*Track 4

Novocaine for the Soul - 9th November 2017

Rather than planning some preposterous Bond like plot, Stuart thought, predicated on a poisoned pen proving mightier than the sword, the CIA would surely have been better served focusing on matters closer to home.

Despite being in the States, visiting Joe, Stuart still used the BBC website for his daily news fix. His dad had always insisted they watch the nine o’clock news, with an unspoken implication its content was somehow more reliable than ITN’s, and this age old subconscious bias must have seeped into Stuart and lived with him ever since. He should cross reference what he had just read later though, it would be interesting to see if the same Castro story, fake news or not, had also made it onto Fox or CNN.

This non contemporaneous report, only coming to light today as the National Archives released a new batch of declassified documents, had revealed that on 22 November 1963 a CIA officer in Paris had passed one of his Cuban assets a pen rigged with a hypodermic syringe, along with instructions (presumably handwritten!) that the device should be employed to rid the world of the infidelic Fidel.

“Seems to me,” Stuart railed at a half listening Anne, “these spies read too much of their own fiction. Swallow too much Fleming. Surely,” he argued, “there must be more realistic, less complicated ways to kill people. Yet the Russians, allegedly, are still up to the same tricks.”

This news item wouldn’t, on its own, have become a headline story. There were plenty of other Castro assassination plots already known about, many equally as bizarre. “Even Cubby Broccoli,” Stuart continued, warming to his theme, “would’ve fired his scriptwriters if they’d come up with Bond boobytrapping a bloody seashell.” The extra twist to today’s tale though, the one that had deemed the item newsworthy, was an ironic synchronicity between this cloak-and-dagger in Havana revelation and a much bigger unrelated event that had, simultaneously, taken place in Dallas. While the CIA were otherwise occupied, pointlessly plotting with a poisonous pen in Paris, five thousand miles away Lee Harvey Oswald (conspiracy theories aside) was taking far more direct, effective action. Shooting Kennedy dead with a couple of rifle bullets.

“Now there was a man who knew how to keep it simple!” concluded Stuart, over their breakfast, ignoring Anne’s attempts to shush him. She seemed unsure whether presidential assassinations made an appropriate topic of conversation for public consumption in Yellow Springs.

Anne got her own back shortly afterwards though. Her sudden, sharp exclamation of, “stop,” halted Stuart’s fork poised hash brown in mid-flight, and she responded to his quizzical look of, “why?” with a silent, but clearly mouthed, “it might be poisoned.”

As proud as they both were of Joe’s transatlantic adventure into higher education, secured via a soccer scholarship, it also provided an obvious fringe benefit. Additional holidays, justifiable under the guise of parental concern. For the second autumn running (or fall as Joe now referred to it) they were visiting him in Ohio, smuggling his favourite sweets past the US food import restrictions and catching a few of his college matches.

Last year, Joe’s first of four, they had based themselves in the centre of Columbus. It was an interesting city, if surprisingly the USA’s seventh largest, but had proved to be a place that could be worn out touristically in one visit. So, for Joe’s Sophomore year (another newly learnt term, helping confirm the truth of Shaw’s, “divided by a common language,”) they had chosen to stay closer to his university, in a homespun hotel in the smalltown rural community of Yellow Springs. Pop.3734 as its hand painted town sign declared with civic pride.

Anne had suggested this location following a day trip to the town last year, explaining how she had loved Yellow Springs’ homely feel, calling it, “a slice of real America.” Stuart suspected though that Joe’s soccer coach, an unreconstructed expat Mancunian, may have got closer to Anne’s true motivation when he had greeted them, after Tuesday’s home game, with, “Hi, I hear you’re staying in Hippyville!”

Yellow Springs certainly centred its marketing on a vibrant artist community, with an eclectic mix of craft stores, galleries, and vegan cafes. Stuart was amused though that even alternative America still couldn’t resist the lure of a good corporate motto, with the local tourist office declaring the town, a trifle ambitiously, to be, “Everyone’s Favorite Place.” By the end of the previous evening, after a couple of beers and a hearty meal at Ye Olde Trail Tavern (est.1827), a pleasant walk along the town’s picturesque tree lined scenic trail, and a craft brewed nightcap, or three, at the excellent (if architecturally functional) Yellow Springs Brewery, Stuart had been in no fit state to dispute their claim.

Today’s soccer match was nearly two hundred miles away, at a university in Wheeling, an old West Virginian industrial town in the foothills of the Appalachians, so they had a long road trip in front of them. To avoid the clear threat Anne might sing repeated choruses of ‘Country Roads’ through the whole journey, in tribute to their destination (with it only being possible to stand so much John Denver, so many mountain mamas) Stuart had pre-armed himself with plenty of CDs for their hire car entertainment.

