28/6/06

Ever tried killing time in High Wycombe? You can't, because the place is already dead!

The ultra-suburb - desperation and depression being deliberately ignored or hidden beneath the spin of Blair's 'cool Brittania' - but what lies at the core of that message is a poverty of the soul -

What then resides at the heart of England? I ask myself this question as I sit in the bus station at High Wycombe, having traveled so much from town to town over the past few months, exposed to it.

Discontent.

Our history is pock-marked with it: Orgreave. Edgehill. Twyford Down. The General Strike. The Tolpuddle Martyrs. Brixton. Handsworth.

It is the foundation of our culture.

Its current form is suppressed by the ever-growing 'ley-line' network of shopping malls spreading across the country and rising incessantly: flavourless, characterless additions to the landscape. These places try to placate the increasing alcoholism, the hooliganism, the homelessness, and the racism by feeding us a myth of multicultural consumerism without class. In so doing they support the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses territorialism of the suburban nuclear unit, of the great English home as castle to be defended from outsiders and change by the acquisition of the Plasma screen or new car etc etc.

But these places continually fail. Why? Because nothing can cure the discontent at the heart of the English psyche. The need and desire to consume and add and crave for it to be repeated again tomorrow.

I should know.

And like some grand ironic joke the middle-classes (don't kid yourself that they went a long time ago) try to make themselves feel more open-minded, more 'continental' by patronizing the endless stream of cafes and coffee shops promoting a pseudo-European lifestyle of espresso bars and dolce vita in the high street - at the same time bemoaning vocally and in print the fact that Europeans are 'stealing our jobs' - the English wear their suspicions brazenly, they have centuries of experience -

And there we pass out of time as we know it - slowing down into a new timeframe, suburban time which tick-tocks backward and forward between the past and the present with tremendous ease; inch by inch we make our way through scenes in the marketplace that have existed for eons: people looking for a place of easy refuge ending up at some god-forsaken flea pit at the end of town trying to keep warm, aching to be moving on -

In this year, this day Newlands Bus Station

Down among the discarded: fag butts, Lotto scratch cards, shoes, and people - the sickening inverse vertigo of 1970s urban planning hemming you in amid the dark concrete pillars and nicotine clouded Perspex kiosks, all narrated by countless chapters of graffiti - and along thin line of shopping bags at the edges accompanied by tired ankles and faded arses - where young Polish women congregate together to share a laugh and a fag after work, together for fear of the constant snide remarks they get and the crass sexual insults from the bored boys of town (is this the way it's always been, does danger get removed through historical hindsight or do we genuinely care less about others?) - and the huddled hat-finks and rat-finks arrive, the loners and the losers, the edgy-eyed and the genuinely afraid community cared for?

A bombshell - the resonance of plate metal deafeningly echoing every time a bus or coach rolls over it on the way to the exit ramp; the noise is painful, everyone winces in suspension, nervy now the end of day tiredness whiteout has come - waiting, doing overtime as the bus they want breaks down somewhere on the M40 and they are left to second guess its whereabouts: a loner in his late thirties with two small rucksacks plastered to his sweaty T-shirt and only £30 in his pocket for the week and two young girls, Nubians descendents, talking about boys at college and smiling warmly at each other and singing from time to time; young lives still full of hope, capable of vistas of life, leaps and dreams -

Looking down at the dust and I count beneath my seat alone 38 cigarette butts, some chewed clear of filters, others fresher and marked with lipstick - a photographer comes along snapping a few pictures of the decay, some portraits - a woman walks up to him after a while:

You're not welcome here, she says.
What do you mean?
Your sort.
My sort?
Perverts, she says now louder than before.
Wait a minute, he replies, I just take photos - they're -

The woman cracks him in the ribs. She's a mother of three on her way home after her late shift at Tescos. Her action gives allowance to others and so it is that they take it. The photographer, who may or may not be innocent, I don't know, escapes with a bloody nose and bruised ribs -

Ten minutes later a police patrol crawls in, parking up in a side bay; the two officers within the car stare out, scanning the collected passengers, the bread-line if you will and then drives away. They do not get out to examine the six little pools of blood on the concrete, trailing away toward a mock cowboy display in the shopping mall window at the rear of the bus station -

All is quiet now -

There's a prayer on my lips but it won't form into words; it escapes me -

U.S. INTERVENTION IN WONDERLAND

Take 1973 beyond apparition

I touch memory
Funny its
Still sticky to the tips
Like napalm

The door creaks open
Feels like it
May even crumble

The game within was hide 'n seek
Years ago -

Children scurry across a waxed floor
Someone speaks into a microphone
Announces a birthday boy
Joy by the July window
Banquet tables rigged with ice cream
Melting; suddenly

The TV in the corner relays images of My Lai

The Mad Hatter and
White Rabbit lead us
To wonderland

Where traces of ivy and cotoneaster grow
In the road
Ready to be burnt

Then harvested?


