Whilst once again wondering what to write, where to begin, how it will end, where occurs the middle by which I may commence—as it were—the tormented countdown to some kind of conclusion; in what direction I will launch my address, by which I suppose I mean, who will be listening—yes, yes, we have briefly squinted at these questions before, dwelt several times on their impact, in fact I have already perhaps tired you out with them—it occurs to me that writing is like travelling, a journey without end where plots pass like moving landscapes, slipping predictably from this comma, to this ellipsis…
Scenes zip by relentlessly like the back-end of towns: backyards littered with broken swings, bicycles tossed to the ground, thrashing threads of strung out washing and sheds surveyed from the window of a train. Against the rhythmic clatter of train wheels on tracks, travelling assumes a kind of suspended disbelief, neither arriving nor leaving, crying or laughing, whispering or screaming; vista, town, ocean and mountain pass like plots packed with characters waiting to be cast, unfolding like a thousand stories waiting to be told. I love this no-where-ness of transit.
This getting-there of travel is a kind of floatation—the suspension of arrival—and the pleasure is the pleasure of reading not terrorised by foreclosure. Getting-there is so pricked with excited restlessness, like the book one cannot bare to finish, like the narrative, so ensnaring that one has to look up, stop reading, in order to release the delicious pleasure contained within the words so sweetly stitched. So entangling can be its spell that one despairs of the release wrapped up in the last sentence, afraid of the abandonment and the loneliness after the last word is cast, no further page to turn, but the cover left to close.
The suspended fictional world cruises us, then seduces us so completely, in so brutal yet enchanting a manner, that to finish is like arriving, like tumbling—at our destination—from it’s beguiling net, only to dream of travelling-on once more, wistfully into the night, the patina of the city’s dancing lamp-light calling us to suspend once again, and float away to that other place, away to Never-Never land, to The Wild Wood, to the Emerald City, without the muting, dulling anticipation, without the arrest that foreclosure affords.
Mummy, are we there yet?
Mummy, can you tell me a story?
Mummy, can you read it again?
Mummy, I don’t want it to finish.
And as the various combinations of words and characters in our favourite plots never fails to give pleasure so long as they endure, so their repeated telling only reassures and cocoons us, casts its inspiriting world of images, and like our journey, it’s all about the getting there not the arriving. It’s about the writer’s ego-centric pleasure in the bric-a-brac of telling. We don’t mind how often the tale is told, just keep on telling it.
And like the authors of our favourite blogs, perhaps it is not the what they’re telling us that we listen to, but how they get there, the chosen mechanism of their transport, the grain of their voice.
We love getting there; it’s just that we don’t know where we’re going yet.
oysters
Waiting tonight on Houndsditch for the 42, my bought tea stretching out the deformed Tesco carrier. I’m wrapped against the winter cold. The 78 passes, then the 100, and another one, a double-decker, the number - something or other - three of them, including a ‘2’. I left my gloves on a train a month ago, heading home for Christmas, and with no replacement the plastic carrier straps chop up the skin in the curve of my fingers and create numb swollen puffs between the white plastic. When I put down the bags and straighten my fingers, the rucks and puffs remain like the tired blistered hands of the decrepit.
The 42. I reach down with my right hand and fuss with the sloppy carrier now ranging across the floor and signal with my left. I look up – NOT IN SERVICE – ungh! I reverse the motion to lower the bag and prepare to recompose against the cold. Unexpectedly the bus shudders to a halt a little after my stop, it’s away from the curb, stopped in it’s tracks type of thing - there in the middle of the street. The doors wind open and the little wizened old lady I’ve previously seen driving the 42 - long died black hair, lots or rings, one signet - calls out to me from behind the wheel to hop aboard.
She asks where I’m heading and I say close to the depot, guessing she’s returning the bus after her shift, and we’re roaring off down Houndsditch, me on the raised little seat at the front by the driver – courteous - she at the wheel.
