RANDOM ECHOES - ITALY 31/10/05

Out into some nebulous place, literally and suddenly shrouded in fog – La Pineta and beyond – a forgotten zone again, haven’t really experienced one in the whole time I’ve been in Italy – the place was a recycling plant on the edge of a small town, edged with low-rise industrial buildings that had each seen better days – the sun a pale white disc through the fog, visible but without any power – a small wooden hut at the entrance from which a young woman dressed in a poorly fitting black uniform and piped with red and gold appeared, she spoke permanently into a mobile phone to someone (Her boyfriend? Her Mother? God perhaps?) and just signaled to us with her hands indicating what we should do and where we should go – from out of the mist lines of old refrigerators and cookers all deposited and left along the border between the site and the wasteland beyond; huge blue waste deposit skips; pieces of wrought iron – then scavenging men appear from between the skips, their faces deep lined, ages unclear, they haul and heave at certain things like king sized mattresses and other bits of household material – the woman in the official hut ignores them and keeps talking into her phone as if that conversation id keeping her in touch with the rest of the world and once it is over she herself will become a permanent part of this place, unable to return, the fog closing in around her and shrouding any way out, parts of her scavenged by the crow like men, or else holed up in her hut waiting for the end.

RANDOM ECHOES - ITALY 30/10/05

Festival of the Thrush (La festa della Torno).

Hunters in the hills – shotgun reports echo regularly even before dawn. Pop pop.

At a point of no return effectively as health breaks down in the hills, and all sense of place is lost for a day. As if this daily fog here had passed into me and I had woken with it and thereby it keeps me at bay from the rest of the world, shrouded from family, from my lover, even from the subtly beautiful town of Pienze which we visit for lunch. Bizarre, to be walking and talking but silently keeping in check the nausea and the dizziness, and the overwhelming sump of tiredness. Unable even to take in the views across the Tuscan landscape, though I know I took a couple of photos; or the fact that at one point we stand in the center of a beautiful duomo looking up at the bright portico seventy feet over our heads. In the car, I am unable even to move for fear I will vomit; it takes all my will just to hold it back until we arrive at our small cottage and Pol sets me up a bed in the garden to be warmed by the descending sun. I sleep for over ten hours and wake as if it were a different person it had all happened to. But am left with an ugly residue of the day.

Autumn shows itself directly in the withering vines outside the cottage. Particularly in the late afternoon sunlight, which has a tendency to readily become hazy and dreamlike at this time of year, forming patches of mist yet never obscuring things entirely. So the vines, with their bunches of white grapes once thick and strong and hanging heavy now turning purple brown and gorged on by fruit flies and wasps, loose themselves and reflect sadly there in their rows some sense of forgotten glory. At the end of one row a white plastic bowl has been left, the vestige of human presence probably from a few weeks back when the idea would have been to harvest the grapes and take them either for eating or primarily for making into wine. Not this year. I look on that view and its passing is sad, brings a sense of finality to me, of inevitability that cannot be fought (perhaps it is simply a reflection that our time here in Italy is coming to a close). Yet, in there is beauty too. The colours are still vivid even in their death throes – the light coming through a paler leaf, the almost icing of must on the skins of fruit that haven’t yet turned. Caravaggio knew these things and ran with them every time he painted a still life. He wasn’t interested in the plentiful, bountiful world the church wanted him to represent; he had to show that the deity could equally present a rotting world at times as much as anything else and there came earthly beauty if you dared to look long and hard enough, and challenge the single world view of his time.

RANDOM ECHOES - ITALY 29/10/05

Walking through Citta della Pieve, Sunday afternoon - timeless - of grand Italian villas built in colonial style now run down - like ‘The Leopard’ - once bustling with life and fortune and now cobwebbed and overgrown, waiting for rennovation – imagining the lady of the house greeting her friends and visitors from the pillared entrance as they arrive up the tree-lined drive toward the pale blue and white house – the light came reflective from the west, diffuse in the late autumn haze, acute through the golden brown leaves – for a moment it all turned into the set of a movie, some poetic sensed European arthouse flick with reminiscent symbols of endings (which of course are coming close) or change – dreaming of another time, yet also highly present in this one – spiders webs hanging from street signs of roads called ‘via G. Gallilei’ or ‘via Giordano Bruno’ and caught in the fading sunlight – strange that now they celebrate and remember men they once branded heretics and burned or imprisoned - of countless citizens of all ages sitting together on benches and talking, sometimes emphatically and profusely, or else watching local football matches played by school kids from open terraces – in anticipation of tomorrow’s festa, like xmas eve or something similar, full of potential, enjoyment, of eating, and of marking the year change (clocks going back tonight, harvests ended) – waiting for sleep and nursing hangovers, dancing underneath the twisting vines and wisteria heavy with seed pods like butter beans.

