North Sea Line Caught, #2: ‘Kissing on the Radio’

Don Paterson on a short history of fluff

’Tis the season of mists and fellow mutefulness, apparently, and there being no one else available to write the substack this week (the other NSPs are all currently on the road or under the cosh) I thought I’d scribble something about fluff, or at least fluff under pressure. Lint, possibly. The poem below was a commission for Radio 4’s The Verb about three years back. The Verb has been on my mind this week. Late last year, in the course of a conversation with Ian MacMillan about the poetry of train stations, I had foolishly volunteered that no poem could possibly be written about Leuchars. For reasons both topographic and personal, I have long found it the least poetic station in the UK. Obviously, the poem was commissioned on the spot.

Leuchars is the closest station to the University of St Andrews, where I taught for a couple of happy decades, and with which I am still gently affiliated. But the station itself just reminds me of all the hours I spent freezing on a bench outside a locked waiting room in pitch-dark December, trying to mark exam scripts in the teeth of a North Sea gale, while yet another fighter jet from the airbase tore up the sky twenty feet above my head and the board told me yet another train had failed to make it out of Aberdeen. The Leuchars poem may or may not be any good – you can and will judge for yourselves, if you happen to be near a wireless next week – but as a rambling meditation on war, teaching, cutlery, dementia and death, I don’t think it can count as genuine fluff.

Unlike the poem below. It’s really a piece of occasional verse, the occasion being the BBC’s centennial: a few of us were charged with coming up with some kind of poetic tribute to the Reithian project, in whatever form we fancied. Writing poems for BBC radio is done for love, and often just for the love of Ian MacMillan. As a casual contributor, one is rewarded, more or less, only for the amount of airtime one destroys. A sonnet that took you three months will pay you roughly the same as someone else will get for breaking wind across the same minute. Lacking the normal incentives, BBC commissions can therefore sometimes be … deprioritised by more financially urgent work, which is a way of saying that I totally forgot to do this one. The dedicatee here is the poet Denise Riley, for two reasons: a) Denise reminded me that the poem was due in 48 hours, and b) she actually likes this sort of thing, or claims to, and indeed is very good at it herself. (There may still be a few who persist in thinking of Denise solely as some kind of doyenne of the UK avant-garde, but I suspect most of you know she’s many other things besides, and besides was never quite that thing in the first place.) By way of competitive encouragement, she sent me a fine poem on the now-lost rite of the 5pm Saturday footie results, specifically on the cadences of the sportscaster – his ‘RP weighty, self-assured and calm, / avuncular with its velvety inflections’ as its rise or fall foreshadowed the fate of the club. One could be certain Stenhousemuir had nilled again, well before the nil was confirmed.

All of which is to say … This poem was written in a tearing rush. As my NSP colleagues know, I suffer from Pascal syndrome. I often lack the time to make things shorter. I wrote the poem in a form I know I can deliver fairly quickly; this is where a certain motor-skill relationship to the old 4x4 can come in handy, and the rhymes left to dictate much of the poem. The poem had to find its way to its own conclusion, as none had been planned. It takes a while to yak its way there, but I kind of enjoyed the passivity. As Erroll Garner once said after an overlong piano solo, ‘I’m sorry – I just wanted to find out what happened in the end.’

In the 90s and early 00s I wrote a fair bit of radio drama. ‘Comedy’, I guess, though I’ve always felt that accolade should only be in the gift of the amused (an opinion reconfirmed only last night by the first episode of Season 2 of Nobody Wants This; indeed). I was naively surprised the first time I witnessed a kissing scene, and disappointed that the actors did not actually kiss: one actor kissed their hand instead. The self-kisser, in this case, was the great Bill Paterson (star of everything, though ’younger readers’ will place him more quickly as Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s dad in Fleabag). I was about to say I’d forgotten most things about the play itself, but because the internet now does ancient history, we’re not allowed to forget anything, and I’ve just found something I wrote which predates the birth of some now-adult children. The play, I read, was another random BBC commission: Dave Bachelor, that legend of Scottish radio, suggested that I turn a wee poem of mine into a four-part drama. “The poem in question was entitled ‘Homesick Paterson, Live at the Blue Bannock, Thurso’, a solipsistic, mildly chauvinistic fantasy predicated on the conceit that jazz had been invented in Scotland, and that the accordion, not the tenor saxophone, was the last word in hipness. […] Imagine our horror, then, when we got the green light. Thus Kailyard Blues was born. Having indulged one fantasy about Scotland, I decided to indulge all the others too, and construct the whole thing from a personal desiderata: Scotland’s full political independence was imminent, and the Scottish Buddhist Liberation Army (aka The Dharma Bams) force Westminster’s hand at every move …”