“If folks put vey’re arm aat when I ain’t in service, I always pick em up” she reassures me, in a foreign accent finished with East End polish, “if ah fink vey’re desprit”
As we approach Tower Bridge she is chatting about the daughter who has moved to Sydney with the husband and two kids. There’s a bit of cussing as the road narrows and she manoeuvres her bus vying for a place in the traffic stream telling me how she started on the buses sixteen years ago when she arrived in London from Greece. Her husband has been dead five years and she’s had enough. “It’s all crap pay and long haars in London, ain’t it luv?”
She asks me what I do and do I have kids, no I say, ‘What, never married ?” no, I reply. Past the Tower of London, The Tower Hotel – ka-bonk - as we rumble over the gap between the bascules of the bridge and downhill past Butlers Wharf and on and away towards Bermondsey. “I’ve saved up - gonna see Dawn in Sydney vis Friday, and me grandchildren, lovely. Gonna move aat vey’re when I give up va busses. Where dya want me ta drop yer love?”
We spin off the Bricklayers roundabout and head towards the depot, “Just on the corner here is great,” I say. A hiss and groan, and we come to a halt outside my flat, the doors whip open with a slap and the breaks fart. “Cheers luv, best a luck” and I step off the juddering red bus at my front door - I’m home. The bus hauls itself off on the final leg of its journey to the depot and I jangle the keys in the lock of the gates, with a wry smile. My own bus to the door, I haven’t left anything onboard, she’s off to Sidney, Dawn and the kids, I’ve my tea in my bag and the flat’s as warm as toast.
And I didn’t have to touch in or out with oyster.
The 42. I reach down with my right hand and fuss with the sloppy carrier now ranging across the floor and signal with my left. I look up – NOT IN SERVICE – ungh! I reverse the motion to lower the bag and prepare to recompose against the cold. Unexpectedly the bus shudders to a halt a little after my stop, it’s away from the curb, stopped in it’s tracks type of thing - there in the middle of the street. The doors wind open and the little wizened old lady I’ve previously seen driving the 42 - long died black hair, lots or rings, one signet - calls out to me from behind the wheel to hop aboard.
She asks where I’m heading and I say close to the depot, guessing she’s returning the bus after her shift, and we’re roaring off down Houndsditch, me on the raised little seat at the front by the driver – courteous - she at the wheel.
“If folks put vey’re arm aat when I ain’t in service, I always pick em up” she reassures me, in a foreign accent finished with East End polish, “if ah fink vey’re desprit”
As we approach Tower Bridge she is chatting about the daughter who has moved to Sydney with the husband and two kids. There’s a bit of cussing as the road narrows and she manoeuvres her bus vying for a place in the traffic stream telling me how she started on the buses sixteen years ago when she arrived in London from Greece. Her husband has been dead five years and she’s had enough. “It’s all crap pay and long haars in London, ain’t it luv?”
She asks me what I do and do I have kids, no I say, ‘What, never married ?” no, I reply. Past the Tower of London, The Tower Hotel – ka-bonk - as we rumble over the gap between the bascules of the bridge and downhill past Butlers Wharf and on and away towards Bermondsey. “I’ve saved up - gonna see Dawn in Sydney vis Friday, and me grandchildren, lovely. Gonna move aat vey’re when I give up va busses. Where dya want me ta drop yer love?”
We spin off the Bricklayers roundabout and head towards the depot, “Just on the corner here is great,” I say. A hiss and groan, and we come to a halt outside my flat, the doors whip open with a slap and the breaks fart. “Cheers luv, best a luck” and I step off the juddering red bus at my front door - I’m home. The bus hauls itself off on the final leg of its journey to the depot and I jangle the keys in the lock of the gates, with a wry smile. My own bus to the door, I haven’t left anything onboard, she’s off to Sidney, Dawn and the kids, I’ve my tea in my bag and the flat’s as warm as toast.
And I didn’t have to touch in or out with oyster.
ok
Today, during an afternoon management meeting, the Director of Front of House Operations recommended that OK magazine be utilized as a tool to keep tags on our current customer base.