County Durham - May 2004

25/6/06 - Cumbria

'Moving, always moving - I am lucky in this', I said. 'Once I thought it might be difficult, frightening, but then you take a step and find it's easier than you thought. But places like this - I indicated the town through the car window - I don't know, they haven't moved in themselves and I find this incredibly sad. They appear to an outsider to be static, forgotten. Or lost. How can anywhere or anyone be so lost in this day and age? So out of touch? Unless, of course it is a desire?'

We pass north to the coast. To Workington. Sunday evening. The town full of red-shirts spilling out of the pubs onto the dry streets, surrounded by flags of St. George. The girls in next to nothing in the hope of post-match sex and the boys stumble and bemoan the poor show of the nation's team, one syllable between them at this stage of the proceedings. There is, always is in Workington, the threat of the volatile - the drunken punch, the bit of bloody fun to pass the time; even better if you can find an outsider to take it out on - and so the hunt too. Groups of ten or so gather on street corners, watching the road like gangs of frontier townsmen bored and looking for trouble, waiting for it to just stumble into town by mistake; the air charged with implicit stares, familial and neighborhood tensions even in the midst of collective celebration - and the Bobbies try to go un-noticed tonight, shirking in doorways in their day-glo yellow vests, wishing they were somewhere else -

Science is how capitalism knows the world; violence is how the ignorant find theirs - On the rim, the coastal edge, shadowing both ends of the town, the surreal rhythmic stretch of two wind-farms - a constant hypnotic turning of the gargantuan blades, like a physical chant trying to calm the atmosphere, disperse the charge at the same time as creating one -

The smell of tar and the millennial mud of the exposed estuary, high full of proteins and salient nourishment that was the source of all living things; the gradual emergence of the sentient, the arthropod and the eventual biped here - waiting for the flood - immobile now, perhaps stuck in the mud? The nuclear age is played out day by day, in the restraint of poverty and under-investment, in the hard edged role of male and female as possession; the turning cars souped up for engine throb and shagging in the back seat; the window gazing and the pram-pushing and the despondent dog-owners necking to watch a young girls arse pass by - and then it strikes you: everyone looks the same here - this is tribal England, and it has not changed since Doomsday, the bloodlines are without alteration, or genetic influx - Man, woman, child - no distinction bar size: the middle aged women all fat, close on obese; the young men sport the same colour hair and the same close crop - and the older men, thirties upward, all carry a faded, tired look in their eyes -

'Do you know these people?' I asked my passenger.

'Nothing to do with me' came the reply - 'oh, wait, hang on . . . .'

Crummock, Cumbria - June 2006

Water Meadow, Winchester - June 2006

Dog Fight, Winchester - June 2006 

16/6/06 - 17/6/06 - Winchester & London

MY RESTLESS ANATOMY

Sitting in the cathedral grounds in Winchester, alone, just a bag of food and about £15 left to my name - a dead ringer for General Pinochet walks past me through the trees, maybe, just maybe…… I ought to shout, to denounce him before these people, mob him, and make him pay -

My head is peeling all over, slivers of dry skin coming away, irritating my scalp - yet I look healthier than ever, they say, in this singular freedom - the evening summer breeze playing about the trees and the tombs - how far have I come? To be sat here like a part-time tramp? Wondering where the next paycheck will come from. In some ways I relish the challenge, surviving on next to nothing, reducing all that I need and carry and eat down to a minimum, alive on the wits edge - in other ways I am beholden to a deep fear of age and insecurity -

