “Ali” could be a ewe or a ram, he points out.

Thirds

In bed I was a puddle of ink

on white sheets,

stained right through to the memory foam.

Charted peaks

of blood results forwarded by text,

“High for age”,

whipping my ovaries to regain

momentum.

—–

GP.

“My anxiety”.

Risks or solutions?

Signed script.

—–

I’m patched, rotating site, waist level

twice a week,

noting the sweats and flushes and sleep

in an app,

reporting my blood pressure and weight

by email.

And the return of puddles of blood

on white sheets.

By Ali Finks 22 April 2024

I read it through a couple of times, also counting on fingers, writing in the margin. It’s in lines of nines and threes, except for the middle section, which rocks between twos and fives. Ali explains that represents the highs, lows, edginess, tetchiness, irritability, migraines or washes of relief that I reported with my cycle, the OCP, mini pill, during my pregnancies and, more recently, the perimenopause and then the real thing. He asks what the “highs” were like. Not highs. Where did he get that idea from?

I can see what he’s trying to do with his poem, but it captures none of the emotions, the existential angst, the toe in the water before plunging into waves of overwhelming uncertainty at each stage. He’s captured the physical parts of it – the visible changes, or the measurable bits. I’m surprised that he didn’t mention the spots and weight gain. “Do you think I could do that within the wordcount?” he replies. I don’t deign to answer. He screws it up and sits in a sulk.

If Ali is stuck into thirds, I like the idea of halves. Before and after. If Ali’s thirds are, say blocks of 27 years, which would fit with my age when we married (27), and my age now (54), that predicts the respectable innings of 81. Midpoint would be 40 and a half. Where was I then? 2010. The aftermath of the financial crash, the start of the Tory years, or the coalition government at least. That would seem like a fitting midpoint. Downhill all the way from that point onwards.

So, we’re still trying to reconcile our thirds and halves. Like a hemiola in music. I remember my chosen role in life – as sometime GANTOB, for the next few weeks or months at least: my hobby/ obsession/ special interest. I try to think about examples of the hemiola in The KLF’s music. Google does not find any examples and John Higgs’ book does not mention any either. Ali is convinced that What Time Is Love is in thirds. He sings it out, the “dum dum dee dum dum dee dum dum dee dum dum” and “oo wee”, tapping out threes with his hand, struggling to sing simultaneously the “oo wee”, to split bars into two.

I play the Pure Trance version on YouTube. He’s remembered it incorrectly. I count it out in 4/4, though it feels as if it is straining to jump out of those constraints. “Dum dum, dee dum, dee dum dum, dee dum dum”. Ten dum/dees to Ali’s eleven. The different versions are all subtly different, with the contrast most pronounced with 1997’s ***k the Millennium.

I can’t find sheet music to prove my point. So I ask the GANTOB hive (question 16 of the 23 Questions). While waiting for an answer I decide to check out Andrew Lloyd Webber’s score from Jesus Christ Superstar (1971), remembering the idea that The KLF subconsciously stole the riff from “Trial Before Pilate (Including the 39 Lashes)” (perhaps via Anne Clark’s “Our Darkness” (1984)). We pop Clark’s track on Spotify, eyes meeting over the high synth “oo” from 3:30. Like a prototype Mu. I scroll through the Lloyd Webber score and find the following for the 39 Lashes section:

There is no suggestion of triplets, and it’s definitely 4/4. It’s all about the syncopations. I would have struggled to write it out myself of course. I give up trying to fit the dum dees to the written notation, but that does not mean that I’m wrong. Ali accepts my point grudgingly after the trumpets come in at around 3:40, sounding like Acid Brass.

“I’m still going to split life into threes though”, he mumbles and heads off to do the dishes. I wonder if I should go and say a few words of encouragement; but you can’t just magic up threes and twos from a misremembered 1980s earworm, force them together, and claim another instance of the number 23.

What a way to spend an evening, arguing about the minutiae of menopause, midlife crises and The KLF.

