Dave's Outlandish Blog

Saturday, 4 January 2014

Wild Nights and Football Chants

Greetings. Its been a little while since I took the time to write on these pages. I don't know if those fine souls who stumbled this way over the years and read my posts have been missing me, but if so, I apologise. What to say? Life. Downs and Ups. Maybe one day i'll tell you the tale of how I came to be a 30 year old social scientist living in North Moulescoombe. One day-but not today...

I suppose the big news is my thesis is submitted, after a last heroic lunge for the finish line back in August. And inevitably, things look different. During the slog itself, it was like pulling teeth: stress and much flailing around, doubts even to its value. After the deadline, and I'm thinking about doing some more. Weird. Just goes to show that ones perspective is often quite narrow.

Christmas came and went. I took the coach up to my mum's place in leicestershire, along with 20-or-so other last minuters, on Christmas Eve. It was a good few days, of being-with and not-doing, of roving out across muddy fields, playing silly games. This time of year has power, despite the wheelbarrowloads of commerce and distraction we've put on it. A time for families, and therefore these days of migration, of returning home, to find the 'safe harbour' as always suddenly slightly different. This time it was the street lights. The council has taken to switching them off (or at least some) to save energy. I didn't notice it at first, until I nearly ran into a bollard during a late night stroll. 'Bollards!' I cried. Anyway, the drop in light pollution gave the starlight a brightness I only remember seeing last in West Africa, as I sat on the bench outside the old house looking up on Christmas Eve, feeling a bit like one of the Wise Men in the story, sans frankincense or indeed, an excess of wisdom.

Now I'm here in Brighton again, back at the grind, but with a clearer picture of my next move. The weather has been wild and soggy. While we were away, the skylight in my office space blew off, dumping a load of sawdust and rainwater onto one of the vacant desks, nearly obliterating one of my friends' work. It has since been fixed. Recently, during another late evening typing session, we could hear the Albion fans over at the stadium, their voices carried across campus by the wind. I'm at home right now, nice to be indoors on another wild night...

A thousand miles south

A thousand miles south its still one o'clock

Its just hotter

As I sit on a plastic stool in the dust

Watching a woman chopping greens into

a plastic bowl

While a pot of oil steams on coals and branches

Red with foam

and a chicken avoids my gaze

I've been here before

Further south

on a fading spit of rock and sand

fishing boats all around

that man sat in chains;

who did the same and worse

and got

what he didn't deserve

Fishing boats all around

'Do you remember me?

Your friend, where have you been?'

Too late

We flee again

to cows cars

traffic

kids in the streets.

Sunday, 5 May 2013

Reduced to clear

It occurred to him, dully, while he was vainly trying to remember what he needed to buy, that perhaps the fruit and vegetable section had been designed to resemble an actual market, with wicker-work baskets of baking potatoes and onions and courgettes stacked in rows of controlled disarray, as if deposited by busy stevedore at the docks. And in the absence of docks, some interior design kid working at the head office had thought to provide them in facsimile, as if the fulfil some subtle need people had for bustle and abundant disorder.

Maybe.

He let out a sigh. Onions. Did he need then or not? While he stood there blinking a maroon-shirted employee – a girl, brown hair tied back behind a white paper hat - rolled past a towering stack of cellophane wrapped aubergines.

It was about five-thirty. He’d just got off work and he’d remembered that Nina was supposed to be coming over later, and he’d promised to cook. She was probably still in the car but he knew he’d better get himself together before she got back.

It was one of the things he both appreciated and vaguely resented about Nina. She wouldn’t let him off the hook. Before they’d met he’d happily let himself slip into a routine of slowly spreading disorganisation, which seemed to have been his default state for years, since he’d been at Uni and the early dutiful enthusiasm drilled into him by his mother had been overwhelmed by the temptations of 9 hour weeks, and the dawning knowledge that he could write an essay pretty much blindfolded. With Nina, it wasn’t what she said, it was how she looked. It was a look that, when they’d come home to his flat on their 4th date 3 years ago and seen the chaos of his front room, told him that he’d better shape up. It was a look that said ‘I didn’t know people still lived like this’, a look reserved for social workers and government officials inspecting condemned factories.

He picked up a couple of onions and dropped them into the basket, a plan forming in the back of his mind. It involved kidney beans, he decided, and headed over to where he dimly remembered they were found. The place was busy with post-work shoppers, student couples in narrow cut jeans and big jumpers, hipster mums and dads, mostly. The queues at the checkout snaked back in anxious antipation, the ambient sound of squeaking trolley wheels and murmured conversation punctuated by the beep of the tills and the self issue machines.

It was its own society, its own cultural world, this place, Nick thought as he mooched along the aisles. He caught sight of himself in the reflection of the glass in the vegetarian foods section, his black overcoat and too-long sideparted haircut, his face still youngish even with the beard that Nina had started to comment on again. He thought, on days when he was being charitable to himself, he could still pass as a latter day Freidrich Engels, or one of those fin de siècle intellectuals who wrote about industrial society and would have been sorrowful atheists, despite their abiding belief in the commonality of mankind. When he’d mentioned this, Nina had raised her exquisite eyebrows and remarked that she liked her fin de siècle intellectuals more when they’d has a shave. Then, seeing his hangdog expression she’d given him a kiss.

