CHAPTER 84

 

 

#17: RADIOHEAD

“Pyramid Song”

from the album Amnesiac

Released: May 2001

 

 

Firstly, I would like to thank the Committee and Trustees for their patience, indulgence and tolerance in awaiting my long-delayed report regarding my time in the city of Oxford between the approximate dates of 27 September 1992 and 3 December 2001. This has been an awkward report to compile and has required many years, and indeed decades, of intense thought to facilitate its articulation.

 

During that period of time I was with a woman whom I loved, in many ways despite herself. I am not really sure that she loved me. She tolerated me. This is not to say that any unpleasantness went on, although it most certainly did. Make no mistake, however, there was nothing brutal or violent, nothing like that. Do you know the main reason why I’ve never really wanted any children? Because I’m alarmed I might have turned into my own father, with all of his brutality and violence. And towards the very end we began to plan for children, and it proved far too late.

 

She didn’t get me. She knew the way I was but couldn’t get to grips with understanding and handling it. She wanted me to be somebody else, namely her father, all tweed jackets and war memorials. Hence I was a failed father substitute, and because I couldn’t afford not to work in London, I was also a failed Oxford yuppie.

 

I think now of myself then and my mind remains incontrovertibly boggled by how stupid and possibly insane I was.

 

There was a thing, and she wanted it but not necessarily from me, and that thing was grudgingly placed in the background, and we worked and played around it but nearly twenty-two years later at the time of writing it is clear that we were not the right people for each other. It was what seemed like a good idea in 1992 and we got marooned in it. We were the best we could do at the time, but we were not a match, were probably never one.

 

While there were good times, these were fewer and further than I would have wished to think even twenty years ago, when I was still in a state of grief and from my general mental behaviour at the time I probably should have been sectioned then. The world goes on without, around and beyond you and your pain is viewed as a fun-spoiling inconvenience for everybody else. But yes, while there were unarguably good times, there was a lot of misery, a huge amount of suppressed emotional pain.

 

The impact of being repeatedly told about your failings, and moreover being mocked for them, is cumulatively painful.

 

Where, therefore, does that place my relationship to the city of Oxford? I have visited it on a few occasions with the person who is unquestionably the right person for me, and the perspectives you glean are necessarily different, and I would say better. We haven’t actually set foot in the city of Oxford since the summer of 2014 but then we don’t need to do so.

 

The things to remember about Oxford are my personal feelings about and experiences in that city, things about which I could never really tell her because she would wearily scoff at me and mock me about them. I wasn’t any better; I didn’t know what I wanted either except it wasn’t quite what I had. There were potential escape routes. In the course of one of my jobs, in the late nineties and early 2000s, two opportunities presented themselves, but I stayed loyal. There were excellent reasons why I didn’t take advantage of either opportunity and obviously time and experience have proven that the decisions I made were absolutely the correct ones.

 

I am not sure, however, that she wouldn’t have done. That last manager of hers, he was everything I wasn’t and could never be; and if he had been heterosexual I would have been out the door. I did from time to time get the feeling that she was deeply frustrated that I wasn’t that kind of person; confident, outgoing, open, who just lived their life and it didn’t matter if we didn’t absolutely like the same kinds of music but her manager at work could do a far better job of persuading her to listen to certain music than I could – I’d just become defensive, shrivel up and painfully shut my eyes. Why? Because I knew from my father – and from her – what might happen if I had the guts to speak up for myself. Cowering in fear, all the fucking time.

 

Even when she was ill at the end, nobody understood how I was trying to balance spinning plates (ha) and manage everything. I’d commute from Oxford to London and back to do my job in order to keep paying the bills and I couldn’t go back home but went straight to the infirmary and I had to stay up all night in her room in case something happened and of course I fell asleep most of the time because I was SHATTERED and still that wasn’t considered ENOUGH and I’d slip back home in the taxi and manage to get two hours’ sleep tops before I had to get up and DO IT ALL AGAIN and that was only five-and-a-half weeks and yes it’s all about YOU Carlin YOU’RE not the one who’s ill I WAS TRYING TO HOLD EVERYTHING TOGETHER AND PREVENT IT FROM COLLAPSING and of course when she was gone it was like who the hell is he bye bye you mug grieve alone and by the way let us know when you move out so we can take the coffee table and that wasn’t the end of it people but mostly robots wouldn’t cease from bugging and harassing me about some stupid trivial thing or other and I had to get out of Oxford altogether because I’d have fucking died in that front room, that half bagged-up front room, the shade of a life I liked to think we’d shared, and there’s the lament echoing into its own fadeout like an existence rapidly being snatched away from me and it took me five full years – TO THE DAY – to emerge from the other end of the dank emotional tunnel and oh you cunt Carlin saying these things about somebody who cannot answer back, well to paraphrase a Freudian analogy, if I don’t say it now, when do I say it, and logically it will never be said, so what was the point of my ever being here, on this Earth, in that case, if I never EVER get, or am allowed, to eat that salmon mayonnaise?

 

I wish to apologise to the Committee and Trustees for the fragmentary and emotional nature of my report, but hope that you will understand why it has taken me so long to deliver it.