ECHO 31/3/06

Is it possible that writers ‘share’ characters? Is there a kind of fictional gene pool which we tap into and end up dragging up the same people – archetypes even - whom we subtly alter each time? Some would argue yes; some would say mere coincidence. Or else they will put forward that old adage that ‘there is nothing new under heaven’. Either way, I am aware of it. I wrote a draft of a short story over the past ten days or so in which a character called ‘Jennifer’ appears. She was not based on anyone I know, merely a sketch accrued in passing during a walk through London town. She figured there in the drama and grew. Then I open a new novel to read, close on a week later, and the main protagonist’s wife is called Jennifer. I would put this down to mere coincidence; it is just a name after all. Sure it conjures a social class perhaps, or a look of the person in the mind’s eye, but it is a common enough name. However, to me it feels as if I have been cheated, that my decisions could be interpreted as being influenced. Or that I even knew it would be this way and that I would have to go further to find my originality. Take another step. Re-formulate what was written. Whether I will r not remains to be seen, but I get the sense I am walking into a Borges-ian labyrinth. A reflective library, teasing me into pretending I may have had an original thought, when in reality someone else was thinking it at the precise moment. Then, does it become a race, a duel even, with an unseen unknown competitor?

ECHO 28/3/06

Grand, rain drenched silence in the afternoon - filled Usebio with joy. Gave him a sense of freedom, peace. A contented link with his past, his childhood, which meant to him now that that he was okay as he was - this man. Then the lightning came closely followed by thunder and that made hime even happier there on the station platform, beneath the awning, dry yet exposed to the elements.

WINDOW 6

Silence now, the house is empty – big decisions have been made – important; now she is refreshed and has found some peace. Good. Her dreams were full again. The man beside her slept comfortably close and in this way the new week had begun better than the last. Even so, fear still rattled around at the edges of her mind and tickled in the pit of her guts. She now felt she could deal with that however.

When the call for work came it roused her from slumber – she had been aware of a number of things (the silence in the house, as mentioned; the call of a Blackbird from the park; the long, distant rumble of traffic on the roads; and the beginnings of her inner calm, also mentioned) yet her eyes were closed and she was replaying an image of desire, the last vestige of her true dreams, enjoying it. There was a portion of beautiful, unblemished flesh, her flesh around her belly, close up; and there was the dry scent of summer, tall trees and a camping tent with its zip undone and the flaps pulled right open to allow air in. She was within, making love with a man she assumed to be the man beside her now. She opened her eyes, looked to the closed window, the blind drawn down pale; then to the man, the top of his head nestled into the crook of her shoulder. She smiled a warm, motherly smile and closed her eyes again. The perfect swatch of flesh reappeared. It was lightly tanned and it moved beautifully as she breathed deep. Over it, casting a shadow, came a man’s profile, vague yet sure of its direction. Next came his eyes and the line of his hair, what little there was of it.

She opened her eyes again in quick surprise and looked once more at the man beside her. His thick, dark mass of hair flopped over her skin and on to the pillow. Nowhere could she make out either the scalp beneath or signs of recession at his brow. She closed her eyes again and sought for that final moment of her dream. Looking for the stranger, trying to ascertain his identity. But it was all gone. Instead her unconscious fought her off, she was left with the swirling patterns of light behind her lids, and a sense of confused lust in her belly.

She didn’t know it then, but another decision had been made.

OYSTERS

GREEN PARK – drunken business man and woman in their mid-forties – dressed in long grey overcoats – she has him pressed up against the red wall-tiles in a corner of the ticket area – he has an odd smile on his face, the aloof conqueror - she moves like a magnet joins them, when he sways left she follows, when he tilts backward she responds forward – his eyes are dark, thin smiles – she is all black tresses and briefcase and she pleads in a cigarette scratchy voice: “I’ve always fancied you.” There is nothing romantic about this clinch; it is desperate, groping, consuming and it stinks of wealth – mobile phone sex, dealer sex, intermarital sex, sex that smells of Thatcher’s needle edifice on the Isle of Dogs –
MUDCHUTE DLR – a haggard, grey man – never seen a man look so grey – like dust – his eyes are nasty, he stares at a woman across the carriage aisle with evident intent – deep folds in the flesh of his face either side of his mouth move and throb as he grinds his teeth in there – he wears a dark coat – there is a heavy aura about the space he takes up in the world – he turns his gaze to me when he realizes I am watching him, those deep-set eyes look into me with something like an immediate challenge – I have to turn away cold and suddenly frightened, thankful I am not a woman –
ISLAND GARDENS – Ramon sat always on an aisle seat with one arm hanging straight down into the aisle space, his large signet ring prominent there – he would tap a rhythm with it on the plastic base - with his other he would tip the brim of his baseball cap and pick his nose – then he would ride the open tracks back and forth and watch the reflections of people as they got on, sat close by, or left at their destination to be replaced by another figure in haste or repose depending on their day – most of all he liked to look at the young men and when he saw one he really liked he would pull out his thick gold necklace and play with it under his chin, toying with his long fingers and hoping they would catch a look and understand his semi-hidden signal – it had worked three times and he had pulled more than a link – rich men and poor, Zones 1 – 3 –
BERMONDSEY – a child in a push-buggy screams with such joy and gusto trying to compete with the howling noise of the wind in the underground tunnel, he tips his head up and with mouth wide open – when he is done he looks round the carriage laughing and looking for approval - his mother smiles, and the carriage smiles with her -

PLEASURE PRINCIPLES

The giant, red-robed Christ of Limehouse – white plastic face, cuddly cartoon features, and puffy fingers in grace – stuck on top of an old Victorian factory building, surveying the DLR –
A semi-deflated blow-up Spiderman climbing a chimney stack on a nursery outbuilding, his head and hands flapping in the wind –
Screaming schoolchildren caught on the train without tickets, the guard only feet away –

ECHO 23/3/06

Something red, bright red – tiles or lipstick
A hooked nose
Leicester Square’s worst busker
Twelve ghosts
A £5 note found on abandoned slipway close to the river
The dark stone skulls of St.Nicholas – death, fear, faith: the real history
A multitude of labyrinths between here and peace
Furious anger of the displaced

Journeyman 2

Journeyman

ECHO 21/3/06

Spotted a face from years ago walking through the high street – a woman who sourly dominated a shared house I lived in nearly 10 years ago near Oval – she was in her mid-thirties then, an office manager for a City merchant bank, a job with responsibility and some pressure – then (isn’t if funny how London repeats and never quite lets go of the same kind of people) she got into smoking grass and hash and taking Ecstasy at the weekends, often spending her Friday and Saturday nights at a club called Samsara in The Fridge in Brixton where she would report back tales of being in heaven, full of bliss, accepted; it became something of a religious experience for her every time – but it was an induced one – the rest of the house would live in fear of the week from Tuesday night onward when she would hit the inevitable mind/body crash, the come down – the swing in her mood was polar, she would become surly, angry and volatile; often she would scream and shout at people in the house for no reason, even once for just walking past her bedroom door and making the floorboards creak – she scared the hell out of me and thankfully after suffering it for 18 months I moved out – Seeing her now came as a bit of surprise, though the way she looked now I could have predicted even back then: her face had become a sullen, rubbery thing, worn out, pinched around her eyes and mouth and looking like it had long forgotten how to laugh or smile; her skin had turned the colour of a rotten plum, a kind of puffy red; her gaze was beady and suspicious, she gave daggers to anyone that came close to her on the pavement as if warning that she might explode at them at any given moment – she wore an oversized leopard skin pillbox hat (!) and an overnight leather jacket, which I could not help feeling was reminiscent of a strait-jacket – she did still look as if she had money to burn, there were a lot of accessories hanging from her neck and wrists – but she moved like she was made of wood, stiffly and without much flexibility left – I wondered if the strychnine they used to cut E’s with had finally damaged her spine?

