A place to park those random thoughts, stolen images, hidden conversations and incoherent babble from beyond the wall of sleep. Odd bits of music and so-called worldly wisdom may creep in from time to time. Don't expect too much and you won't feel let down.
The artwork shown above is conveniently titled "Underwater" and draws much of it's inspiration from a long and soggy meditation taken whilst considering mankind's impending watery doom.
*Don't mention the movie "Waterworld".
An inner voice whispers: “There is no internet. No phone signals.
No shops or pubs or amenities for 14 miles. We’re at the road’s own craggy end. Whatever
you do don’t get into an emergency situation of any kind.”
The roads are narrow, clogged with errant sheep, confused
pheasants and the occasional brooding stag. The sun, moon, the glacial,
battered landscape and the clear, warm unseasonal breeze are magnificent. We
are in “the Glen”. A short period of
minor adjustment to the new reality will be required.
“My Jaguar is in the workshop” said our landlord as he
apologized for leaving us alone, whilst driving away in an inferior but clearly
more reliable car. Jaguars eh? Dusk was descending so I made friends with the birds. There
are a lot of them here, always quite angry with each other as they bicker at
the various overflowing feeders. We’re not the only stupid things on the planet
it seems. Red squirrels eventually pick up the confidence to raid the feeders
too, they’re a bit more violent, they wrestle with the tops and poke at the
nuts and seeds or bend the wire frames with tough buck teeth that I presume
are worth risking to attack the metal larder.
We wake up early. The garden is full of sheep, well four
sheep, two ewes and their faithful, fatty lambs. We’re concerned but there are
sheep in all the fields so this is probably normal, so long as they don’t eat
the plants or the chicken food and so on. The next day there are twenty seven
sheep in the garden.
At night the skies are dark with no light pollution, there
is no one nearby, no vehicles or streetlights. We can see into space. There’s
the moon and Jupiter and some other blingy things. Wispy clouds allow the
celestial fairy lights to peep through at us. We’re alone. Like Joni and Graham
we light the log fire. This is our house now.
Out in the glen we hear the sounds of dogs and quad bikes.
The shepherds are at work, driving the flocks down from the hills. Then a
darker shadow grows across the glen. It’s 8AM, there’s a large blue HGV parked
down on the single track road, it’s engine running. We hear the sheep bleating
as they are led towards the wagon. They are quickly scuttled inside and so off
to wherever. They won’t see the glen again, that’s for sure. Today there are no
sheep in the garden. As I grow older, I’m mostly ambivalent than ever about
Indian food.
At times we will crack and seek out civilisation, there,
shining at the end of a forested tunnel way down the potholed and beaten track.
Blinded by the sun going out, blinded by the sun coming back. A pheasant ricocheted
across the windscreen, thankfully unharmed and we live on to eat a canteen
breakfast in a garden centre. It’s surprisingly good complete with an almost
perfect fried egg. Like the rest of the clientele we are of a certain age and
attitude, killing time before we take in the final backwards view from the
bottom of a shallow grave or inside a plastic urn. (I don’t really think about
these things often, just at garden centres). We will be the last of the boomers
one fine day, they’ll all miss our purchasing power and wit and wisdom then.
The weather is always just outside, we try to ignore it as we walk into the hills. It comes and goes. Today we are in the footsteps of Queen Victoria. Not my favourite queen, royalty being something of a peculiar human invention albeit leadership of some type is always needed. It’s the lack of “qualifications” and the family connections I object to, that and the abuse of privilege and rank. The walk is unplanned, we leave the house and turn right and trek onwards, already we’ve broken all the rules by being unprepared and vague in our intentions. We do however have an extra, older walking companion who has planned all this but simply forgotten to tell us about the details.
We move up the glen through a
variety of conditions and surfaces. There are trees, stones, and the sounds of
rushing waters as time ticks down slowly in God’s own country. It’s a “there
and back again” kind of trek so we’re back before the dinner burns up, down
from the hills and eating shepherd’s pie in the cottage.
At night, when the books are exhausted and the keyboards are
quiet, we take refuge in a grainy TV signal’s output, looking much as it might have done in the 1960’s but with washed out colours. For some
reason the volume is also governed down so a high level of concentration and
focus is required just to get through regular, pastoral TV otherwise it’s just
another blurred experience. Any bodily creak from a stray bone or couch can
render the program narrative quickly incomprehensible. I find a few glasses of
red wine apply the necessary numbing quality needed to adjust to this pace of
broadcasting and so enjoy the variable and distorted content. Misheard dialogue
and blurred vision is always entertaining.
Alone.
Life here is not without it’s drudgery. The regular filling
of the bird feeders being an essential task. Sometimes also removing struggling
birds trapped in the feeders is required. They just get lost in some feeding
frenzy at times. Sunflower seeds are their favourite, even though it takes time
and technique to split them open and consume them, the birds don’t mind.
Peanuts are more run of the mill, pecked at and eventually destroyed with the
hammer action of the bill, pulverised and gone. I scatter random nuts and seeds
on the ground, the squirrels, chickens and Guinea fowls don’t seem to mind.
Everyone gets fed.