Ok Brad
Ok Oprah
Ok Victoria
Ok Scarlett
Ok Angelina
Ok Madonna
Ok Colin & Justin
Ok Vanessa
Ok Robbie
Ok Nicole
Ok David
Ok Billie
Ok Ant
Oh - fuck off Jade - didn't see you there.
Ok, that's better.
Ok Brad
Ok Oprah
Ok Victoria
Ok Scarlett
Ok Angelina
Ok Madonna
Ok Colin & Justin
Ok Vanessa
Ok Robbie
Ok Nicole
Ok David
Ok Billie
Ok Ant
Oh - fuck off Jade - didn't see you there.
Ok, that's better.
when
And so once again dear reader I turn from something to almost nothing as I consider this, my address to you, and in doing so realise that in addition to not knowing the 'what' and the 'why' of writing, the thing that now plays heavily upon my thoughts is its 'when'. I don't know 'when' to write. I don't know when you are ready, you don't say, because of course you don't ask me to write. It is my choice to decide upon the right time, the time that you are ready to read. I don't want to display an over zealous adolescence, an ever ready urge to provide a relentless prattling discourse upon nothing-in-particular, pumping out the words with scant disregard to their piquancy, to the 'spice' of their meaning, the delicacy of their impact upon you, casual reader. But, like others I imagine, I want to seem spontaneous; I wish to avoid the laboured delivery of one merely performing a scheduled function, obliging his diary with pedestrian punctuality.
I know a little of these fecundities, as I am myself a reader and I glean a certain pleasure from observing the anticipated and rhythmic 'clocking' of my newsreader, the invigorating bubbling-up to the surface of fresh feeds, like oxygen, as they are polled and logged. I measure my reading list and hence my favorite writers by this reassuring pulse of publication. The palpitations of the site which suddenly, after slumbering silence, throws up six new feeds, clocking up unread entries arrhythmically, engenders a kind of neurosis of reading - what is the author trying to say in this hiccupping publication, what literary suspension needs to be applied to his or her bumpy off-piste course? I look at the list of my favourite sites and take delight in the ping-ponging of names from unreliable to beautiful from cheerful to scandal from pandemian to humdrum from six words to ... as feeds flicker and flash, fizz and futz, one here, one there, like the half-broken neons flickering above the neo-decrepit streets of 2019 Los Angeles in Bladerunner. And in observing this flickering, this rhythmical blossoming, I recognise the flicker of meaning contained in these texts. That not only do my favourite writers deliver their messages, craft from language - credibly, politely, poetically, drearily, intolerably, uncertainly - like potters at the wheel forming an elegant vase from a soggy spinning mass of clay, not only do they 'handle' language, but their writing oscillates and trembles with a meaning not conjured up by the author at the writing stage, but which is bound up in the frequency it's publication.
As I gloss over this text or that, I consider the story told by this 'when' of writing. Is the writer deploying a kind of suave authorial nonchalance by measuring and staggering the release of his babblings, and does this apply a certain sexy sheen to their reading, like the final addition of butter to a sauce? Or, does the author not care-a-less about such scheduling, throwing out his texts at random, unhindered by punctiliousness, like burps and farts released at will. And like the unhindered expulsion of these burps and farts, what are we to learn of his avoidance of good manners? Like an automatic golf trainer, firing balls at a predetermined interval, does measured publication remove the flamboyance to be found in unpredictability, remove the skill exercised in reading? Is the newsreader then no different to the lover - always listening for the phone (he has not called because he is stuck on the tube, his battery is low), always alert for the postman's footsteps (he has not replied perhaps because he did not receive my letter), like the lover who checks his mobile because he did not hear an alert (perhaps it is MY battery that's flat, perhaps I did not here the tone because I was in the loo, perhaps I inadvertently set it to silent, perhaps he did not receive my text - perhaps I should resend, perhaps I missed his call because I was talking with another). Like the writer of an earlier post who does not know his reader, this lover does not know his loved, guesses at his movements, tries to trace upon his eyelids the shadows of his dreams, tries to outwit his next and every move, anticipating and seeking out every sign of that love. And like our lover, the writer seeks the same response. Like our lover - ever questioning, ever demanding, too often building the verbal discourse of his plight, trying to earn sympathies, and in doing so, alienating himself from the loved object - so the writer, begs the sympathies of his reader.