ECHO 19/3/06

It is close on 5am on a Sunday morning – the boiler is chugging and rattling away downstairs and it is this noise that wakes me – it makes me angry – so I stumble out onto the landing and realize that the hall lights are on and the security door is unlocked – another light is on in the smoking den but there is no noise coming from within – I check the boiler, and discover the heating has been left on all night – I pull open the double doors to the den to see if anyone is still awake – on the sofa, still in his clothes but with a blanket pulled some way over him is A fast asleep; the detritus of a night’s marijuana smoking laid out before him on the coffee table and the TV plays the Austin Powers DVD menu screen over and over, repeating jingles of jaunty music that I am assuming have accompanied this thirty year old man into the land of hash nod – I switch the lights off and turn off the boiler –

Everything is about burning, using up, consuming without a thought for the planet - and it is people like this young man, selfish, inebriate, blinkered, without a care, that are sealing its ecological fate –

Once upon a time dope smoking went hand in hand with an alternative way of life, cranks who empowered themselves in the name of Mother Earth, motivators against war, poets who marched on Washington or started movements of change in the name of the future – now they are just wasted, lonely individuals whose eyes are turning redder by the day and whose faces look like joy is an ancestral commodity, and who feel the need to womb themselves in the unnecessary consumption of power and natural resources without thought, as if someone else will do the right thing and that will excuse them – its bullshit, it’s the typical human trait of passing on responsibility, its spoilt children messing up the garden and not clearing up after themselves – it is fashion – it is hip to care less – and we have no excuse with all the information to hand, all the evidence we would rather hide beneath the blanket, pull it right up over our heads and sleep on through, tranquilised until it is too late -

PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS

The house meeting was entertaining. Whether it accomplished anything remains to be seen. But it brought some laughter afterwards. True to form, however, there was evident conflict in A towards J. He contradicted anything that J said, and the reasons he gave were thin. J offered to clean a stubbornly dirty window but A told him to leave it alone. J mentioned some advice given by one of the landlord’s associates and that info was dismissed by A as incorrect: “it doesn’t work that way, mate”. But there is a moment of checked hilarity when A asks quite honestly if everyone can keep the lid down on the toilets. Looking around the room where we are all sat, his smoking and TV den, piled with cigarette ends, rolling papers, ashtrays, blankets, DVDs of The A Team (of course, A and his A Team!) and the stench of stale marijuana smoke suffusing everything, his request strikes us as absurd and hilarious. At first we think he is joking and that he has thrown a comic moment purposely into the proceedings, and we laugh. But his stern look quickly changes that and we realize that he is being dead serious. For a moment the meeting looks like it might go pear-shaped as he evidently takes offence, and then he qualifies his request by saying “it looks better that way; and we don’t have to look at any pee or stray pubes”. That’s it for J; he holds back a huge laugh and politely ends the meeting there and then. In his room he rolls on his bed with laughter.

At 2am, waking after a dreamy sleep, J goes to the bathroom to piss. The toilet seat is up! He frowns, smiles again to himself and puts it back down.

At 6.45am J’s alarm goes off. The only other person awake in the house is A. J listens to him hawking and coughing in the bathroom, brushing his teeth, showering etc. When A vacates, J gets up and goes straight for his ablutions. What does he find? The toilet seat has been left up – by A! J finds it even more amusing. He wonders if the request was perhaps a test by the stoned A to see if his co-habitees would honour any request. Or maybe it is just A’s view that it’s one rule for him and another for everyone else?

If You Can't Beat It - Join It

Serious Poem Alert

Look out! here comes a serious poem
Avoid it at all costs
It’s a pompous bastard at the best of times
Like a broken-hearted bore at the bar
Who has to tell everyone
Just how much damage was done
And when you look you realise
Aw shit! It’s me!
The author of your own demise

Really what I want when that mood comes
When it tries to set me up on the stool
Is to hear nonsense in a cosy voice
Up close:

Sipping tea with a group of gambling ants
Laying bets on sugar lumps
Or a fat and irreligious monk
Who has got the hump
With God and upped and just run naked
To a cellar to get drunk

When I get that feeling
Sometimes dawn or maybe late
That profundity is here
I don’t want words of wisdom
I trip the wire, set the siren off
Stick my tongue in vices
Break my pencils in the river
Eat mahogany or oak
And get tired among the carnivales
Dancing on my neck . . . . .


London, March 2006

ECHO 17/3/06

Are we being led by the US Christian Right, the neo-cons, and by Blair’s assumed Christian devotion, into a second Dark Age? Would seem so. Tyranny, torture, suppression, and misinformation. It’s not an original thought I’m sure, but I read a book this week - Infidels – A History of the Conflict between Christendom and Islam by Andrew Wheatcroft (Penguin) - that lays out some historical parallels which I believe points to the answer.

Richard Perle and David Frum – figures in the Bush administration, have written a book entitled: An End To Evil: How To Win The War On Terror – they call it ‘a manual for victory’ and it is written in a version of Orwellian Newspeak. In 1984 Orwell wrote a lengthy description of the language used by The Party and handed down to the populus of Airstrip One (Britain). Words were divided into three categories: the A, B and C vocabularies. ‘A’ words corresponded to everyday words necessary for such things as work, eating, cooking, travelling etc. ‘C’ words were primarily scientific and technical. Frum and Perle, Andrew Wheatcroft argues, have written their book mostly in ‘B’ words. Orwell describes that vocabulary as those words ‘deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude’. Perle and Blum’s book is suffused with attacks on countries that opposed the invasion of Iraq and who they therefore believe engage in ‘thoughtcrime’. The book is a paean to Newspeak. To quote: ‘Terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war against this evil, our generation’s great cause . . . There is no middle way for Americans: it is victory or holocaust.’

Wheatcroft maintains that the use of the word ‘holocaust’ (without its usual capital ‘H’) is clear use of Orwell’s vocabulary ‘B’; the authors being fully aware of the emotive impact of using that word on a modern readership and in this way connoting terrorism with Nazi exterminations. Wheatcroft goes on to ask (I am paraphrasing here): ‘Are America’s alternatives really ‘victory’ or the careful, planned, systematic, efficient and remorseless extermination of an entire culture?’

He highlights the fact that the ‘language, structure, intention and method’ in the neo-conservative’s book reflects that used in the medieval text The Hammer of Witches, more commonly known as the Malleus Malleficarum. This was a tract written in 1486 by two monks and provided canonical and biblical backing for the hunting down and destruction of witches. It is, to quote Wheatcroft again, ‘one of the most malign texts ever produced’. Both the 21st century book and fifteenth century manual use similar methodology. Each one presents the situations and causes of evil; each details how it spreads; each attacks any dissenting voice or anyone that may doubt their view; and finally they both offer ‘operational necessities’ and guidelines to perpetrate a war on evil.

ECHO 11/3/06

Saturday morning, early walking – empty streets, the silence lovely – broken glass across the pavement, brown bottles – up by the creek the wind and cold come in, whipping up eddies in the road dust – the same wind is channeled to a disabling strength between the steel and glass corridors at Canary Wharf, pummeling the face –

The café owner loves to talk. Delicate Portuguese accent; expressive. Talks to a customer, a woman in late middle-age pulling a shopping trolley and dentures, about his family and how he feels jumpy today and he doesn’t know why. Yes he told his wife this information this morning but there wasn’t time to discuss it properly because he had to get out and open up the café. Slick contemporary joint that it is: leather seats, wood-topped tables, chrome bar, coffee machine, selling continental bistro food, cakes and confectionery; Italian style.

He is charming yet capricious, fissile, and volatile – I’ve seen him explode on a number of occasions, though never without just reason – when it happens it is fierce and sure like a knife – strike, remove –

He chats next to a pretty young blonde woman who obviously comes here regularly – she orders a semi-skimmed cappuccino - they talk about their coffee consumption, he explains that he has had to cut down and she echoes the same, talking brightly about keeping things in moderation – questions about the success of the business, questions beyond the usual, a flirtation perhaps? He smiles, and his childish grin comes in to play – he has odd skin, dry and paper like, almost expect it to crack when he smiles, but it has a moon like quality to it so he appears to glow from time to time –

The young woman keeps chatting – there is a vivacity in her voice and body that reminds me of Pol, my lover – I recognize it because I don’t have that ability to be effortlessly sociable, gregarious; I am the polar opposite for sure: quiet, reticent, more a dark cloud than a sun – the café owner is distracted by another customer waiting to be served and so he has to move on, but before he does he gives the woman her cappuccino for free – people like that, especially women, often receive gifts because they give so much of themselves and they give it freely, they trust in other human beings (just like Pol) and the universe rewards them – personalities like mine, reserved, make their own way and receive such things less often – it is no matter, it is just the way things are –

ECHO 10/3/06

Odd acoustics through the day become a fascination – echoes and senses of distance even when in close proximity as if I were hearing the atomic ‘hush’ between sounds, objects, and surfaces. A violinist at Canary Wharf for example, playing a short piece by Vivaldi in front of a large pillar, yet the music is only fully audible in one spot directly in front anywhere else and it sounds as if it being played through a dense fabric. What strikes me about this is the passivity of noise as opposed to the usual aggressive London assault.

DEPOSITS

One face two trains – she is fast asleep, chin on chest, in the nook of a crowded commuter carriage – a thought comes to him: Do I know you? Something familiar about her, yet if he rationalized he knew it could not be possible. He recalled two girlfriends from long ago and wondered why he had not been happy with either. Later, he deposited a cheque in an ATM machine in a bank in West London and one of the women behind the counter rubbed her chin against her shoulder in a similar gesture to the sleeping woman. Again he stopped and noted it. It was something about the action, not the person, which resonated.

Andy hawking in the bathroom every morning – it is so loud you can hear it throughout the house - I wonder what he is trying to bring up – some rock chipped off his soul? A bitter seed? A block of ice? Whatever it may be it takes a huge physical effort – it’s a miracle his lungs don’t burst. Sometimes I think I might find him expired on the floor or else discover a strange bloody deposit in the wash bowl and learn that he has been rushed to hospital.