I turn to something more productive, pulling the BCG box from the other side of the table. I get to work on Curt Finks’ journal. There are a lot of threes in life. We had Peter Higgs’ The God Particle (TGP) in part 2 of these Muons pamphlets. Turning over the next page in the journal I try to work out his scribblings on cyclic AMP, wondering if they might become part 4? I am struggling to identify what part of Curt Finks’ life was not midlife crisis.

To be continued…

Pamphlet 33 of the 52 Pamphlets

Answer to Question 16 of the 23 Questions

The two ghosts, Ian and Curt, are sitting in the back seat of Gillian and Ali’s car. They are pretending to be strapped in, as if safety is a concern. Ali is driving. They are listening to R.E.M. on CD. Out of Time. Losing My Religion. 

It has been a productive trip, for G&A at least. She had a number of errands in Aviemore. He had kept driving to Granton-on-Spey for a meeting with his lawyer. On the way back they had stopped off for a meal at the Duke of Gordon before stocking up on some frozen items at the Coop, to add to her earlier grocery shop. They drive up to the croft just after night falls. The ghosts can tell from the heat emanating from the tyre tracks that somebody has been here recently. That someone being Bronwyn Gosling. She must have left only a few minutes ago. Gillian and Ali are oblivious.

G&A go inside, unloading the car in a couple of trips crunching over the gravel. Then they close the front door, draw the curtains, and peace descends. The two ghosts sit in the car, taking in some of the details. It is not a new car, but it is comfortable. Ian dismisses the vanity mirror on the passenger side, while secretly desperate to have a look. He wants to keep busy. He is aware of “an atmosphere”. Curt has been unusually quiet. Ian thinks that he knows why. 

Inside, she is in the utility room, shifting things around in the chest freezer to make space. “What does GLT mean?”, she calls through to the lounge, where he is stretched out watching trick pool shots on Instagram. 

“No idea”, he shouts back. 

“It’s your handwriting. Looks like a pasta sauce or something. Dated 14 February 2024”. 

“Sorry. Must have been in a rush”. Another three letter acronym that he had coined and then forgotten. 

“We’ll try it tomorrow night. Maybe that’ll jog your memory”. 

The following morning she hits the road early, heading to Inverness to do some staff training. She has had a recent promotion. Her prior experience has attracted the attention of the spreadsheets in America. Ian and Curt are with her. They have not left the car all night. Ian is pretending to be clipped in at the back and Curt is sitting with her in the front, still brooding. At Newtonmore, just past the shinty pitch and the grill, at the Ralia turn, she turns left onto the new A9. Without a sound Ian slips out of the car. He is not allowed on the new A9. It was not built until decades after he was alive. Curt is quite relieved, glad to have her to himself. He is going to try some “techniques” and influence her thoughts. He starts humming. He cannot understand why she has not as much as looked at the materials that Bronwyn dropped off recently. The “BCG” box. His box really, if memory serves him correctly. There must be something of interest in there. Instead, Gillian has been chasing around sourcing new chapters for a fictional Bill Drummond. Why can she not recognise a bird in the hand.

Ghosts do not use the types of networks that we rely on. They are more tuned into bosons, leptons, quarks and muons. This has some advantages. Tapping into the wider cosmos he becomes aware of a strong and rather unexpected signal. Somewhere in the vicinity of the East Anglian fens, Grayling Muir is making a rare visit. Curt whips off to check out the small number of locations they shared in life. The community hall, Bronwyn’s house, Curt’s cottage, the birdwatching hide and surrounding environs.

Grayling is hovering around Bronwyn’s garden just outside King’s Lynn, leaning on a bird table. Just as in life he continues to look suave and has a full head of hair. Rather like an American Peter Egan, Curt thinks. He hasn’t seen Grayling for decades. His previous jet-setting ways, following the exciting life of an academic, mean that he has a much wider territory to explore, if you like airports and conference venues, and the exotic holiday destinations that follow to offset the time in the library. As usual, Curt is left feeling very parochial in his presence. He accepts Grayling’s warm welcome with a degree of steeliness. 

