Death, loss and love. Message from the Darkness.

IM Geoff Nicholson, 1953 - 2025 (achievement: 71 years on this sweet lil planet of ours)

If there's one tragic inevitability in this life, it's that we're all gonna die. No line-up of attention-seeking, ziggy zig ahhhh sigheilling tech-overlords presenting as the all neuroSpicegals (at the Trump inauguration, if you missed it) have quite cracked How Not To Die, yet.

As the world goes dark and the skies are lit by a 3-billion year anomaly of planetary alignment, cowboys storm the powerWhiteHouse to swear in their Meme bitcoin mines and whip up the bandwidth in a quantum-leap towards singularity and Mars [living forever screaming AMEN for their secret, experimental eugenic codes where "we", The Humble Consumer upload our data (that they own) onto Shein-y servers in post-proxy-war desert-lands, benefiting Them for equal infinities in this galaxy and all galaxies ever to be discovered] - or maybe it won’t be that bad - maybe I’m polarising things, as I start a civil war inside my casita, manhunting the devils who fling my only van key into the cosmic loop of a fiesta after-party in this remote village in the Alpujarras in Andalusia - or certainly a war inside myself. Trapped, with bombs going off in the opposing barrios, fires burn in the roads, villagers target my mouth with local wine, paradise can be an assault course. Are we going down another floor? Into the belly of this journey within? I warm myself with a casual bed-scroll, blue light festering my mind on Sunday at about 3am. The Proud Boys and dodgy leaders who'll murder babies to get out of jail don’t have the stamina for it around here, but I ain’t sharing my geo-location, baby, when everyday is Gaza. In the words of Leonard Cohen, "You want it darker?"

I knew Geoff Nicholson was ill but I wasn't expecting him to die. Not yet. But there it is, on Facebook. Facts. He told me walking wasn't easy four or five years ago, when I “ran” into him with his partner Caroline Gannon (whom I perhaps first met whilst performing at a launch for his collaboration with The Royal Photography Society's Del Barrett in 2017 (I believe). It was an excellent party in a gallery in the basement of Charing X station, buzzing as an Ballardian Apocalypse show, a different crew to the one I knew, expanding from his Bleeding London (2007) novel, with G-Pop (citizens, denizens, legitimati pirate-arti-types) handing in 58-thousand photographs of the streets in London, offering an alternative to the rising Google planet. It was a side-project known as The Photography Republic of London, and Del's a wonderful supporter of me here, also being responsible for the 100 Heroines project. Strangely, this was the auspicious night I met Briony Bax (now MBE), the daughter of Adrian Mitchell, recently returned from LA, where she'd supported her husband, Simon, and was just taking over Ambit from Dr Martin Bax, with Tim Bax, Martin's son). I'd also read at an event Geoff named: The Map is Not The Territory, 23 09 2016 at the Horse Hospital, launching his book, The London Complaint. This was aside my brother of Ambit, Travis Elborough, who has uploaded a final conversation with Geoff here, where Geoff's voice seems shakier than I ever wanted to accept. Travis will likely share the understanding that Geoff was in our lives from the days before official mentorship programmes. It wasn’t that long ago, really, pre-LinkedIn culture of shining your good deeds like Brownie pins, when there were just decent people who'd look out for people they'd run into, not find themselves in some kind of financial hashtag universe.

It was good to find Geoff in his stride on one of those serendipitous collisions which makes London fabulous, in Herne Hill at the Sunday market, where we stopped for cocktails at the old Under Milkwood. Yet I sensed a bafflement to him, attributing it to finding himself back in the UK, when he saw how concerned I was when he told me he was finding it difficult to walk. I found this ridiculous, and couldn't really take it on. For a man who wrote the brilliant Lost Art of Walking (2008) book, which poses all sorts of psychographic concepts aside a deftly factual and fascinating précis of pedestrianism, such as daft Victorian competitions which would leave London, to pursue ridiculous time-based challenged such as only walking for one mile an hour, for 60 miles, how could this man stop walking? My elders always seemed so invincible. To be honest, it wouldn't have been too sardonic a thing, because it's exactly why I liked him as a writer, he can hold irony very well - the light and shade, although, initially, a book on walking made me kinda wonder, WHY? Weird subject matter for someone obsessed by heels, or feet, or certainly the fiction of such a fetish in the classic New York-based, Footsucker (1995). Yet here is the magical contradiction of day and night. Life can be a full of ups and downs, as I write on a terrace in the January sun of Andalusia, with the worst cold I've ever collected. His story all unravels in his final book which explores mortality, Walking on Thin Air. I couldn't read that without impersonating an ostrich, but perhaps soon will come to it, if my van keys would show up, so I can follow that river made of tears to a point of reflection, find that sea which is a road all its own.

