THE INSIDE OF THE INSIDE
The argument was conducted under wraps, under roofs, under cover of town and country, time and place – mainly by email, but often by clandestine exchange of notes between members of the audience at the weekly ‘Friday Night Is Music Night’ recording for the BBC Light Programme.
Indeed, the argument had been going on for many years, spanning all manner of communication systems, such as Morse Code, Semaphore, via the gossiping of folks on the blower or press-button-A/press-button-B kiosks (whilst letting drop important sounding words or noises between the gossip, all of which spelt out the intrinsic message), envelopes taken on horseback as well as by the more normal Royal Mail vans, telegrams, telex, smoke signals learned parrot fashion from the Sioux Indian, sign language, uncouth gestures in public gatherings such as football matches or pop music gigs, tell-tale coughs and splutters picked up by the Radio Three microphones between movements at classical music concerts, children surreptitiously passing ink-blotted notes between desks whilst the teacher turned a blind eye to their mischievous faces fully giving the game away, tin canisters zipping along high wires in department stores between counters and cash desks bearing handwritten messages as well as invoices and coins, sweethearts exchanging billets doux with strange words out of context amid their amorous ravings … and, then, of course, messages could be passed without even the people involved knowing they were messages: like the hidden patterns in the movement of crowds, windows opening, windows shutting, chimneys giving off smoke from nursery fires where the children watched armies of red sparks marching up the sooty backdrop of their world, traffic stalling, traffic backfiring, traffic policemen waving arms to direct the snarling vehicles of the town as they crisscrossed the gridworks of routes in telling, remorselessly random patterns of journey…
No end to the various means of conducting the argument, therefore. But what was the argument – constituted of all these messages through time and place – and who was arguing with whom? The crowd was slowly, methodically, patiently queuing up for the BBC’s ‘Friday Night Is Music Night’ in the Golder’s Green Empire. I forget if the theatre was called the Empire, because time often interposes obstacles to memory now and again, because a message delivered too easily is often not a message at all. Each message was equivalent to a word in a sentence, though these messages often contained more or less than simply a word. Often just a letter. Sometimes a string of meanings that, together, had very little meaning … unless joined luckily with another message that gave it a context of new and crystal clear meaning. Two messages together made sense, then, whilst each on its own was complete nonsense.
The queue of people snaked round the streets of North London as a gold and purple sunset crusted the rooftops and chimneys and TV aerials with a ghostliness that few of the people in the queue would ever forget, even though they did not even try to remember it, because by being ordinary people, they did not have the worry of noticing the beauty around them. They rarely looked up from their feet.
So the question remained. What was the argument? Who were the insiders that realised that it was being argued out at all amid the apparently haphazard footprints of the queue as they slowly vanished inside the theatre via the rusty turnstile of the inscrutable ticket-keeper? And were there insiders within the insiders? And inside of the inside: those who knew that time and place were huge signifiers at the core of the argument being conducted by the message and the messenger?
I was in that queue. I knew I had to be there so that I could seek out the inside of its winding crocodile of pink and black humanity. A line of people could have a centre of gravity just as much as a mass or crowd of people gathering into the shape of an audience that was once a queue. They do say proverbially an audience was always once a queue. I stared at my neighbour behind me in the queue. A father with his daughter? I then turned to watch my other neighbour in front. This was a professional queue maker by the look of him. A one-man band of facilities: chemical toilet, blanket tent, thermos and comestibles. He smiled. But I knew he was not on the true inside of the queue, not the pukka core of the queue. The way he looked at me – quizzically – made me wonder if he thought *I* was the ultimate queue maker. The insider that all bogus insiders yearned to become.
Meanwhile, the queue continued its lethargic course, because nobody was heated enough to fasten the pace of its argument. Nobody was there, I felt, to hear the concert of Light Music waiting to tinkle out its notes inside. They were simply there to form the queue. Their eventual emergence as a full-blooded audience was merely secondary.
I then abruptly noticed a sad-faced woman on the other side of the one-man band. Someone who stared past this one-man band – in fact she ignored the strident busker that the one-man band had suddenly become so as to entertain the queue with his music, entertaining the queue from *within* the queue. She not only stared past the one-man band’s flashing tambourine, but also past my own unfamiliar face … towards the man with the little girl. All three, the man with the little girl, the little girl herself and this woman had tears sparkling in their eyes, connecting them by a message far more meaningful than any language of words that arguers could possibly use to outflank each side of their argument.
We all vanished into the Empire … but not before noticing, in my case, that a few puffs of smoke from a nearby chimney veiled the darkening sunset. A few birds sat on a washing line like crotchets. It was Friday night.