“Still the same old Curt then”, laughs the professor. 

Curt attempts a smile and then gets down to business.

“Funny you should turn up”, he gabbles. “I was just thinking about my American trip”. He shivers at the memory. He hasn’t been inclined to return. Until now. 

November 1994. Curt is sitting on a plane, fretting about the future. He is having a rather late midlife crisis. Questioning his faith has been a career long issue. Norah has given him a book for the trip, and he is not sure that it is helping. The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?* by Leon Lederman (1993). He is finding it difficult to concentrate, after too much brandy on the flight and the announcements about the descent to Dulles Airport, Washington DC. He is back in the 1960s and Peter Higgs has proposed a boson, which is a wave in a field which gives mass to all elementary particles. It is just a theory. There is not definitive proof. But it has to exist, to explain the way that atoms and the universe behave, or everything will topple over. It must be there, but it cannot be seen or measured. His thoughts loop around, trying to replace the God particle in the theory with God himself. Something apparently so important and fundamental and powerful, but invisible and unquantifiable and unknowable. He looks down over the ocean, imaging the waves that you cannot see from this altitude. And the forces that must be keeping this aircraft up in the air. He wants to be down on solid ground. He cannot believe any of it.

December 1994. He is standing in a heavy tweed jacket and tie, making his way across a huge car park to a hospital block on the Parkland Memorial Hospital campus, Dallas. He is a few weeks into his “exchange”. Grayling has pulled some strings to arrange a hospital chaplaincy attachment for his English friend. 

Curt feels as far removed from his normal life as it is possible to be. He is used to flat terrain. He is from East Anglia after all. But the skies here, and the sunsets, viewed from the considerable elevation of his dormitory room balcony, across oceans of cars, highways, skyscrapers and strips of shops, are overwhelming. His wife, family and friends, feel a million miles away. An expensive call required to even just hear their voice. 

He supposes that this is part of the plan. Ministers are hard to fire. He has been shunted around for months by church bureaucracy back home. From a steady congregation, to a short spell in a hospital job in the closest District General, and now this. His usual job, back in the parish, awaits on his return, but for now it is all about time away from the ordinary, learning new tricks at his rapidly advancing age. He imagines his congregation back home anticipating his reinvention, imagining a bold, upright, confident Curt striding up to the altar, booming out his welcomes, ad libbing succinct passages, introducing new rousing hymns learnt from the Dallas plains. He wishes he were back in the vicarage, with Norah, rather than his whitewashed room in the Texas Woman’s University Dormitory. Either that, or they are trying to break him. Hasten his retirement. He wonders what his exchange partner is doing in King’s Lynn. He will be getting to know the congregation, filling his shoes for a few weeks, sleeping in his spare room, enjoying a boiled egg and soldiers with Norah. They themselves may never meet, though their paths may have crossed in jet streams.

He climbs into the elevator and presses the button for the chaplaincy offices. He pats his pocket to check that he has a book with him. Albert Camus’ The Plague (1947 in French, 1948 in English). Something absurdist and metaphysical, inspired by a cholera outbreak. If he has some time during the day he will be able to dip into it. He hopes it will help him understand disease and our response to death. He finds the patients he meets on the wards too far removed, behind bed rails, drip machines, charts and monitors. 

He drops his carrier bag beside his desk and sidles across to speak to Chris, a student chaplain who seems to know everything. Curt is piggybacking onto his email address and is about to send his first message to his son Ali. Chris is typing for him, because they only have a few minutes before the team’s morning huddle. R.E.M. is playing on the local radio station – The Edge, KDGE – same song.