Loss and how we cope with it can be a great pre-occupation, or for poets, it can define every waking hour. Or, in Geoff Nicholson's case, every walking hour. Usually, I can offer a prayer to what is lost, and find my way. Maybe the keys'll turn up, maybe Geoff isn’t really dead. Serenely checking every corner of the cave, to the tune of the lost key bardo of a studio, I wonder how seriously we take Death. It’s like an assault of reductive rhetoric in a playground of orange retrograde, we burn through this life with love or toxicity, but more likely, some of each. Crying is a great relief.

Geoff's an author I have read many books by, after first meeting him through Ambit, where he published my first fiction. I'd sent in a story called Lyla anonymously. I’d listened to Oasis on loop as I wrote it. Geoff remembers the peacock feather and whatever else I stuffed in there, hoping to make an impression I was nervous my words would not. I wanted to be published in a legitimate literary magazine, away from the Vogues and Marie Claires and Elles and NMEs and Sunday Times and BBCs who'd published me before. I wanted to do it anonymously rather than by name-dropping, or using my past bylines (which I'd spent years slogging on achieving as a freelancer and was likely then teaching and working as a fashion copywriter and beginning to learn filmmaking with my ex-husband). Geoff had taken over from JG Ballard in 2007, and was initially called the "American prose editor", not that he had a particular penchant for American prose, but he was based in America and I did once read something clever he penned which I can't find now, but would recommend others try (because there's a lot of good content about Geoff online) about the differences between writing for an American audience versus writing for a British one (the speech, the toward/s, how we use color &c). Geoff lived in New York in the 80s, and shifted through LA, where he lived with former wife, Dian Hanson who worked as the "Sexy Books" editor for Taschen. Together, they once took the time to show me around the office in LA, a concrete ship-styled building which I really hope survived the fires. We parked up outside, and Geoff took photos of me and my soon to be husband in front of the RV which had my wedding dress stashed in the back. We were on our way to Vegas, and have since divorced. In this mega-liner of an office, Dian slid open her drawer of WWII gay porn photography for a book she was working on. It gave a totally different slant to the life of soldiers and will be forever etched in my mind. It adds to better known coffee-table naughties she pulled together such as The Big Penis Book, The Big Book of Pussy, The Big Book of Breasts, and most recently, The Bigger Book of Breasts. Dian met Geoff in New York. She was still editing for avant-garde fetish magazines, pushing the boundaries of sexual liberation, as he did. Something that was encouraged in the pages of Ambit, where boyish-gaze fantasies and psychedelia templated Crash, and far more. Boundary-pushing was a classic kindness Geoff offered, an avuncular introduction to Dian. In retrospect, she impressed me with her feminist belief in pornography and liberation, and it was far closer to my understanding of freedoms for women, after growing up at Loaded, having to sell my decidedly un-Greenham Common life in Sky magazine "What do you do when your boyfriend becomes a porn director?" stories in my late teens, followed by fencing through early years at The Daily Star, aside working in more middle-class and privileged heroin-chic style magazines and the music press, whilst DJing, particularly at Manumission, where strippers and the lure of an onstage sex act attracted not only many thousands of ravers to pay through the door each Monday, but it was a significant crossover into sexual empowerment through liberated women learning how to pole dance, joining with our (often working class) sisters, rather than denying the Bonnie Blue meshed factor of livelihood and empowerment (she's currently being slagged off for taking the Guinness Book of Records achievement of taking over 1000 men in 24 hours). It is my opinion that these somewhat ‘showbiz’ liberations of women in the 90s did what the 80s did for liberating working-class men to become more entrepreneurial in Britain, as per the classic Harry Enfield Loadsamoney narrative.

