EDITORIAL

XENOPHILIA

Mark Ward’s piece Growing Weed on Lord Clitheroe’s Estate (p78) raises the question of English xenophobia which seems to be the main driver of Brexit madness. The Oik might, at first sight, seem provincially North West  – Mark Ward, Jim Burns, Keith Howden, Tanner, Bob Wild, Dave Birtwistle and John Lee are all from the North West. John now lives in Spain as a Bargain Loving Brit in the Sun when he’s not in his Perigord bolt-hole dreaming of…Salford(?). Tanner, a Scouser has moved to Brighton, a town often full of French tourists (if he wants to have a natter with these exotics we suggest he checks our ad on p26).

 Beyond these parochial boundaries the Oik has distinctly xenophiliac tendencies. Ron Horsefield is always banging on about France and has translated Proust and Leautaud for our long-suffering readers (we just can’t stop the bugger – his wife Enid has done de Sponville and Edouard Louis). Ivan de Nemethy is Hungarian and Alexis Lykiard is Greek although both these writers came here as tots and could easily be considered more English (products of Oxbridge etc) than the proletarian editor of the Oik. Ivan’s house burned down recently and I wondered why he didn’t sell the refurbished Hackney gaff and buy a castle in Devon or the Yorkshire Dales. But he wasn’t having any of that. He loves that cosmopolitan vibrancy and the fact that his street, Evering Road, is known locally as Murder Mile. A true xenophile.  

Extending our metropolitan contingent we have Ken Champion and Jeff Bell. Jeff is a Geordie expatriate in Dalston (but has a house in France) while Ken is a Londoner whose dad used to go to the dogs and knew how to eat a jellied eel. Nigel Ford is also a southerner but has lived in Sweden since 1969 (I suppose somebody has to) 

Then there’s the Irish, soon to become even more foreign unfortunately. Aubrey Malone (Dublin) and Martin Keaveney (Claremorris). Aubrey’s stories (most recently in Ballina Stories and Poems) evoke an exotic ambience of priest-haunted repression (Aubrey’s brother is one although Aubrey himself is emancipated enough to have written a biography of Bukowski). If Aubrey’s patch is a recognisable variant of English provincial life Martin’s The Rainy Day is almost another planet reminiscent of the great Flann O’Brien whose fictional academic described a west coast recording of a pig grunting as the finest Gaelic on record.  

And this is just a survey of Issue 41. Earlier we’ve had submissions from USA, Egypt, Israel, India, Czechoslovakia, Scotland, Northern Ireland and a Russian living in England.  Let’s face it, even celebrate it, we’re all immigrants – just like the weeds on Lord Clitheroe’s Estate.

Ken Clay Jan 2019

KEITH HOWDEN

1. Team Photographs 

George led me to the wall where thirty one
photographs in black and white proposed
thirty one seasons of a side that never won
anything. Young and brash, we colonised
in callow ranks athletically transfixed,
a team without distinction. First, he stared,
not at myself but at Hugh Naylor, relaxed,
arms folded, head erect in an assured
self-confidence in some earlier team.
George spoke, voice loaded with reproach,
'You know the story, that man did me harm.'
He moved to point my later photograph -
'You're sitting where he sat.' - struck visually
to shape our present quarrel. Seasons later, young,
I poised the same null landscape over me,
the slowly vitiating and corroding
townscapes of a time and mood less innocent
than I or our young faces had supposed.
Black and white stripes posed celluloid assent.
Petrified, agonistic, we advertised
different seasons of a side that never won
anything. Upland behind us were
the marches of a landscape I had known,
the blind and narrow town under the moor,
the pattern of the mean, ascending streets
that fashioned us. George pointed Naylor
and myself, wearing corrupting industries,
complicit in that landscape’s weather.