THE BLACKCAP RETURNS

March 2002

After finishing off the remains of the fish pie and my second mug of tea, I headed out. It was gone nine o’clock, the night was starless and the radio in the Landrover was locked on Radio Three. I was in luck: a Baltic special was being broadcast from Estonia featuring my current favourite composer, Avro Pärt.

Down the A41, heading for the M25. Turned off, then up some country lanes. Ten minutes later I was standing on a bridge staring down at the motorway traffic speeding below me. ‘Suicide is painless, it brings on many changes …’ But not yet, not tonight. Not when there is still work to be done.

On with the overalls, over the fence, down the embankment and I was on the hard shoulder. I had my tools and I got to work. It wasn’t how I had planned it, not how I had written about it in The Daffodils story. For a start, the paint was white, not black. I used a roller on a telescopic extension, not a brush and I scrawled the graffiti over twin pillars facing into the motorway and not on the side of the bridge, so not facing the on-coming drivers. Traffic was thundering by a couple of feet behind me. The sluice gates were open and adrenaline was coursing through whatever carries it around my body. Do you do these things for the adrenaline rush or for the greater good of mankind? That’s not a question I consider worth asking or answering.

I did the right-hand pillar with ‘TO VOTE YES TEL 0780 240 4174 AND TO VOTE NO TEL 0780 240 4175’. As a truck roared past me the driver let me know what he thought of my nocturnal activities with his horn. It scared the shit out of me. Then I was on to the left-hand pillar. ‘IS GOD A’ and underneath that ‘CUNT?’ As big and as fast as I could do it. Then I was off, scrabbling back up the embankment.

A sixty-second time shift and I was out of my overalls, back in the Landrover, heading down a country lane with the sounds of Avro Pärt’s Litany, performed by the Tallin Chamber Orchestra and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir bringing down my heart rate. And so to bed.

Six hours later. First light, dawn chorus. That blackcap I mentioned in Daffodils has returned to sing in the hedgerow at the back of our house. His song is almost as good as it gets. Back in the Landover, back down the A41. Back on the same bridge, scramble down the same embankment. My plan had been to take a series of photos of the graffiti using my now over-used montage method. On to the hard shoulder, camera on and at the ready. I had been hoping the heavy morning traffic would have ground almost to a standstill leaving me feeling less endangered but no, it’s still powering by at a deafening speed.

It’s only as I look through the lens when I start taking my pictures that I notice that whichever authority it is whose job it is to do these things had got there before me and had attempted to obliterate the words ‘GOD’ and ‘CUNT’ with grey spray paint. Was this because they had only a limited supply of paint or because the words ‘IS’ and ‘A’ and the phone numbers bit didn’t offend their sensibilities? I would like to have their opinion here for you to read but I doubt that I will get it together to track them down and record it for you.

I take the photos as planned but even if ‘GOD’ and ‘CUNT’ hadn’t been partially obliterated I have to admit it all looked a bit shitty, kind of scrappy. A job not well done. Nothing like the proud, bold statement making itself arrogantly known to 48,000 passing motorists a day that I had imagined when sitting in the Safeway’s coffee shop with the vase of daffodils in front of me.

Back in the Landrover heading up the A41 and I’m still thinking about the words ‘GOD’ and ‘CUNT’ and then I realise my mistake. God is a cunt. No cunt has ever before or will be again as big a cunt as God. God is all cunt. In that it is through this God thing – the He, She, It or Zen non-concept of whatever it is or isn’t – that everything has come into being, been born. The whole universe and everything has been pushed through this massive cunt, the midwife going, ‘One more push love, you’re almost there,’ Satan holding God’s hands and moping Her brow.

Oh shit, this is all getting a bit Douglas Adams: a concept too far. Then I see one of those rectangular blue bicycle signposts that I’ve recently become infatuated with. A couple of days ago I hatched a plan to steal all nine of these cycle signs along the stretch of the A41 between Tring and the M25 to make into a picture consisting of three rows of three of these signs. I pull up on to the soft verge to have a closer look at the sign. As I’m looking I find myself pulling the black felt-tip from my jacket pocket and writing on the sign ‘IS GOD A CUNT?’ No phone numbers, just a discreet little bit of graffiti. I stand back, that looks better. My desire to nick it has evaporated. The felt-tip back in my pocket and the camera out. Click. I stop at the other eight signs that I had been planning to nick and repeat my efforts with the indelible felt-tip and camera. On the last of them, instead of asking my question I put ‘TO VOTE YES PHONE 0780 240 4174, TO VOTE NO PHONE 0780 240 4175’.

If they are any good I will use the nine photos to make a picture. One of the things I like about graffiti is the way it evolves. It either gets cleaned off or painted over by the authorities or it elicits responses from later wall defacers or it’s left to the elements to work their slow but unstoppable eroding ways upon it. It never stands still. I have another plan: in 12 months or thereabouts I will return to these nine bicycle signs and take nine further snaps. Use these photos to make another picture, identical in composition and framing to the first. Interested parties can compare and contrast the two pictures, check out what the authorities, rival graffitists and the elements have conspired to do with my efforts.

Oh shit. There’s a cop car behind me. He’s flashing me. How do I explain this? And, yet again I’ve let my tax disc run out. I pull over into a lay-by. He pulls in behind me. I get out. I reckon it’s always best to get out. Show willing and meet them man to man.

‘Good morning.’