On a side note, I enjoyed the film Pleasure which looks at the LA porn industry of the late 90s, pre-Only Fans). The bendy loopholes of liberation and ethics are generally where exploitations occur. Union-membership for strippers was a subject I made a radio documentary about at the BBC, for 1XTRA. If women are abused, we're better protected by safe working practice and not stigmatised, I feel the same about legalising drugs, about mental health, many of the more shadowy parts of life. We have to enter the darkness to liberate our souls. As a cultural journalist I was always interested in where progressive collisions create new elements, yet shadows are where our strength comes from, I am learning, after a life of media-related exposure.

Will the pain never end? I was perhaps lucky I've learnt to cry again in the past year. Living my best life in the light and shade, humankind's final steps in depravity know no bounds. It’s been a helluva time since Covid. We ascend into Futures, where expansion comes from retreat, we see the evils of the world unfold, but can do nothing. Coming to this mountain, I am trying to work and learn self-control but boundaries remain a challenge in my white blonde million dollar lifestyle. To reach my great wise age to reflect on the past three decades of getting to a point of survival where I can AirBnB my digital nomad-arse to liberty and reclaim my sanity from the fuckwits who groomed away my agency to have any ability to have time to think or behave independently, I am grateful every day. After a post-New Year's celebration with friends who'd been skiing on the slopes I watch dawn on, I spent 5-nights on the beach, in my van, before crawling back up this mountain for another fleet of visitors and a writing workshop on Darkness from a Jungian perspective with the great Dr Rachel Newsome (her Substack is one of my recommendations here). She's really cracked into exactly what I needed, never having done anything but train other people to write, doing a creative writing exercise on a connection which left me in a Zoom freeze with about two words around The Darkness (not the band) having loved the playfulness of pretending to be a forest in my first session with her back in November, and going into the terrifying subject of Pain in December. It’s deeply affecting (in a good way). My connection to the Internet is not the same here as it may be in London. This occasional “loss” is also a freedom. I had been beginning to think I'd spent too long in love and light, and obviously, far too much time scrolling. Now, I find myself ready to face my shadows. Marrying self-development with creativity, where we go as far as we can, helping those in our breakout groups, it's one of the most amazing things I've ever experienced, a metaphor for the physics I have been returning to, to find my way. Everything is. Collective support is important, here my friendships are often digital. That workshop reminds me of doing the Mehmet Sander sessions, when I learnt how resilient my body is. Over the summer, another friend (another unofficial "mentor" and an acclaimed psychoanalyst herself) had turned to me in Holland Park after I'd been filming that Tim Burton film, taken my hand, and explained to me, that we had to own our shadows (I can send recommendations, comment, should you desire). Sometimes, the black penny takes a while to drop. I'd been reading a lot of Jung and living with a hood up for a long time. My loose change has been swirling in drama and trauma for years, and only now, after losing everything to such a point of no return has the golden thread pulled me towards a ridiculously overdue 'hero's journey', where I would face the hermetic golden dawns on the Sierra Nevada ahead, and start to understand that mountains have been around longer than any of us, and our existences here are so fleeting, I've reduced denial to a series of chapters which I can finally find my centre through. "Losing" is on a par with "broken" to me now. I refute either and find my centre, little else matters onthe journey to the grave. I understand I am not going there in one piece, unlikely to be chopped up, unless those days do come where I break again. I'm better equipped than I have been before. My psych-tests are 10/10, baby. I needed to come to this cave. But also require more sunset meditations to reach past the gateways I explored using the third way - yoga, transcendental meditation since seven, thanks to my mother’s tapes (David Lynch loved TM, and I've seen several fans of Geoff suggest he was a David Lynch of the written word). Listening to David Lynch's final transmission about The Beatles and Nothing, the village bombs its fiesta leftovers for some kind of pagan revivalism, rigged in nostalgia for better times, for without the past and without the future, there's nothing to breathe in to tell us where we're going. One portal to another, one rut to another, one breath to the future, grieving in waves which may drag us under. The sun will go down, the sun will come up. Why are we nice to everyone as we climb up the greasy pole? Because we gonna smile as we slide down. Feel the force of my future, I ain’t hanging about upside down in my Underworld, drowning forever, or maybe it’s where I’ll stay.

