ECHO 18/1/06

The stories families tell - each other and others – repeating them until they almost have the power of myth – collective – and even though they themselves have told them so many times, laughing in the same places or crying at the end, whatever, they never tire of them, never fade from the same intonations and looks and means of communicating the tale – this process intrigues me, it is indestructible – even if guests have heard the stories before they will still be told, on many occasions after the question ‘have we ever told you the story of…?’ and then carrying straight on into it whatever the answer – the need to share and re-experience again and again through words something that they already know intimately is intriguing – Why? What is achieved? – is it a fear of mortality, a nostalgia for the past? Is it therefore a lack of pleasure with the present? The stories after all often seem to occur in a specific time frame many years ago and certainly have little reference to the ‘now’. In any case it is a reminder of the need for storytelling, the tribe laying out its history for others to see.

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Reflecting on this semi-vagrant lifestyle since the end of the panto - I find I have an odd sense of being a teenager again, but not in some youthful immortality way, more in that sense of being in limbo between freedom, self-will etc and being held in check by circumstance, waiting for something to happen and move life on – don’t get me wrong, I am appreciative of the rest and easy days I am having at present in Studley, but effectively I am a stranger in someone else’s home – in the morning I flit around a little like an awkward ghost, out of my usual routine, making coffee before anyone else is up and setting up my laptop on a wooden board on the bed in the spare room (my room for a while), whilst all my other possessions sit in carrier bags lined up along the skirting board waiting to be set free – without a job, money saved is now becoming money spent – I rediscover those strange hours after mid-day when nothing much happens in the world and one realises the sense of a day passing, the true graveyard shift of day-time TV and post-lunch blues –

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Two women living in the house opposite call me over to give me the post for the house I am staying in which had mistakenly been delivered to them – their Midlands accents are very strong and at first I think they are calling to someone else until they pronounce my surname out loud and I trot over the road – one stands in the window offering the package of letters, the other sits smoking a cigarette over a bowl of Weetabix – I am not sure if they are sisters or dykes – both are in their early 50s and have subtly dyed hair, flabby jowls and heavy eyes (leading me to suppose the sister option) – I apologise for disregarding their first few calls as, I say, I didn’t think anyone here knew me – “Oh we know everything,” they reply in unison. Then the one in the window carries on: “We know everything in this house, we’re magic.” She tips a wink at me and the other one, with a spoon of wet Weetabix held half way to her mouth, does the same.

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SPERNALL - word sketch

Unfettered by routine
The Crow oversees the day
Parts with the space about him
Seeming to digest light
His black coat
Against rain clouds
Are powder over the
Collected hedgerows
Russet weed over weed
Passing through
Race an unknown other
Reel him in
Sightless, tormented
By mud, fire
Avenues of frost
And the line of man