They watch the message sending, and Curt shouts in disbelief when Chris explains that it has gone and will be in Ali’s inbox already, available to read when he next logs in. The team is gathering around the table in the corner and asks what they have been up to. Curt starts to explain but is quickly interrupted. They need to start the day’s work. But he is not worried. He does not hear the team update. He is imagining himself in the New College library, Edinburgh – a space he knows very well. He wonders where their computer is housed. He wants to know if his son has replied to his message.

The Two Ghosts

#GANTOB2024 Pamphlet 32

To be continued…

* Which takes us part of the way to answering question 11

There is still time to contribute a pamphlet for the #52Pamphlets, or submit or answer a question for the 23 Questions.

Apologies for the break in writing. It has been over a week. Never mind. It is sometimes useful to pause and take stock. In the period leading up to this gap, there had been pamphlets several times a week, racing to complete the unofficial 9 Missing Years project before the end of the first run of Bill Drummond’s The Life Model. This was delivered on schedule and has been sent to the man himself for information.

I have been busy with work, but have found time for some essential GANTOB admin. I personalised two of the pamphlets to send to the authors and sent the second GANTOB book to the British Library. I have also been sourcing some recordings of previous GANTOB blogs. I hope to upload some of them to the site. I should note that we are over half the way through the 23 Questions – if you want a question answered, you had better be quick. Oh, and we are 3/5 of the way through the 52 Pamphlets (which are all now listed in one place for ease of access).

GANTOB (the project) will end when the last of the 52 pamphlets is completed and the third book published(*). At the current rate this is likely to be by 23 July, the anniversary of the rebirth of The KLFRS and the inception of this work. Whatever the date, after that point there will be no further GANTOB activities. So, if I am finished before 27 August there will not be a Battle of Perth, in Stirling or Perth. If that is the case and you want to re-enact the battle yourself, then please contact me. You would need to provide an idea for the battle and the estimated number of participants. I would send you a battle pack to help you on your way.

But on to more important matters. I have been exploring the box that Bronwyn brought up to the croft a few weeks ago: an unexpected haul of my father-in-law Curt Finks’ papers. I have been struggling to work out what to do with them. After conversations with Ali, we have agreed that two of his Dad’s journal entries and an email, may be of wider interest, but will require some context setting. There may be other materials that we can use later on, after a bit of discussion with Grayling Muir’s family. My Finks “discoveries”, for better or worse, will form the basis of these Muons pamphlets. Be prepared for some hobby horses and rants from the old codger.

Poor homesick Curt. Ali tells me that he was on an exchange between November 1994 and February/ March 1995. He cannot remember the details precisely, as he was at Uni at that point, putting the finishing touches to his PhD. I knew his parents by then – had been to stay with them a few times even – but they were distant figures, more my grandparents’ age. I struggled to talk to my future father-in-law. He always seemed a closed book, already trapped in its pages. But there were, as I suppose there are for all of us, glimpses of something else trying to get out. He loved his music, birdwatching and his film nights. He and Ali could be thick as thieves on some of these topics, as Norah(#) and I were off doing the dishes or baking for one of their regular commitments with the church – mother and toddlers perhaps. And here I am, 30 years on, stuck in the pages myself.

GANTOB 17 April 2024

#GANTOB2024 Pamphlet 31

An answer of sorts to question 12: “When is enough?“, as posed by The Quantitative Surveyor

(*) As with the second book, the third book will not exactly repeat the material from the blog. There will be some further developments in the text (though perhaps not the “big reveals” that we secured from The Philatelist and the New Year’s Day Vienna trip in the second book) and editing to help it read more like a book than a “book of the blog”. The Deputy General is on standby.

(+) Please note – this section of the “Curt Finks” journal is imagined. He did spend some time in the Center, but the details of the workings of the chaplaincy are from another hospital, documented elsewhere in his papers.

(^) Mention of Parkland Hospital is not intended as a Discordian reference. It is just where Curt Finks’ chaplaincy exchange ended up. GANTOB (the project) is not an attempt to fill any part of that canon. Furthermore, any coincidences around the number 31 or 22 November are just that – apophenia.