RANDOM ECHOES - ITALY 27/10/05

Up on the estate a man is duped by the previous tenant of an old farmhouse into believing that a stone artifact in the shape of a Doric pillar head and now cemented into a recess on the front wall, is a genuine Etruscan relic. Of course it isn’t. The previous tenant was a clever fraudster who was good with his hands and this feature added and additional £10k to the asking price.

24 HOURS TO GO
Last night I slept better thanks to brandy
A small confrontation in the day
Broken backed
Coffee on the stove bubbled through
The tart smell of applewood in the grate
Papa in carpal tunnel bandage sat with arm raised
Paint-stained clothes stank of ammonia
A man didn’t know the meaning of siblings
Twenty-four hours of duty left
Voices of conscience barked at night
My prize: a bundle of kindling heavier than a head.

The loudest noises at night come from the trains in the gully below, about half a mile away. You hear them a long way off at first, their hectic whisper contained and pushed ahead by the hills on either side of the tracks. Then they charge through close by, some of tremendous trans-European length, with their oddly UFO-like sets of three-pointed headlights, two below one above floating in the dark and taking the curves at high speed.

RANDOM ECHOES - ITALY 26/10/05

Fog again this morning; dense and with that permanent sense of being enclosed in one’s immediate space - the white noise of nothing, a blank canvas.

Each vine thick with
Rotten moments
Dribble tearful
Attacked
Tries to retain dignity
To hold form
But each quick lap, lick
Or suckerful
Ages and denies them
Quintessence and they are
Sweet offal for hornets
Prophesying dangerous,
Open-sored and split words
That ooze readily
When trying to be honest

What moves in the spaces
Between: the interstices,
The integers?
Their balance and tenure?
A finch with mottled beak
Singing drunk;
Some ungodly things
Dancing, making hellish
Business for the fool
And the beautiful courtesan
Jolly even in face
Of trouble

RANDOM ECHOES - ITALY 25/10/05

Our painting job is turning into a sentence of hard labour. We are into the fifth day and are still in the same room as when we started (with another room yet to be started on). The heat and porous stucco suck at the paint, drying it rapidly and slowing progress. The views from the house are extraordinary, particularly the sunsets which are incredibly moving (reminiscent of Leonardo’s background landscapes – gold tipped clouds, the awesome fading perspective of rolling hills and hilltop towns and villages revealed, the sinking mist creating islands within and giving different aspects each evening) – but at present these feel like a distant bonus that we can only appreciate for ten minutes before the sun disappears at the end of the day, when our back breaking work has been done. The patron pays us a pittance, a laughable amount of money. We are disappointed and angry and we await a confrontation when we finish and make clear the work we have done.

TRACK OF THE WEEK

Diamond In Your Mind – by Solomon Burke (original by Tom Waits) from the album ‘Don’t Give Up On Me’ – under strain this is a good reminder to keep your perspective

RANDOM ECHOES - ITALY 24/10/05

Thick fog as the shutters are opened, spectral forms outside of thinning vines, garden artifacts, bunches of apple twigs; self contained feeling, nothingness beyond the tree line becoming a motif.

The whole family has to be involved in the making of polenta. Primarily because the mixture has to be stirred by hand constantly for 45 minutes on a hot stove so each person takes it in turn to do so for a five minute stint each. And it gets tougher as the process goes along because the mixture thickens to a large, heavy, golden mass.

Up at the Loggia, Virgil learns of Jesus visiting a dying mother, of family members waiting and waited for, of a long dead husband seen at the foot of a bed, of revelations about strippers and videos and local porn rings, of much laughter and hilarity and riches made.

