A penny for your thoughts, Vince, Teesdale Mercury

A penny for your thoughts, Vince

Nov 13, 2007

VINCE Denture, Cockfield's only living poet-philosopher walks a lonely road. Not for him the well-trodden byways of Greece, Greenwich Village or Vienna; no, Vince strides out over refuse tip, past pigeon loft and bus shelter, on into a setting sun of splendour, beauty, romance and understanding, eating a bag of chips.

 I hadn't heard from Vince for a while, so popped up to see him. I was surprised to find that he has made improvements to his council house. 

I was not, of course, rude enough to ask whether the council (or rather the arms-length publicly accountable housing association) was aware of the changes that he had wrought, but somehow, I doubt that Vince has bothered to tell them.

The back garden still bears the scars of the lines of trenches Vince dug when he was going through his war poet stage, but in time, Nature will heal them. 

 When last I saw him, Vince was being heavily influenced by Tennyson and the later Victorian romantics, so wore a green velvet cloak and sported a long, elegant beard.  At that stage he had turned the back bedroom into a small scale reconstruction of St Pancras Station as an example of all that was best about Victorian Britain; this was a development I wholeheartedly supported. 

 Imagine my surprise, then, to discover that everything had changed. 

The front of the house is now covered with corrugated iron sheets.

The garden has bushes with strange, five-sectioned leaves which Vince uses for ‘medicinal' purposes. Loud, repetitive music booms from the open window. 

His complexion, however, shows the greatest change of all.

He is, let us say, heavily suntanned and his hair hangs in mighty dreadlocks, held in check by a crocheted woollen cap. 

Apparently there had been a few difficulties when he had first chosen to permanently wear dark sunglasses, leading to a particularly embarrassing incident in which he found himself by chance in the Methodist ladies' coffee morning.

Vince informed me that he is no longer Vince, having changed his name to Raydone Ghettoman and claims to have been born in Kingston, Jamaica, to a Rastafarian family. 

I did not inquire as to how he had ended up in Cockfield or how his elderly mother in the miners' cottages felt about this.  

I decided instead to ask how his creative life was proceeding. 

"Me talk da gangsta rap," he replied, "and me give tanks to da Lion of Judah dat me am now poet in residence for da council at Teesdale."

I asked what poetry this residency had generated, given that its terms of reference were to record and celebrate everyday life in the dale. 

"Me only writ one so far, man and dis am it."  Vince/Raydone then proceeded to intone his latest opus at high speed in true rapping style, shaping his fingers into a gun and walking round the room in a curious hunched way.

 "If ya gotta a little ear me wanna bend it,

Me gotta penny in me pocket, wanna spend it.

Me cannot find a loo, me wanna dash it,

Da council shut da place an den day trash it.

Me gangsta man him wanna tell da council

Open up da bog or else da boyz will.

Me want to know de truth so come and tell it,

If da people want a loo why go an sell it?'

Vince/Raydone then bade me a polite farewell, regretting that he had to prepare jerk chicken for ‘when him woman come.'

As I made my way back through downtown Cockfield I pondered on how rarely true genius brushes past our lives. 

Waiting at the bus stop I realised that today had been such a day.

First published in the Teesdale Mercury, November 7, 2007