(#) Names have been changed.

An unofficial entry for one of the gaps in Bill Drummond’s The Life Model by Katie (AKA The Foundation Doktor)

I Am Sixty-Eight (under): 29th of April 2021 to 28th of April 2022

I usually love the number forty¹, in all its varieties. Τετρώκοντα (tetrṓkonta), चत्वारिंशत् (catvāriṃśát). Quadraginta, in Latin. Four tens. A quad. A courtyard. Something solid, enclosed, cloistered, a lawn in the middle. Peaceful, shaded, away from the rush and bustle.

I have a long history with the number forty². Forty³ beds. Forty⁴ pairs of shoes. Forty⁵ flags on forty⁶ islands. Forty⁷ bunches of daffodils. Forty⁸ paperback copies of a book, burnt. Forty⁹ second plays. Forty¹⁰ posters. Seventeen more than twenty-three.

I am sitting in my not-cloistered garden. It is early May. The daffodils have long faded. I rejoice in their shrivelled magnificence. I wonder about handing out forty¹¹ withered daffodils to strangers, but Covid lockdown rules might not allow that.

I have been writing, as usual, but other than that my options for artistic endeavours are limited. Numbered rules abound. The “rule of six” means that outdoor gatherings are allowed. Or “two households”. There are “thirty-three high risk” countries apparently.

Hotel quarantine is required if you arrive from one of these countries. I think about writing a letter of objection to the Government. Surely people will not be required to stay in the hotel for forty¹² days and forty¹³ nights.

I do not like the word quarantine. I have looked it up of course. I understand its origins. It originated in Venice in the time of the Black Death. Pox be on you, if that is not mixing my metaphors.

So, before people even understood bugs, or the role of rats and fleas, those clever Venetians had identified that there must be some way in which the plague was being spread. They took no chances, opting for that Biblical number.

I google the plague and check how quickly it would cause problems after infection. The CDC says that the incubation period is 2 to 8 days. So those poor souls languished on ships for weeks longer than was strictly necessary.

Quaranta giorni at anchor. Hellish. Imagine the heat, squalor, stench. I slumber gently in my garden, thankful for small mercies. I think about writing a forty¹⁴ day diary in solidarity, documenting the life and times of an artist during Covid lockdown.

I could make it into a painting, in forty¹⁵ neatly aligned squares. As I doze, I pick away at the idea. If I am going to represent forty¹⁶ as a quad, a square, then how do I divide it up?

Six point three two four treble five three two zero double three six seven five nine. Makes it sound like a phone number. Or 6.324555320336759 if you’d prefer, though perhaps it keeps going on to infinity like the number Pi.

So, to achieve a square I will need just over six words per line over a bit more than six lines. But the length of a word rarely matches its height exactly (except short ones like “a”). I give up.

I am not going to snip up words, shunting letters to the next line, or guillotining lines into “almost thirds”. Surely the artist’s job is to produce clarity from chaos, to help yourself and others find meaning. I change tack.

I am relieved when I wake up. The 25 Paintings are wondering why I have been neglecting them. The number is, after all, a perfect square. I sometimes miss the obvious. I labour over a 25+15 connection but give up.

Not that they would make a square of course. They would make a rectangle. The same is true of my “25 A5 sided knitted rectangles”. I can’t remember if the Million Stitch Blanket is a square, but it could be.

It is a huge relief when the Covid rules start to loosen. Strictly speaking I have been able to visit the barber for a few weeks by the time I turn 68, but customers and hairdressers alike have been hesitant.

We are still encouraged to stay locally. I yearn to travel. No need to be exotic. Forget the Congo. Penkiln Burn would do just fine. I have written some contemplations on finding its source, in a little book called 3”x1”.

My copy arrives from Cally early May 2021, along with some of his other “Ration Books”. He devised his plan for short, rationed reads in 2019. In 2021 they feel perfectly timed for our perpetual war (and recovery) against Covid.