Stained by Thatcher and T'Pau defining female possibility, aside Madonna. Working on the Star in the era when Katie Price was asking readers of my own bylines how big she should make her breasts, being financially dependent on creating such cherished headlines as Status Coke by Kirsty Allison, after being given some very strong painkillers from Francis Rossi, the singer of Status Quo, and getting the scoop on him divulging the less stadium-friendly narrative about Rockin' All Over The World when punk flamed and inflamed its veins with heroin, on that tabloid desk I never fitted in. I'd never picked up a tabloid before walking through those doors, but I learnt to interview fast and write in that elusive poetic style after about year, pattering off my own columns which would get heavily edited, beyond my control, and on occasion I was truly stitched up by the late Linda Duff, my editor. But this is what women had to do, in some ways, to survive. She was surviving. My ex-model of an editor on Scene who binned me for crashing out in the fake-furs of the fashion cupboard was surviving. James Brown at Loaded was surviving the suicide of his mother. Those before us have all likely suffered more than us. Our parents scarred by their own wars. However, it is possible to say No. I was packed off to the Star after Loaded. How far we all went was too far. There wasn't Wellness, the DSM wasn't too distant from defining queerness as a mental illness, there were pills, loads of them, and psychoanalysis was largely viewed as something for Americans with too much money. So one pack of wolves I was involved with (and there were many) was a training ground for the sleazy hacks who dodged latter Leveson enquiries, where their criminal behaviour was not for the public interest, just sheer bloodymindedness that it was "for a story". I have been raised by some ghastly people, who have ghastly stories all their own. My choice was looking for my own story by being part of other people’s, pushing my own boundaries to exceed my own capabilities, and it’s been a long realisation to understanding where to point blame and shame. I jacked in my column after editors changed my copy one too many times: "Born To Be Wild - I'm Kirsty Allison, I'm 21 and I earn my crust as a famous DJ, jetting around the world..."

