Where do obsessions come from? I’ve always been prone to them, on the oddest and most random of places. For some reason, this is one. I’ve no conceivable connection with the institution, it’s not an immediately stunning college and - needless to say - I’ve never set foot there. But something about the open court and its lovely redbrick intrigues me.
In 2019, I had a compulsion to write the sequence below, using ‘Catz’ as a starting location. It’s from my JACK THE STRIPPER, which was a Poetry Book Society Recommended Reading.
So baffling is this obsession that - with my family away, early next week - I’ve booked a room to stay there, next Monday night! I’ve not been to Cambridge for over 40 years so it will be good to explore, especially since I’m now supplementing my pension as an Oxford tour guide.
And maybe I’ll meet Jack there?
ST CATHARINE’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
My father's closest friend was a fellow, in Spanish and South American literature.
His one aim in life was to ensure this connection yielded me a prestigious scholarship, at that most unattractive of Cambridge's ancient colleges.
We holidayed biannually with this acquaintance – a hairy and unhygienic midget – whose ears sprouted wandering tendrils of insane seaweed.
Dr Rodriquez made frequent attempts to seduce me – claiming an affinity with the Apostles, and E.M. Forster.
At last, I was invited for interview.
My interlocutor was a complete stranger.
Since I spoke not a word of Spanish – and had never heard of Pablo Neruda – I was violently escorted from the premises.
Kidneys jabbed, my head locked – testicles under bombardment – I glanced into the Porter's Lodge and saw Rodriquez, reading One Hundred Years of Solitude.
DEVALUATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION
Quite unexpectedly, I met Rodriquez many years later.
My father severed their intense – yet ultimately fruitless – relationship.
He then shrank alarmingly – eventually living in a matchbox.
I was forced to work my passage ‘before the mast’, to South America.
That vast continent, rivers running in mud and loot, so suited to a young man out for his fortune.
I returned to England as a pauper – arriving in Tilbury with the Fray Bentos pies and petrified bird shit.
Rodriquez met me off the ship, proffering a copy of Conrad’s impenetrable novel Nostromo.
CREATIVE WRITING TUTOR
For years, I chronicled our motorway service stations.
It was enough to see sunset over the slip-roads, sunrise over burgeoning budget hotels, snow falling onto university technology colleges.
An insomniac army marched with me – miles from urban elites and their innumerable allergies.
Literature had vanished, but the causes grew.
When someone dies, and then years pass, where are they all that time?
Now I come to write about it all, my experiences are trivial but unstoppable.
FOUNDING MYTHS
Although a working-class lad – my father a Derbyshire glue-miner, mother a sock fitter – I rose to prominence at Oxford, eventually joining the Bullingdon Club.
I was merciless in my exploits.
My inner knowledge allowed me to sniff-out members of the lower orders – many were exterminated in gravel pits, at Radley.
You may think this tasteless, but my intentions were hilarity.
Especially beloved were newly-opened restaurants, where pitiful owners ‘sunk life-savings’ into dreams of regeneration with food fit for The Guardian.
We'd dress as Congolese nuns, enquiring if an annual prayer meeting could be held there – offering extraordinary largesse.
Needless to say, the place would be obliterated.
People are extraordinarily tolerant of privilege – many thanked us for utterly destroying their dreams.
Have you been in a housing estate, on Christmas Eve?
The lights twinkling and the sound of broken bones?
If you have, such frippery can be excused.
You see, there must be a moral.
In many ways, I regret those days.
I see a huge metaphor working its way outwards.
Now I plan caravans and stress-free retreats.
Weep at road-kills, horses in winter coats.
Please remember, everyone gets hurt.