3”x1” was published in 2020, but that was a “missing year”. Not one of the 9 Missing Years, but one of the Covid missing years, experienced by us all. I enjoyed writing as “me”, not one of my alter egos.

I open the book at random. Page 23. “This is me with all my ‘issues and insecurities and rampant ego’”. Yup, that’s me alright. I turn back to the beginning and read on. It is 1964, or is it 1962?

Anamorphosis. I am Hans Holbein. Painting, but in words. I have a skull. No need to hide it. I am 10 (or am I 8?) years old, holding it in my hand, fresh from the burn. Later it is hidden.

At 68 years old I find details like age and dates rather slippery. Other things run like clockwork. The bowel screening letter, with its little plastic stick, arrives with some late birthday cards. The postie commiserates about the task ahead.

I reread the book in a sitting. I am happy with it. Cally has done a good job. I do an internet search to answer my own question about sparling. They do still return to the River Cree each spring.

I would love to be able to pop down to the Cree on spec, stand in the water, hand in the water, waiting for the fish to struggle on past, upstream. But instead I am here, stuck in north London.

Fifty strides. That is all it took to break out of my lockdown haircut abstinence that first time around, July 2020. For this lockdown loosening, May 2021, I am back again at Metin’s and I have a proposal for him.

I rehearse my idea while waiting on a chair carefully distanced from a young guy waiting his turn. I’m before him. I’m relieved to see that he has headphones on. I don’t want him to hear me making my case.

I read through my proof copy of Antimacassar by Tenzing Scott Brown. That’s me by the way. Metin’s current victim is paying. I have jotted some ideas down, but as I sit down I am thinking about just one thing.

Metin drapes me and sets about his task. He is talking about masks. I nod, trying to hold my breath. I am not used to being this close to someone who is not family. I clench my nostrils when inhaling.

Metin is in his rhythm. I am still thinking how to frame my idea about selling books from his waiting area. Before that, however, I need to work out if 127 is a prime number. I give myself an ultimatum.

One hundred and twenty-seven is the age of one of the characters in TSB’s book. It is also, I finally decide, after working through the 17, 23 and other promising times tables, a prime number. Here goes with my idea…

After recounting the plot of my book, its two main characters, my various pseudonyms, including The Travelling Salesman, and my idea to translate it into Kurdish, I stop and look up.  The young guy has removed his headphones. He’s smirking.

Do not take your adult son with you to the barber. On the way home he chides me about cultural appropriation and my inconsistencies around flags. I don’t care. Metin is up for the idea. Luckily it’s only fifty paces.

Forty¹⁷ second plays. Forty¹⁸ Google searches. Seventeen Wikipedia pages. I am cycling through forty¹⁹ regular activities that I have listed like a Paul Daniels memory trick. I am doing everything I can not to think about Lily James’ Netflix haircut.

If I have eight times forty^20-27 second plays then that makes three hundred and twenty seconds, which is just over five minutes. I do a dry run of the TSB plays in Best Gent Hair Saloon, stopwatch at the ready.

Metin and two waiting customers pretend not to hear me reciting the lines. Forty²⁸ seconds later I have still not finished the first: Sofa. The actors will need to speak and move very quickly, or I have misled the reader.

The next plays – Hot Towel and Cut Throat – are done and dusted in around forty seconds²⁹ which is gratifying. I need to read the rest carefully to remember what would actually be performed in the plays and what is padding.

Eight forty^30-37 second plays in twelve minutes forty³⁸ one seconds. That totals 761 seconds. Another prime number. I discuss times with Metin. He worries that it would take longer with customers unfamiliar with the script and him so busy working.

That September I manage to travel all the way to Great Yarmouth for Prime Yarc. It is lovely to see the sea, the horizon. I feel rusty giving my performances at first, but Tam Dean Burn is a great help.

Original Projects produce a booklet for the event: The Edge of the World, by TSB. I do a show and an exhibition. People come to watch. We feel connected. We have all survived the great pause, back from the edge.