This was a very different story to Geoff. Where I'd fought it out on Fleet Street, he hailed from Sheffield, and rather outdid expectations for his class, by getting into Cambridge and reading English at Gonville and Caius. When we first met, above a pub in Soho, he'd flown in from LA for the launch of Ambit 189. I was reading aside David Gaffney, the Manchester writer who read brilliantly, and I was terribly inexperienced. It was my first reading, I was nervous: "Up to about 2000 words works well as a reading," coached the late Dr Martin Bax after as he passed me a cheque I never cashed. I had obviously gone a little too far, again. I remember an abridger from Radio4 being there, and Geoff asking me casually whether I'd been hit as a child. I attributed it to him being somewhat into the fetish scene. Geoff always thought I lived a charmed life. Good shoes'll do that to a man who wrote Footsucker. It remains one of my favourites of his. He's gone. He's left books. I hope they don't go out of print before I get around to reading all of them because he produced about thirty. Tim Bax’s favourite is his first, Street Sleeper, which began a theme of VW Beetles. Dian and he split some years ago now. In retrospect, he says he was a bit depressed, living in this amazing house in LA but it not really being the environment for a walker. I've taken comfort in him having Caroline Gannon in his life, to share cocktails and art, and travel with. She's a photographer, and writer, and is beautiful, and no way a second measure. A solid inspiration for me, as she holds her own words closely, kindly and smiles a lot. I hope she can get through this without serious pain. Like a battle against the patriarchy, he never said the word leukemia to me. I had no idea, he said it was a blood/bone thing. Superstition and acknowledgement of the darkness is a complex journey. It is about fear. And fear of death is everything. I have been around a lot of death. I used to think funerals were cool, if it was dead people from the London scene, they were always older than me, and you were able to know icons who you'd have stories about knowing, and you got to see famous people at the wakes and be a part of that glorious party of nihilism and excess which gatekeeps the skies before you hit them yourself. It's a coping mechanism, a disassociation towards acceptance. A chaos. The acceptance of madness is hard when you have been called the maddest in the mad unit, and had to find Leonara Carrington’s words only when you were ready. I believe some people are okay with dying young, when they do. I used to say, we just turn into the sparkly bits. Actual death, having faced it personally, I'm not bothered, I likely had a huge rush of DMT (the same drug that is found in many plants in these mountain hills and is released when we are born and when we die) as the brakes stopped working on a car I was driving, and I found a weird calm and acceptance as I flew to a still under the M4, towards the Chiswick roundabout as I drove myself back from Heathrow after being at Cannes Film Festival. That was my moment. I saw my life pass, not the things I would expect, but I've done deals with God to be good in some of my madder moments, lapsed in badder ones, have danced with the Devil, but you gotta believe in the devil to play. Taking responsibility for losing anything is tough, to lose oneself is worse. The absent minded abyss of not quite being 100% on where you left your keys and wondering whether Mossad have been in with a shadow-ban or whether a black cat's snuck in and thrown it over cosmic cat bed over the mountain is where fiction, and imagination, and entertainment, and Art, comes from. The NetherNether world of Dreams. Black out moments. But that space, that void holds an enlightenment all its own. Not knowing is perceived as a place of shame, blame, and we're “supposed” to own every part of our lives and thoughts, but I'm starting to find that place way less scary than I ever have done before. It's way more interesting than the orange playground where monstering people is basically making monsters of ourselves. Anger and vengeance keep us in cages. So now I find myself wanting to do the "shadow work" despite being unqualified to write on Death, really, as my parents are still alive, and I haven't had to suffer the loss of them, despite some "anticipatory grieving" in preparation for years. Whilst I've been on this mountain, I've banished the princess in me, released my inner mountain warrior queen who drives a van and holds her shit together. It's been quite revelatory for me to get this independence, away from signifiers of work and men, finding my true hardcore self within. This is my charmed life, and that is what Geoff really saw in me. Someone who really did swing from one chandelier, seamlessly to the next planet. I hope I throw nothing good away in the process but that too is an acceptance that there are few perfections, or everything is perfectly imperfect. How we accept the entrapment of idealised aesthetics is like so much of humanity, living in optimism and hope - that is the beauty of life. Witnessing the avant-garde chew up an anti-airbrush couture of its own, the 90s pout converts to a Millennial pout - we destroy the future to accept the past, mislead ourselves in the mythical and signifiers, be that with possessions or what we do with our hearts. Survival is game theory. Truth lies beyond, yet it is here right Now is Now. The great panacea of screen-based storytelling is one world, all its own, and where we disengage with those truths to look within and find our own, is the liminal twilight of our times. It is not like the real world and the digital world are binary, and separate: one influences the other - we hurl as atoms. We can take solace from Pinterest's Blavatsky-esque AI-generated diagrams which seek to align the spiritual into "motivational" or self-help tarot packs, but beyond the trap of living hand to mouth - being hypnotised with the beauty of earth itself, to live another day, with the acceptance we are just passing through, is where I take daily pleasure from here. It has not always been this way. Hitting oneself abusively with denial gets none of us anywhere. For me, taking to my bed can still be as important as being a highly productive achiever. I believe in fallow periods. I have been overshadowed by the influenza of our times as much as things which have seemed beyond me. But that is not for here. Death gets like fucking Spotify, if we're lucky to rack up another, the tap don't stop on the register at the pearly gates for the dearly departed. Especially when I've not really been too discriminating about age over the years. Reverence, wisdom, respect - I've been groomed by elders, and exploited for the great energy which is youth, like I'm in an Epstein factory all my own. I have always had an obsession about morbidity, that this will end. Like youth itself.

What gets a poet out of bed in the morning?