The common theme he had chosen, in pulling together this season’s cruising selections, was his favourite American bands. Stuart liked to think of this as helping to re-import the nation’s best music, a form of cultural re-education. This was a concept particularly pertinent to Eels, he explained to Anne as he slotted ‘Beautiful Freak’ into the Chevy’s disc player, as they were a band that had always been significantly more successful in the UK, whilst largely ignored back home. Anne had always been remarkably resilient, or maybe she had just learned to be, in the face of Stuart’s musical preoccupations. It helped however if he tempered his choices, factored in her tastes, and Stuart knew Anne loved this album, especially ‘Not Ready Yet’.

Mark Everett, commonly known as E, was an often-troubled soul. Unsurprisingly so once you had read his excellent autobiography ‘Things the Grandchildren Should Know’, a touching retelling of a life scarred by a whole catalogue of personal tragedies. This rollercoaster like nature of E’s life could equally be tracked by the sequencing of Eels albums, sometimes happy occasions, recorded off the back of a new love, only for this to be predictably dashed by the next release’s descent into the blackest of moods. As with many of Stuart’s favoured ‘mavericks’ though, it was E’s uncanny ability to document these depressive periods effectively in song, with a healthy dash of gallows humour, that made the band stand out. They had seen Eels lots of times and their live performances, while always strong, were similarly disposition-driven affairs. Stuart had long ago formed a set opinion on the Eels leader’s contrary nature, “it might be schadenfreude, but I just prefer it when he’s miserable.”

‘Manchild’ brought ‘Beautiful Freak’ to a conclusion. Another ditty of despair, based around the singer’s admission of dying inside, albeit one tempered right at the end by E’s hopeful (yet never wholly convincing) claim that he was finally over it.  

Stuart replaced the Eels album with The Strokes’ ‘Is This It’. Cognisant this moved them closer to Anne’s margins of acceptability, he sought to distract her by postulating, “these must be two of the finest first albums ever made,” and challenged her to name her own favourite debut. By the time Julian started casting his aspersions on the intelligence of ‘New York City Cops’ the outskirts of Wheeling were coming into sight, and Anne, after admirable consideration, had come up with a great answer. Kate Bush’s ‘The Kick Inside’. Her own genuine love of music, as well as her tolerance of his (accepting it with only the gentlest mockery of his obsessions) were just a couple of the many things Stuart loved about his wife, not all of them quite so selfish.

Stuart had used Anne’s period of quiet ‘best debut album’ contemplation to construct his own ‘top five’ list. Knowing better than to share all the detail though (keeping his inner workings to himself) he settled outwardly for an inadequate summary, simply advising Anne that his outright winner, “just has to be ‘Unknown Pleasures’.” 

5) ‘Beautiful Freak’ by Eels – While E had now written many albums worth of wonderful outsider driven songs, he had never bettered the true shock value of ‘Novocaine for the Soul’ and ‘Susan’s House’.

4) ‘77’ by Talking Heads – bought on the strength of the beguilingly disturbing ‘Psycho Killer’, only to find, unbelievably, that the rest of the album betrayed an even more disturbed mind.

3) ‘Funeral’ by The Arcade Fire – Stuart had made some really bad impulse buys after reading promising NME reviews, but had never regretted the unheard purchase of this weird, folksy masterpiece.

2) ‘The Scream’ by Siouxsie and the Banshees – the first great punk album, an opinion he had formed way back (listening under the bed covers on his Pye transistor) as John Peel played the record in full, twice, on its release date.

1) ‘Unknown Pleasures’ by Joy Division – tempting as it was to place something less obvious at number one, this simply remained the most aurally alarming debut album Stuart had ever heard, or ever expected to.

Lots of near misses here Stuart thought. Gang of Four, Television, The Smiths, and Portishead all deserved honourable mentions, but unluckiest of all to miss out had to be those Strokes. As they had just heard, ‘Is This It’ was surely the most effortlessly cool (New York or otherwise) album of all time, yet he still couldn’t squeeze it into his top five.

Their Wheeling trip proved successful all-round. The size of Stuart’s lunchtime Reuben sandwich (in a classic Diner, all red plastic and chrome) meant he wouldn’t need to eat for another week. Its portion size inflicted such a wide margin of defeat over Anne’s lone veggie option that it might just have inspired Joe’s team, who themselves ran out comfortable 4-0 winners over Wheeling Jesuit, keeping them on track for post-season qualification. Another clean sheet as well, a statistic which mattered even more if you had travelled almost four thousand miles to watch one of the defenders.

