This is the sort of thing...

...we have to put up with.

It’s not easy. Having said that it’s easier for me then it is for the boys. I can at least just walk, I don’t have an imperative compulsion to wee on something every few yards. It amazes me that they aren’t completely dehydrated by the end of the day, I imagine walking into a pub dragging two hairy husks behind me.

I imagine a lot of things. That’s the beauty (and the curse) of having oodles of time and space and no one with whom to share it (spoil it), one’s mind wanders and you’re allowed the room to indulge yourself fully in your own brand of jibberwaffle.

I’m stuck somewhere in my noggin with a half formed thought that the river is somehow allegorical, that I’ve passed my wicket gate and am on my own ‘straight and narrow’. It does appear to cut across (my) life, and if you’ve walked far enough, the where you’ve been, are, and where you’re going become blurred – blurred sufficiently for landmarks like bridges to become significant.

There are times when I feel I want to catalogue, to commit to memory, to burn sharp pictures of the abrupt end of woodland and the step forward into dappled sunshine, the gaping, forbidding mouths of dark pitch, echo less tunnels or even the sheet of sleety rain seen approaching across the wind.

But there’s no allegory here, for surely any simile should serve a purpose? I might so purposelessly compare Charlie’s bladder habits with April showers as the river with the habitual drawer of my life.
Eventually we’ll come to the sea, that’s all I know – at least I think I know that. Follow a river and you’ll reach the sea?

And now I need the sea. I’m full to overflowing with leaf littered pathways beside glittering moribund water. Sick of foppish beauty. I long for the brutality of open water on spring tides driven into rock and stone by bitter winds.

Do you ever dream of hiding tight behind the log, by the fire lit, in a whistling westerly shrieking it’s curse to the plume and spume of dying waves?

Life’s taken a turn for the gentle, and I don’t like it.

oh,

I nearly forgot, Kristie, you make the mail all better.

Thanks.

I are...

...a nonny mouse.

That’s me.

A face amongst faces, a blur. Now you see me now you don’t. A smudge on the psychedelic hysterical cornucopia of life.

My blue heaven, my fantasy….come true.

The world is so giddy with possibilities I hardly know where to start.

There’s not a single person I know, ipso facto I can’t offend any of them (at least not with anything more than the most fleeting of misgivings). I might begin to speak, eve’s drop, debate or divilishly just plain listen and simply walk away without an so much as an‘excuse me’ if the conversation becomes even remotely boring or bothersome.

The dogs and I can walk to our heart’s content or sit and procrastinate with the languid dipping ducks in the leaf strewn pond if we wish, and gaily doff our caps with a cheery, affected “I say, what a splendid day!” Or walk on by in sulky silence if it suits our churlish mood.

Yesterday I sang all day. On Sunday we sat under a new moon on the low stone wall of St. Peters cemetery (wherein, solemnly interred, lie many of the most boldly named dead people I know; the Cluckbuckets (including Ethel! indeed), Alice Sparkles, Hugh D. Pugh, Stanley Gumpett and Fanny Growcock (would that the latter two had met and hit I off, I should cry with laughter for a week if I ever met a Gumpett - Growcock)) and barked our own chorus to the evening gritstone walls and high, dull, dead eyes of the West Clerestory – until other canine voices (and who knows, perhaps the odd human one too) joined our clamour and we fled giggling to the river.

On Saturday, in the main, I worked a long but ad hoc and part time shift in the local bar. There was live music, and fun and drunkenness and too few glasses and rather poor (though I admit it myself) service at times, though always cheerful. And I was asked if I were gay by a lady even older than myself because I had apparently spurned her advances – though I still don’t know what form they had taken. Perhaps it was her propensity for lubricating her copious bossoms in the drip tray on the bar when asking for a drink, or more likely when she demanded a pen and paper – on reflection maybe, to write a saucy message and telephone number – and I happily informed her that there was no need to write her order, if she spoke veeerrrry slowly I was sure that I probably decipher her dialect no matter how gin sodden her vowels might be.

On reflection tomorrow I might try being gay. They do seem to have such fun.

Now, if I might also open mail with such anonymity then my existence would be truly idyllic. Although I no longer live in my old address I am still naïve enough to have it redirected to whence I may occasionally retrieve it. Who knew that there were so many peevish people in the world? One would think that the scant pounds and pennies that I owe to various once-well-heeled and vigorous institutions would be, so far as harassing me, below their dignity in view of the many trillions that they now owe us. If I were they I should certainly move out of that vast glass-house before casting sharp, bitter little rocks in my direction.

Hey ho, a-nonny-no and bollocks dipped in raspberry sauce – they’ll have to catch me first.

seen a ghost?

flying pigs
sleepy wet dogs
faery lights
frost
cold, wet and windy nights viewed through the window in the glow of an open fire
a duvet on the sofa
sweet chestnuts and marshmallows in hot chocolate
a ring without a finger and a small, crushed golden heart

what evokes the season in you?

gypsy

Allow me one more dip in the plunge pool of self indulgence. A swallow dive, not really, a swan song more like. After all if you can’t be self indulgent on your own blog, where can you?