RANDOM ECHOES - ITALY 23/10/05

Some unseen, secretive bastard steals £300 from me by electronic means back in the UK. I find out a week later. The police need a report on my return.

Padre Cecco, 74, short sighted, thick glasses and prune-skin face, walking through Citta on Sunday afternoon composing sermons, pondering a mystery: “Why is it, no, how is it, no, is it possible that the distance between those fallen autumn leaves on the paving stones in Piazza Perugino (as they fall there every year) could be markers of time? Metaphysical as much as corporeal? Not the leaves themselves but the spaces between? The leaves are way posts, yes perhaps spiritual ones, beautiful honey brown each, some stuck flat to the concrete others curled and dry, more prone to fly away, and between these life passes. The reflection of many Sunday afternoons and of the proceedings of a life between each. The young families with their children in pushchairs, wrapped up against the start of winter; the four soccer players with their strange haircuts; the group of tourists parading slowly through the main street and the market; that bunch of local people whose faces I recognize, each of them, strolling after mass this morning having their photo taken with that man in the woolen hat who looks very familiar to me yet is not one of my usual congregation. There is quite a stir going on now.” Padre Cecco stops and looks amazed at the face of the man he now knows is an actor from a famous television series. A police drama series. Cecco’s favourite. Cecco is excited. Cecco joins the hubbub around the actor and his small entourage signing autographs, having photo’s taken with wives and siblings. Cecco forgets pondering mysteries and shakes the hand of the actor with the bulbous nose, a man whose face he knows in every detail, a companion almost there every other night in his living room with him: solid, honest, intelligent, heroic. A character to admire and aspire to. Cecco is overwhelmed with gratitude. But the stranger who is not a stranger cannot answer the praise with any sense of reality or equality, for Cecco is simply one among many.

Items on the market, Citta della Pieve:
- china plate with image of an old steam train arriving at a station, replicated in embossed blue pattern
- 2 German army helmets from WWII
- an Italian tank soldier’s helmet from WWII
- a bronze angel statue with huge unfurled wings, ready to fly
- a selection of humourous postcards from approx 1930s, beautifully drawn and coloured
- so many poorly painted images of Christ performing different miracles, seemingly always beneath a sky so dark blue as to be representing a world in permanent night
- a thick metal bracelet of unknown origin (it is claimed) made to look classical/pagan, but not original for sure

RANDOM ECHOES - ITALY 20/10/05

Heavy rain storms overnight, sounding off on the tile roof. Here in the small single storey house it is possible that we might get washed away, afloat like a boat.

Waking and the clouds are thick but broken over Monte Amiato – they move fast and acute, almost falling over each other, chasing tomorrow.

Up on ladders and scaffolds, fingers covered white with fresh stucco – a prepared board with tools and paints, brushes and rags. Outside the arched windows a view across to Chiusi and Montepulciano that changes from hour to hour with differing light and weather conditions. Sometimes the hills and towns are closer but less defined; at others they are crystal clear, almost seemingly within reach. The artist is aching between his shoulder blades from bending his head and neck hours at a stretch to complete the commission, face and hair covered with fine dust, gesso, drops of pale paint in his beard. While the view beyond now turns silver, lit from within, where he would rather be sat on his bony arse with his paints and a tin-nibbed pen in the lee of a cypress tree.

CHARACTER

In the Loggia Virgil learnt of the paralyzed son’s trade as an arms dealer selling for British Aerospace and other similar companies. A tetraplegic promoting missiles, guidance systems, smart bombs etc. He made himself very wealthy; bought himself time. He is now selling his paintings (at first just a hobby) through a small gallery in Bonn. At the opening night of the exhibition there, his 'other' profession is kept quiet (as it is at all social functions, large or small) and is referred to simply as ‘engineer’. Virgil feels sick. He is also told that the son will not eat meat unless he knows from where it has been sourced and if it has been humanely treated and slaughtered. So Virgil takes the website address of the gallery where some of the paintings can be viewed. There is a pair of views of the Loggia itself painted from different angles and under opposing weather conditions; there is also a painting of a Holocaust memorial in Budapest containing thousands of shoes of Jews and gypsies killed. Virgil wants to speak to this man and ask him questions, ask him whether he feels he is paying back some regret through these ironies and hypocrisies?