I perform some forty³⁹ second plays, reminisce about the forty⁴⁰ beds, soup, cakes, lines, my uncle, cannibals. Everything is getting back to normal. I walk along the beach, have an ice cream, avoid small talk. That is not my forte.

KATIE, pretending to be Bill Drummond, 9 April 2024

Pamphlet 30 of the #52Pamphlets

The last of the 9 Missing Years

Incorporating answer 7 (about the skull), answer 8 (on sparling) and answer 13 (on √40) of the 23 Questions.

If you can present this pamphlet of 40 x 40 in a square of 40 then please get in touch.

An alternative to the two ghosts’ submission for the 9 missing years (I am Fifty, 29th of April 2003 to 28^th of April 2004).

After a bracing couple of weeks in Orkney, I am heading back down to King’s Lynn. The ferry crossing is not as rough as I had expected after reading about Storm Kathleen. Arriving at Ali and Gillian’s croft just after 7PM, I am surprised to find the place shuttered up. No luck on the phone either. I try the front door, but it too is locked. At least it isn’t dark as I explore the perimeter and look out into the fields. No joy. I get back on my way and reach my lodgings in Dalwhinnie in time for a hot meal.

Connecting to the WiFi when I get back to my room I check in with the GANTOB blog. They’ve been busy. Several full pamphlets since my “The Long Journey” on 21 March. But there’s nothing there about the content of the box that I dropped off with Ali – the Curt Finks papers. I am disappointed. I wonder what they have planned.

The post after mine – by the two ghosts – makes me shiver. The idea of the ghosts of writers haunting living authors as they stop off in Dalwhinnie (even if one of them is dear old Curt). I wonder if my technical pieces qualify me as a writer. My pamphlet for GANTOB is yet to be published in a book, but it’s been printed as a pamphlet apparently (awaiting my return hopefully) and I’m told it will be in the 52 Pamphlets volume. I leave the main light on in the room to ward off any spirits. I’m not scared of them, but I don’t want them to see what I’m writing.

I have flicked through the “9 missing years” posts and think that the two ghosts’ entry is a cop out. They are meant to be describing the “above/ over” part of Drummond, and simply skate over him, focusing instead on their own preoccupations and narrow field of vision. I can’t blame them – they have limited options to do otherwise. And one can imagine that ghosts are rather fixated on the idea of sins, death and the devil. However, if Gillian is going to be successful in putting forward these GANTOB pieces as valid companions to Drummond’s book The Life Model, then they are going to have to add something helpful and/or interesting. I like a challenge, and I am going to attempt to fill in the details for 2003-2004. It will be the negative of the two ghosts’ version of Drummond. The other side of the coin.

I am going to use Drummond’s own words for the year in question. I found them at the back of his 2008 book 17, which I picked up for a song in Kirkwall. I am going to make my imagined version of Drummond into a detective, exploring his previous acts, making discoveries about his intentions. Let’s see how it works. I can always redraft if Gillian doesn’t like it.

Bronwyn’s imagined Bill Drummond writes…

It’s 2003. I am waiting. For a train, then a tube, and then a co-author, fellow traveller and editor. I am not thinking about writing. I am procrastinating, dwelling on the past, using my energies unproductively to worry and reframe my previous actions.

I stand by my contradictions. I hold multiple opinions in my head at once, jabbing away at each other, accepting and even welcoming their opposing forces, like magnets spinning on the spot, trying to find their match. Take flags. I hate flags, but I designed one and displayed it across the Atlantic Archipelago. And in one interview I used the symbolism on another flag (the Red Hand on the Ulster banner) to explain my daft proposals years earlier (the idea of chopping off my right hand and throwing it into the audience at the 1992 Brit Awards). I can’t have it both ways. I want to bury all these thoughts.