- Yet -

I understand and accept I should have no knowledge, leading to learning and thereby (question) to good writing? The necessity of discovery, a cleansing of mind that could be intrinsically altered in the quest for expression; for ideas and knowledge found or learnt on the way not beforehand, in process - a story, ways of being perhaps, symbols? - this I begin to comprehend should be my approach instead of the belief that all good artists (writers particularly) know much before they set out on a creative endeavour; it ought to be the opposite - the chance to widen ones understanding of a subject, human nature, meditating on existence, on images, themes and actions; or further, on the need for love, company, gratification, temptation, desire, passion; on the good and the bad actions taken in search for these things or as a result of these things; of time and solitude; of the sun and the traveler; of the souls' wide open endeavour to maintain light -

An example: the multitude of books old and new laid out in the dim cloister at the rear of the cathedral - a quiet, timeless poetry of place and objects together; a stillness beyond the obvious, working away on a physical and metaphysical plane of course - an evening to learn of space as the best medium to carry one's faith; and between the leaves of a book -

The close blackbirds ignore me where I sit beneath a huge, aged fir tree beside another Hepworth sculpture (echoing that one at Snape); they hunt for worms, gently cantering close and are joined by an officious looking Jackdaw who walks among them disapprovingly - I am become nothing more than part of their daily environment and this pleases me no end - I can be invisible -

Two young women, late teens/early twenties are filming each other on hand-held DV cameras; one climbs the low bole of a cherry tree across the quadrant from where I sit - they are laughing gently, intimately and their laughs echo off the four medieval walls -

What is a vision and, by extension, a visionary? Is it a reactive state or a proactive one? Is its fuel exclusively without or within? I'd like to think it was always the latter, in the natural world (whether by another extension that includes the man-made or not I am not sure) - Oliver's Battery - Leonardo's Sycamore Helicopter - Oppenheimer's Basic Destroyer - all found without, external observation consistent with dreams -

- Like

am I living a lie? People have come to think of me recently as a modern day Dick Whittington (they told me so in Suffolk and here now in this deadly county) - a bag on wheels and a laptop, carried hither and thither across country - maybe I am if you put it that way, though it seems too romantic to be the case because my movements are out of economic necessity (I reply) - but didn't Whittington go to London looking for gold (they answer swiftly)? -

The camera girls come near, standing in the shadow of a dense, succulent tree over by the north wall - they are taking more intimate pictures of each other now, the lens close up to their faces, their eyes - maybe they are falling in love? First lovers each? And these images are records of this new emotional place they find themselves in? Recorded for posterity; either to be erased in time when it all goes sour, or else kept as testament to those initial days of lust and excitement when they look back years hence - still giggling, still testing the branches, still laughing in the religious shadows of a cathedral - like it was only yesterday -

The calm navigation of their souls - the meditative steps inside -

And in continuation, I wake at dawn the next day, collecting myself and my belongings in a room I've slept in for only three nights, with its small wooden puppet theatre in the corner dusty but well loved once; and trundling the bag out of the door in silence so as not to wake anyone in the house I see as I go the quiet shadow of the Japanese girl I'd been told rents a room but whom I have not met at all, now crossing the threshold at this early hour with a small china bowl before her, and a red tear of tiredness in her eye - and the bright morning, a glimpse of a fresh view through a sloping, green corn field toward hedgerows and copses with the early mist hanging low in the fold, collecting heavy - nobody else witnessing it but me on that road, this clarity of the new day with its wide open possibilities, its ready anticipation (even though mine is fairly well planned) -

Carrying on up the hill I recall the things I learnt about old friends last night - new proposals of marriage in Northern Ireland; an old flame now living with a German composer in London; recent friends returning to Aldeburgh already to watch performances given by people they know; A.F. has returned from a restorative trip to Greece where he read Proust; PC is in France for the christening of a friends baby; and my family (nieces, brothers, sisters-in-law, aunts, parents) are all well met in northern Italy - that is good - important - I have deep affection for them all -