Well, I'll be sure to tell ya - sure as nichts is nichts, and knowing me Nietzsche from me Goethe: it's all about Death, baby. Everything is. It took Jim Sclavunos, the Bad Seed, to clarify this for me, but the great mortal trail towards retirement is really about what we chose to leave behind. Coleridge, Keats, Blake, Byron, Bukowski, Plath, Stevie Smith, Eileen Myles, Kim Addonizio and Maya Angelou - these are names who survive, knowing Death, like most mark-making, heralds the ultimate creative intention, to live beyond these times. Every line an epitaph, gathering up to the great sahasrara (seventh chakra) magnetic fields which connect us all, yes, the mycelium we radiate into, where we sublimate our comprehension outside of ourselves, we know that is the greatest shadow, to create as long as we stand. Or fear nothing. This soon will pass. We ain't necessarily scared or negatively obsessed. It’s just we maybe don’t want to accept that billionaire oligarchs give Death quite the focus that Poets do - thinking the rich have to split their fears into concerns about their zeroes expanding. It’s a weird competition to think it’s true school to know that Mars is just a construct, man. I'm a portfolio career gal too, however poets are a little beyond cash. What the above administration seem to currently be overlooking, in their mad polarisation, and basic nastiness of name-calling is the ultimate cash in of cachet remains with art auteur freaks. Why? Because like Geoff, we rise above. Sure, Geoff took levels of puerility on the Internet to an artform all its own, he was deathly funny. It all is. The fat laughing Buddha of Babylon. Ha ha ha. Who's laughing now, and who's crying? I am crying, I have been for days. What doesn't make you crazy, hopefully doesn't send you mad either, but what Geoff Nicholson teaches me today, is that nothing matters. It never did. Print and be damned. He never wanted children. I thought it would happen when I grew up. It's never happened. Om shanti shanti. I am grateful he published to damnation in the world he has left behind. Sitting with him in this bardo, we know love and light sure don't cure everything, we got to go into the shadows to hold ourselves, or it's gravy train. What doesn't kill us, we choose to become stronger or we die a bit, and we're going there anyway. Better to stay strong, but maybe not superficially. So here I begin to line those words up, make something that'll live longer than us, or not, nothing matters because the darn poetry of life is that it is ultimate binary. In this form, it ends. With nature as my ultimate mentor, here in the full heat of January, the most bitter tragedy of all, when you love being alive so much, is that bitterness and tragedy belong in the cave of lost things, with the many precious things I've lost before, jewellery, animals, stories. I've given away dogs, and yes, my key turned up. On advice of my best pal's mother, the dear elder to Kelli Ali, I took to my iChing app, and I found the key in the cosmic cat bed of compost mountain. How it came to be there, likely a combination of light and shade in this life, my golden dawn.

Without an authentic stab at living eternal, we ain't going nowhere. You're living in the future, losers. So we must accept something good will come in the darkness. Anyone who knows anything, or even nothing, knows the secret to getting up to Space-X is you gotta go down below Tinseltown and the binary belief system, of yes/no, black/white polarities where girls love pink and boys carry weapons, explained to us by Barbie, in a movie sponsored by Mattel, or you gonna have about as much power as sharing a Palestinian flag on social media. We gotta get deep down, into our darkest Goya depressions and take power in the shade of El Greco. We gotta get deeper than an oil-spilled Dante, darker than a date with Caravaggio meeting Joan of Arc in a Pre-Raph opium cloud; more messed up than a rock star's smog of narcissism as their shield, don’t be scared. Poets, sure as shit, have been fixated on living forever for longer than a pipe-dream seed investment targeting a billion at a tech bro (like the recent founder of Loop, who's reported to be having a bit of a spiritual dilemma on what his purpose is. I'm here for him, should he desire my consultancy services). This is not a job application though, it is an obituary, of sorts.

I crown the egg-shaped head of Bezos in the court of King Donald with the tunes of annihilation of oblivion, where the crowd croon Russell Brand and Epstein as masters of the New World, they may like to think they're ultimate disrupters, like they're some punk-rock poet maverick dudes, sure, they don't give a shit - but, our light comes from the fact that poets don't give a shit MORE. This is the key to happiness. I am blacker than this background of words, as light.

My revenge to find contentment in these darkest ages may accompany youth’s belief that death is so far away it doesn’t matter, but on the waves of grief, realities roll in.

Gold, sure, it's older than the trees, and glints as the New World twists digital DMT into our faces with upside down games, Let's play: Are you a poet or preacher? Do you know, or claim to know? Fake guru or seeker? Pleaser or deceiver? Nothing matters. I love walking in a graveyard, but lately, less so, seems more creepy now than it ever used to as truth comes closer.

Revenge is to treat everyday as a luxury, and for me, that means becoming more calculated with my time and learn from the achievements of Geoff, rather than thinking I have an eternity to fill my canon.