How often is too much, what is not enough, and when will we learn?
And in anticipation, how soon is now?
I know a little of these fecundities, as I am myself a reader and I glean a certain pleasure from observing the anticipated and rhythmic 'clocking' of my newsreader, the invigorating bubbling-up to the surface of fresh feeds, like oxygen, as they are polled and logged. I measure my reading list and hence my favorite writers by this reassuring pulse of publication. The palpitations of the site which suddenly, after slumbering silence, throws up six new feeds, clocking up unread entries arrhythmically, engenders a kind of neurosis of reading - what is the author trying to say in this hiccupping publication, what literary suspension needs to be applied to his or her bumpy off-piste course? I look at the list of my favourite sites and take delight in the ping-ponging of names from unreliable to beautiful from cheerful to scandal from pandemian to humdrum from six words to ... as feeds flicker and flash, fizz and futz, one here, one there, like the half-broken neons flickering above the neo-decrepit streets of 2019 Los Angeles in Bladerunner. And in observing this flickering, this rhythmical blossoming, I recognise the flicker of meaning contained in these texts. That not only do my favourite writers deliver their messages, craft from language - credibly, politely, poetically, drearily, intolerably, uncertainly - like potters at the wheel forming an elegant vase from a soggy spinning mass of clay, not only do they 'handle' language, but their writing oscillates and trembles with a meaning not conjured up by the author at the writing stage, but which is bound up in the frequency it's publication.
As I gloss over this text or that, I consider the story told by this 'when' of writing. Is the writer deploying a kind of suave authorial nonchalance by measuring and staggering the release of his babblings, and does this apply a certain sexy sheen to their reading, like the final addition of butter to a sauce? Or, does the author not care-a-less about such scheduling, throwing out his texts at random, unhindered by punctiliousness, like burps and farts released at will. And like the unhindered expulsion of these burps and farts, what are we to learn of his avoidance of good manners? Like an automatic golf trainer, firing balls at a predetermined interval, does measured publication remove the flamboyance to be found in unpredictability, remove the skill exercised in reading? Is the newsreader then no different to the lover - always listening for the phone (he has not called because he is stuck on the tube, his battery is low), always alert for the postman's footsteps (he has not replied perhaps because he did not receive my letter), like the lover who checks his mobile because he did not hear an alert (perhaps it is MY battery that's flat, perhaps I did not here the tone because I was in the loo, perhaps I inadvertently set it to silent, perhaps he did not receive my text - perhaps I should resend, perhaps I missed his call because I was talking with another). Like the writer of an earlier post who does not know his reader, this lover does not know his loved, guesses at his movements, tries to trace upon his eyelids the shadows of his dreams, tries to outwit his next and every move, anticipating and seeking out every sign of that love. And like our lover, the writer seeks the same response. Like our lover - ever questioning, ever demanding, too often building the verbal discourse of his plight, trying to earn sympathies, and in doing so, alienating himself from the loved object - so the writer, begs the sympathies of his reader.
How often is too much, what is not enough, and when will we learn?
And in anticipation, how soon is now?
idol
During the pilot stage of a televised audition and casting show conceived to pluck a short list and crown this years blog idol from a circus of thousands of mostly dismal applicants, the self-appointed (and some would say, rashly opinionated) judging committee abandoned their project in it's rudimentary stages over an irksome argument that developed whilst deciding the final name for this award. The following short list formed the battleground upon which no reliable conclusion could be arrived at:
jack idol
cheerful idol
beautiful idol
unreliable idol
revolutionary idol
humdrum idol
pandemic idol
goldfish idol
flux idol
I myself, being bone idle, thought this a more accurate moniker for these ever reflexive activities.