Wolves on a terrace in Hammersmith – prowling in large cages among placards and information booths – and those eyes, bright and golden, watching every move, the head low to the ground – nearby a video plays with images of vast tracts of snow covered ground and a pack of these creatures make their way across hunting territory accompanied by a voice-over describing their habits and the potential of extinction in certain parts of the world – a child is held close to one of the cages by her father as a few spots of rain fall on the terrace, she is scared and clings on to him looking at the cage over her shoulder and then burrowing her face back into the man’s neck – one of the keepers comes over having seen this and suggests something to them and the little girl nods her head through tears – having deposited a small lump of meat into the cage from her hand, the girl strokes the thick mane of the wolf and laughs.

ECHO 9/3/06

WHAT A WASTE

Fresh ground organic espresso blend coffee ready through a stovetop
The miserable face of a co-habitee in the morning
A giant pizza box in the kitchen forced into a bin too small
Urban birds don’t return often to a garden feeder
He never calls me by my name, only ‘Dude’
Is my life becoming too small?
A horizon on the floor of a train
Two peacocks at Canada Water, possibly plastic

- - - - - -

Strange that A. converses in clichés and epithets: ‘a day is what you make it’ – ‘seize the day’ etc. Even stranger is why he feels the need to impart them to me. Does he believe he should try to teach me a lesson? I can’t help wondering if these are, in reality, things he is trying to remind himself of. He knows nothing of my day after all, what I do at work or play – he can’t even remember my name calling me ‘mate’ or ‘dude’ all the time (I mean do I look like a dude?). Maybe he arrogantly believes that he is better than me in some way? Or that there is a territorial battle that needs to be fought between two males newly living in close proximity? His father is an archdeacon so perhaps this is hereditary sermonizing?

ECHO 8/3/06

Donald Rumsfeld blames the media for exaggerating reports of violence and insurgency, and potential civil war, in Iraq. He even attempts to deny the reports made today of 18 men found in a mini-bus, blindfolded and shot dead. His denial would be almost comical if it wasn’t so dangerously autocratic. If proof is denied then anything is possible – the power to rewrite history at speed, the power to change reality into political fantasy at will, the power to force feed the populus.

- - - - - -

TOPOS – 2

This night becomes a question
Sure the pillows are warm yet
Warmed by the acid – angry, bitter –
Of sudden truths

In valleys where two bodies lay
With sweat and heavy DNA
Of love - the blind lead the dead
Into the wind

Buckfastleigh

everything by the cankered hand
of a (imagine!) divine gardener,
weather worn, tending and nurturing his plot
amid a bestiary of nightfall companions:
tourmaline panthers, golden owls
creatures with patience in their necks
listening among the foliage to the nearby hearth
eyeing the icon covered walls
and the coming and going of lovers and friends
through a garden to cheat death
to capture memory and life
swimming in that deep invitation
the succulent moorland dripping
and feather-robed Crow Charlie
whose days were spent roaming the high ground
watching horse-back shepherds and calling the granite
“thee blood stone”………


Original draft - 18/5/99
This draft 5/3/06

ECHO 7/3/06

A couple – a conflict, based on irresolvable differences.

One of them is capable of great leaps of faith and hope, and possesses the ability to ‘switch on’ optimism and joy at will, despite any other feelings - a product of choice and a healthy upbringing. The other is a fatalist whose joy is a more sporadic visitor – a product of experience and upbringing.

We are witness to decades of conditioning through experience, life journeys resulting in two people falling in love but discovering a point where their essences differ incontrovertibly. How can these differences ever hope to be reconciled? This discovery is painful and is why their relationship is now in jeopardy.

One offers to change – treatment, drugs, a concerted effort. The other doesn’t wish that; they wish for change but nor that. Their concepts of life are steady monoliths that can never meet. Yet how it that together they are capable of great love, joy, laughter?

It is a situation that could be resolved given time. But they don't have much left.

TOPOS - 1

Unexplained death at the river’s edge in Greenwich, close to the old Royal Navy Academy – the yellow incident sign reads: A man’s body was recovered here on xx February and is believed to have entered the river at 1.20am – the wording is strange, that word ‘entered’ makes it sound like an exact action, premeditated, or that the man was void of life signs when it occurred, dumped and thrown away – the meridian calls and when it does time shifts and life leaves in all manner of ways – further along the bank something sinister in the huge disused jetty: between thick girders, an animal skin of some kind has been stretched like a sail, leathery, pale yellow, almost translucent in its degradation – are these disparate elements of the city, odd coincidences, or clues to the death further upriver? Something evil afoot? A representation of the city’s darkness, an essence given form as a monster or killer? Someone whose knowledge of the history and rituals of the river leads him or her to conjure old symbolism, archaic examples and thereby become another chapter in the criminal history of the city – an ancestor to Spring Hell Jack, or the Ripper? A ritual maker of simulacra? Hiding out among warehouses and abandoned power stations on the southern bank, the old hospital building built in 1616 for retired mariners overlooking Poplar and Canary Wharf across the wide curve of the river at the Isle of Dogs – the smell of the sea, the noise of canon fire, an admiral’s statue – There is the possibility that this body was another of the river’s cadavers whose deaths have never been solved – Roberto Calvi hanging from beneath Blackfriars Bridge, his pockets filled with stones, the conjecture being that he was killed by the mafia but has anyone ever been charged; the limbless torso of a child apparently used for witchcraft – Maybe this body at Greenwich was a simple suicide? A man driven to the action of drowning having taken a heavy dose of senecol, or Valium laced with alcohol to ease the cold and the fear once in the water?

ECHO 4/3/06

Early morning 6am – tired, but the joys of silence and solitude for a few hours before the house wakes are priceless –

The house stinks of marijuana from A’s lengthy smoking session last night – lights on and LEDs blink everywhere, a trail of energy waste in red and green -

So Blair believes history and God will judge and vindicate his action over Iraq – an action based on a lie, a fabricated piece of information that somebody’s secret service (US, UK, or Italy – the three way cabal of neo-con countries) doctored and tailored to meet the demands of the Bush fascist project, and Blair was the Goebbels, the propagandist prepared to hold hands with the devil and stand up first with a dossier full of falsehoods – would God really support that Mr. B? If so, you make your faith baseless, marred, and dirty (as dirty as the invisible uranium you claim was the proof for invasion). And in so doing give further fuel to radicals who see Christianity as decadent and lacking in moral strength – you prove them right. Why? Because you repeat all that Christianity has done to the Islamic faith in the name of God since the Crusades. You cannot stand up before God and history and claim yourself to be an emissary of His word while innocent people are dying in your name. We have entered into a Second Dark Age – where the rulers misguide their citizens with false words and myths, hypocrisy and subjugation; where torture is excused as a necessary result of war; where seats of archaic learning and civilization are raised to the ground through siege and bombardment; where humanity is treated no better than the lowest animal, chattels to be abused, wills bent to the powerful irrespective of their rights; where the law and its apostles are in league with organized crime; where mercenaries become heroes and secret forces are given sanction to work beyond the reach of justice. (NB Essential reading: Chain of Command by Seymour Hersh).

The 1950s UFO sightings epidemic – intriguing, mass psychosis almost – a sign of the times they say, the fear of communist invasion and fast technological progress creating (possibly) archetypes from the unconscious, giving form to hidden aspects of the psyche – yet despite that there are some mysteries remaining: the two RAF pilots flying their Meteor jet at 14,000 feet and followed by three fast moving discs also tracked on RADAR from the ground and which the MOD chose to suppress any de-brief or information on – the strange red lights and beams at a US airbase in the UK, seen through trees by a number of US guards and for which there remains an audio recording of the event –

Watching Oliver Stone’s movie Salvador – a serious film; almost unbelievable at first as the two main characters aim at a comedic double act – but it turns into an indictment of right-wing US foreign policy and military aid abroad in the 80s – another example of dirty motives, fear and paranoia driving US hegemony always into league with abusers of human rights – if history is to judge (as Mr. B claims it will) then surely it must eventually judge the US as a dangerous meddler, a bully preaching empty freedom at the end of a weapon; abusing words such as democracy which they have made meaningless, rewriting the dictionary as they go, rewriting what it means to be human. It would be interesting to have a crystal ball at this moment.

ECHO 3/3/06

Cormorants on the Thames, early morning, low tide – close to Chelsea Bridge – one of them arcs high leaving a point close to Battersea Park and heads upriver before circling twice and switching over towards the southern bank where it comes to rest on the water. Then another comes low to the surface, through one of the bridge spans – fast, a dart-like silhouette sure in its course – there is something primeval about these birds, from another time – they have a mocking look, tricksters – Close by, almost unmoving, living a different rhythm to the Cormorants, a Grey Heron stands in the shallows and exposed mud probing slowly through the surface with its fissile beak, long legs resting on the remnants of wooden jetties – surrounding it in frenetic pace are Black Headed Gulls, Herring Gulls and Fulmars mawking and bartering for space on the shore – the Heron, by dint of size, seems aloof and superior to these little squabbling relatives; gently it moves among them, stopping to check for minnows, focusing there, bringing to bear its immense quality of patience then stretching out that almost ermine neck to take its catch.

