Summer’s End

And now it is the time of year when the great sad golden chord shall sound — the chord that Doll By Doll's guitarist, the wonderful Joe Shaw, named Summer's End. E A B E A B, for those of you who take notes. I probably mention it every year, but hell, so many good things in life only get mentioned once a year.

The farmer has taken away the broken stile by the railway line where I often walk. It was the only place on that particular route where a man could sit, and I sat on it for years, and for most of those years I used it for what somebody once called a paralysing sense of complaint — sitting there feeling sorry for myself in a landscape that was doing nothing of the kind. I turned a decent opportunity for generative ritual into mere sentimental ceremony. Now the stile is gone and I have to keep walking, and I am not sure that isn't an improvement.

People want a summing up at this point, and a man who has spent thirty years quietly improving his own biography is not the ideal witness for that job, so take the following in that spirit.

It is as important to conceal as to reveal, and nature loves to hide. Our culture is addicted to revelation and it's pathetic. What gets revealed is always in a frame anyway, and there are days when it is better to be like a small child and touch the frame rather than look at the picture.

If everything's sacred, then nothing is sacred. I say that as a man who has sat through more attempts at continuous sacredness than most and watched every last one of them curdle into good manners.

A writer needs cold places to which to return alone. Not every line becomes a song, the notebooks are full of things that will never get out of them, and what stays in there is the rent you pay for having somewhere to go.

And as long as you accept and remember that there is danger, you're safe.

About the stories. You will have worked out by now that some of what I have told you is not true — the whisky with my name on it, the woman who fed me the images and shot a man in Newcastle, the months in the lighthouse eating dog biscuits, the gathering of Romany musicians in the Lebanon to which I was invited and from which, you will notice, no photographs exist.

I am not going to apologise for any of it and I am certainly not going to sort them into columns for you. I will say this much: I come from a place and a people where a story was a form of hospitality. You did not tell a man the truth about your week. You gave him something to take home. The ones I made up are, without exception, about the same things as the ones that happened — and if you want to know which is which, go and ask the people who were there, and be ready for them to disagree with each other.

What is true is this. I was born in a town that smells of linoleum. My mother ironed to Lightnin' Hopkins and kept a black woman made of wood in the coal shed. I left, and I was in a band that was too much for everybody including us, and a man took my voice off me in a street in north London and I got it back in a lower register, and I spent some years being no use to anyone, and then I sat in a hotel in Oban and wrote three songs in an afternoon after nine years of nothing.

Four hundred songs, they say. I have never counted, and I would not want to, because the number would be a full stop.

I have been lucky in a way that is hard to explain to people who measure these things in the usual units. The audience I got was small, spread from Bergen to Bautzen, and inclined to write to me. I got twenty years of work I chose. I got Michael Cosgrave in the passenger seat, Joe Shaw still on the guitar thirty years on, Deborah singing the harmonies, a fanclub run out of a post office box in Derbyshire, two horses, two terriers, a market hall clock, and a creek at the bottom of the village with kingfishers on it.

The terriers are asleep. The light is going. Down in the orchard the apples are coming off the trees at that rate they do in the second week of September, one every few minutes, and you hear each one land.

The great sad golden chord, then. E A B E A B.

Play it slowly. Summer ending has surprisingly little to do with why it is sad. It is sad because it is so obviously, so ridiculously beautiful, and because somewhere in the middle of playing it you work out that it was always going to be this short.

Be kind to somebody who cannot pay you back. Turn the board round at the slipway and wait for the ferryman, who comes in his own time and is not a bus. And when you get where you are going, tell them a story, and make it a good one….