I edit this, listening to the show, which is the finest radio show I have ever heard, by one of my closest inspirations, Johny Brown from Band of Holy Joy, a mentor I first met at the old Bull & Gate at 14:

https://www.mixcloud.com/Resonance/bad-punk-24th-january-2025/

It starts with a storm of tears and disbelief, until the calm comes. The acceptance. I buy Johny Banana Yoshimoto's Kitchen when his mother dies, I pass him my copy of Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads because I am now living in el duende. It's all about loss, living, and how we handle having what we have and what we don’t. The last words spoken are as important as the ones you steal along the way. Few stand truly alone, here I meet a coven of mountain warrior women, whose flaws I admire them bearing, and do not judge in some princess competition to score the prince. My emergence of belief in my own dogma comes from a faith in others, but more and more in myself. Jesus would never have been anything but a madman without the apostles. I love these religious lessons, not a binding practice. On a mountain you sure as shit learn tadasana pose.

Stanley Donwood & Thom Yorke, Somewhere you'll be there In Stitches, 2024, Tapestry, 200 x 200cm. Courtesy TIN MAN ART.

The oldest woman in the world died recently, Tomiko Itooka, in Japan, age 116. She was into climbing, bananas and milky drinks. Maria Branyas Morera in Spain went slightly before her, in August last year, at 117. Doesn't seem that old when your time starts to run out. Morera recommended: "order, tranquility, good connection with family and friends, contact with nature, emotional stability, no worries, no regrets, lots of positivity and staying away from toxic people." Stress avoidance is a general wisdom from the true ancients. Knowing that love, light, hate and the darkness are all our own is as simple as lighting a candle in a church. Turn that light On. Stop loitering in the hallways. If martyring ourselves like Jesus or Mother Teresa isn't for us, and we're burnt out from materteral responsibility and can't HEAR our own HEART BEAT, what are we left with? I have found voluntary work some of my most rewarding in life, doing stuff beyond my hood-wearing self, if the death of Geoff teaches us anything, it's that we need more poets and indie-thinkers, and mothers are the best. Why? Well, before I close writing here, I think it’s good to refresh the point that I didn’t know Geoff would leave so soon. Questing for something better perhaps goes out of fashion as you get older, the freedom of being a troubadour is carrying nichts but the soul you saved for yourself, knowing your best days are possibly in entropy, like the planet, but why should that stop us acting with best intent in every last living moment? I read something this week, or heard it on Woman’s Hour, that mothers are the best diplomats. Women accept change in a less damaging manner than the constant drone of men. Our lives are full of blood and monthly turmoil. Change can be a positive, like accepting trauma of the past, in order to reduce the anxiety it may cause us. In the current paradigm, walking around in a lungi cloth and a higher state of consciousness can get a bit romantic, the art of finally not giving a shit does require some comfort from the elements. And thus I found the great writer in Manningtree, after writing The Suburbanist, he himself was living in a suburban part of the village, up a close, and channelling his own mentor, Jim Ballard, to the extreme. His garden, an obsession. Twee and weird, he'll have found it all extremely amusing. Inside the sliding French doors of his final man cave, the book collection was captivating. This is the last time I saw Geoff Nicholson. He was going in to buy The Telegraph at the Manningtree Station in the pub on a platform, where the barwoman screams out the arrivals and departures across the guys from the 60s who appear to have inhabited the place since it was a folky blues club. He hadn't seen me waiting for him, getting in on an earlier train, because I too, like waiting rooms. I often feel like I've cocooned myself in one, maybe this is why it is really called a Green Room, but Geoff was horrified that he had not been there to welcome me from the train, yet, as I returned to London later, in a strange way, I knew I was becoming one of the witches in his life who dragged him to Manningtree, the territory of the Witchfinder General and the subject of AK Blakemore's novel, who was first published in Ambit, under Kate Pemberton and Briony Bax MBE. Delighted as I was to meet him for a tour, I didn't know this would be our last rendevous, when he had to send me alone into the night. Talking about the heartbreak of Ambit leaving its vortex. Death blow - imprisonment - the deprivation of liberty. This was our discussion as he walked me around the harbour, stopping by the estuary, before he opened the shut gate for me. Geoff, a total poet. Neither of us would ever call ourselves a poet, but everything can indeed be witnessed through the poet’s lens, or physics. Show me a rich poet, and I'll tell you stories of starving for my art, a life without children, whatever. Neither would Geoff ever have been so crass as to say that he was deeply fond of me, and Travis, like we were his own kids.

