Let me come clean. I am Darren Lock. I am Darren Lock, the owner of Horsford News. Up until 3.15am on 19th October 2008, I worked seven days a week for virtually nothing in a newsagents in a village of Horsford, just outside Norwich in Norfolk. I worked to pay the mortgage to put a roof over my family’s head. It is a tough life. Customers are unforgiving, and at worst, rude. I’ve lost more money running this business than I needed too, but you realise that running a newsagents is a bit like plugging a dam with your finger only to find another breach happens down the line.
On Sunday morning, a speeding car struck my house at 75mph. We know it was that speed because that’s what the speedometer was stuck out when they cut the female driver from the car. In the car were three children and another passenger, who fled the scene. I saw him run off as I walking into my living room to see that there was no side life on my house.
We were evacuated. The building deemed unsafe. But I take my hat off to the building workers who shored up the structure and weatherproofed it. It broke my heart to see baby Verity’s high chair and toys on display from the street below. Heck, I even made the lead news story on Anglia Tonight on Sunday. I am a star – whoopee fucking do!
I don’t think I’ll ever recover from it. But then the nightmare only starts.
For two days, we have been fighting with insurers to get temporary accommodation (luckily we have somewhere very temporary to live) and I’ve been under increasing pressure to reopen the business.
This is life at its rawest. But in this Idiot Nation, populated by morons and noddies, the culprit will probably get a tap on the head and sent on their way – their life completely unaffected by this catastrophe. Remember, this person was driving uphill at 75mph in a 20mph zone.
We are lucky that none of us were killed…for that I thank God.
Category: Diary
If you have children of a certain age, then I am certain you may have come into contact with a TV programme called “In the Night Garden”. At the beginning, I used to just let it wash over me but then the deeper meaning and tragedy of the lead protagonist struck me.
The show begins at night time with a small child (different for every show) about to go to sleep. Their parent strokes their hand and so the show begins. They are told to imagine a boat the size of their hand and it cuts to Iggle Piggle alone at sea:
The boat sails off into the distance and Iggle Piggle joins his friends “In the Night Garden”.
Now this seems all harmless, but when you think about the narrative construct of the show there is a dark sadness running through it. Firstly, Iggle Piggle doesn’t actually exist in this programme for he is a dream in the child’s imagination and so therefore one can deduce that Iggle Piggle’s adventures in the garden are his dream. So you have a dream within a dream.
In the first dream, Iggle Piggle is happy and having all sorts of adventures in his dream world, The Night Garden, but in reality (or the first layer of dream reality) he is in fact alone, abandoned on the sea at night. At the end of every show, all the characters go to sleep except Iggle Piggle, because he’s already asleep, alone on the dark sea. Now what I find upsetting is that the baby at the beginning of the show continually dreams of poor old Iggle Piggle being alone on the sea. He is destined to be alone in the imagination forever until his dreams bring him the friends and company of which he desires.
So it is a programme about the dream world, the nature of desire and isolation.
Whoudathunkit, eh?
Here’s a link to more of my thoughts on “In the Night Garden”
Now the story of Shaun Dykes broke earlier in the week and it is a signpost, a portent even, of just how disconnected we have become from reality. The story goes like this: a depressed young man goes to the top of a car park and threatens to throw himself off. The police attempt to talk him down, but all the time a crowd jeers at him, fires off expletives and urges him to do the dreaded deed. An hour later, the young man jumps and the baying crowd rush forward to video his grisly remains with ghoulish glee. The story has been nicely summed up by the BBC.
Now I’ll be the first to raise my hand to admit I’ve made some choice comments when a suicide has delayed my tube journey. “Why don’t they ever wait till it is off-peak?” and “The service isn’t that bad…!” etc. but this is beyond me. Mr Dykes friends are saying that they believe their friend could have been talked down and that the crowd are directly responsible for his death. How did we come to behave like this? I have the theory that media such as the Internet and YouTube and whatever else has totally desensitised us (or is in the process of desensitising us all, young or old, male or female). Or perhaps collecting horrific post-suicide images has become the new Top Trumps of this digital (de)generation? I don’t know. Where’s the compassion? Where’s the empathy? Where’s the reasoning?
It scares me…and now an apt pop video…
And now we have an official video to accompany the remix of “Seville”. I like this “readymade art” approach to video making.
The great thing about the Internet is that it brings people together and it can also be a means of producing new art, new work, new music via virtual collaboration. The enigmatically titled “Piggyback Orchestra” contacted me recently with a remix they had done of my track Seville. I liked it and I present it here for your delectation. So here is “SVL”:
Direct download: CLICK HERE
Oh well it looks like a new “album” might be coming. The muse has paid a visit and when the music comes, we’ve got to do our best to serve the muse and get it all down on the hard drive. I’ve gone back to one of my old recording tricks of relying on the technology dictate the music. In this case, the Boss SL-20 pedal is acting as a sketchpad, allowing me to quickly generate rhythmic guitar loops on which to build songs. It’s a bloody great piece of kit for stimulating the musical muscle, but I have to be careful not to repeat myself…not to repeat myself…not to repeat myself…
Direct download: CLICK HERE
Yes, who can believe that a whole year has passed since you were given to me. What games we’ve played and what fun we’ve had. I am so lucky to be your Daddy and maybe one day you’ll find this message and know just how much I love you, my precious little girl.
Now let’s stop with this mawkish sentimentality and have some fun. The BabyTV Channel is probably the greatest invention since sliced bread. They have a webpage where you can upload your baby’s picture and they animate it and produce a birthday celebration animation. Whoo-hoo! Little Verity is a star. (Hopefully this link will work for you)
Click here for the good stuff.