- - - - - -

Watching Fellini’s La Strada again – Giuletta Massina as Gelsomina is iconic, her performance is even more affecting second time round, with the knowledge of all that is to befall her throughout – if you break it down it is such a strange performance: half silent comedy, half Greek tragedy – never less than enchanting – and Anthony Quinn’s final scene is so harrowingly honest it is the lasting memory I will have of the film – pain, guilt, solitude –

- - - - - -

My Father’s 72nd birthday today – speaking to him on the phone so far away in his hospital bed, his voice like a pale version of its usual self – hoarse, gasping for breath and as weak as a little child’s – though brief, it is a harrowing conversation; I listen for signs of hope, for some glimmer of strength in him, but there is none and as we talk I pace the wooden floorboards in the hallway trying to send as much of my remaining youth to him, to transmit it down the phone, manifesting itself as phrases of encouragement which cannot cure him even if they do provide him with love.

TRACK OF THE WEEK

Police On My Back - by The Clash, from the album Clash On Broadway

ECHO 2/3/06

Still the ignorant live on among us, brandishing their juvenile insults at anyone they believe should be the victim of their words. They exist still in a cocoon of bigotry and hatred towards anyone they perceive to be ‘different’. They wear their hypocrisy with pride and hide their cowardice behind their gangs, egged on with liberal amounts of alcohol or drugs – this allows them to absolve themselves of any responsibility. Their belief system has been passed on by fathers, mothers, and by the culture they choose to expose themselves to – the popular push of hatred –

- - - - - -

And having to take control at rehearsals, seeing through the lack of preparation by the writer and director today – total confusion and inertia – so I take the script and rewrite elements of it to bring it to better life and it works – it’s a joy to know that it is possible to do so much so quickly now –

- - - - - -

There is an etched plate of steel in the water basin gazed on by twelve art students – hairy, skateboarding giggle-fits – but it is not of our world – the third floor of the university block has become a shrine to the winter migration of a falcon – the bird’s barbed edges have long gone but it has left this accident of chemistry ready for us - to attempt to understand the cypher there where it’s full strength urine has marked the plate, etching the surface – now washed and ready for ink – we like to think that maybe the creature has left us a message, some first for cross-species communication – its name – or a representation of a map of the places it has been in its pathway north – or a list of kills perhaps? - We move together, the students following me to the bench where the ink is warmed in its crucible and is giving off the rich oily smell as it gets close to readiness. I layered it on to the steel with a padded rag, working it into the shallow marks – we avert our eyes, not wanting to lose the surprise of what might be there, waiting for it to be transferred eventually to paper, the end of the process – and when it is, there is nothing immediately recognizable, it is literally the mark of bird piss, you can see where it had run slightly as the bird moved away – but that abstract form now delineated in black and white still maintains all the meanings we want there to be; each one a reflection of the individual - (NB it is a fact that falcon urine can be 3000 times more concentrated in uric acid than its blood levels and that is strong enough to etch steel) -

ECHO 1/3/06 - 60 die in Iraq

The Day Of Breath And Air -

Stale air beneath the Thames 24:7 – the tired sighs of a cashier over morning coffee – Eleni Karaindrou’s Eternity Theme plays – a municipal fountain splatters onto the paving stones – a plastic frog statue dressed in waistcoat and fez –

my father goes back into hospital during the night, unable to breathe despite the oxygen tank beside his bed – his condition is changing, he has not been able to shake the bronchitis for over three weeks now and in turn this is affecting his heart - the visit to the UK in January has taken its toll –

the action of flight by a falcon - actually able to breathe through its bones which are hollow and connected to its airsacs (lungs) - a more efficient respiratory system than ours -

breath – what a luxury that must seem to my father – inspiration – it makes me wonder if my father is running out of inspiration, running out of ideas and purpose as he ages – and that life ceases the inspiration fades –

so much potential departure around at the moment, time passing into the ultimate moments – maybe it is this recent proximity to the Greenwich meridian? Is it tuning me into a greater awareness of time? Sensitivity to its passing and the meaning of mortality? – I am afraid – winding my wristwatch on to change the date from February 28 to March 1, 48 hours in a matter of seconds –

ECHO 28/2/06


A and L, an Ozzie couple, have moved into the house and it fills with the stench of his grass smoking – it stays in the nostrils, a present sweetness –

A, 30 going on 21, is the son of an archdeacon and he has a large tattoo on his right leg proclaiming ‘Son Of A Preacher Man’ – he is a hip-hop devotee and talks constantly about the new turntables he is about to take delivery of - he smokes constantly, is addicted to the stuff – and with my history I recognize the signs: the poor communication skills, the mood swings, the furtive behaviour, the devotion only to smoking at any given opportunity whether it be first thing in the morning before work or for the entirety of the evening – a day off work is seen as a full day to smoke and get stoned – the need comes before anything else it is the priority around which everything else is balanced – and it affects his relationship with L – with him in a permanent stoned state the way he relates grates against her sparky computer-whizz kid personality, she is stifled by it and that is evident – they rarely go to bed at the same time as A sits up on his own in his smoking den rolling joints and watching late night TV – Christ I remember the pointlessness of it all, the solitary malaise and funk of getting stoned alone, the feelings of separation and stagnation, of becoming distant from oneself, and of the constant fear and paranoia – what is A running from? because that is what it is really about when you smoke that much, subsuming some unresolved anger or despair – tension rises between them as L berates A in front us in the kitchen last evening, he raises his eyes and leaves the room – this only their second night in the house –

snow and a bracing wind this morning – I watch the dead leaves from last fall spiraling, caught in the corner of the garden fence – the naked tree rocks fiercely in its upper branches where Blue and Great Tits and the occasional Robin plunder the fresh buds, tiny green morsels – A enters the kitchen in a white bathrobe his eyes puffy with post-stoned morning lethargy built up in his sleep -

- - - - - -

My father goes back into hospital unable to breathe properly – I spoke to him only a few days ago and he sounded weak, heavy with infection and wheezing – it’s a very troubling situation – my Mother in turn is losing her voice through stress and worry – questions of mortality at the back of my mind throughout the day –

ECHO 26/2/06

She tells me the story of F over breakfast. F had been a school friend in the 60s and died a few months ago after years of alcoholism. Her family were no longer traceable (a brother, who had two aliases, eluded the police; all other immediate relatives were dead). Brian her lover, also an alcoholic, had died of throat cancer four years before. F was left with her cats and a friendly hairdresser who would visit once a month to cut her hair, and who it was had found F’s corpse slumped in an armchair. At the time the police were unsure as to whether or not she had taken her own life. However, at the inquest in Winchester, the doctor’s report made it clear that it was a combination of cirrhosis of the liver and hepatitis that had killed her. She had no effects of any worth, having spent all her money primarily on drinking; her clothes were borrowed or cast-offs passed on by friends. She did spend some of her income on her cat as the creature was found to be in good health. What was ultimately most tragic was that this woman, a wreck at the end of her life, had been a staunch anti-Apartheid journalist in South Africa for fifteen years, and had been imprisoned for what she had written. She had achieved something powerful with her life and talent. Had shown huge courage, bravery and commitment. How did she end up dying alone? What led her to a place of such despair having been someone of such strength? Was it simply down to the alcohol addiction? If so what had caused her to use it that way?

The details and the bigger picture of a life. Reconstructing it appeals to me. Why? Primarily because no one else was there to celebrate it. Her funeral had been attended only by a handful of school friends and some professional mourners and a few nuns. Because that final solitary part of her life must have been so painful, agonizing, and presumably full of hidden grief.

I wonder what happened in South Africa during her imprisonment. Something tough that never left her? Perhaps she was the victim of, or witness to, some of the beatings and torture that went on as part of the justice system or the violence perpetrated elsewhere? Something difficult to deal with in the long run? Maybe a friend or friends were killed? I think back to my visit to Robben Island and know that anything was possible in that time. Sad too to realize that in the end her life had only moved from one cell to another, that she became as much a prisoner of addiction and place in the UK as she was a prisoner of conscience in SA.

Wine from 11a.m. So she was a wino. Something slightly more feminine about that than say whisky. She could, as many alcoholics are, be capable of great charm that would be subsumed by an abusive, volatile personality when visited by friends or when talking on the phone.

Something was being gently revealed as the story was told – something elusive yet important and fascinating, sad as it was. I became curious to know what fears she had and what, if any, ambitions still made her daydream. She was highly intelligent after all. Who was the husband she married for three weeks in SA? Why did his brother when contacted by the authorities about her death claim he had paid for the funeral and wanted reimbursing when in fact it had been a Council burial as there was no immediate next of kin to pay for it?

