Island of Lightning Read Free Page B

jiving’s beyond me, although my wife, who frequented the original Cavern, is adept. One music lover who heckled with cries of wankers was removed by the constabulary.
    Yes, times are hard and the environmental movement financially embarrassed. The world now requires greens who are innovative entrepreneurs, maybe prepared to live with nuclear power. As the new austerity bites, so idealists seem fewer. Or am I simply bewildered by middle age?
    Nevertheless, at Sussed we decided to do Elvis proud. The shop window displayed copies of the Daily Mirror front page from August 17, 1976 – “Elvis Presley is dead” – and old album sleeves, such as ‘Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite’ and ‘Elvis Sings the Wonderful World Of Christmas’.
    Dead, one man said to me. Don’t you know he’s only sleeping?
    Like every other hero from history…
    4.
    Now town teems with men with impossibly black wigs and muttonchops. They are entrants in the festival’s karaokes and competitions. And I ask, who are these people? Why have they come? The clearest answer is they hail from south Wales, especially the valleys, and the English Midlands. What they’re creating is a magnificent working class eisteddfod. And whoever they are, they certainly understand the protocols of alcohol.
    Thus the Elvis Festival is an excuse for drinking. Exactly the same as international rugby. But it’s more subtly done. Thursday and Friday drinking constitute exquisite preliminaries. The booze is to be savoured, indeed relished, each glass deliciously anticipated.
    Saturday drinking on the other hand is relentless and singleminded. The drinker is not merely owed his drink. He deserves it like no other drink he will take. This Saturday drinker propels himself determinedly into the amnesiac twilight of Sunday morning. The wreckage of Saturday night is spectacular.
    Sunday’s drinking has a wistful quality. Despite the regularity of Sabbath sport, a tracing of guilt adheres to it. The toasts are wry yet congratulatory. We survived last night, they seem to say. Don’t know how. Don’t know why…
    For the Elvis Festival, drinking continued into Monday. This was a shifty, apologetic drinking, for which the drinker asked himself, why am I doing this? I didn’t know I was allowed.
    And Tuesday drinking? This is the terra incognita of booze. Yet I saw two men with cans of Special Brew together on a bench at Trinity. It was 9.30 a.m. and they were ready for the world. They too felt Porthcawl and Elvis owed them a drink. Perhaps we did.
    5.
    Saturday night it rains torrentially. But I’m out with plenty of others, not all of whom are inebriates, looking for buses amongst unfamiliar fleets. We’re soaked but there’s a definite camaraderie.
    What would Elvis have done? someone asks, joining a bus queue.
    Get a taxi, comes a reply.
    Before I go I pass the breakwater. Surely nobody would be rash enough to venture there? But yes, a hesitant figure has blundered on, looking for the right road.
    He won’t find it there. It’s a dangerous place to walk, along a narrow stone pier where the lighthouse glows a spectral orange through its panes.
    Better take care, Elvis, I say to the legions surrounding me. Better take care.
    As to Katia, I’ve forgotten what she looks like. Yet I know I will see her again.

Infinity Speaker
    Homage to Guillevic (1907-1997)
    Avebury
    The stars are running down the avenues of Avebury. I look through the stones at the comets and sphinx-faced Mars, at the cartoons of the constellations and all the familiar cosmic crowd. And together we gaze down the avenues of Avebury, seeking the energy stored in its cells, that battery that burns under the wheat and the wheat-coloured flints and the sunken coliseums of chalk.
    Down these white roads I go, and think: do stones wait? Are these stones waiting? Perhaps for some summons from the ones they will recognise, and though