RANDOM ECHOES - ITALY 19/10/05

A fire needs sense, a plan, pattern to ensure it takes - particularly in a small stove such as the one here in the small rural cottage. First, fine apple twigs and small branches that have fallen over the summer and dried in the intense afternoon heat (with the added beneficial addition of the subtle sweet aroma they give off too); followed by some larger hunks of wide, fibrous bark. Finally, when these two have taken without interruption, add the short, thick cut logs.

On the train to Orvieto her face was reflected in the trees and on the vines – a minor miracle.

Orvieto cathedral – nun sits on a small stool alone in a chapel, silent prayers, before a piece of cloth with supposedly some stains from the blood of Christ on it – there’s a theme developing here, see the church in Lago Maggiore. This relic is stretched and framed for all to see, placed high up on an altar. I start to wonder about all these blood stained relics and wonder if there wasn’t some medieval production line somewhere. I mean how come all these sanguine parts of Christ ended up in Italy? Someone somewhere was making a mint out of original religious marketing.

RANDOM ECHOES - ITALY 18/10/05

Cutting rotting grapes from the vine, late at night once the hornets have cooled down and disappeared (and I mean hornets the size of your thumb so yes they scare and sting – 7 times and your dead!) – thick and sultry dark grapes oozing with smelly juice; cutting them so they drop into a bucket with a satisfying splash and plop in there with the rest. Then knocking down the loose dry leaves turned brown and falling in the slightest breeze.

TRACK OF THE WEEK

Allowing 2 this week to mark the culture shift to travelling:
- Personal Jesus by Johnny Cash – from the album ‘America IV’
- Eternity Theme by Eleni Karaindrou - from the soundtrack album to the film ‘Eternity And A Day’

RANDOM ECHOES - ITALY 16/10/05

Cousins changed beyond recognition after 15 years or so. One now a fat middle-aged man with a thick untrimmed moustache - looks like a character from an Edwardian parlour piece. Dressed in shambolic white suit, standing in the background of wedding photographs looking on at the brother who no longer speaks to him because he has never repaid money he borrowed.

Driving back from Lago Maggiore to Umbria, five hours on the A1 central motorway through Italy – passing: walled cemeteries; Milan industry and chrome flyovers; silhouetted trees Sunday afternoon with three farmhands still out there working hard at harvesting; roadside kiosks selling fruit and water, dark women standing there on the central reservation; lone prostitute out toward the slip roads in Rho; through Piedmont into Emiglia Romana into Tuscany into Umbria; through Florence pointing out Brunelleschi’s dome from afar; truckloads of pigs squeezed in around Mantua; cavalry horses transported all day long; nightingale piano outside Bologna; Johnny Cash & Bobby D all the way.

LAGO MAGGIORE - sketch

Of wry peasant stories and induced dreams
Of historical meetings between powerful leaders
Of a boy lost one night 1944 mistaken for a spy
being shot at as he crossed the bridge home
Of tripe and spaghetti mixed for supper before Il Duce
left alone to eat and dream up more crazy schemes
Of near misses with the Borromeo’s
Of near death experiences beneath the shallow waves at Cannero
Of one lung and a thousand stair climb
Of Amperes monolith pumping energy into Piedmont
playing electric atoms off against each alp
Of clichés and stereotypes broken by the season’s changes
and the necessity to go with them
Of sleep deprivation in a quiet lakeside room
Of metal played on metal as a source of spiritual harmony
Of sleep now it is silent
Of naked freedom
Of a camp bed
Of humour and comedy above all else
Of canopied fishing kayaks competing to be the brighter
Of strange silhouettes in the center of the lake that carry on playing
Of keeping your nose clean and your eyes peeled
Of distribution of logs on an autumn night, each correct place
Of meaningless words and translations in a thousand languages
Of folktales replayed
Of each ridge of Monte Rosso down to the waterline
Of words that will become mainstays, prayers,
passwords, codes for new form
Of hugging Arabs close to the war memorial turning their backs
on strict devotion, overwhelmed by nature’s mirror they gaze on
Of streets named after writers, artists, politicians, and nobodies
Of heroes and villains in one shell
Of oily fish and turpentine
Of cleaning the late afternoon with potato skins
Of these unrelated things in the eye of the clock
Of silver omens in the day, of wooden ones at night
Of the argument of the retreating communist
Of the spine turned outward
Of borders close at hand
Of one hundred mallards flying west
Of pretend towns on the other side that only come out at night
Of partners in crime, love and adventure
Of the thousand yard stare
Of two books with no covers
Of a crooked hand
Of brandy and Bacchus imitators
Of palaces built and lost to the previous century
Of electronic alarms and half-brothers with wiry grey beards
Of rainstorm palms
Of egg albumen and of cormorant castles
Of doorways into nothingness
Of the edge of things: jetties seeking for some place
Of blood dried on cloth and scientist priests
whose propaganda seduced all
Of orchid churches
Of pale open walls like the flesh of men and women
Of pirate heads and coconuts and Popeye paintings
Of forgotten striped sun beds
locked away in rows at the close of season
Of idle drawbridges and dinghies upside down
and of the lone rower making the length mid-water