Bruce Chatwin (a nod to him in this entry's title) reflects on the importance of the nomad in the culture of past societies (particularly those on the steppes of Russia and Mongolia) - oftentimes they were the herders of vast numbers of horses or cattle, and were connected to (or were themselves) the settlements shaman - the conjurers of space and time, of visions beyond the known, the witnesses to what was over the horizon - yet also the healers and advisors, totally practical, the watchers of the villagers flanks, and bearers of change or alarm - without the nomads the 'settlers' would not have survived - As I fell asleep last night my journey today played itself out in my mind - it ends (or begins?) with a kind of void waiting to be 'filled' - I think it was connected to this urge for discovery and learning I mentioned earlier and seems to be a result of my recent restless existence - the void is not empty however, it is full of questions, anticipation - it is not taxing or confusing, it is surprisingly quiet and restful, a musing place! Maybe, to paraphrase Marguerite Duras, it is 'the writer's unknown'? Finally, I am out on the pilgrims trail, outside my tribe (my family) trying to report back as often as possible, having to be patient, imagining myself with them - and so I slept -

And after all can we help the genetic programme? Or even dare to attempt to change it? What would be the point? If one has a genetic disposal toward restlessness can nit be fought, reconditioned? Or must it be allowed to take one where it will? Unbound. Or is that just a vision of romanticism that is totally impractical in this age? Perhaps it is now decreed that wanderlust must be kept in check in all aspects of our lives - free only to be expressed in so far as which channel we switch to or which websites we allow ourselves to visit - Yet there is so much benefit to be had; a searching quality to life that is important; a kind of open-eye form of living that moves out into the day, constantly hunting for information and inspiration, and that brings contentment, a rare commodity these days -

I have come to believe in omens on this journey; in objects found that have a great deal of power even if they are only conjurers of memory - you must still be careful with them, they are both delicate and strong - wood especially - the power of natural forces upon it (the tide, wind, movement, abrasion) allows it the opportunity to become different in character given time, it will retain traces of its past but is irrefutably altered for the better - so it is with the allowance of wanderlust -

I am reminded of my Italian grandfather's long walk home in 1944/1945 from a prison camp in Germany all the way back to Piedmont in northern Italy, over the Alps!! I never met him, he died penniless 35 or so years ago, but his story of endurance and subsequent suffering has taken on a huge importance and significance to me since I first learnt of it - outside of the evident tragedy inherent in it, I believe it set up a form of 'learnt' nomadism in my family (and in many people in the subsequent post-war generations e.g. Kerouac et al) that has been passed on - my father moving across Europe, then on into the UK and when I was growing up we move again and again, leaving my 'rootless' and therefore perpetually restless (a good thing) - perhaps tragedy, mutated and relearned, has become joy? Balancing the past in its own small, yet significant, way?

One skill I have never learnt is the ability to sleep upright, say sat in a chair in a railway station - a useful art for the traveler - You do have to love a city café for its egalitarian invitation to all (including the tramp who is sleeping upright in that chair over there at the edge of the patio) - regulars, irregulars, passengers, stay-at-homes, visitors, thinkers, lovers, and poseurs - they come and they partake in good surroundings - some never want to leave, after all, if the café is good life becomes so much easier -

14/6/06 - Winchester

Despondency in this dry, depressed town, this half-life of community care rejects and drug pushers - I carry a sense of loss with me through the evening, a new struggle solely connected with the change of location, this sudden move from Suffolk - and a pall of bad fortune comes with it, people chasing me for payments, friends subsuming and ignoring me in conversation, wiping out my words on the telephone - do they consider me dumb? To be bullied? I am aware of fear and silence; out of place, seeking solace in stray walks without direction or awareness (unlike my usual self) - a sense of reckoning - desperately seeking the magical, the transportive, in the riverside meadows here -

I stutter from stem to shallow brook, the reflections there are uneventful - they leave me confused even in their stray beauty; something growls beneath, a new sense of overcrowding - maybe I need to penetrate a deeper realm of solitude again? The drastic measure of breath, something closer to a meditation, an asceticism perhaps - but devoted to what? These things overwhelm me on my evening walk; I am guarded, reserving strength - I feel myself to be a shadow of the moon, yet I know I could experience a curvature of light without regret if only I could see it; my feet hold the only sound of hope tonight, crunching on the stony path or through the waterside grass - yet I am looking for the tide and the beach where I was in true hock to freedom without disparagement or judgment -

I reconnoiter the aged flint walls and medieval gateways; the hard, bleak crosses and metallic halos encroached by insects - in a cloister I read the spines of books laid out in cruciform and realize the only word that strikes me as having any importance is 'chymical' - an old spelling and means of discovery - I imagine the process of cameras then, that 'chymical' endeavour of eye and science, the quiet dark of the developing chamber, the smell of nitrates and bleach and emulsion - my grandfather long dead watching over my shoulder, smiling his approval, wishing he could have a go - looking, recording; a contemplation and reward - maybe that is my new credo and rhythm, the walk, the observer, the shutter clicking in time with history?

