The Ned Wood Archive

The Meaning of Unrequited

That was Wednesday November 24^th, 1976.  I haven’t forgotten.  I have forgotten most of what I did next.  Thursday.  I dunno.  Friday.  Lectures maybe a practical.  Saturday coming and not having to go lectures didn’t cheer me up.  Beating Cardiff 3-0 didn’t cheer me up.  Even though it was at Cardiff and we were now fourth.  Going down to town and scoring some cheap vinyl didn’t cheer me up.  Sunday.  Going to see Racing Cars at the Old Ref certainly didn’t cheer me up.  They were crap.  Everyone else liked them, but I hated them.  I hated that song they had out about Shooting Horses.  It was based on a film I’d seen one evening which was also boring.  I hated them all.  Nothing that weekend helped.  I sat in my room right through till Monday.

Oh Mary.  When I live my dream, I’ll take you with me.  Till that day, you’ll run to many other men, but let them know it’s just for now.  Tell them that I’ve got a dream and tell them you’re the starring role.

Do I feel like this or am I making it all up?

Monday, I’m sat right up next to the Juke Box in the Coffee Bar trying to get the Kinks You Really Got Me and the Who’s My Generation to blast away my mood.  Someone should invent some really loud hateful RocknRoll that lets you sandblast away your anger and your hurt.  Not so much Dave Davies’ hard core chords, more like a pneumatic drill or concord taking off.  The singer would have to shout not sing.  And he’d shout about Hate and War or Revolution or Anarchy or Rioting or crass things like that.  No keyboards, no saxes, just chords and shouting.  You could have Keith Moon on drums though.

Girl, you really got me going.  Sometimes it helps.  Sometimes it doesn’t.  Sometimes there’s a perverse pleasure in this game.

Tuesday.  I don’t believe this.  I’ve been playing the unrequited lover for 6 days now.  Sat in my room,  deep in my room.  Or sat in the Coffee Bar,  deep in the Coffee Bar.  I’m made of stronger stuff.  If you take an axe to me, you’ll kill another man, not me at all.  Sometimes I can talk myself up.  Sometimes I don’t want to,  Sometimes my mood is so fickle, it’ll follow whatever’s being pumped out by the juke box.

Wednesday.  December 1^st.  I’m just about to start living my life again by rolling off to a lab when Nick rolls in and starts railing about nationalisation.  Again.  I don’t want to talk about it.  But then, this is the one link I’ve got with Mary and it’s like a bruise I have to keep rubbing.  If I listen to Nick, I can feel the hurt more and get closer to her.  

He wants to know whether I would nationalise the banks.  Like no way.  You can’t do that.  What would it prove.  Nick says banks make too much money.  On the other hand nationalisation infringes on individual liberties too much.  Meaning that everyone should be free to run a business.  I’m not really listening, cos for a while he’s talking about nationalising some stuff and not others.  Eventually, though, I brighten up a bit and join in.  So what’s already nationalised.  The railways.  Electricity & Gas aren’t they?  Now they’re all OK.  They work.  What about the buses.  We don’t know.  Then we decide that the buses should be like water.  You pay so much a year and get as much as you want.  Meaning you pay rates and buses come by every five minutes and whenever you want one you take it without having to pay.  Which is cool if you’re a student and wouldn’t have to pay rates.  Or whatever.  So how would you decide how many buses to have.  You’d have to tune the number.  We both think that maybe you could have a free shuttle up and down the avenue where the traffic is really bad so as you’d get fewer cars, but the arguments for putting a bus from Millbrook to Highgate would be limited as only a couple of students would use it.

“Ah,” says Nick, “If you were a socialist, you’d do it for everyone”

“But we’re not socialists are we,” I reply. “We’re doing this because it saves money all round.”  I look at him to see if he agrees, but he carries on.

“Now would you nationalise the press?”

Maybe that answers my question, because that must kill nationalisation off straight away.  No way can you have a press that is not independent.  But maybe he’s playing devils advocate.

“You have to have a system in place that divorces control of the means of production from control of the production.”

Which means what?

“The nation owns the printing presses, right.  It pays various groups of editors and journalists and print workers to produce various newspapers.  It doesn’t have to judge which are worthy and which aren’t”.

Oh yes it does.  Say I want to produce a newspaper.  Do I just turn up and ask for my share of the press.  Me and every one else each with our own different opinions.  Say we all produce some outline of our paper.  Someone has to decide which gets printed – my football and music rag or Tom’s croquet weekly or Dick’s racism today.

“You’d need to create an independent review body.”  He’s thinking hard as he says this and I’m not sure whether he’s stumped or not.  It’s still not clear whether this is a question of deeply held beliefs or an exercise in coming up with a solution to any problem we might throw up.  “It all boils down to having a strong and knowledgeable electorate able to understand the issues and elect a body capable of independent rather than self interested thought.”

“You sound like Mary,” I said. “it’s just the sort of thing she’d say.”  

Mary.  I wonder what she’s up to.  Nick didn’t notice my sudden silence.

“You know Mary, don’t you,”  he said.  “She’s a bit upset.  Apparently she fancied that guy that Sally’s started going out with.  We should take her out and get her drunk.  Cheer her up a bit”

Was it true?  I knew Sally and Gray were seeing each other – it had probably started over the weekend cos I saw them over at Chamberlain for breakfast on the Monday morning.  You couldn’t really keep that sort of stuff quiet cos the cleaners came round at about nine thirty to throw everyone out of their bedrooms.  Not that everyone wanted to keep their conquests quiet.

So, Mary was upset.  Excellent.  No I don’t mean that, I mean maybe that was why she said no.  You know.  Jeez, what do I do?

Actually nothing.  Maybe I should have gone straight round and tried to cheer her up, maybe not.  But I didn’t have a clue what I should do, so I did nothing for the next couple of days, not wanting to put my foot in it.  Then on Saturday, a group of us went for a walk around the golf course, which was something we did every so often, and Mary came along.  I enjoyed the walk, which was a bit of country and then a stroll round some pretty big houses, the golf course being right next to a wealthy estate.  It was funny, I was admiring these places and imagining myself in them, Mary was denouncing them and their owners as symbols of everyone who’d ever ripped her dad off.  At least she was in a good frame of mind.  Actually it was the same day as the Chamberlain Christmas party, so everyone was in a good mood.  

I found I could ask what seemed like intelligent questions of Mary, or at least, repeat some of the stuff Nick had said and sound as if I knew what I was talking about.  Would she nationalise the banks?  She would.  Would she nationalise everything?  No she wouldn’t.  Not the corner shop or the local butcher.  How could she guarantee that a nationalised press would be free?  She would run it like the BBC.  Was she coming to the party tonight?  Yes she was.

And when we got back I heard Forest had won 4-2 so I was truly over the moon, even though Wolves had won 4-0 and gone back above us on goal average.  Bastids.