RANDOM ECHOES - ITALY 14/10/05

Autumn chill - still the city maintains warmth of place and unexpected serenity – even that despite the thrash metal fan on the overcrowded train to Verbania (one hour North of Milan – our destination) who decides to let us suffer with him the throes of adolescent angst and shite taste in music and who looks himself like he is not enjoying it but using it solely for statement.

Milan Central Station – awesome edifice (perhaps built by The Big ‘M’ – not sure, it’s grandiose enough for it to have been) – mythical winged chariots adorn the front, the interior mapped with astrological signs carved over entrances in yellow stone.

Faces of the Milanese are very different to those in Rome or Umbria for example, a wider genetic mix – German, Swiss, French. There are the dark, almost stereotypical Italians but the blonde haired or fairer skinned northerners alongside confound expectation and place. And of course the cooler more fashion conscious Milanese display their peacock character far more than anywhere else I’ve been in Italy – this does mean however they are noticeably less warm-hearted and open, without that sense of natural sensitivity to other’s needs that the more rural Italians have even within an hour’s radius (Piedmont, Lombardy) of Milan itself. The way they greet or assist you is far more aloof, hurried, and judgmental. But the Milanese have always considered themselves to be ‘apart’ from the rest of Italy and this goes right back to the later medieval and renaissance rule of the Dukes of Sforza who campaigned bloodily for their own state.

Pol learning Italian from an out of date tourist phrasebook, seemingly quite useless: “Be careful! I can’t slow down!” – “Would you like to make up a foursome?” – “This is a lovely straw hat.” Smacks a little of some ex-pat novel about life under the Tuscan sun, you know the kind of thing: Aga Saga’s in Italy; hateful, tepid literature.

Stresa – the jewel of the lake, where Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt met one day to sign treaties and carve the future world up.

A parting image -
Butler's Wharf, London

RANDOM ECHOES 13/10/05

Countdown - last day

An empty red room, ten thousand ghosts in there all connected - an arbitrary mark on a wall that dates the entire history of occupancy: a splash of red wine from a house warming party, in a property that never was a home or warm either - the ambience marred by too much struggle and tribulation and now it's just another aspect of history made day to day - I guess if I took the time I could remember everything that went on in there, every twitch of every muscle, every whisper, every oath, every mistake (and man so many), but you know what? I've never felt less sentimental in my life. I'm gone Brixton, gone.

Harold Pinter wins Nobel Prize for Literature which means it is exactly 8 years since I moved in to the flat on Coldharbour Lane that I am moving out (see blog entry dated 27/9/05 to see why).