It was subsequently muted that a runners-up show filmed at Elstree studios would be considered, in which these candidates would be encouraged to blog in and out of each others lives in pretended domestic intimacy and these interactions be monitored and commented upon. The working title of this show is Celebrity Big Blogger.
jack idol
cheerful idol
beautiful idol
unreliable idol
revolutionary idol
humdrum idol
pandemic idol
goldfish idol
flux idol
I myself, being bone idle, thought this a more accurate moniker for these ever reflexive activities.
It was subsequently muted that a runners-up show filmed at Elstree studios would be considered, in which these candidates would be encouraged to blog in and out of each others lives in pretended domestic intimacy and these interactions be monitored and commented upon. The working title of this show is Celebrity Big Blogger.
jouissance
And so once again I turn my attention from almost anything to almost nothing and start to write, but write what? It occurs to me that there is a stock of themes here from which I may draw my scripts trajectory, templates if you will, with plots and characters waiting to be directed and named. Here is the mother of all templates of course, the journal. If this is blogging then ostensibly it’s in the fashion of a journal, but with what protagonists and plots will I spin my script, provide my hook? What images, gestures or encounters plucked from the bottomless pit of daily life can I assume robust enough for you, docile reader, to resonate with, be ravished by, dip into, share? But of course you don't know me, perhaps I have provided no clues. Were we old friends perhaps you would be hugging your ribs anticipating a script of almost intolerable comedy, asking yourself on this as on other similar occasions, how you will cope with the gut-wrenching pain of uncontrollable laughter in the face of such comic torment. You might say to yourself, oh, that one, he is as funny as ever, he makes me roar. But you don’t. You know nothing of me, to be reduced to tears by my tragic prattlings, saying to yourself, oh that one, he's so reflective, he always trawls my secret depths with his knowing, searching prose. Oh, that is so him, he's so wan. Alas, these longed for warm recognitions, anticipations, or responses, do not form the texture of my unfettered mutterings.
The very fact of my writing, of my searching out and locating this space for text, for wringing out my jitterings before you, rustles-up an anxiety in me of a prolific response: who does he think he is, writing these things here, in this space? This place of all places which we baptized with our words, this place where we were just getting comfortable when he trolled along, poking his words around in our eeks, our familiar things twinkling reassuringly in the half-light. Really! Putting his words here, words which trip us up, distract us, as we tread our path through the deep dark wood. His words cause us to veer from the path. What does he want to tell us and more to the point, why does he want to tell us? Why has he waited this long and why has he chosen this as the time for his irritating outburst?
And of course, it seems, after all my blatherings, my lexical coughings and farts, it seems that I am capable of telling you nothing. I seem to spin a fabric, a whispery web of something-but-nothing, barely knitted together. But nothing holds still for long enough. Everything seems to slide. Slippage seems to be my thing then, glissage, as the French would say.
Perhaps it turns out that I haven’t actually got anything to say at all. I don’t have a story to tell you. No, there is no catalogue of links waiting to be posted echoing my hobbies, no mappings, no postings, no photo-sets story-boarding my weekend reveries. Here you will not find me unfolding lewd sketches of tender moonlit entanglements under the disused signal boxes of London's over-ground railways stations. You will not find my drawn-out tales of dining experiences with friends and colleagues cataloging the significant restaurant openings of 2007. You will not find mindless aphorisms or pendulous dragging narratives detailing the inconsequential meandering thoughts that plague us all when sleazing in the dark zone. And you will certainly not find the churlish comic-tragic posturing doused with rhyming couplets and folksy popular songs so overused by the amateur auteur.
And so you don't know me at all. And why would you want to bother?