With West Virginia’s ‘Country Roads’ now taking them home, their return journey conversation, with a mix of happiness and pride, centred on how well Joe was doing. Thriving and maturing in his new environment. His gift for football, or soccer as they were compelled to call it here, had never quite delivered a professional career. He had never had that all-encompassing, almost ruthless, self-belief many of his peers seemed to enjoy, but the opportunity to use football another way, to get a great, debt free degree was proving a fantastic compensatory return on his talent. Flourishing academically in a US system that suited him, Joe was becoming more rounded from the experience. US college soccer teams are packed with players from a multitude of different countries and cultures, and you could see Joe’s outlook visibly broadening.

This spontaneous outbreak of parental joy also proved useful to Stuart in deferring another topic, the potential elephant in their hire car. While it might remain undiscussed for now, the next ‘Challenge’, with an extra layer of transatlantic difficulty added, was fast approaching. Stuart continued to postpone the subject for now though by talking to Anne, maybe for the first time, about how he had felt himself when leaving home for university, almost four decades ago. “We seem,” he suggested, “to have shrunk the world since then.”

Cambridge to Sheffield may only have been a journey of a little over a hundred miles, but for an unworldly ‘hick from the sticks’, at the dawn of the ‘80s, Stuart admitted, it had been an utterly dislocating experience, and had taken him far longer to settle than it had Joe. Their son’s journey of discovery might, measured in atlas terms, have been thirty-five times further than his own, but via some strange twist of time and technology, which Stuart suggested, “would make a great sci-fi plot,” it somehow seemed much shorter.

“No pain no gain though,” Stuart concluded. Those initial doubts had soon dissipated, and he thoroughly enjoyed his three years in Sheffield, a city he still loved to this day. He had secured a good degree and then stumbled, even at the height of the ‘80s recession, into a successful career. In Sheffield he had watched more bands (and drunk more beers) than he had ever imagined possible, and made lifelong friendships.

“Here’s hoping Joe does the same,” Anne replied, “he seems well on the way.”

Back in Yellow Springs, back in Ye Old Trail, with a tasty pint of Green Flash IPA and a healthy portion of bier cheese and pretzels (the Reuben now forgotten), their discussion finally, inevitably, moved on the day’s other key event.

“I wouldn’t have too many of those. Long night in front of you,” Anne teased, knowing she was on fertile irritation soil. She had been the one who had quickly burst Stuart’s PALATINE balloon last month. He had been flying high from his first-time success until Anne brought him back down to earth with, “you have realised, haven’t you,” which she knew he hadn’t, “we’ll be away this time next month.”

Stuart had reacted by playing his usual ‘Ace of Optimism’ card, dealt as ever from the loaded deck of positivity he had inherited from his father. This was a well-rehearsed tactic, one he routinely used for disarming pessimists and pragmatists alike. “It won’t matter,” he had countered, “we’ll be taking your laptop.”

He had expected this card to win the hand, only to find it unexpectedly trumped by Anne, playing her own ‘Queen of Realism’, “you’re missing my point, they’re five hours behind us. It’ll be 5am. Don’t imagine I’ll be helping!” Her new-found ‘Challenge’ enthusiasm clearly wouldn’t be stretching as far as missing a good night’s sleep.

All of which explained why, having snatched just four hours of shuteye, Stuart was now sitting in their hotel reception area at 4.30am, with only Anne’s Apple for accompaniment. Before sitting down, he had weighed up the pros and cons of giving the perplexed looking night porter an explanation for his nocturnal presence, but had concluded that any attempt at honesty was only likely to make him sound even weirder than (from the looks he was getting) the guy already thought he was.

Anne’s time-lag bombshell had left Stuart in a world of confusion for a day or two. At first, it had been compounded even further by an extra layer of complexity, one even she hadn’t predicted, as Stuart realised the UK clocks would be changing on 29th October, causing a six-hour time difference with Ohio. Luckily, he was soon advised by Joe that Eastern Time (whatever that was!) would also be ending their own daylight saving a week later, on Bonfire Night. With this additional panic avoided, Stuart was back to just the five-hour time difference. Looking at the clock behind reception, there was still half an hour of this left to go.

Checking his emails, managing them down to his self-stipulated single page, and reading the BBC’s match report on last night’s World Cup Qualifier (Switzerland having beaten Northern Ireland) still only eat up another twenty minutes. Out of boredom Stuart tried a speculative early logon to the ‘Challenge 69’ site at 4.50am. Expecting no joy, he was staggered to find a new message, the next ‘Challenge’, staring straight back at him:

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(To be continued, at 10am tomorrow. Can you solve ‘Challenge 12’ in the meantime? If you think you have got the answer, then please reply direct to this email post, to help keep the ‘challenge’ open for other readers.)