3 good omens in silver:
- a wyvern on a rooftop in Faringdon EC1
- an elasticated hairband
- a foil cup for a sweet cheesecake

Postcard Princess - sketch

badly shaken, the eldest daughter left:
an empty bed strewn with pine cones

a couple drowned in gold embrace
shrouded with white linen

a Japanese servant with painted face,
peers through window open

the superior cat all in grey
hunts grace beside ornamental pond

in patience that daughter collected
and pinned these on her wall

until her jealous sister leaps to covet
the space she left and burns them

sibling revenge of images traced
now ash bones


Newcastle-under-Lyme, September 2005

People place - Tate Modern, London

RANDOM ECHOES 12/10/05

Countdown - 2 days to go

Taxi dash across London middle of the night - stashed ironing board, guitar, telly and a proud castor oil plant to Bermondsey in the company of a friendly taxi driver high on fasting for Ramadan. He tells me all the different ways to get from Coldharbour Lane to Southwark Park Road in approx 10 minutes (which is nothing short of a miracle in itself) and he talks so fast, semi-deliriously. At the end of the journey he helps unload the car and then repeats the directions again for me twice just in case I ever get lost. Thank you, whatever your name was.

It would seem the questions regarding pantomime dames were provident.

Bring out the Cosmo in you. If you do he'll become deliriously happy, start to shake and then levitate. Believe me I've seen it happen.

2 lovely coincidences on the South Bank:
- meeting creative guru/gent who only 45 minutes before I had been talking about with affection in another part of the city, and whom I had not seen for 18 months
- explaining to a friend in a crowd how and why I love the woman I do and as I do she is standing right behind me having just arrived

TRACK OF THE WEEK

Losing Streak - by Eels, from the album 'Blinking Lights and Other Revelations' - simply a great song from a great album, a song reminding me where I am at right now, hopefully where you are too!

RANDOM ECHOES 11/10/05

Countdown - day 3 (3 to go)

The household items I'm putting out on the street in the process of moving are contributing to the economy of night-time scavengers - that strange breed (not exclusive to London) halfway between tramp and poverty stricken opportunist. I watch two quite different examples last night, around 8pm. Dickensian mist hanging round the street lamps, a broken down bus at a stop further along the road - troops of passengers standing silhouette in the shadows and cursing their bad luck. Then the first scavenger appears, literally out of nowhere (for a moment I wonder if he hasn't just come up through a manhole), an expected example perhaps. He is in his mid-forties and wears baggy, ill fitting and dirty beige tracksuit trousers with a natty black sweatshirt; his bald crown is capped on either side by thin springy curls, almost blond. He watches the street avidly, seeming afraid of being spotted or else embarrassed. And he mutters inaudibly. First he toes a couple of cardboard boxes outside the taxi booth and the tiny jerk chicken shop, but there is nothing that interests him there. Passing me, he eyes my rucksack then opens a polystyrene burger carton with nothing more than a few scrapes of ketchup inside. After that he heads for the next mound of refuse left outside the flats for next day's collection. He picks up a stack of VHS video tapes, some with the tape hanging loose; he picks through them reading the labels then puts them back and they collapse, strewn across the pavement. Muttering wildly again he retreats and heads back on himself having found nothing of any worth to him. A Nigerian woman dressed pretty smartly, parks up in her VW Golf (second hand?) and wanders quickly over to the same pile of things and pulls out a microwave oven, it's cord hanging loose and with the plug removed. She holds it at arms length as if it might snap at her or be full of some unidentifiable matter, she sniffs at it, she opens and closes the door, looks inside and then bundles it off into the boot of the car and away she goes. It's a recycled economy to a degree, somewhat seedy and grim, but it appears to reduce waste. I find it both gratifying and sad at the same time.

Down by the river I spotted some people walking all over the world - they were surprisingly respectful, even took their shoes and socks off.

The Dixie Queen left her moorings at 6.50pm. A crowd gathered to watch her depart. The little boys watching with their parents, they asked what it was doing as it stopped midstream and performed an elegant smooth 360 degree turn, blowing its call and heading downriver toward Canary Wharf. It was a fine performance. However, the steamer looked precarious and fragile as it entered the shipping channel and moved away. I expected to hear bad news the next day. Fortunately, it did not come and this morning Dixie Queen was back, tethered to the mooring barge, rocking gently.

