Bob Bell Bides His Time in The Great American Lockdown
Bob’s home office in California
The great by-product of the shelter-at-home or lockdown is the supposed opportunity for folks to get their teeth into a long dreamt of project, whether it be to paint the kitchen, learn Greek, read ‘War and Peace’, get that overgrown jungle of a garden into shape at last or maybe take up yoga.
All excellent ideas of course, and certainly if there ever was a time to pursue such dreams the time is most certainly now.
I’ve been retired for several years, and have thus long been in this position to start or finish countless hitherto postponed or long envisioned projects, and I regretfully report that a great deal of them remain stalled to this day. The opportunity is there, but is the will? The fact is that the will is a misty thing; it becomes heated, boils and then evaporates, and the result is a lot of nothing.
Several passions have dragged me along in this life. I suppose a love of music has been the main one. Despite a tin ear, a lamentable lack of the ability to carry a tune, and a regrettable sense of time, I have been drawn to music ever since I first heard Bill Haley on record back in 1954. Being given a wind-up gramophone in 1955, as a get-well present to speed my recovery after having my tonsils removed, and also being given a copy of ‘Rock Around The Clock’ to play on the instrument, kindled my interest, and now, all these years later I am still a mad record collector, and never fail to thrill upon coming across a dusty pile of 78’s in the corner of a flea market.
This love of music also lead to a career in music, working for record companies and managing musicians, and the years spent in doing so have shaped and moulded my life and my friendships immeasurably, and in a way that has really enriched my existence, and I am very, very glad of it. No regrets there at all.
A side interest in record collecting has led, in recent years, to restoring old record players, from wind-ups from the ’20s to tube amplified changers from the Forties and Fifties. A lot of fun, a considerable amount of history, and an intolerable demand upon that bane of all collectors, available space. Also, it turns out that the amount of hours spent upon restoring a 1952 Webcor record player sadly in no way equals the potential dollar reward when one tries to sell it. Few people see and hear these little players with the same eyes and ears as I.
I’m a country boy at heart, but circumstances currently dictate my wife and I live in a large city. When we bought our house, one of our main requirements was that it have a large garden. Not necessarily because we liked gardening, but because it would be a buffer between us and a pressing, noisy and intrusive urban world. It is indeed a glorious, if somewhat overgrown refuge, and we love it. But where is the time to really keep it in order?
My mother was a librarian long before I was born, and when I came along, she instilled in me a great love of reading. Indeed, she taught me to read at the age of three or four, and I was away to the races by the time I started school. As a boy, I had all the classics on my bookshelves - Dickens, Scott, Defoe and the then-current boys' books, Arthur Ransome, a bit of Blyton, and a lot of Richmal Crompton, the writer of the William books. Oh, how I loved William! The eternal mischievous schoolboy, always aged eleven, always trying to have fun and adventure, and always being misunderstood and getting into trouble. But the appeal went beyond his misadventures - the books were also a very wry and extremely astute commentary upon the adult world, and I think that for me therein lay their greatest appeal.
From there during the teenage years, I discovered the moderns, Britain’s Angry Young Men and then, the Beats. Kerouac, Corso, Ginsberg, and Ferlinghetti! Old Ferl … what a word-slinger he was, how he made language dance, the meanings shift, the images of contemporary society seen through the mirrors of a linguistic funhouse. These guys led me into a romanticised teenage tramp period, hitchhiking around the south of England, a bedroll slung across my shoulders - I was a bindlestiff, with a book stuffed into my back pocket.
I made friends with a like-minded guy in Somerset named Brad, and we eagerly discussed the intricacies of making small campfires, the possibilities of devising small iron cooking sticks which we might carry with us as part of the bedroll, and use these sticks to dangle a billy can from. The joys of wine around the campfire were explored, and our favourite book was ‘A Tramp’s Handbook’ by one Harry Roberts, which gave advice upon myriad vagabonding associated subjects, such as earning money from repairing pots and pans. We shunned consumerism, flashy shiny things, and the pursuit of money, and imagined ourselves dharma bums of the English countryside, reading from Donald Allen’s ’The New American Poetry, and Paul Reps' ‘Zen Flesh Zen Bones'.
As private collections of vinyl go, Bob’s is impressive to say the least
It was around this time that we discovered we both loved jeeps. As a kid growing up in the shadow of WW2, artefacts of the conflict were everywhere, from pillboxes in the hedgerows to rows of old army vehicles in junkyards. The army vehicles were deliciously lacking in chrome, devoid of shiny paint and were decidedly utilitarian, square, boxy and thus very groovy.
Being teenagers, the cost of owning and running most of these vehicles was way past our means, but a lowly little jeep seemed just about possible. Above all, their total lack of consumer appeal spoke to us - the Perfect Beatnik Car. The how’s, why’s and wherefore’s of us becoming owners is a subject for a future monologue, but suffice it to say owning and operating an old 1940’s era jeep has been part of my life ever since those far off days.
My daily drive these days is a 1946 Willys CJ2A, and I am currently rebuilding, from scratch, a 1951 Willys for my wife. What a lucky woman!
All of the above, all of this listing of my various passions, music, reading, jeeps, the outdoor life, record players and all the other avocations and recreations is a long preamble to why I am writing all of this. Dear old Martin Hesp, the visionary owner and operator of this very website, has pestered me, and I do mean pestered me, for many years to do something meaningful with my time, which, as Martin is a writer himself, means that 'meaningful' means writing. In his words: "When I read your missives, Bob, I do tend to think you are wasting valuable hours doing up old Jeeps and making old things work, or not, as the case maybe - you ought to be writing".
Thus these words. And I do thank you, Martin, for getting me off my arse and sitting here pecking away at my keyboard. It is a great way to start the day - coffee, muesli and then an hour or so conjuring up a thousand words of god knows what about god knows what. Have to say in my defence though, regarding the jeep fetish, it is remarkably therapeutic to bring these old machines back to life, it really is. Sort of a meditation, if you like. Or maybe all these passions act as conjunctives, joining together all these mad threads of my being. Who knows? At any rate, they give me something to write about.
So the writing is all very liberating, and it is yet one more thing to do each day, one more task to fulfil amongst the myriad others. And outside the weeds grow higher, inside piles of records await filing, my shelves are filled with unread books, when the pistons and bearings arrive next week, there is an engine to rebuild, and in half an hour someone is coming here to look at a record player.
Guess I’ll have to tote it down to the street and to the garage, mask in hand, and hope he doesn’t have the virus. Jeez, so much to do and so little time.