It’s been a mostly sunny and blue skyed break; the strong
September sun is unexpectedly bright and strangely warming. The house faces
south so we bask in it all as the friendly clouds allow. I’m reading a book
about young arty types on Hydra in Greece, a historical work of fiction. At
times the alien heat almost works and some slight transportation takes place if
you just close an eye for a moment and forget about Brexit and fashion anxiety.
The glen, but on a Greek island; perhaps not quite yet and no Leonard Cohen striding
around, making conquests, stringing along fickle muses, buying houses and then carelessly
warbling off into the sunset. No. We are firmly in Scotland and the dead grey
churches are out there as a stiff reminder; empty, standing like some strange
presbyterian theological litter, comatosed now but once intent on chewing up all
the green grass at the edges of the fields.
By Friday I’m back to having a second attack on actually reading the final
book in the Knausgaard saga, part 6 of My Struggle. I’m struggling with this
one. It’s heavier and more reflective and I feel it strangling every thought in
my mind at times. I’m blinded by the tirade of words, like some verbalized Mozart
or shredded guitar figure. I’d planned to finish it sometime during lockdown last year but didn’t even bother. I decided to allow myself to coast over those unreal
months. Now we’re on the sunny uplands of
further self-inflicted austerity I might as well try, there may be some comfort
in his bleak but busy with the minutest detail, elongated prose and
self-exploration.
I'm still reading...
We made it home safely, fuel shortages and a stupidity surplus all failing to slow us down. Thanks to the weather gods and my lovely wife for making it a very enjoyable and peaceful week. Our first break away since everything went crazy last year. The glen leaves it's mark once again.
They were called the "Whitedicks", Jane and Bobby Whitedick. Their's was an old European name, they'd traced it back to France where it seemed they were descended from the Blanc-Ricard family. A noble house that had done quite well for itself up until Napoleonic times. Somewhere along the line, they suspected when a great, great grandfather had landed in New York, the name changed to Whitedick. No one knew why it had been changed or clumsily translated. The English derivative would be Whytdyke, or so they understood, it was the old Saxon version. Family history was patchy, records had been lost and there was a bit of here-say in the detail.
When a TV producer friend was chatting to them a few years ago he seemed keen for them to star in their own reality show, "At home with the Whitedicks!" That was the proposed title. It never happened. They were all quite drunk at the time and in the end settled for obscurity.
Little did I know that in the next year or so I'd have lost my job, get barred from pubs, move to Glasgow, move to Jersey, live in a barn, get a brand new Telecaster, see my band start up and break up, watch my father die, become a rubbish "Christian", join two cults, get a dog, stop smoking fags and weed, meet my first wife, meet my current wife ... phew!
... please just calm the fuck down, it'll only end in tears. We all know this. True happiness is found in the mid-range of a golden glow, not the cold blue of the thin stratospheric heights.
"It's probably best for all that you should consider everything you write to be, in that moment, the most important thing you've ever written."
Here in our reality based community nothing is new. Every TV show is a rerun, every meal is leftovers, clothing and fashion is on a design loop, every plot and policy is a carbon copy, every tune has a familiar melody, all our friends look like us now, warranties and patents have run out. Cats and dogs have grey faces. That was just before the machine stopped ...
"I saw a farmhouse burning down, right there, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night. We rolled right past that tragedy until we came up on the roadhouse lights".
We were travelling and that quirky old-school music was playing, all sounds and visually stimulating words. I could have been asleep. The dials flickered as the beat and volume changed. I hadn't been out for a while or tuned in much. I didn't really understand that nobody travels very far these days, "there's no need" say the government. It's too risky, you no longer should take such a chance, now that the machine has stopped.
In those occasional conversations you share over a meal, someone is slowly chewing their food. While I speak I cannot help but read their jaw and head movements as a nodding confirmation of whatever point I'm trying to make. As the evening progresses I slowly realize that we really agree about very little regarding anything that actually matters to me. (It was always my choice not to use brackets in this final paragraph).
Sometimes you hear the people above moving about, appliances making sounds and vibrations. Outside vehicles pull up in the middle on the night and workmen being excavation work. A dog barks. There's the smell of cookery in the air. Footsteps. Traffic noise creeps in through open windows. Streetlights. The sounds and effects of weather. The hot water boiler. TV reception. The postman's footsteps and the people who clean the stairway and common areas. Flat living. It's mostly OK.
One thing I've quickly realized is that, based on the use of communal rubbish and recycling bins around here, most people have no clue. Our area is reasonably civilized, in my opinion, but I can't help but notice that people just don't understand or care about recycling. They won't flatten out cardboard boxes, they don't wash out cans or containers, they think that you can recycle polystyrene, food waste appears in the recycling and so on. They are either ignorant, confused or careless to the point of not bothering at all. Unless everyone takes some responsibility and follows guidance (?) we're screwed.
Not quite sure what to make of Hookland yet ...
The world of horticulture is rife with long and crazy names for everything. I never can remember the names of plants or flowers, pretty sure that these aren't Amphetamines either. Peat Worriers, Dingleberries or Beckhampstead's Glory, interesting but for me they form a barrier to deeper understanding. The other barrier being laziness.
Weeds are tricky to identify too, seems a shame to pull them up when the bees and other buzzing, flying things are clearly enjoying the flowers or buds and they just look ... greenish with tinges of yellows. It's like taking away a kid's popcorn halfway through a gaming session. I need a plan.