In recent days Virgil didn't want to listen to his portable digital jukebox as usual when walking around the city. He wanted final access to its sounds, to let them leave an imprint on his nervous system before he departed. A walking audio blotter soaking each nuance up, letting it reflect inside. All the things he'd despised now became fragile and dear through impermanence: the constant traffic decibel attack, the tap tap of bicycle pedals pulling up behind him on the pavement, the ricochet of a ship's horn bouncing off Tower Bridge and Butler's Wharf, the babble of thousands of mobile phone conversations taking place on the hoof. The stream. The oaths and curses of the mad people and the sane (?) ones. The winding of cranes. The lull of a faucet running. The bullying cormorant calling. The bubble of the coffee pot at 7.35am.

East Coast Epitaph

You came this way on a 125 - bleached hair, shades
With your sexy graceful afternoon shivers
Then dressing again your feline hand
Soft poured from leather sleeves
Dropped motorbike stars on the carpet
Before you carried yourself away
On that bright machine

I went out, threw candyfloss from the West pier
Saccharine meteors to turn the tide red
God knows this town at the edge of the world
Could do with a little colour
Its name’s no longer pronounceable
On road signs the first letter eats the last
Like a giant Pac-man


Deal, Kent 2003 - 2005

RANDOM ECHOES 10/10/05

Countdown - day 4 (four days to go)

12 hours solid driving on the road, coincidentally commemorating the publication of Ginsberg's Howl somewhere near Aylesbury (on the radio an article states that perhaps a new Beat Generation is called for in the current world climate, an artistic renaissance of dissent, but I believe it will never be allowed to happen because artists are no longer encouraged to define themselves as outsiders, as observers and commentators, challenging the status quo, instead they are accumulated and assimilated through offers of celebrity, made safer that way) - being chased by demon adminstrators and puckering landlords - ascending the Wolds into the low cloud moisture and fog, screaming rain all the way back into London only to turn around and repeat it all again the next day - though the autumn sun accompanies us this time, a car full of plants and shrubs and CDs and shoes and boots - and presents for neices who shine with beauty and joy and lighten the travelling load for an hour or two - then descending Fish Hill with the Vale of Evesham lying out there beyond, vast - after the car has reached her destination and is left there now until we return, the typically English phenomena of works on the railway line puts us out onto a bus route in the middle of the Black Country for Sunday evening, past Longbridge ghost factory, past Bourneville and Cadbury World, in the shadow of strange chrome pyramids which may or may not be connecting the Illuminati so they can keep an eye; scoffing tomatoes and sucking limes to cleanse the pallate, on the back seat - unemployed ghouls and bike riding joy riders standing around in car parks and street corners - my eyes fill up with groggy sleep and now permanently red-rimmed, I get dizzy spells and that odd floating feeling on terra firma when my balance system kids itself its still in the car driving, carrying that motion on - at one point I am told I've turned grey, blending in with the facia of the bus - singing songs from 'Oh What A Lovely War' and discussing pantomime dames - what works and what doesn't when a man gets up in drag?

Forgotten Zone -
Southwark, London

RANDOM ECHOES 7/10/05

Countdown - day 7 (1 week to go)

Never get into a lift with a certain P.B. He has been stuck in lifts 6 times in the last 3 months. It is his curse. He gives off an electro-static charge every so often, due in part to his heavy smokers breath after any form of exercise (even just walking from the smokers den to the lift). His bulk rubs against his clothing causing friction and static charges, which are in turn carried around his body by his profuse sweat. This shorts out the elevator's signal when he presses the button for his destination or even stands in the vicinity of the electric wiring behind the panel facia. The elevator starts it ascent or descent but then shorts out almost immediately between floors. Anyway, this is not meant as a personal attack on the man, just a warning to you that's all.

Finally get hold of my replacement debit card, four weeks to the day after I asked for a new one and two weeks beyond it's original expiry date. Erosion has taken place, anger has been ditched as worthless, acceptance of the lack of control one has over some aspects of life has settled into a fine dust somewhere in a corner of a drawer in the filing cabinet the administrators dragged into my soul.

A. came round last eve. He sat on my almost empty bedroom floor and went through the piles of CDs I had weeded out of my collection as part of moving out. He shuffled through each one, making a pile for himself and commenting on the quality of them. He completed his joyful search and recognised he now has enough new music to last him a year. Which can only be a good thing.

I want to say a fond goodbye to an old man I never met but have heard much about recently; wish him well on his way from this life. By all accounts he had a great garden and I intend to give a little bit of it back in honour of his memory.