And so once again I turn my attention from almost anything to almost nothing and I start to write. Write for who? It occurs to me that there is a stock of basic readers here for whom I may draw my scripts trajectory, blank canvases if you will, waiting to be directed and named. Thus in order to connect, in order to unfurl this text (we've already observed it forming a trajectory in an earlier passage) I must address it, and I address it to you. Taking refuge in the reassuring knowledge that we must have met, I write this to you, I write this for you, for in order to write, I must have already invented you. Your charms and foibles, your fay approach to reading, glossing the text, grasping a phrase here, a word there, looking up, your head cocked to one side, staring out to space. I do not expect that your reading should be devotional; it is this cut-up reading that excites me. Ah yes, you are looking down again, you are reading on some more, good. Sliding, slipping, skidding through the words, lovely!
What can it matter how much you take in, what you sieve out, what remains? For without you, I am nothing.
Thank God I found you.
I think I love you.
The very fact of my writing, of my searching out and locating this space for text, for wringing out my jitterings before you, rustles-up an anxiety in me of a prolific response: who does he think he is, writing these things here, in this space? This place of all places which we baptized with our words, this place where we were just getting comfortable when he trolled along, poking his words around in our eeks, our familiar things twinkling reassuringly in the half-light. Really! Putting his words here, words which trip us up, distract us, as we tread our path through the deep dark wood. His words cause us to veer from the path. What does he want to tell us and more to the point, why does he want to tell us? Why has he waited this long and why has he chosen this as the time for his irritating outburst?
And of course, it seems, after all my blatherings, my lexical coughings and farts, it seems that I am capable of telling you nothing. I seem to spin a fabric, a whispery web of something-but-nothing, barely knitted together. But nothing holds still for long enough. Everything seems to slide. Slippage seems to be my thing then, glissage, as the French would say.
Perhaps it turns out that I haven’t actually got anything to say at all. I don’t have a story to tell you. No, there is no catalogue of links waiting to be posted echoing my hobbies, no mappings, no postings, no photo-sets story-boarding my weekend reveries. Here you will not find me unfolding lewd sketches of tender moonlit entanglements under the disused signal boxes of London's over-ground railways stations. You will not find my drawn-out tales of dining experiences with friends and colleagues cataloging the significant restaurant openings of 2007. You will not find mindless aphorisms or pendulous dragging narratives detailing the inconsequential meandering thoughts that plague us all when sleazing in the dark zone. And you will certainly not find the churlish comic-tragic posturing doused with rhyming couplets and folksy popular songs so overused by the amateur auteur.
And so you don't know me at all. And why would you want to bother?
And so once again I turn my attention from almost anything to almost nothing and I start to write. Write for who? It occurs to me that there is a stock of basic readers here for whom I may draw my scripts trajectory, blank canvases if you will, waiting to be directed and named. Thus in order to connect, in order to unfurl this text (we've already observed it forming a trajectory in an earlier passage) I must address it, and I address it to you. Taking refuge in the reassuring knowledge that we must have met, I write this to you, I write this for you, for in order to write, I must have already invented you. Your charms and foibles, your fay approach to reading, glossing the text, grasping a phrase here, a word there, looking up, your head cocked to one side, staring out to space. I do not expect that your reading should be devotional; it is this cut-up reading that excites me. Ah yes, you are looking down again, you are reading on some more, good. Sliding, slipping, skidding through the words, lovely!
What can it matter how much you take in, what you sieve out, what remains? For without you, I am nothing.
Thank God I found you.
I think I love you.
hello
It was recently suggested to me by a friend that reading Hello magazine would give me the advantage at work of knowing which celebrities were in town and whom is dating whom.
Hello Kurt
Hello Pete
Hello Kate
Hello Kylie
Hello Justin
Hello Renee
Hello Goldie
Hello Jordan
Hello Britney
Hello Jennifer
Hello Victoria
Hello Sir Richard
Hello Your Royal Highness
Well now, isn't this nice...
