Ivor Cutler

Unexpected reading, prone in front of the stove on a cold, clear, windy afternoon. Looking through all my Ivor Cutler books for a drawing of a boy who planted himself in the garden until roots started growing out of his feet.

I read several of his books at speed, looking for the next intake of breath. The world brought up close and crazy, perverse and defiant and warm. Short pieces with drawings here and there. Tiny format. Half of A6. Biggish, tight print. Never knowingly understood, as he liked to say, looking out sideways from his book covers.

Sailing on my floating island, I take one breath per day. I breathe it in at midnight —a great big breath — and spend the rest of the day clutching the roots below and letting out bubbles.

Ivor Cutler was on the radio when I was about twelve: Monday Night At Home was on Monday Nights, At Home, a bizarre concept now. Quiet and unpredictable, funny from a long way back. Ivor Cutler telling us about gruts for tea, oh no, not gruts again, in a voice that sounded slowed down inside a thickset hedge. Ivor, born Isidore, Cutler grew up jewish in glasgow, a disquieting category like most other beginnings in life, that gave rise to a displaced child with a perverse streak.

I spent ten years at the conservatoire learning how to listen. After graduating with an A+, I gave several concerts, sitting on a chair listening to restive audiences. Eventually they started bringing instruments and went home after, thrilled with the quality of my reception. 

I bought Ivor Cutler's books at Compendium in Camden. He brought them in himself in his bicycle basket. This was pre-internet. I know him through his books and his bicycle. Later, when I was talking to people about teaching literature, I wanted to talk to him, but he sent me a half-page note on lined paper declining.

And now, looking for Sam who planted himself, to his parents' consternation, in the garden, and couldn't be dug up, I find him again. Different pages come through. Like this one, from Is That Your Flap, Jack?

The albatross, the stormy petrel, the armadillo that grubs for ants in the desert night, the rock cavy with his York gangster face still and alert, the boatbill and the marabout, shoulders hunched from the ache of carrying the world, Schubert's Hurdygurdyman and my grandfather, stumbling through the main street of a long long village, fledglings fallen from the nest. They all have their tune, which is silent. Small girls can hear it. They comfort dead flies, and little brightly-coloured lumps of detritus.