Does it annoy you too, that people seem to just talk at you, not with you? As if you were just a sounding board, a solid surface for them to reconfirm their own views by reflection. Apparently one is sufficiently interesting (or more likely just conveniently docile) enough for the speaker to voice their opinion to, but not interesting or charismatic enough for them to wish to listen to your considered reply.



I breathe in to speak. They continue to talk…implacably, continually….as if they had gills, like a Jehova’s Witness on speed. I give in.



A small thing? Yes perhaps. But they add up. The small rudenesses, the simple polite informalities that evaporate in the hustle and bustle, the inconvenient tiny truths of busy urban life all add up to make you want to shout and swear and hit out to burst the bubble of anger that’s welling up inside…..it’s not just me is it?



No more. Soon. No more.



I don’t know how to describe it, but I feel (and I think I know that this is how some survivors do feel) like a crash survivor. I’ve survived my own crash, and even if it was metaphorical it felt very real. And now, no minor irritation can bother me, I have no time for annoying trivia, I have – quite literally – held my hand up to people who have kidnapped me and my ears and stolen my time to say “no”, life is too precious.



But it’s much more than that. There’s no melodrama here, just a growing acceptance that I am dying slowly, like a tree perhaps in unsuitable ground, withering from the inside out. I have no illusions that I’m different in any way to all of the other hunched shoulders intent on our daily grind, weaker than most perhaps, too sensitive and less able, but I have begun to wince and ache as the protective enamel of my soul wears thin. It will kill me to remain here, of that I am sure, spiritually and eventually physically too. It’s a process in progress.



Everything else is simple common sense then in the context that I genuinely have nothing to lose.



It occurred to me to ask your advice. I have more genuine friends here then ‘out there’, but there’s really no need, it would just be rhetoric. So I thought I’d just let you know so you don’t think I’m under any illusions or fantasies of hermitic bliss, that I’ve thought this through – especially since the boys are coming with me and it won’t exactly be idyllic for them either.



There’s plenty of wilderness here still, especially in the North. And I can withdraw in planned stages – with equipment, resources, food and tools not to need to take unnecessary and foolhardy risks. There’s a small reservoir of money to draw on for essentials and in case of emergency, and of course there’s all of the time in the world….to find a place suitable and sufficiently out of attentions way to settle and build.



At the moment I am in a state of growing anticipation and horror, made very real because I know that I am actually going to do this.

keep the swelling, lose the pain

Have you ever,

howled in woods?
whinnied and nickered,
pranced, danced, shied
and cried and generally
made a great fuss...

At least there was no one around, be thankful for small mercies. And there was me, and the boys, enjoying a long walk in the woods on a beautiful autumnal morning full of great grey almost trees hesitating in a slow lazy mist.

And then I stuck my dick in the nettles.

Not just like that you understand, rather I went for an alfresco wee and was distracted by Charlie scratting around in the leaves behind me.....and then I stuck my dick in the nettles.

It hurts. You can't imagine how much it hurts. I don't want to describe how much it hurts because then I'll have to remember....exactly how much it hurts.

The only 'tiny' crumb of comfort is that it also swells up.

you'll never guess but...

Where a river floes, where people are apt to gather to the source of traffic and commerce, of liquid life.

Great cities, gritty purposeful towns, villages becalmed in seas of green meadow, divided by arterial waterways, green, brown or sparkling brook that give and take in measure the ingredients and effluent, the fish and fowl, and crop and cooling balm to set the form of white hot steel in shapes we know and need in clouds of screaming, scalding steam.

All edges in the land, the mighty crinkle cut, where once great glaciers wove patterns in relief or soft stone slipped and slid, warped over under, layered, thrown up in laval anguish. The land lent gravitas by movement now set in stone.

We are drawn to edges.

We are drawn to boundaries. To cliffs, to river banks, the gates of mountain ranges, the beginnings and ends, the exclamations of mineral vocabulary.
Perhaps we stop and stare and whilst we do so put down roots. Or we come here and go no further, define our life by a boundary we did not set but perceive as fate, a natural given, a literal perceptible border about that which we might consider known and therefore ours.

And build, and often prosper, comforted, in our place.

But boundaries have two sides, by definition they divide, a division which invites the naturally inquisitive and inventive to connect. And so we build.....we bridge.

"Bridge".

Too small a word.

Too small a word for herculean iron of Victoriana or gossamer suspended ribbons, spider trellis, gothic multitudinous arch or square ribbed stalwart cage that leaves what I know, where I am and disappears like a lover’s promise into hope filled otherness beyond.

...lately I’ve been thinking about bridges.

starry starry night