Three places - two weeks, February

TRACK OF THE WEEK

Wandering Soul - by Kate Rusby from the album The Girl Who Couldn't Fly

ECHO 24/2/06

The Flaneur

Some sinister essence through Heron Quays, Canary Wharf, then on towards Limehouse and Shadwell where the seeds of history are more present, brief glimpses through the modern veil something parting, time travel occurring if you take the time to look – a pub called The Artful Dodger, grim, blackened front –
Investigating that area around Greenwich and Deptford and across the river into the Isle of Dogs – inevitable constant reminders of history – the Ravensbourne River close by, bridged first in 1830 – someone once said that the process of investigation was always more interesting than the result, outcome or final story –
Tia Maria cake from Hammersmith Farmers Market in the snow –
A tramp (dirty grey beard, stained pale blue coat, carrier bag) crossing a modern plaza square (little fountains dotted here and there) at an angle to a pretty young businesswoman on her way to work; he can’t take his eyes off her legs – Pavarotti sings ‘M’appari’ on a radio which accompanies the scene – the tramp eventually clashes into a chrome chair outside a café at the edge of the square –
The flaneur is a dying breed, if not dead already; too much fear on the streets to encourage that free roaming – but still that aptitude for walking and observing along an unplanned path, taking note, trying to absorb aspects of place, to allow them beneath the skin; to understand what lies in the brickwork, the people, the historic ‘stain’ with all its repetitions and reasons why certain things happen in a place, even why they have always recurred and attracted certain people or groups or activities – perhaps the flaneur is a vestige of the nomadic, scratching away at the sedentary; by necessity an eccentric governed by this obsession to resurrect archaeology and populate it with the cross-references of fact both past and present and fiction - the closest now is the psychogeographer, far more covert and occult in his/her activity – though perhaps even that behaviour is the influence of the modern city or the times?

ECHO 23/2/06

One Day’s Preoccupations:

Mangy-tailed fox, beautiful face, crosses the road 8am on the Pepys Estate heading into the giant warehouse opposite; she waits on the pavement in full view, fearless, watching the buses pull up at the stop and commuters climbing aboard – a discarded morsel has her eye and she will wait until she can slink over and retrieve it –
Natural mystic – on the tube she reads a print out about the Gospels, a call to hear them, and with a yellow highlighter pen she marks: Luke – on the front page of the dailies the image of a bombed Shi-ite shrine in Sammara, Iraq signals civil war – millenarian times –
The Itinerant – freedom at the expense of security – heading for another crossroads with dust of the road behind –
Buster Keaton, Harry Caul (The Conversation), Adrian Monk – outsiders trying to be understood, reaching out in their individual ways only to be thwarted in their attempts –
Teodoro, the character I’m playing at the moment, is the same – something protected inside which at the same time he is desperate to have cracked open and revealed –
My father’s health, my mother’s ability to cope in the long term and the geographic distance I am from them – I wonder if I shouldn’t move to Italy for a little while after the job in London, help them out, look after them both? –
Snow comes, acute –
I don’t want to use any old tricks in the production, in playing Teodoro; don’t want to rely on repeating anything easily accomplished –
I wonder who Rebecca was – her name is on a sticker stuck to a wardrobe in one of our new rooms here – was she young when the family moved in, and then grew through her teens here, watching the tree in the garden grow from her window, the occasional limb lopped off when it got too near the house? Maybe she had her first boyfriend or girlfriend during this time, sauntering over to the little park behind the house, arm in arm, to sneak a kiss and cuddle out of sight of her vicar Dad?

ECHO 22/2/06

The Harp of Erin is still a drinking pub – I was wrong - by day it looks like it is abandoned (grilles over windows, boarded doors, advertising posters on them) yet from 6pm it is open – clashing at the edge of reality – inside a woman drinks alone at the brightly lit bar, hair in a tight ponytail, fingers wrapped round a cigarette – two Nigerian men in duffel coats, collars turned up against the cold, drinking stout and talking fast – a large blonde woman in her early 40s stoops over a pool table at the back – banners are strung along the ceiling and around the glass shelf over the bar: Union Jacks, Jamaican flags, Nigerian, Cameroon – from the street the whole is over-exposed by the bright lighting, almost cinematic – it is a forlorn place, tucked into a corner of the world – its exterior of pink and white seems comical now, mutton dressed as lamb.

ECHO 20/2/06

New journey – The Harp Of Erin, forgotten 1930s pub, decorated like a large pink and white iced cake – McManus and Son (Builders) know the place well, their fathers before them used to dink in there – up to Harnworth Quays, huge corrugated steel edifices, ministries of public opinion, churning out The Daily Mail and the Evening Standard – Neptune Street comes like a wave before Jamaica Road – a young office worker finishes her make-up on the bus, brushes on cheeks, pouting lips at her reflection in the windows – through Druid Street and past Crucifix Lane, the smell of pagan and rotting Christianity – I wonder then if I still have the power and faith to create what is necessary over the next few weeks here in London, rehearsing a new character only half formed on paper, a sketch – a lone red telephone box stands in the midst of a desolated building site – signs proclaim ‘urban serenity’ in Wimpeys Watergardens condominium near the Arbuckles, Pizza Hut complex – nearby the Osprey Estate is degraded to the point of becoming dark matter and imploding, presumably taking all urban serenity with it when it goes - the grey areas of morality near Waterloo in the lee of the Eurostar station – a commuter talking into his hands free overly loud so we all know his business, Phases of Gravity held in the palm of his hand almost religiously, a biblical attempt – any journey into the unknown or along an unfamiliar route is bound to be a process of accruing information, direction, deletion, and reassessment, changes in tack and environment; it requires one constant whatever journey it may be: patience; marry that with an open-minded ability to leave ones preconceptions behind, and you will arrive at a good destination (except, that is, in rush hour in the metropolis) – the bloody arms of Parliament loom silently, unannounced, upon us as we cross Westminster bridge; the breath of heartache and lies still vividly upon it: the bleeding Iraqis, the families of dead service men and women – meanwhile the tourists still come to sample it digitally, take home their little record of history and tradition, the evidence of age without wisdom – and not far away New Scotland Yard has removed all evidence of itself; all the adverts to join the force, all banners and signs, all phone numbers and across every street level window bomb-proof curtains have been drawn – strange coincidences then of meeting old friends and recent acquaintances -

ECHO 19/2/06

Early Sunday morning in the city – Deptford High Street and the Kentish girls are heading homeward in their 4x4 Ravs and their Mini Coopers after a long night out, stereos playing loud dance music; one stops to pick up a hitch-hiker, black guy carrying work tools and a hard-hat – the newspapers are laid out by the Asian couple that own the little general stores, being the only shop open at 7.30am – magpies are like different creatures here, not shy and guarded like their rural relatives, instead these here wait close perched on railings and fences almost at eye level and watch you wander past without flying away, chattering – the buildings in the area are a mix of blemished ageing edifices and, further back from the main road, London low-rise ‘50s and ‘60s flats – the older properties have a tarnished grandeur: stucco and plasterwork decorations and embossed details of leaves, wreaths, filigree curlicues and porticos now flaking; some have corner turrets capped with ornate spires or weather-vanes or copper-stained slates –

Dream of South London and the pop groups of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s – Squeeze, The Jam – I am on a playground swings with an unidentified mate; we are raucously singing ‘Going Underground’ and ‘Another Nail In My Heart’ as we swing back and forth – we're dressed as snappily as possible for the time: black stay-press trousers, white shirts and a Harrington and duffel coat; my mate - lets call him Haggis for old times sake - has a trilby on, loafers and white socks – there is huge energy and fun emanating from us - we are no older than 19 years, 20 max – a female friend passes, we've known her for ages since school and after – black jumper and scarf, ponytail, drainpipe jeans – she shouts something when we say hello, scolds me angrily then yells that she is getting divorced already (from another mate of mine) and bursts into tears – I jump down from the swings and tell her I’m sorry – she looks fit to collapse so I take her off to a Turkish café a short walk away; we sit outside and she tells me all about the arguments, the coldness, the fruitless attempts at making it work, the bullshit that my mate has been giving her while he’s been off with other girls – she cries on my 19 year old shoulder and I wonder what it’s all about this growing up lark, she’s only two months older than me and now she looks lonelier than an OAP – somewhere ‘All Around The World’ by The Jam is playing on Radio 1 –

That odd sensation of waking up in a new home – the unfamiliar noises that you isolate in the dead of night and try to work out what they are and where they are coming from – eventually they will become commonplace and thereby virtually unnoticeable, but for now they are present: the clunking of the boiler and the ensuing throbs and pops of the central heating; the shifting of floorboards as they expand or contract to temperature – the disorientation of unknown place and presence – and then where I sit and write in a room at the front with the blinds down, pinned to the wall handwritten on a faded scrap of paper is this quote:

'I said to the man who stood at the gate "Give me light that I may tread safely into the unknown," and he replied "Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than the light and safer than a known way."