‘Good morning. Do you know why I’ve pulled you over?’

I don’t answer him by asking ‘because you were keen to answer the question “Is God a Cunt?”’ Instead I say, ‘I think so’ in vaguely apologetic tones.

‘I noticed you pulled up on the verge at the Bulbourne turn off and then again at the Berkhamsted one. The first time I thought you might have broken down. So tell me, why do you keep stopping and getting out?’

Time to get economical with the truth. I mean, how do you start explaining all of this to a traffic cop doing his job?

‘I’m taking photos of the blue cycle track signs as part of an art project.’

And I’m thinking, I’m probably old enough to be his dad.

‘Do you know what that sign is over there?’

‘Yes, it means this road is a freeway.’

‘And a freeway is?’

‘A road where you are not allowed to stop.’

‘This is the second most dangerous road in the county. Now you might not think you are in danger driving your big Landrover but a little old lady driving along at a steady 50 in her Ford Fiesta – she goes right into the back of you, she wouldn’t stand a chance.’

Of course he’s right, just as I wouldn’t stand a chance if a massive artic ploughed into the back of me but that’s the price you pay for art, you know that. Your mum knows that, but maybe he doesn’t. He is asking to see my driving licence and telling me he can smell alcohol on my breath. And I’m thinking that maybe you’re thinking: ‘surely if religious art, new or old, is supposed to be about anything it should be about celebrating something bigger than the self, something that is reaching out to the unknowable at the core of creation instead of Drummond’s usual irresponsible hijinks and warped sense of self-promotion, even when he attempts to cloak it in a fog of self-deprecating asides?’ Instead of trying to think up a defence to whatever I think you might or might not be thinking I answer the officer’s question.

‘No, I’m not a drinking man,’ which isn’t quite true but it sounds good saying it.

‘Well as I said I think I can smell alcohol on your breath so I’m going to ask you to blow into this.’ The truth is I did have two glasses of red wine at about 6 pm last night. I usually do. It’s my way of winding down from another hard day’s graft with the mighty pen and giving me the fortitude I need to help put squabbling children to bed. He tells me the do’s and don’t’s before I blow. I blow. It shows negative. He decides to overlook my other transgressions and lets me off with a caution and a word of advice.

‘There are plenty of these cycle signs elsewhere if you want to take photographs of them for your art project.’

And that was that. He returned to his car without even checking my tax disc or giving me the chance to say, ‘Thank you, officer’. Or asking him to take into account 25 other incidents of me defacing state property.

Before climbing into the driver’s seat I notice how a European strain of the cowslip has been successfully seeding itself along the embankments of this stretch of the A41 and I wonder if this is a bad thing for our native strain and where does it leave the oxlip celebrated by Shakespeare in his ‘I know a bank whereon the wild thyme grows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows …’ from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Back in the Landrover a William Walton piece on Radio Three. I hate Walton so I push in my Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds cassette. I’m singing along, adding harmonies that Brian never knew existed. And as I shift down into third to pull round the Crows Nest roundabout and I’m giving it ‘God only knows how I feel about you’ the mobile goes off.

‘Hallo.’

‘Bill, it’s Neal. Can you hear me?’

‘Yawhat?’

‘It’s Neal Brown here.’

‘Hang on a minute, I’ll pull up.’

I pull into the Crows Nest car park and turn the music and engine off.

‘That’s better. It’s Neal here. How are you, Bill?’

‘Fine. Why?’

‘Well I just wanted to confirm with you about the daffodils – are you still planning on bringing them to the opening at the Henry Peacock Gallery this evening and at what time?’

‘Yeah. Yeah. But it won’t be there until about seven. I’m taking two of my kids to see a Roald Dahl thing this afternoon in Milton Keynes. But Neal I’m glad you’ve phoned, I’ve got this other idea. I bought an A3 black clothbound hardback sketchbook yesterday. It looks lovely.’

‘And?’

‘Well I was thinking I could leave it at the gallery. People could be invited to add their responses to my Daffodils text or respond to what other people have already written. It could build up into something … I don’t know. A sort of artist’s book thing.’

‘I’ll give it some thought, Bill, if that’s ok with you. I’m not quite sure what the gallery might think. Maybe you could consider some kind of gold embossing on the cover – something that invites people to add their own text. Have you thought of a title?’

‘Yeah. Is God a Cunt? Obvious.

‘Bill, the line’s breaking up. I’ll talk with you later.’

‘Yeah, see you, bye now.’

I turn the engine over. Get in gear. I’m back with the Beach Boys and the rest of the crew on Sloop John B. Drive the remaining miles into Aylesbury, pull up outside the Court House at the bottom end of the Market Square. Clamber out, do a deal with the florist for 40 bunches of daffodils. I had made a commitment to give away bunches of daffs at the opening of the ‘New Religious Art’ exhibition at the Henry Peacock gallery tonight. Next, I drop my film in at Boots. Then I head down to Safeway’s, amble into the coffee shop, nod to the regulars, order a Big Breakfast (only £2.29 for any seven items and two rounds of toast) and attempt to get these words down on paper before they evaporate along with the mist and morning dew.

Post Script

The blackcap (Sylvia Atricapilla) is a member of the warbler family. Like most warblers they are migratory, a visitor to our shores from tropical and southern Africa. The male has a characteristic jet-black crown. His rich and melodious song is most often heard between March and July. They nest in woods, tall hedgerows and gardens with plenty of brambles and briars.