Hello Kurt
Hello Pete
Hello Kate
Hello Kylie
Hello Justin
Hello Renee
Hello Goldie
Hello Jordan
Hello Britney
Hello Jennifer
Hello Victoria
Hello Sir Richard
Hello Your Royal Highness
Well now, isn't this nice...
hyperopia
It's greyer out than in. Flat winter sea-side light that won't allow a texture in, stops forms from etching in the gloom. It's floodlit, but not like a photoflood. No, not warm, it's dank, fills every empty pool with a banality that depletes me. It's SAD light. Inside it's tungsten yellow, a warm mellowness, for matinees, muffins, and fireside hostages. I'm walking to the river, as it's suicide composting on the sofa. The traffic, like rain before it develops character, drizzles it's way along the road. There's a kind of slow motion here in strolling to the river. Dull days are like bewildered grammar. Today is like one long sentence without punctuation slipping and sliding uncertainly between unrelated clauses and random prepositions. I slide into the eventuality of this insular indulgent mood and hope to make sense of it by averting my gaze uncharitably from the grizzly faces of passers-by with whom I'd rather not relate.
Suddenly, also sliding, two protagonists come into my lonely little play as one black and the other silver Mercedes cross paths, smack, headlights crack, wings fray and the scene, no injuries, conveys the exclamation mark so far missing from my day. Pepped-up by a little vigour, I turn with jolly gait, into Queen Elizabeth Street, and head for Maggie Blake's Cause, and the river. I've been coming here for years to sit, contentedly, looking out blankly, not quite to sea - not awaiting the French Lieutenant exactly - but it amounts to the same thing really. In London I seek structured opportunities to expedite these vacant episodes of staring. There's Primrose Hill and it's unfolding vista rolling sight lines grazing Westminster, Canary Wharf and fading into Greenwich Park where this picture is reversed but just as blissful. Richmond Park, Wimbledon Common, I suppose even The Eye provides this visual nectar, but for me, my window on the river is where I effect a kind of sensory dumbing down. I recently considered moving onto the twenty-second floor of Aragon Tower in Deptford Creek. Here, you pay for height not space, the chic sun-kissed twenty-second floor costs twenty to thirty thousand more than the dingy lower level flats. It's expensive to eschew the floor in favour of the sky. But I end up on Butlers Wharf, and where the river swings north-east - The Pool it's called - and passes Wapping, the sky and river meet. It's not exactly what the Time-Out guide to London would call breath-stopping, but as my eyes trace the distant silhouettes of cranes, church spires in Rotherhithe and Millwall, the thrusting towers of Canary Wharf, and old warehouses, now apartments, cladding both banks, I feel that I could sit here long into the night whilst the landing planes of City Airport are reduced to pretty blinking lights.
Through the bascules of Tower Bridge, the prettiest City view of all: The Gherkin, Lloyds, Nat West, The London Port Authority, Custom House, St Paul's.
Close up, in a corner, underneath a nearby bench, some abandoned orange flowers, green stems wrapped in fine gold leaf ? I put on my glasses, oh, an empty Veuve Clicquot bottle, left from New Year's Eve.
Suddenly, also sliding, two protagonists come into my lonely little play as one black and the other silver Mercedes cross paths, smack, headlights crack, wings fray and the scene, no injuries, conveys the exclamation mark so far missing from my day. Pepped-up by a little vigour, I turn with jolly gait, into Queen Elizabeth Street, and head for Maggie Blake's Cause, and the river. I've been coming here for years to sit, contentedly, looking out blankly, not quite to sea - not awaiting the French Lieutenant exactly - but it amounts to the same thing really. In London I seek structured opportunities to expedite these vacant episodes of staring. There's Primrose Hill and it's unfolding vista rolling sight lines grazing Westminster, Canary Wharf and fading into Greenwich Park where this picture is reversed but just as blissful. Richmond Park, Wimbledon Common, I suppose even The Eye provides this visual nectar, but for me, my window on the river is where I effect a kind of sensory dumbing down. I recently considered moving onto the twenty-second floor of Aragon Tower in Deptford Creek. Here, you pay for height not space, the chic sun-kissed twenty-second floor costs twenty to thirty thousand more than the dingy lower level flats. It's expensive to eschew the floor in favour of the sky. But I end up on Butlers Wharf, and where the river swings north-east - The Pool it's called - and passes Wapping, the sky and river meet. It's not exactly what the Time-Out guide to London would call breath-stopping, but as my eyes trace the distant silhouettes of cranes, church spires in Rotherhithe and Millwall, the thrusting towers of Canary Wharf, and old warehouses, now apartments, cladding both banks, I feel that I could sit here long into the night whilst the landing planes of City Airport are reduced to pretty blinking lights.