ECHO 18/2/06

Home like some odd, raggedy palace on the high road eastwards, not far from Marlowe’s haunt, the river a whisper on the other side of a council estate where it branches into muddy creeks and inlets still populated by warehouses and shady alleyways – far lights and balconies – a room facng the road with exposed wooden floorboards throughout and Victorian fireplaces tiled green still cold – a large annexe where the diocese used to hold their meetings and Church dances and which we hope will become our play and party den – the attic space is full of junk and old wooden beams – Pol does so well all day, suffering from almost incapacitating pains and back problems she carries on with barely any complaints pulling at the cases and boxes and bags (our meager possessions this time round), shuffling a new space to make it home – meanwhile we find our feet in the city once again: the totality of people, the hurried and the harried, the spatially inept, the attitudinal street boys n’ gals and hoodies and skaters and gangstas all pursing their lips in some strange universal challenge or trying to stare people out with iron gazes – and then there is the river here, with its one –eyed spies and swindlers, the charlatans of the north bank watching, waiting, asking questions of the south with an arch smile and a nod to the past – strange too that I know this place from before, to be familiar with it from almost a decade ago, the doors and the tavern behind –

ECHO 17/2/06

Setting to move back to London – trepidation, but now things become wide open again – working again which I need to do and some sense space – the only task is how adaptable we will be to the changes? Dramas are forming as disparate people claim territory and little governances of the house, domesticities, power games – still, elsewhere the stars were out, the pub warm and friendly with its spike-haired locals reeling back home along Toms Town Lane or falling into the River Arrow -

ECHO 16/2/06

Abu Ghraib prison coughs up its ugly memory once again as more images of abuse of detainees are released – sordid, bloody sequences – harrowing – the motions of a prisoner bashing his head in anguish against a huge steel door that he has been strapped to – dogs snarling at prisoners – naked men tied together or being knelt on by US soldiers – smears and pools of blood – I wonder if the history of that place is inescapable, that it is passed on to a legacy of evil kept alive by the US Army and Government, a legacy that the US is condoning and seemingly prepared to expand upon in turn making them blatantly no better than Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship – do they believe that they are morally faultless since 9/11? That horrid episode is an excuse for sanctioned behaviour like this? In which case are they not tarring the memory of those people who dies in the Twin Towers? Surely their suffering and their families suffering should not beget bestial torture in their name? And that justice and truth become empty rhetoric in the mouths of Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cambone? Are not the people of Iraq also worth that honesty if they are to have any faith in the attempt to bring them some sense of self-governance? Can you blame them for anger when the history of a place like Abu Ghraib is being brought back to life? Why would anyone want to model themselves on killers and torturers in the name of democracy? How is it that the neo-cons are blind to this?

TRACK OF THE WEEK

San Michele Arcangelo - from Birds & Church Windows by Ottorino Respighi.

ECHO 15/2/06

Scattered feathers, pale at the edge of a field – a bloody bloom on the soil; an extraordinary mark of death in early Spring – a Sparrowhawk inevitably borne down from above onto an unknowing Woodpigeon – despite the stillness here now, it can still be imagined, the energy left behind in that wide circle of feathers and down with the dash of gore is enough to provide one with an image of the moment of impact –

Images released of British soldiers (boys) smashing Iraqi teenagers over their heads and bodies with thick riot sticks, pummeling the writhing boys on the floor hidden behind a wall and a voice accompanies the activity, a voice from behind the camera full of glee and enjoyment at the scene as if it is simply an innocent schoolyard ‘bundle’ –

A storm beats at the window all night – doors crack and panes of glass shatter – when the day finally breaks it is clear, almost magnified -

ORNITHOLOGICAL CHECKLIST

Redwing – 20+ Goldfinch – 3
Long Tailed Tit – 8 Goldcrest – 2
Buzzard – 1 Fieldfare – 10+
Grey Wagtail – 2 Greenfinch – 2
Green Woodpecker – 1 Lapwing – 20+
Yellowhammer - 2

ECHO 12/2/06

My Papa taken into hospital with pneumonia, apparently mild but it is putting his heart under strain – not long after I get this news I wander the house feeling lost and with a sense of dread – imagery of oxygen masks and desperate breathing, these kinds of horrors – I stop at the window at the top of the stairs, it seems an apt place to come to rest and I don’t know why at first, but I’m attracted to the raw wooden sill and frame, it comforts me – I watch cats and blackbirds shadow each other in the garden; or else eating windfall apples at the foot of the tree, their soft innards exposed to the drizzle and turning brown – funny that last evening, dining out with Pol’s parents, we talked at length about my fathers pride in his work and achievements, his history and the communities he grew about his restaurants in the UK – even though his passing seems unlikely today or in fact as a result of this sudden illness, I know that I have to deal with the inevitable and it saddens me – I take a long walk this evening out to the River Arrow, the drizzle still falling; a great sense of peace and warmth out in the meadows, of silence and reflection – the worry of the day lifts and a small, sharp pebble in my boot digs into my foot and keeps me in the present, stopping my mind from dwelling on possibilities, the scenarios of grief – symbolism was everywhere: dense, impenetrable trees dripping, almost sweating, in damp folds and soft mossy places; a shallow stagnant pond by the name of Grey Lady Lake hidden in a wood with dark twisted objects just beneath the water – for a brief time I have premonitions and anticipations, as if at every birdcall or rising of crows from their roosts, someone might try to get in touch with me with bad news –

ECHO 10/2/06

Big wooden barriers, slats burnished to a metallic sheen by the weather – in the Southwark Diocese offices we meet a friendly woman and a wiry, thin bishop who peers at us through thick glasses – London seems void of people today, there are empty spaces where people used to be, and it feels strange (again I have that feeling of it being at arms length from me, veiled) – I recall Karl Wallinger in his studio, I wonder what he’s doing now after all that speed and activity, up there high above the city, gazing back in time – many dead flies on the windowsill, ornately splayed legs, thorax curved over to touch the head, caught in the afternoon light, swallowed by dust – all these young film-makers and TV Drama students come in with their little digi-cams and hide behind the pop-out LCD screens, mumbling their way through their sessions, a lack of expression, a lack of communication, surely storytellers should be able to communicate?

ECHO 8/2/06

Who knows of Samashki in Chechnya? Who made any noise about it in the West? About the degradation of morality there perpetrated by the Russian army, by the ‘new’ Russian leaders? Who knows that the small town was shelled perpetually for months? That civilians were targeted before any strategic, historic or symbolic target; that the occupation force regularly entered the town on foot or in tanks in the supposed search for Chechen rebel fighters and instead laid waste to houses, torching them, bombarding them, maintaining a cordon of fear. But more than that, fuelled by the cocktail of drugs (Promodol and Dimedrol) issued in their first aid kits, the soldiers shot civilians point blank, not just men of fighting age but women, children and animals too. They opened up hiding places and burned people alive in them, pouring petrol in and setting light to them with a match or a grenade. It was even reported that a child was lynched and his body remained hung from a tree with a sign around his neck that reminded the population that ‘The Russian Bear has awoken.’

Hypocrisy begins at home.

- - - - - -

Panic and fear, anxiety riddling my body at 2a.m. Can’t sleep; lie waiting for it to return or for the dawn to appear whichever comes first. Mind creates a maelstrom of images and concerns amounting to overload: time passing, where is my life going; the grip of failures; money worries; immediately, the fear of having to drive the M40 later in the morning on little or no sleep – feel my self literally shrink and shrivel –

Eventually, behind the wheel, I see the dawn and it comes on glorious; a slow, visual rumble of burning pink at first, a gross ember. Then somewhere near Banbury the sun breaks the horizon and blinds the East-facing, burning off any thin cloud and gradually summoning blue –

ECHO 7/2/06

Something in the harsh glare of halogen lamps almost bleached but still maintaining its form – something pushing at the boundaries, beyond the norm, beyond predictable (is it possible?) – a blast on paper seeking out the darkest corners and throwing in light: open, vibrant, scintillating; of bare flesh, legs in unison, glossy lips, eyes of cats – beyond lethargy, tiredness – swept along by anarchic seeds, adventure, whip cracks in the street – taking a long hard look at what I’m carrying around with me, where I’ve been; more than faith, beyond belief; at the edge of things, borders, places of physical change and places that are aspects of the self – the allure of the historic, greatness through smut

Images from where I’ve been:
A plastic woman removes religion from a top step with crack pipe;
Liberal humour in cinema foyer displays self on red carpet;
Commuter woman displays underwear in high heels and neon blue;
A four digit hand at the edge of a frame tinkers with sneaker laces;
Fourteen buckets of ice on the back seat of a taxi;
A naked woman rolls on oily green tarpaulin;
Celebrities in dream states replace their respective images in Polaroid versions of themselves to cut out and keep.

ECHO 6/2/06

Karachi, Baghdad, Jakarta, Gaza City, London, Denmark – the noise is coming on loud, the volume turned up fullest into the red – everyone is demanding blood, and blood is what they will get – ours and theirs – Christian and Muslim blood, the Dark Ages are returning and we are at the behest of the elites on both sides in this decision – 2000 years means nothing, has taught us nothing about achieving a higher goal, an example of respect, education, progress, tolerance, humanity – all the words written, all the images, all the knowledge is being debased –

Meanwhile:

Michelle sits in Burger King in the Kingfisher Shopping Centre with a large paper cup of coffee and a Whopper for lunch. Black two piece, short skirt, hair back in a tight ponytail, the secretarial look is perfected. She gazes out of the window onto the mezzanine where the pushchairs and the OAPs roam; her hand ponderously placed on her cheek like she’s forgotten something. Why this underlying sense of dread or fear again? Where does it come from? It is a question she asks herself often these days, gazing into next doors garden from her first floor flat or, as now, arranging to meet her best friend for lunch; she’ll bring her three-year-old and they’ll all laugh for an hour before Michelle goes back to work in the reception at the recruitment agency fending off advances from the local lads and silly questions from the Eastern Europeans who’ve just arrived in the area looking for a job.

