Read out at his funeral, 16/02/26
by
The first time I saw Joe Fenlon was in the old Labour Club, somewhere around 1984-85. We used to put gigs on down there and Joe was one of the early supporters. He was very striking to look at, dead skinny, with long hair and stripy jeans. He must have had a source for those jeans as Kate, his sister, who I’ve only just met, tells me there’s still a pair amongst his possessions. It can’t be the same pair, surely, not after 40 years?
I didn’t know him all that well in those early years. He was just one of the Whitstable crowd, a character, a Whitstable freak. He wasn’t the only one.
Later we became very good friends. This was in the mid-90s, when they were building the new by-pass. I remember a conversation in the Neppie. We were talking about the road and I offered my help in organising a protest.
He dismissed it with an airy flick of the wrist. “It’s OK. I’ll meditate in the field and create a psychic barrier,” he said.
In the end we did set up a protest. It was me, Joe Fenlon and Paul Fryday. We met in the East Kent, when Max Denning was the landlord. It was in a little back room behind the bar. We went by a variety of names, including The Flat Oak Society. This was after an oak tree that Joe used to climb when he was a kid which was under threat from the road. He described it as – and I’m quoting him exactly now: I wrote it down at the time – “the reservoir of memory in the landscape, the anchor knot in a pattern, the focus around which the landscape weaves.”
That’s how Joe talked. It was one of the reasons I took to him. He just said the most extraordinary things. He was a student of weird literature. He’d read Madam Blavatsky and GI Gurdjieff: all that occult stuff. Alfred Watkins. Katherine Maltwood. That’s how he got into geomancy: looking for ley-lines and figures in the landscape.
Anyone who knew him would recognise this as the stuff he liked to talk about: the Whitstable ley-line, the Kent Zodiac. But the grandest and craziest thing of all was Gog-Magog, the Humanoid Landscape, after which one of his books is named.
I remember the first time I heard about it. He was living in a shed in a garden in Foxgrove Road. This must have been in the early 2000s. I went to visit him. He was out in the garden, leaping about in his bare feet, saying, “it’s really there, it’s really there.” He was radiating this extraordinary intensity, as if he’d just discovered the Holy Grail. He was painting a picture. The picture showed a giant baby inscribed upon a map of the British Isles. East Anglia was the head. The Chiltern hills represented the spine. The face was in Essex, the legs in Kent and Sussex. London was its belly.
He spent years working on this. He said he was like a mad professor, holed up in his shed, with his maps and his Anglo-Saxon dictionary, making magnificent leaps of the imagination to come up with this fantastical figure of his. The book that came out of it is a wonderfully colloquial compendium of strange conceits, some of which almost make sense.
That’s not to put him down. He was very clever, was Joe, but he was completely self-taught, constantly going off at tangents. He lived on the edge, in more ways than one. He was often homeless. That shed was one of his more salubrious places to live. He was in a tent on Sea Street for a while. He had mains hook up and a computer. He was writing yet another book. He was offered hostel accommodation in another part of the country, but he refused to go. He was a Whitstable native, and no one was going to make him leave.
So that’s how I will remember Joe Fenlon, my friend. Wilful. Stubborn. Funny. Wild. A glorious non-conformist, endlessly fascinating to spend time with. Whitstable’s shaman. We will never see his like again.
About CJ Stone
CJ Stone is an author, columnist and feature writer. He has written seven books, and columns and articles for many newspapers and magazines.
Read more of CJ Stone’s work here, here and here.
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