Through the bascules of Tower Bridge, the prettiest City view of all: The Gherkin, Lloyds, Nat West, The London Port Authority, Custom House, St Paul's.
Close up, in a corner, underneath a nearby bench, some abandoned orange flowers, green stems wrapped in fine gold leaf ? I put on my glasses, oh, an empty Veuve Clicquot bottle, left from New Year's Eve.
britney
I've decided my imagined relations with Morrissey
Represent a spastic outpouring of flummery
I'm saving my tears
For Britney Spears
Represent a spastic outpouring of flummery
I'm saving my tears
For Britney Spears
blip
Here at home on the couch feeling - what d'you call it - disenchanted, not comfortable, physically taut - I'm waiting for something to happen what is it ? There's a twinge in my thorax - so rest and watch tv - the Blue Planet - I'm hungry and want tea. I've spoken to mother and booked lunch for her birthday at Scott's on Monday February the fifth at twelve-thirty. I'm aware of a familiar arrhythmia inside me, a kind of thoracic nagging - dragging my thoughts from the wet things on tv and obsess on the organs discordant inside me. As I try to ignore the snagging gets stronger, I'm sweating, relax ! Control your breathing (I talk myself into reassurance, I've been here). Something in my chest seems to blip and I flip in my head and the urgent sensation, whatever has fed it, that discomposure of earlier, but now growing stronger and feeding itself without hinder - sets everything pumping without care or restraint and my head starts exploding and here there's a pain and this awful sensation which is reaching a peak - my heart is now thumping and skipping and slurring not purring - well flying, my temples are sweating I'm crying, limbs tingling with pin & needles in - I wrestle with racing a kind of conducting like trying to deaden the shock of destructing, and pains in my abdomen and back seem insurmountable and the race in my chest that's almost uncountable and now I'm in panic and think it's my calling but I've been here earlier as I keep recalling - must try to zoom out and relax to bring focus on breathing and now set to calmness the stuff and the feeling of failing - unhinging my grip upon what would you call it, like things which seem friendly and cosy and breath long and slowly ... the grip starts unfolding as someone inside slips their foot off the throttle and pulls on the breaks and the gears shift to idle and whilst everything seems like it's not quite as normal as I seemed to recall it but certainly slower less frantic and panic has shifted to what would you call it - a foggy denouement.
My apprehension he'll open the throttle again and deliver me over the hurdle with frantic propulsion is quashed now the sadist inside me has bedded his mental corrosion and now I feel shattered and scared and, well, alone.
No fun - a panic attack on the couch here at home.
My apprehension he'll open the throttle again and deliver me over the hurdle with frantic propulsion is quashed now the sadist inside me has bedded his mental corrosion and now I feel shattered and scared and, well, alone.
No fun - a panic attack on the couch here at home.
delicious
I flout the censure that forbids adult tears,
Demands a man prove his virility.
By dissolving in tears whilst withholding constraint
I follow the orders of my body.
I'm in liquid expansion,
I make myself cry
To prove my grief isn't illusion.
Tears are signs not expressions
That of body not speech
Words what are they
One tear says more than all of 'em
Demands a man prove his virility.
By dissolving in tears whilst withholding constraint
I follow the orders of my body.
I'm in liquid expansion,
I make myself cry
To prove my grief isn't illusion.
Tears are signs not expressions
That of body not speech
Words what are they
One tear says more than all of 'em
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