I am heading out to the superstore Tescos at the edge of town (Oakenshaw), and as I pull into the slip road heading toward the car park an Audi TT slips in ahead of me. Silver bodied with a pale red cabriolet soft top and either side of the number plate two silver Playboy Bunny symbols. I reckon that the guy driving this must believe himself to be some kind of super stud, but as the car takes a right hand bend ahead I see that the driver is actually a woman: late forties, serious blonde highlights, and a fake tan that makes a Seville orange look bleached by comparison – she guns the motor along one of the routes to parking spaces and slips effortlessly between a couple of family saloons. When she gets out of the car she checks to see how many people are looking at her. I am guessing she owns either a series of local body-health suites or hairdressing salons. At a guess I’d say her name was either Natalie or Tracey (with an ‘e’).

- - - - - -
Daylight and life – this is what she says she needs before her nightshift starts, so we go for a little circular walk – school’s out for the day so the road is full of cars and 4x4s, and hurried pockets of children and parents who all (can’t work out why) look vaguely scared – maybe it’s just stress – through the council estate at the end of the road, identical houses, where men collect cars that don’t go anywhere and bags of litter remain at the foot of trees and shrubs and big sisters walk their little brothers home – beyond this, numerous derelict and abandoned low lying factory pre-fabs are set back from the road, evidence of local 1960’s manufacturing hey-day long since dormant – arranged at the rear are some large machines removed from the gutted buildings, now rusting, and old lemon-yellow office furniture worn out by time and the weather – we go in to the brand new breeze-block and steel Leisure Centre, a friendly girl in a bright yellow sweatshirt and jeans shows us around the facilities: the new (empty) pool and gym hall, the changing rooms, even the barely touched drinks dispenser is a new feature – a man in his early fifties sits alone in the viewing room overlooking the pool, staring at the soft ripples on the water there, he doesn’t move as we pass by and I cannot work out what he’s doing there but either he’s a pervert waiting to watch anyone who arrives for a swim or else he’s meditating in the peace and quiet and warmth – once out of there we head back, the wind whips across the adjacent playing field and we roam along narrow alleyways between housing estates that remind me of being a teenager and losing my virginity in one on a summer’s night . . .

Cathedra (R101)

In the morning they are with ashes
Afloat, sucked within the skeleton
That titan cross-hatch of girders
Char black with experiments

Gargantuan shoulders hunched against the wind
Change colour with the cries of memory
There in their perpetually gaping mouths
Gazes turned to altitude trails flailing

More, the ball of flame to the earth echoes
Hydrogen light bodies trying to spread their wings
In shadow play - sequenced brothers of the land -
Historic comets falling for progress –

In the evening, creature forms
Wrestle with the notorious landscape
Lumber like invading alien warhorses


Cardington, Bedfordshire 2000 - 2006

ECHO 5/2/06

The couple still managed their love life despite the covert need to accomplish it without the parents overhearing or discovering them. For the woman, in fact, it became something of a thrill – the prospect of being caught aroused her even more.

- - - - - -

A man alone in his car driving at breakneck speed through the night. No longer knowing who or what he is – just going, leaving whatever past he had behind him or at least trying to – his successful partner, stability – now he loses all sense of fear and mortality and instead of heading home, guns the accelerator and follows the road wherever it will take him – he no longer feels he can provide or give, that he is not the equal of her, that his opportunities are limited and predictable – all night he goes, just the white lines and the darkness beyond the halo of the headlamps, briefly he stops at ‘Rumblin’ Tums’ café – eventually he ends up at the coast, a small fishing town – he has no idea if he is North or South but here he stops and books himself into a hotel with the notion that he might start afresh without burden of the previous ‘him’ – the blind funk, the absolute terror of jealousy and failure, of an inner loneliness turning itself into solitude in fact a call to be found -

ECHO 4/2/06

A mature woman’s aversion to ‘things’;
Feeling removed from the world due to symptoms of a heavy cold - lethargy and barriers and the inability to speak, which in turn causes familial strife;
Knowing that my parents are leaving the country and returning home soon brings back latent feelings of abandon and singularity;
The word ‘failure’ etches itself into the past 24 hours;
Cars become places of serious discussion.

ECHO 3/2/06

The students walk into the room. They are young, none older then 21. I’ve forgotten how young that is, how awkward you are in the world. Most are incredibly shy and not very good communicators. Some play ignorance like a fashion accessory, some just wear a shell. It’s hard to get the scenes we are working on and examining full of energy, to motivate them and therefore us in the process; with two exceptions throughout the entire day. I am surprised, saddened, and by the middle of the afternoon, bored. I trot off in my mind, filling in gaps and watching swans come in to land at approximately the same height as the university building we are in, their heads extended and pushing onward in unison. We take a break as dusk begins to turn the light in the room. The students thank us sheepishly and leave. I recline across three chairs, tired and at an end, a cup of instant coffee (which I hate) propped on my chest. The other actor-cum-lecturer comments that all the scripts this afternoon have had a prostitute in as protagonist; she wonders why it is that these youngsters have such a preoccupation with the seedier side of life – because it’s what they know from the TV and because it makes for ‘good’ drama material, easy drama material. We enter into a discussion about evil. Had we ever experienced true evil? Silence for the first time all day as we pondered the most interesting question we’d had to deal in that time. She answered that fortunately she didn’t believe she had. I answered that I had. And it had been a surprise because it wasn’t singular, it wasn’t personal, it was very much a collective experience of events in one particular place. I had seen it in faces and heard it in voices and felt it at the end of numerous fists. She was curious where it had been, but I couldn’t bring myself to reveal the location and I won’t here either. You’ll know it if you end up there.

ORNITHOLOGICAL CHECKLIST

Grey Wagtail – 3 Heron – 1
Pied Wagtail – 4 Goldfinch 25 +
Song Thrush – 3 Moorhen – 3
Mallard – 4 Red Kite – 1
Lapwing – 6 Redwing – 10+
Coal Tit – 1 Jay – 4
Green Woodpecker- 1 Buzzard – 1
Kestrel – 8 Sparrowhawk – 1
Wren – 2 Fieldfare – 20+
Greenfinch - 2 Nuthatch - 1

ECHO 1/2/06

In High Wycombe of all places, five flights up discussing journalism and bad theatre – realisation – a moment, there with concrete domes stretched out toward those singularly suburban hills – the truth is a difficult beast to master particularly when you are trying to write about something beyond the self – what gives a writer the right to presume that he/she could write about an issue in the rarefied atmosphere of his/her own home/workspace? If a playwright sits down to write about (for example) the US/UK invasion of Iraq, what truth can they be expressing other than second hand info and guesses?

- - - - - -

ROYALTY

The man walks proudly along the street in this satellite village. He walks at a pace very much his own. The village allows him that. When he moved away, years ago, to Brighton – alternative cosmopolis - he was beaten up for the way he looks, the way he crosses gender. But here, in the non-descript village where he was brought up, he is left alone; observed, yes, but left alone.

When I am introduced to him he is on his way to the shops. I have seen him do this daily. His hair is swept back from his forehead and completely bleached. Through his eyebrows are three metal studs and ring piercings. An elegant black, embroidered velvet coat, hangs heavily down to his black leather DM’s and is finished with black fur collar and cuffs. His fingernails are painted black; and he carries a black and white cow skin handbag. His face, slightly puffy, is whitened with powder, enough to change his natural skin tone; his eyebrows are neatly plucked. He does not walk so much as glide along the street, his head held high. He doesn’t say very much, doesn’t need to.

The only people that give him grief, and make him flinch with the memory of the Brighton beating, are the three lads who charge up and down the street on their mini-bikes in the early evening, hammering the air with the incessant, thin whine of their motors and throwing the occasional taunt at him as they pass. But they dare not touch him - no one does - for fear of being ostracised.

- - - - - -

Polluted nose and throat from Monday’s exposure to London.

This is a place of men in vans, with huge paunches and steely eyes.