I nudge myself into more productive territory. I recently had a chat with the poet Seamus Heaney about the area around Cushendall, on the Antrim Coast. We did not talk about flags or right hands. We were more interested in Ossian, writing, art, and the tower. I felt like a grown up, part of the scene. I gave him a copy of my book How to be an artist, with the Last Page insert. He looked pleased and promised to read it.

At the opposite extreme of the maturity spectrum is Mark Manning. We are writing a book together: Wild Highway. He is a long-term co-conspirator and a fellow artist at our antiestablishment end of the market. Can I say right hand man? Defined as “An indispensable helper of chief assistant” in my dictionary. Maybe not, perhaps that’s more Gimpo. I’m meeting him too.

Mark (AKA Zodiac Mindwarp or Zed), sent me an illustrated copy of The Sermon On The Mount a few weeks ago, instructing me to read it at least once a year. I did not expect Mark to be a source of moral education and propriety. I tucked it away and forgot about it. But I decide, while waiting at the Creation offices, that I really should read it before I meet him. I pop out and manage to find a £1 Pocket Canon copy of the Gospel of Matthew (King James Version) in a second-hand bookshop. It has an introduction by AN Wilson, which I vow to read later. For now I turn to chapters 5-7 of the gospel itself: the Sermon on the Mount.

There is some good practical advice in here: “Agree with thine adversary quickly, while thou art in the way with him; lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison. Verily I say unto thee, thou shalt by no means come out thence, till thou has paid the uttermost farthing”. Been there, done that, with my Roger Eagle graffiti moment in court 17. No excuse, but I was lucky to have been let off with a fine. I can’t do the inflation conversion from a King James VI farthing. I need to behave myself.

And just below that I come to a section that makes me pause. I know it of course, from my time in Sunday school in Newton Stewart and Corby, but I had not made the connection before: “And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.”

Is that what Mark was getting at when he gave me his rather fancier version of the Sermon?

I read backwards to unpick it a bit. “’Though shalt not commit adultery,’ but I say unto you that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.”

In which case I’m screwed. Why does it always come back to that. I try to keep personal details out of any of my writing, to protect everybody that I love and have loved. I pop the book back into the charity shop and head back to the office. They’re all there now and have started without me. The guy at the front desk hasn’t passed on my apologies, and they don’t believe my excuses. I say nothing about the Sermon. We have more important things to discuss. We’re back in 1996, looking for the Lost Chord, or Satan, or ourselves, or anything, up the Congo.

 It’s 2004. I’m waiting. In Lincoln. Under a tree in front of the cathedral. In my right hand I am carrying a bunch of daffodils. I must look like a Jehovah’s Witness, standing stock still, holding out my offering. Or perhaps the jilted half of a date. I do not want to appear desperate. I am not a chugger, waving busy people down for their bank details. This is art. I know from previous instalments of the 40 Daffodils that it just needs one person to stop and others will follow.

“Random acts of kindness”, somebody called it last year in Milton Keynes. I looked it up and read Anne Herbert’s book. I think about it while I am waiting for my first victim to arrive. Victim is wrong. I’m thinking about the opposite: “random acts of violence and senseless acts of cruelty”. But it’s not really a random act of kindness either. That is meant to be “nonpremeditated… inconsistent”. I stand here with my premeditated flowers, just like last year: 100% consistent. But that’s the way that I like it. The flowers are my flags, yellow banner on a green pole. I can wave them around without cultural appropriation or nationalist overtones. I relax. Get into the role.

But what if Welsh people take offence. Or if somebody thinks that I’m collecting for Marie Curie. Maybe they’ll  try to throw coins and notes into my bucket. I try to stop overthinking and put on my best smile, striding out, right hand forward.

BRONWYN, channelling her inner Bill Drummond, 9 April 2024

All the 9s:

• Pamphlet 29 of the #52Pamphlets
• One of the 9 missing years
• Answer to question 9 of the 23 Questions, when considered together with the two ghosts’ submission. Question 9 was “What are the two sides of the same coin?” (posed by The Numismatist)

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