26 April, 2010

Dear Ant,

Awarded the prizes in your name at the Hull Glimmer Short Film Festival this weekend.

The Anthony Minghella International Short Film Prize went to a mad, brilliant piece by Ramin Bahrani called Plastic Bag.  The film is narrated with great and understated wit by Werner Herzog.  It’s about the tragic emotions of a plastic bag who, having been used and discarded, is blown in the wind, searching as he goes for his ‘maker’ and for the meaning of life.  The ‘movie moment’ for me comes when he meets a red bag, the breeze takes them and they dance together like kites in the sky.  Isn’t she beautiful? he asks, excitedly, hilariously.

It’s a cruelly short-lived love story, alas.

AM writing in Hull, 1970s

Last time I was in Hull, October half-term in 1978 or so, you met me at the station.  I’d come up on my own from the Island, and managed the transfer between Waterloo and Kings Cross and was feeling pretty pleased with my twelve year-old self.  Different times.  You hugged me and asked me if Mum had given me any money for my keep.  Knowing full-well she’d given me a fiver.

So this weekend, I was braced for the emotion of recollection and loss.  I thought the station would be more or less the same and that I’d remember you standing there, waiting for me, my incredible brother.  Your smile, a blend of warmth and knowing.  Your gift for connection.  Your ability to see into souls.

But the station wasn’t the same.  Nothing to remind me of the visits of my boyhood.  Not even a whiff of recollection.  There’s a steel-and-glass shopping centre right next to the station, with a Tesco extra if you please.  And the air is different.  On Princes Quay, an alfresco cafe serves coffee in a daft two-cup arrangement.  Hull has acquired fancy northern ways.

(True, I didn’t have time to do the other stuff, the stuff that would surely have conjured you up and conjured up the tears.   I didn’t see Norman Staveley – your accountant and friend.  I didn’t visit your colleague Tony Meech in the University drama department – the place where you metamorphosed from quasi-delinquent schoolboy into the artist as a young man.  The place where you went in a slug, but emerged a butterfly.  There’s a studio there now with your name on it.  I didn’t go to your old house at 168 Park Avenue, where there’s a blue plaque and even a tree sculpture in your honour.)

So my bracing was unnecessary.  I didn’t bump into you on a single street corner.  There was no pain of vivid memory.  None of those sudden slap-in-the-face flashbacks which characterise grief.

The opposite, I’m afraid.

The truth is that Hull has moved on.  You’re just an echo now.   At the awards ceremony, the young film-makers who listened to my thumbnail sketch of your time at Hull weren’t – I think I’m right in saying – hugely interested.  They have their own careers to think of, and – except as a name on a prize – you can’t help them anymore.  Don’t be offended.  It’s just the order of things.  Larkin too, I noticed, is reduced to a logo these days: inch thick specs.  

The power and pulse of your charm and talent  – it used to electrify rooms.   There were fights, almost, to be near you.   Now all of that seems so ephemeral.

A brief dance in the wind.  A love story, cruelly short-lived.