13/6/06

Aldeburgh to Winchester

In Winchester the insane Peter Baumann accosts me in a bar - his stream of consciousness ramblings jump all over the place as his mind cannot keep control - sometimes it comes close to genius, other times it is frightening - image piled up on image, some volatile disturbance deep in his psyche - he starts with reports of pianos on Brighton beach, his solid head moving sideways for fear he will be ejected form the premises - then his speech runs something like this: yeah, yeah fucking Brighton, the pianos, do you know who I am? It's hard for you - but you see I was fucked up the arse, sorry ladies forgive me - yeah, yeah - shake here, here, remember me - and so it goes and he offers a tattooed hand for me to shake, and reclines in the armchair in his shorts and T-shirt then leaps up and says something inaudible before leaving -

A puppet theatre placed in my bedroom - dusty and aged, it leaps to life whilst I am asleep - King Alfred has burnt the cakes and is running from his terrifying cook who wields her rolling pin and brings down the retribution of a blazing inferno starting in the kitchen - when the devil comes to take them both just before they are burnt to a crisp, it is the King who sells his soul and his (supposedly) scary cook relinquishes her body to the flames and to the afterlife - there is a thunderous round of applause - when I awake the show is long over but there is a dry taint of cinders on the air and of course the faint singing of a chorus of 28 amazing voices -

I have one question on my mind when I am fully awake, which I won't answer here: can you become attached to a landscape? And if so, why?

12/6/06

An impenetrable sea mist arriving over the mill-pond water coated like mercury with the night - fudging the distinction between water and night sky - yet the moon above remains bright, full, untouched by this fog - the engine of a boat never seen, no lights, no clue to its whereabouts, the sound carried greater distances at night, with nothing to reflect the sound away - even inland the sound of the waves breaking on the shore are audible at night - this constancy is a beautiful thing - peace-making with place, history, another journey of self - beneath the revealed craters of the moon and the wayward avenue it creates on the gentle waves - but words can't really suffice here, only music can do justice to the sea like this, it’s the only medium that can come close to the potential and the reality and make art of it - set the right tone; my words can't hope to come close -

I'll take the old red bike along the coast road - watch a last Harrier cruise low over the salt marsh, his blue-grey wings idling in the morning breeze, head tucked down low for hunting -

The clowns Flip, Flap and Flop are separated and not happy - the youthful vigour of their time on the coast will not pass easily, it has imprinted itself on their souls and they remain pleasantly marked -

10/6/06

ORFORD NESS: STATION OF THE SUN

The barren testament of men who believed they were greater than gods, than nature, 'the destroyers' - pioneers of 'new' warfare, the ultimate 'shock and awe' of the techno-nuclear arsenal: invisible weapons; H-Bombs; offensive microwaves and radar - and the tests and counter-tests to observe and control impact and splashdown; or the results of lethality and vulnerability, of fragmentation and inordinate vibration - and all this at the edge of the world where the land still moves, silting up and changing, aggregating itself, eating itself and spewing itself further; where the sound of the universe comes, settling and attempting to heal history, to redress the balance -

In today's sudden heat, quicksilver appears to rise from the baking horizon and skin burns quickly in the pellucid morning -

I cross to the Ness on the small ferry, the first of the day, from Orford quay - a thin young man, the skin on his face pre-aged from exposure, guides the boat across the Ore, ear bent to his portable radio - in the prow sit twelve passengers, visitors, some wearing hats to ward the sun - one man carries a small grey plastic microphone which he uses to speak, holding it up to his throat and emitting a robot-like sound, clipped and void of tonal variation - His name is Coe Powell and this is his pilgrimage back to the place that robbed him of his voice - He worked on the Ness as an engineer for the AWRE (Atomic Weapons Research Establishment) in the 60s and he believes some exposure to radioactive materials caused the throat cancer that beset him a decade and a half later - Now, he says, gazing into the middle distance as we approach the jetty, the current moving faster on this side of the river, he comes here two or three times a year as part of his 'exorcism'; trying to piece together the past (both personal and historical), the place has become an obsession since it was opened to the public in 1993 - as indeed it seems to have engendered in all users since it was acquired by the MOD (or War Department as it was called then) in 1913 - obsession, destruction -