*Writer starts crying* left only to laugh at the great dead writer’s final words about bitterness, envy and martinis.

https://psycho-gourmet.blogspot.com/

Also here:

Hollywoodwalker.blogspot.com

And all those wonderful books.

(Incidentally, Crass, the band and cult also had Essex connections. I once performed in the Colchester arts building where they showed their work, interrupted by electric doors, opening and shutting - I didn't know how to hold or shut a door back then...in youth. And then you find yourself at the other end of the table, holding the door for the new cool kids.)

LIFE QUEST - WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO?

It is a choice of these binaries, or a sprinkling of all?

1.) Get rich, or die trying. Do we accept money as a single salve to liberty in the cosmic chain of corporate abuse? Do we have time to smell the flowers? Cash gets the filthy out of jail, keeps the exploited within (except the real super-psychos, of course, but I have been listening to the recent Reith Lectures on Violence which explore traumatic responses and society). We may not yet be at the tipping point of destroying the white collar/black market, ying/yang paradigm of psuedo-regulated, tax-dodging, archaic legal feudalism of non-progressive logic, money is one just one index. Happiness too, which we also all deserve some of, the planet deserves love, sex, winning…

2.) Acceptance of slavery! Ya know whole, the word, comes from Greek for Health and thereabouts?! Single doctrines are built around chucking the guilt upon the meek in the rhetorical blame game, hereby, by the grace of lord, we find ourselves in the church of our choosing, if we are lucky enough to live in a “democracy” where there is some choice. Fanaticism lies in all dogmatic possibilities. Social Media relies on Brand Fans. I would rather be a laggard than a flag-waving evil as my faultline. Goodness too is an index through actions which define us. Yay, for recycling, electric cars, and taking the hit on making others rich. Do to others as thou would do to oneself, in my experience has led to be being dominated. Doctrines and art help find my whole, as the year strikes into another new day and I tick off the calendar. I am not in receipt of a Burroughs-trust fund yet I am grateful to be a slave to myself only.

3.) Drop out! If you can't accept life as a consumer, become a hobbit, meet me at the crossroads, baby! Skip-diving is not a shameful pursuit, if the goods are there for the taking. This is the first rule of art school. Beg, squat. Grow your own. Become a pirate. A "conspiracy theorist". An anarchist, a punk, embrace the niche minority where you do not fit into the mainstream consumer narrative. Know that covens are real. The only system is a sound system and the key to the chest is in our songs! REJOICE! It’s a sad state that squatting is now illegal in Britain and the biorhythm of state support is barely enough to reach hope, and corporate social responsibility if better demanded could raise the bar for everyone on this planet. Ho hum.

4.) Go mad. Find yourself in a meta defrag of your own truth. Dementia, psychosis, or falling away with the fairies. Be aware that those in category 1 love to call those in category 3 dirty, unsanitised and not as hardworking as they are. There is little great about being hardworking if it's maintaining point 2 and you're not happy. The fear is rich and the index is high. Not a recommended option, going this far down or up. But by all means necessary, growth and strength comes from what doesn’t push us over the edges. The edges are as real as anything…

5.) Procreate. Give it all up and pass it on to your kids. We need new blood. I was that new blood to Geoff. I didn't realise that. Me and Travis Elborough were like his kids. It's the most political thing you can do, have babies, even if you don't have time to think of it like that in your constant offering of your own energy to theirs. Tough gig, respect.

6.) None of the above, a blend, get a dog. Adopt don't shop where possible. Do little, cost less. Be thoughtful, enjoy it where you can, know you're in your swimlane, that's fine. Shop ethically. Behave decently. Go on the occasional march. Do as much as you can and possibly live to be older than Tomiko and Maria.

6.) Create. That's what I'm left with. I feel my virility in this is all I have,the baton is passed.

If you can afford to support me on this journey, I am grateful beyond words. I have not had my voice to complete the recording of my audiobook I have been promising subscribers for nearly two years, but am now recovering on the beach, the sound of waves behind me. Bearing me with the strength I need.

Rest in peace, Geoff Nicholson. Born 4 March 1953, died 19 January 2025.