Coals

Picking up pieces of coal 

And dropping them into my pocket

Wiping my hands down on my shirt yeah

Lost another piece of my soul

I have no problem you see

With a wealth of 900 thousand

More than one man should be proud of

Pick up another little piece of coal

Riches under rags

Rich dark veins I hide

Witness the public throwing stones at my dead muscle, skin and bones

In a coffin on a hearse in southgate street

I got beaten for pulling up roots

They didn’t know I was the master

Said I looked like a vagrant disaster

Not the owner of a turnip plot

What became of my gold?

Was I the inspiration

For a seasonal Dickens creation

And a philpot with my profile bold?

How will my story be told?

A miser mean and cold

At the roadside looking for dirty little pieces of coal

This is the only song that I wrote alone, finished at 4am in the morning after a couple of weeks battle with it. It has the feel of Aimee Mann or Neil Young and I’m more than pleased about that.

It’s about Jemmy Wood, the miser of Gloucester, a character who’s life spanned across the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. Apparently he was the inspiration for Charles Dickens’ Ebeneezer Scrooge and was infamous for being the richest commoner in the Land. There are lots of tales about him and the one that captured my imagination was the notion that this wealthy banker would visit the docks to save money by picking up coals from the roadside dropped by the coal merchant’s carts. There are other threads of urban myth including being beaten up by a labourer for taking turnips from a field he was the landlord of, which I’ve included in the song.

I get that surreal feeling again when I stand outside McDonalds on Westgate Street because that was where the building that his haberdashery and bank occupied once stood. It seems appropriate that a corporate entity of McDonalds’ ilk occupies that spot now.