Redshank call in the reclaimed marshes close to the jetty area, up-ending flights, scared and scattered - on the horizon the aerial masts of the BBC World Service are shrouded in a syrupy heat haze in the old 'Cobra Mist' area, facing out to sea like waiting sentinels or servants - sucking in and spewing forth invisible words and reports, mirrors for a changing and violent world whose seeds were sewn here in the not-too-distant past -

Cobra Mist: the top secret 'backscatter radar' project run by the US military through the 60's and into the early 70's when it ceased operation, thwarted by 'severe noise problems of undetermined origin' - myths have since grown surrounding the activities here, even to the point that some say UFOs have landed or were the source of the unidentified sonic 'attacks' - who knows? For now it is still out of bounds to visitors even though, supposedly, it has long since been given over to civilian purposes - yet the squat, grey control building is remains covered in sound-absorbent plates - a patchwork of baffles and sonic disruptors, the sci-fi jargon adopted and relished by the military for their gargantuan, lethal toys -

And how the names spilled from their pens and their pursed stiff upper lips: Blue Danube (Britain's first atomic bomb, built in the 1950s) and Yellow Sun Mark 2 - the sun as icon and symbol - appropriated because the weapons would burn with the power of a million suns and because man believed that overnight he had become the creator, the one universal rule; standing outside time, unanswerable to any natural force - the power to leave behind desert and dust -

I stand before two large 'tumuli' at the southern end of the spit - the Labs - metal constructs and piping 'growing' out of their inland facing edges, wide concrete mouths at the other, screaming out to sea - these lead on to the 'pagoda' buildings, the test chambers (Labs 4 and 5) that look like square mushrooms and are the trademark silhouettes of the Ness - the earth and shingle pitted and undulating as if given way deep beneath during test explosions - stray metal objects, some a livid red in their rusting, are scattered and so twisted, spelling out words in new languages: cuneiforms, ciphers (to the gods of war looking down, waiting for the correct plea to come through?) - the whole spit is so unearthly and desolate, dramatic, surrounded by the sudden horizon line to nothingness - the dry, burning sky above, the harsh scrub and blistered sand and shingle make me lose track of my location, the eye has little to corroborate distance so all distances become one and the same, the pervading sense of being in a desert broken only by the sinister and apocalyptic traces of man -

Then a singing note comes on the wind, rising and falling in odd harmony, a thrumming deep inside the air itself and I am baffled as to its source - sitting in the Bomb Ballistics Building, looking out through the observers window across the striated shingle that runs to the sea - and that song just rises from nowhere, pitch perfect - I suspect it is the force of the wind running through some material in the building itself, the metal struts maybe, vibrating at a magical frequency and becoming a constant hum - or maybe, just maybe, it is the undetermined noise that stopped Cobra Mist? That the earth itself began to sing as defence, protection? Or maybe it is simply the background hum the universe makes which even the US military could not reckon with. I'd like to think so. Here where the view out to bomb impact sites is bleached by the overwhelming daylight, where kine-theodolites recorded the descent of freshly dropped bombs into the ocean - I'd like to think it took nothing more than simple music to stop the arrogant Argonauts of progress -

Up on the roof there is a large, heavy set of viewing glasses mounted on a steel podium - their lenses are tinted and aged now so that when one looks through them they add a kind of puce yellow tint to the view; and gazing at the two 'pagodas' this lends them an added hint of post-apocalyptic nightmare; that the light of the sun has become semi-obscured by risen dust-clouds of atomic explosions and fallout, and all beneath is subsumed by heat and dry dust, of the earth trying to come to terms with its own radical demise and struggling, sick, yellow -

Down on the beach, detritus collects at the high tide mark, a line of blackened seaweed marking the furthest point inland that the water gets and among it a multitude of artifacts brought here by the deep currents out in the North Sea and thrown up onto the land:

faded pink plastic sunscreen and baby oil bottles;
yellow plastic spades;
red 'Prince' cigarette packets with health warnings in Russian or Polish;
yellow hard hats;
shoes, sandals, trainers - always in singles, never in pairs, and totally forlorn, hinting at some watery demise;
wire mesh and netting in all shades of azure blue and stinking of the sea;
and a brown leather glove giving the shoreline the finger -

Lost histories - fresh journeys passing.