Never trust your landlord, they'll shaft you then put all the responsibility on you for it, making out they are squeaky clean even though they never provided you with a habitable home in the first place.

Politeness thrown straight out the window of a moving train by a 42 year old raver with a guitar and pretensions to be the new Gallagher brother. Spatial awareness nil. Grace nil. Respect nil. Intellect nil. Weasel eyes and cursing those nearest for even breathing. Rebel with an ulcer.

RANDOM ECHOES 6/10/05

St Agnes Road, Southwark - millenarian chants and protestation written in marker pen on the side of a large white van, and in the doorway of a house talks of 'refusal', 'revelation' and 'retribution'. The new three 'R's?

12 hours in Manchester - starts with an argument on the Viccy Line at 10am and ends with a journey back down the country at 10pm the same day wondering why ticket reservations make strangers of us all.

TRACK OF THE WEEK:

Into My Arms - by Nick Cave, from the album 'The Boatman's Call' - only love (?) can change your heart/mind/soul

RANDOM ECHOES 3/10/05

Waking early, Virgil was aware he had been dreaming - a bloody dream of war, some commando attack on an enemy stronghold of some kind - typical movie look - choreographed cinematographic images in his mind - teams of hard bitten soldiers hiding behind ditch walls and fences, waiting to launch their surprise, but then all hell breaking loose as the team are spotted and tracers start to fly, grenades explode around them - then a jump cut to Virgil alongside another team member stood by a gateway, the gunfight still going on behind them somewhere, waiting for a staff car they have spotted along the road to arrive carrying important personnel - when the car halts waiting for the gate to open Virgil and his compatriot pounce, guns at the ready - the figures within are surprised and stunned to have been caught out this way - Virgil recognises journalists from his own country sitting beside high ranking secret police-style officers, the journalists look sheepish, one even nods 'hello' to Virgil - Virgil is confused about many things: time zones, trust, why he is carrying a weapon at all. As he ponders these things the car drives away snagging his ally with it and dragging him along the ground until it turns a corner and he is released, rolling away. Virgil runs to him and his chest is all abraded and bloody but the man is still alive and moaning. It was this event that directly woke Virgil up. It was still early, not long before dawn, and the first autumn chill was present in the house. Virgil got up and went into the kitchen where he found a corn-on-the-cob had fallen on the floor overnight from the shelf above the cooker. It was odd there in the middle of the room, alien and furry, though also not dissimilar to a hand-grenade.

Smithfield Market, early morning, Monday - large cuts of meat, blood, organs kept in clear plastic bags, the smell of meat, splashes of thin crimson, groups of workers standing round in bloody white overalls - an ambulance arrives wheeling it's way into Grand Avenue and pulls up outside a compartment, the paramedics jump out and start working on a large man who has fallen and cracked his head on the paving, his blood mingling with the cattle blood; he is alive but badly hurt. Nearby, I overhear a young man within a group of onlooking meat packers say: "He's always been a bit sick. Seen the women he goes with?"

Partial solar eclipse today - antumbra (great word) or negative shadow is cast on to the earth's surface; primarily across Africa and most visible over Sudan in this instance.

Conductor blows his whistle fast, October rain is half his song; the readers in the quiet zone are offended when the plastic-armed teens start rioting dirty on the rail; the bridge groans awkward, patience blown skyward; each is trying to get out of a glass cage, the comedown at tired end of day; watching the edits over copper on the way; and just who is your personal trainer anyway, do you get one when you run out of ideas?

Wired man on Coldharbour Lane, a living robot of a man - walking into traffic without looking to protect himself, he just points the direction and goes; dark eyes, dead in there, never look directly at the drivers of the vehicles, he just presumes to have his space and gets there slowly as if challenging the cars to run him down at speed - He walks then straight limbed, stiff, almost economic, inured to any fear, the tight waist-length leather jacket he wears also confines his movements, further adding to the robot similarity. His shaved head built like a dome goliath, thick wedged skull. Something intense and unpredictable about him.

Yesterday's (Sundays) horoscope reads: 'pile all your belongings into a box and move on' - which is precisely what I began doing on Saturday!