ECHO 30/1/06

London again – so overly familiar that I feel I have not even had to travel there despite the fact I have been up since 7am to make my connections – everything I see and hear is so ingrained in me it holds no sense of the new – plus I feel the weight and size of this city like no other, I don’t for example feel that in Birmingham or Manchester, it’s oppressive, bullying – Streatham (my destination) stinks of burnt cooking oil and cigarettes, fluctuates between the two – the high street is laced with questionnaire holders trying to stop people in the street to complete a survey on street crime or better public transport (both of which are beyond repair, this is the new forlorn hope) – when I leave I am surrounded by this halo of acridity and the bitter gripe of carbon dust from the Underground I can taste at the back of my throat –

A man with an eye-patch climbs up to the top deck of the bus – someone receives some harsh news about their finances; always London seems to promulgate financial woes in certain areas (SW and SE being two prime zones), a city where fortune and poverty are side by side in totally unequal measure – a young Ethiopian man bangs his feet hard against the pale blue plastic facia of the bus interior, he is bored, and as he does his kicking he looks furtively around at the rest of the passengers but carries on nonetheless, almost asking to be challenged – at the rear of the bus another young man plays his favourite music extra loud on an MP3 mobile phone, the music distorts and fills the bus with a grating, unpleasant beat –

Passing through Brixton High Street again, I find it hard to believe I lived there for so long – I have no fond nostalgia for it, just a sense of stress and hurt (physical and emotional), struggle and fear - peppered by the occasional pleasant or special memory –

Eventually I hole up in a greasy café near Baker Street run by a Turkish man and wife – ash and cigarette butts have been left on the table and I sweep them off with the edge of my hand – a watching ‘seer’ in the corner comments in Turkish to the owner about each customer that enters and what they order, the two men laugh impishly – I am waiting out the close of this long day, expensive and strange – the seer rolls a cigarette, wraps his beige scarf about his neck, it is a cold day and with night creeping in now the temperature is dropping to its iciest, felt in here as the door opens and closes onto the street with customers leaving or entering – London always seems colder when it gets cold, all those buildings channelling the wind between them and throwing it out in certain places twice as harsh –

Ponder the street through the window – London is like a coating, some kind of jelly-like substance which it is possible to extricate myself from today, but which rests upon me thick and gelatinous and numbing – I can still see through this layer but everything beyond is slightly distant and blurred – it doesn’t have the capacity to wear me down on this short visit, not as it used to; that wearying confusion of space, speed, cacophony and stress doesn’t infiltrate with the same pervasive, seeping, claw-like power as it did day-to-day – London the invader, the rapacious army: consuming, assailing –

Suspicion everywhere: new anti-terrorist posters, new claims that ‘Together We Can Beat It’ – like a war zone – and everyone scans you far more on buses and tubes, judging, wary –

Back in the café, I ask for the toilet and am directed by the seer to a blistered and scratched white door to one side of the room, it is stiff to open, so much so that I have to pull hard and almost fall back into the café – the seer shows me with a quick gesture that I must go downwards – I peer into the long corridor beyond heading toward the rear of the property, at the other end is indeed a stairwell lit by a kind of dim cosmic-blue light and leading down into what I presume is the basement area – there is a large full-length mirror at the end of the corridor so you see yourself walking toward the stairs – the top step is an ornate ceramic tile, decorated in Turkish style – down the stairs and at the bottom the area beyond smells of mothballs – the lavatory itself, off to the right, has a sagging roof and a dark blue shirt has been left on the floor beneath the two wash basins – the toilet itself, when I venture in, is full of dark, semi-solid shit – I presume a vagrant had come in to have a wash and a dump and then left having forgotten his/her shirt – after recoiling from the visions that greet me down there I go straight back upstairs and into the café, to be greeted by the seer grinning back at me as I open the door – for a moment I wonder if he is the faecal culprit and that he had left it there deliberately, that the whole experience beyond that door (the dim lights, the mirror, the otherworldly atmosphere etc) was some kind of test and that he gleans something of each persons character when they venture down there that he can share with the owner – he winks at me and begins the process of rolling another cigarette -

ECHO 26/1/06

Making our way along the M62 through Saddleworth towards York, spying the red coated man of Hart’s Head Moor watching and waiting by the roadside in his faded serge coat, surrounded by the noise and the dust of this arterial run carved through the high land; his is a vantage point, and he waits like a dumb sentinel as if someone may come and give him release, held in check by invisible shackles – on every bridge someone has stuck the word ‘gouranga’ in huge bold letters on fluorescent coloured paper, this word cascades away into the distance, the last effort of a Hari Krishna devotee who walked miles and miles to do this –

Strange now that I have seen my work recorded and presented in the Jorvik Viking Museum to know that my face is being viewed by the public, relayed over and over again for at least the next 5 years; whilst I age it will stay the same (though there is the addition of make-up and a wig in this case) – I will gradually become an artefact – it’s a pleasant feeling – mixed in with the genuine ancient artefacts of York, the leather and the tools close on 2000 years old –

Sparrowhawk by the roadside with its fresh catch, a magpie, in death throes beneath it’s talons – the bird of prey standing upright over it, wary and proud at the same time, challenging any other creature to come near and demand what it has caught – then, pitifully, another magpie (presumably the mate of the dying one) comes close and tries to fend the hawk off - to no avail, the twitching and fluttering of its mate are the last movements it will make as it tries to salvage life but cannot -

ECHO 24/1/06

Back to Redditch today job-hunting – eye-opener – we make our way to the temp agencies for interviews to register, sign up etc – see what we may get, though we don’t hold out much hope – faces stare back from the windows of the industrial agencies along the same street: sallow faces, shaved heads, shifting feet, sorry looking eyes - as we sit in the reception area of the first one, filling out the forms required, I listen to the background conversations between the agents and their clients, they tell how quiet it is at the moment, how January just doesn’t have the same forecast as December – the mood is grey, dismal – then a troop of young men wanders in and they gather and hang about in the corner – all of them wearing jeans and short jackets or coats, some of them I recognise as those I saw gazing back earlier from the other agency window – they are Eastern European and some speak better English than others who may not speak English at all – one is evidently voted spokesman and he approaches the little blond receptionist and asks for a job – the girl manages her usual routine and realises that the group have not really understood the procedure to register, they smile back at her as if she has given them each the best paid job in the world, but she is merely explaining they’ll have to make an appointment and come back with CVs etc for interview next week – one of them cottons on and whispers and then they all shake their heads ‘no’ – this goes on for a few minutes and then they agree to come back next week but are none the wiser and they file on out – later, two late-teenagers arrive and ask to see ‘Joe’ and are told to take a seat - they are wisecrackers, street hip, and restless – one of them starts to talk openly about his forthcoming court case and reckons he’ll get away with whatever he’s done; he talks about shifting ‘M’ (I am guessing he’s talking in ‘code’ about dealing marijuana); he is proud of himself and he looks around the waiting room as if challenging all those in there to better him – they are both told that ‘Joe’ asked them to come in at 4 and it is only 2.45 so they leave with a kind of subtle noise making (banging feet, slamming doors out in the corridor) – a young Asian man enters wearing a dark blue duffle coat and stands at the reception desk and asks for work - the receptionist gives her usual spiel re: registration and the man replies ‘come on, no, just a job you know, a job’ - the girl repeats herself - ‘but a job’ he says, ‘it’s all I ask here; no, you have a job?’ – it is quietly desperate and he has the air of a man who has been told the same thing everywhere he has gone all day long, and probably has the dole office on his back or may even have had his benefit cut off - in the end the receptionist calls in ‘Joe’ who eventually offers the man a packing job for the night in a new supermarket complex, he goes through the directions of how to get there with the man who nods and finally asks: ‘but only for one night?’ and Joe says ‘yes, but if they like you, you might get a few more nights’ – the man leaves thanking Joe profusely - if he’s lucky he’ll have got minimum wage (£5.05) for 9 hours work without sleep or benefits of any kind and that may have to last him all week.

ECHO 23/1/06 - Burford.

Waking to the noise of hundreds of crows in their tree-top roosts; a cacophony of calls that never ceases or takes a pause from dawn through to mid-day.

Photos of the couple that own the house we are staying in for a night. Everywhere. Some in triplicate and most posed in studios and shot through semi-romantic misted lenses. The pair gazes into each other’s eyes or smile wanly and misty eyed out at the camera. I find it unsettling, at odds with the ease of a relationship as if they are trying too hard.

In Stow-on-the-Wold the Brethren preachers come out and stand on the corner of the market square, calling out their messages and sermons, warning the people of apocalypse and sin. Catherine of Siena may well have been proud (see yesterday’s entry)! These three men, two well into their seventies, the other a grey looking man in his thirties are immoveable, as if their feet are stuck fast to where they stand and their mouths keep on bellowing, cavernous. I guess this is an event at least 400 years old.

The cracked iron hearth–plate in the ancient fireplace – cracked into three pieces, yet still upright there – a man on horseback, Lord Fairfax, his steed broken at the sides so the head is separated as are the hindquarters from the rest – it dates from the time of the English Civil War – blackened with age, torn apart, yet still standing – I half expect it to get up and move, to trot off on the baying horse and spew musket smoke and powder and brimstone (seems to be the order of the day here) – fervour and bloody violence underneath the ‘peaceful’ Cotswold town. And as if in prompt my Father tells the story of how, after banning a wholly unpleasant character from his hotel bar for causing damage to it, was beaten up by some of the locals one night. Turns out they all (including the banned man) were members of the local branch of the National Front and they had decided to meet out their brand of ‘support’ for their fellow racist.

- - - - - -

the fieldfare is my echo
gazing from this window to where
he stands – son, marshal, devotee –
listening to the mid-day moment
and the certainty of the next windfall

the radio signal guides me
toward evening - if I’m lucky enough -
swinging through comedy at the basin
cold feet on the ticky tiles
worried about rising ennui