8/6/06

The days bake - elemental - swarms of the upper middle classes arrive alongside the biting June bugs - at Snape the festival is beginning and the hats are out in the heat haze, the river turned to a mercury glut at Iken - the rest of us pass the time with chips and ice cream and long walks out into the marshes or along the beach - I venture up to Thorpeness, plastic tables spread out in front of the 'Italian bistro', the greasy end of the tourist trap - inside the owner keeps an eye on his three immigrant workers, he smokes constantly behind his net-curtained flat at the top while they kick dust in the car-park, smoking too, waiting for custom; very good boys -

A piece of bone marked like part of an Ordnance Survey map - dry white, with measurements and a latitude inscribed - the paler blue square of the sea and a low tide mark, then the contours of a beach and the immediate inland features, faded on the marrow - I attempt to pick it up, but it is rooted into the dry earth there and how far into the ground it goes I do not know -

MP3 player unexpectedly plays Slim Gaillard's 'Slim's Jam' whilst in random mode (the best way to use it really) - that happy track, with your man Slim scatting away and chatting to Diz and Bird who it appears have just walked in on the recording session and decided to join in with a couple of choruses in A Flat; much to the delight of Slim (and us) who scats on vout - I realize a connection - the first person to play this track to me, maybe fifteen or so years ago, was a writer and poet called Neil; I used to work for him in a small but excellent bookshop he owned in Hertfordshire. He was writing a novel at the time, amongst other things - a crime novel - and it was a pretty intense and volatile period in which he would spend hours tapping away at his typewriter in the flat above the shop and then from time to time explode into tantrums, shouting at the work or himself before storming off to the local pub for a pint or two at lunchtime. A couple of times he smashed the shop up right in front of me. Anyway, I don't want to paint a bad picture of the man because he was excellent company and kind hearted. After all the effort, and despairing of the mediocrity of Hertfordshire and its poorly read locals, he chose to sell off the shop and relocate to - this is where the connection comes in - Aldeburgh, where I believe he was living when his novel was published and where he also completed a life of the poet George Crabbe - in fact, I believe I can locate his house on Crabbe Street -

Bongo Sue arrives at DP's Bar with her collection of drums, large masses of dark wood with animal skins stretched taut - Bongo Sue, a Yorkshire woman clad in tight black with slashes along the arms exposing skin, tribal fetters and long hair, who unleashes deep rhythms there in the middle of the bar, her head swaying and the tempo quickening - the evening crowd thins and then thickens again with the newly attracted: all the young and old hippie dreamers of the East Coast gather in that tiny place, the Polish barman smiling magnanimously and doling out San Miguel for the hottest night of the year so far - the chorus go wild and start to dance and pulsate in the middle whilst others look on bemused but smiling - Bongo Sue, joined by anyone who can get close to one of the many drums she's brought, is in her element and with her confidence growing plays on for a good hour, palms reddened with blood, hair cascading and shoulders swinging and rocking like crazy -

2/6/06 - 4/6/06

Laid low with a ravenous vomiting bug - hallucinating deaths and fate in the early hours, mid fever - shaking sweats - drifting in and out of sleep, stomach spasms and waves of nausea - watching the dawn break - all day body heavy and wasted, barely able to walk - the sun cascades without, tempting all things to wander, but I cannot - I pass the day on the sofa and periodically rise weakly to drink water - dreams of bugs and other biting insects, some microscopic crawling across my skin; of swamps and infectious airborne disease - itches on the skin, the sense of tiny feelers there and mandibles penetrating skin, sucking blood -

The nub of a boat moves along the edges of the Alde; the muddy, silver fringe - gulls rise and Shelduck disturbed - the dumb greyness above settles in for the rest of the day - the boat is cross cruising, showing passengers the habitats; birds like Cormorant atop exposed ancient wood-posts - the moving, hypnotic reeds - what am I looking for when I gaze from this window? Always, something hidden in the landscape and thereby in me; that constant mystery that I have never found or been able to name in all these years - that question, the unidentifiable reason for gazing, is always with me and it means I cannot sit still for long and, say, converse about stuff; I am drawn out there - interrupted, distracted, attracted constantly, without effort - for the secret in the hidden curve where the river turns briefly north - what is there?