Look: it kept me off the streets. The play climaxes with the triumphant rapping of The Declaration of Arbroath by President Sean Connery over a funk groove supplied by ‘Wayne Shortie’s Shipping Forecast’. Bill played someone, I think, called either Lafayette McNab or J.J. McFadyen; I forget. There was a love story at its heart, of course, and in one scene … Bill kissed his own hand. Apparently I filed this moment away under ‘good ideas for emergency poems’. Back then, I was still more musician than poet, and I had a lot of fun writing all the Jimmy Shand-meets-Weather-Report McJazz for the show. This included making the ECM arrangement of Burn’s ‘Ae Fond Kiss’ which played under Bill’s autoerotic smacker. (I still play it; I’ll include it below for anyone who reads jazz algebra.)

So here’s ‘Kissing on the Radio’. (The asterisks aren’t some paratextual affectation, but just there to stop Substack smooshing everything together.) I make no claims for it, and I less wrote the poem than ‘made it up’. If I’d written it more slowly, it’d have been much worse. Fluff is best not laboured over. I am not sure it makes a serious point, other than ‘silence often improves things’, a reflection you may arrive at independently long before the end of the poem. I think it’s quite a sweet little thing; one has to make time for those, surely. I’ve occasionally read it live, and discovered a fun bit of audience participation – fun for me, at least. After the lines ‘… can you resist / a cheeky dorsal level test’ I ask everyone in the audience to kiss the back of their hand. It has two things to recommend it: a) the sound of an audience kissing themselves sounds like five yards of velcro, and b) it makes everyone feel extremely weird and vulnerable. Go on, no-one’s looking. Gives you a funny feeling, doesn’t it. Anyway … the window is starless still; the clock ticks. The page is printed; the poem is fluff, but that’s £18.72 in the bank, so who’s laughing now, eh.

Kissing on the Radio

(for Denise Riley)

Actors faced with – BEAT – THEY KISS

lest kissing lead to awkwardness,

cold sores, flu, or simply bed

will opt to kiss themselves instead;

*

and thus the radio-drama snog

is how you tell just how a man

precisely feels about his hand.

For men, alas, will often hog

*

this bit with darling, would you mind –

or come ‘ere you, or I beseech –

and in the well-timed plonker find

a way to silence her, mid-speech.

*

They broach the pop-shield with the back

of their left paw, and plant a smack

with lots of extra wet and suction

to be dialled down in post-production.

*

Now harken to the glowing tank!

What’s that sound? The crunch of locks?

A munching horse? That final yank

before the kitchen sink unblocks?

*

Oh dear. Real kisses, we efface:

we lock our mouths down tight, like rubber

seals on docking ports in space

where nobody can hear you slobber.

*

Now: pucker up. Can you resist

a cheeky dorsal level-test?

Ha ha loser. No, I’m joking –

but wasn’t that a touch heartbreaking

*

in its sad, squeaky isolation?

Imagine the compounded shame

of doing something quite so lame

before a whole attentive nation.

*

Now play that little squelch again

on the old-style tape-delay your brain

keeps around for such short measures

as it would play back at its leisure;

*

and as the quality degrades

and your auto-embrasse gently fades

into the Atlantic churn

to which all smackers must return –

*

ask yourself: what clever foley

could honour, say, that secret Santa

who blew your mind below the holly?

A ring pulled on a can of Fanta?

*

Would you brick a ripened peach

for that white hour in late December

you made out on the stony beach?

The sound’s the last thing you remember.

*

So thesps: when scripts call for a kiss,

just say your line, and pause, like this –

*

*

and trust the thrill of the dead air:

we all know what to slap in there.

---

Don Paterson’s winter webinars mini-series – three classes on Symbol, Space and Scansion – is now live and tickets are going fast. Read on for all the details and a special 3-in-1 ticket offer ….

Get all the details at northseapoets.com 🌊