'The Baroque': A Suit Review

With its opulent lining and elegantly tapered waist, this unusual suit - fresh from the garment house A Suit That Fits - has a definite touch of the baroque. Brilliantly fitted with a gorgeous lining, it clings like a lover to the sides of your chest, heightening every sensation. One touch of the pure wool fabric, liberally padded and lined with satin, and we guarantee you’ll never want to wear anything else. Sit in it for a while, as I am doing now, and you begin to notice all kinds of things. First there is the ticket pocket, a small flapped opening halfway down the torso on the left hand side, perfect for storing theatre tickets and other random things; then there is the fine slate pinstripe, quiet enough to make an impression without dominating the overall look. A suit, we think, that’ll add a whole new dimension to your wardrobe – the exotic look of the 21st century ‘corporate baroque'.

To read more about this suit click here.

The Cinema and a Pale Yellow Jumper

What a cool evening I had last night. After ten minutes of waiting outside the wrong Odeon on Leicester Square (did you know there were two?) Sean rang me to see where I was. When we finally met he was wearing a lemon jumper and his hair looked blacker than before, as black as soot in fact. We shared coffee/toffee ice-cream in the Odeon and then watched The Prestige. Sitting in the cinema with someone called Sean was a strange thing, especially as my trips to the flicks with my ex Shaun (who I still feel a connection and love for) were always incredibly intense. Am I the only one who finds there's something sacred-like about cinema-going? Think about it. When you enter the auditorium, you leave behind the world of light and enter an utterly different dimension. Not only are the scenes projected before you often unlike anything you've ever experienced, you're forced to sit in silence or talk in a hushed whisper. At its most basic level, there's something incredibly beautiful, almost philosophical, about it, a bit like Plato's cave. You sit in a dark room, watching patterns of light fall against the wall, and when you turn around you see scores of faces, also whitened by the light: what could be more beautiful?

After the cinema we went - by Sean's recommendation - to the most marvelous restaurant in London: The Stockpot! I have to admit, as soon as we walked in the door, the clientele surprised me. An old man was sitting in the corner, sucking on his gums, while beside him an old woman, who looked like a bloated frog, stared blankly at a mountain of mash that was piled on her plate. The place itself was simple, slightly grim-looking depending on what you're used to, and decked out in cheap decorations. I felt like I'd stepped back in time to an innocent Britain, not yet fooled into thinking that by making something look nice you immediately improve its quality. The food was like the food you get at home (a British home, I mean): that is, charming and unpretensious. We had turkey, roast-potatoes, carrots and Cranberry sauce - a whole Christmas dinner in fact, Brussel Sprouts included - and left feeling full and very English.

That night, in bed, listening to Anna Netrebko sing Rachmaninov in her creamy white soprano, I cast my mind back to Sean's yellow jumper. Sitting opposite it after the darkness of the cinema had felt like being in the proximity of light, as if an essence of pale yellow had distilled in the air and could be touched if I reached out. Rolling over, I snuggled into the dark warmth of my duvet, shut my eyes and slept.

The above painting is by Xavier Pick, a contemporary London artist who makes beautiful pictures of London by night. To see more of his work or purchase paintings click here.

Alternatively, visit my classy London-based sponsors: A Suit That Fits.

Tockington Manor

I went to a Chroma reading last night at Waterstones on Oxford Street (Chroma is a literary journal in which my poems have appeared) to watch my writer-pal Brynn read his winning story, Spawn of the Regime. While he was chatting to Louise Hercules, this month's Chroma cover-girl, I sat down with a mince-pie and a glass of water and looked around at the crowd. Straight away, I found my eyes drawn to a familiar face on the other side of the room. It was a face I will never forget, probably because it's so closely associated with a time in my life in which I was happiest. "Caroline," I said, raising my voice above the crowd. "I knew it was you!" she said.

The most interesting thing about my friendship with Caroline (a friend of mine at primary school) was more the backdrop over which our friendship played out - the fact that the school we attended was such a special place - the stuff of dreams, really, or of Harry Potter as Caroline said last night. In the heart of the English countryside, Tockington Manor was surrounded by acres of grounds in which we could lose ourselves for hours: sometimes we'd read together quietly in the woods; sometimes we'd venture far into the trees and sit on a moss-covered rock that we called, oddly, 'the quarry'; sometimes we'd tell stories and fantasize we had magic powers; at all times, though, we were surrounded by nature, by rabbits running through the vast fields, by enormous oak-trees that swept their leaves across the green, and deep woods that rustled their leaves, and pear trees that grew against the old stone walls. It was as if the headmaster and his wife believed in the Romantic ideal that contact with nature is crucial to the instruction of sensitive beings - and I am grateful to my mother and the Toveys for allowing my soul to be attuned, at least for a time, to the natural rhythm of the universe. The experience was character-building and continues to influence my creativity today.

When I think about it now, and realise how far the lives of Caroline and myself have diverged, and how good that time was and how it's now gone, and the years of alcoholism that followed, I feel sad; until I think that other children are enjoying today what I enjoyed all that time ago. This is an extract from a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in which he writes about what I'm trying to say more lucidly than I ever could. It's called 'Frost At Midnight' and it's addressed to his son, Hartley:

Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,

Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,

Fill up the interspersed vacancies

And momentary pauses of the thought!

My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart

With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,

And think that thou shall learn far other lore,

And in far other scenes! For I was reared

In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,

And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.

But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze

By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags

Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,

Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores

And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear

The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible

Of that eternal language, which thy God

Utters, who from eternity doth teach

Himself in all, and all things in himself.

Great universal Teacher! he shall mould

Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,

Whether the summer clothe the general earth

With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing

Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch

Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch

Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall

Heard only in the trances of the blast,

Or if the secret ministry of frost

Shall hang them up in silent icicles,

Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

This entry was made possible by A Suit That Fits.

The Blackened Caryatids of St. Pancras Church

The other day I wrote the following lines:

Below the vast November sky the heat-cracked surface lies
half an inch up, baking and changed,
the roots are fruitlessly unearthed.
The blackened caryatids of St. Pancras Church stand like sentinels,
themselves unobserved – potential reminders of a cancerous London.

Something moves lugubriously in the earth. The armoured octopi have stirred;
their feelers snake past tarmac and stone, dreaming
of gustation, touch.

I still haven't got a clue what it means. I've tried to revise it, to try to make sense of it, to make it part of a 'whole', but every attempt seems to fail. It's very frustrating. The Caryatids and the roots undoubtedly obsess me, but I don't seem to have anything interesting to say about them. It's partly the way they stand that interests me, each of them spaced so gracefully apart, gazing into air, with one hip thrown wide. But the thing that obsesses me the most is the way they're so dirty. I don't know how long ago the above picture was taken, but now they're literally black. On the one hand they embody the beauty of the female form, but on the other hand they're marred by a thick pollutant. The first time I walked past them, there was something incredibly poignant about them. For a moment I felt as if they were speaking to me, that they existed just for me and wanted to tell me something - that they, the Caryatids, and everything they stood for, were being deformed by the crazy ugliness of the industrial/commercial world.

An old teacher of mine, Tim Liardet, said there comes a point in the writing of a poem when the writer should know what he's writing about; only then can he form a fully realised piece of work. I guess what I've been struggling with over the last few days is that I didn't know what I was trying to say. I thought it was something so deep in my unconscious that I was unable to bring it to light. Whatever it was, I thought, it's too garbled, too dream-like and fragmentary. But now I think I know what I'm saying. I know what it is the Caryatids have done to me. They've reached into my soul and reminded me what it feels like to strive for something greater - something not of this world -

This entry was made possible by A Suit That Fits.