She was good for him. He knew this. His friends told him, repeatedly, and occasionally he believed them.

He arrived at the canned foods section, and scanned the shelves intently. A little old lady was gingerly checking something in her purse, her trolley parked a little way up the aisle. An older gentleman, who Nick took to be her husband, was waiting earnestly further up the aisle, a slight tremor animating his bald head as he stared back at her. Nick waited patiently for the lady to finish what she was doing, and then reached down and grabbed a can of kidney beans and dropped them in his basket. Suddenly his phone rang. He fumbled in his pocket and pressed the call button. It was Nina.

‘Hey babe’

‘Hi Nick… are you free to talk?’

‘Um, yes…’ why wouldn’t I be?, he thought. Her voice sounded awkward, formal. And immediately his heart gave a lurch.

‘Listen, um, this isn’t easy for me to say, but… okay, so I’m not coming over to yours tonight. The thing is…’

He didn’t remember the rest of the conversation, although it had been mostly horrible and obvious and inevitable, and afterwards, he’d recall how he stood there dumbly as she’d laid it out for him, his shopping basket at his feet, the old couple shuffling up the aisle. He could have sworn that the old man had turned and looked at him for a second, as if he somehow sensed what was happening, with that look that all coupled men give in situations like this, an expression of pity and relief, that he himself had made it through.

After she’d hung up, Nick looked at his shopping, at the red onion and the can of kidney beans, then stared around. The old couple were disappearing around the corner to the next aisle. A voice was talking over the tannoy asking if John could proceed to the checkout. The noise of the supermarket continued unabated, as people queued and paid and bagged up and chattered to each other about nothing much and their trolleys sqeaked along the disinfected lino floor. Out of ideas, he picked up his shopping basket, and walked down the aisle.

Monday, 14 January 2013

Thoughts on the pier

Okay, right. So its been a while. A long while, and a long way. and I'm back. Here at least, although other things have moved on and changed. Such is life, I suppose. In Brighton last night, on the pier. Shut down for the night, staff mopping and cashing up inside their little plywood booths, a few daytrippers enjoying the gaudy panoroma of the seafront all lit up. Bouncy castles deflated, funfair rides lying dormant. And I thought - this could be a chemical plant, or an oil refinery, or an offshore launchpad; it might as well be. All this kit, and underneath a weary victorian frame, and underneath that, the tide coming in like a black silken sheet and shimmering in the electric street lighting. Over there's where Pinky killed that man in Brighton Rock. We have a big wheel now, as if to confirm those London on sea jibes. Its a nice size, about seven pounds. Ambiguity there. Last month/Last year, the burning of the clocks, and we all followed the bobbing paper lanterns and hammering samba drums and all the people to the beach by concorde 2 and thralled to the sight of the bonfire. Drums and winding throught the streets of town in a big bopping mass. More drums please. Work is good. Or its okay. It demands much. But I do like the sparks flying when I get a good idea. Those wild European philosophers painting mad pictures with words, like they've caught a loose thread and pulled it to see the great carpet unravel in their hands. Best leave it there. Peace

Monday, 26 July 2010

First Movement: Awakening of pleasant feelings upon arriving in the country

Back at my parents' house in Leicestershire. I seem to have reached a point where I'm having to look seriously at my life. I won't go into details, but after a couple years now of questioning and confusion I realise I'm going to have to work on myself before I can reach out to someone else.

Hmmf. Its okay, really. In fact its good, because to look at myself, I must also look after myself, I need to connect with others, to work on my health, to undertake healthy pursuits, take rest; to practice being 'happy', which is really more tricky than it sounds, but profoundly necessary. So yeah, if the tone of this here blog becomes a bit more circumspect and less 'jaunty', its only because the emotional depths of its author are being sounded for perhaps the first time.

Walking yesterday across fields along the footpath that leads from my house to the village churchyard, a route I've taken innumerable times from back since I was at primary school and used it as a shortcut home. Memory-saturated. The village itself is small enough that I pretty much know all of it, from the time I did a paper round and was made to lug enormous bags of Leicester Mercurys for the local newsagent, for which I got the princely sum of £4 a month and all the Yorkie bars I could eat. Obviously, every time I come back something has changed, new houses appearing where there used to be green space, posher cars in driveways, new faces behind the co-op counter. And I notice things differently, too. Like how silent the place is in the evenings, as residents vacuum seal themselves inside double-glazed bungalows. And how small the place is. I'm different, too.

The Geographer Doreen Massey writes of places not just as 'meaningful spaces', but as collected assemblages of trajectories, of the lives of their inhabitants as they interact with the wider world. Returning home, then, especially after a long time away, is always unsettling; the familiar is rendered poignant by the presence of the new, forcing one to measure the progress of our own lives in the changes.

Anyway, in terms of changing landscapes, my own is about to open up a bit more: I've got my mum to insure me to use her car. My first solo drive is therefore imminent. Wish me luck.

Wednesday, 14 July 2010

Aklo Letters

'... I am going to write here many of the old secrets and some new ones;
but there are some I shall not put down at all. I must not write down
the real names of the days and months which I found out a year ago, nor
the way to make the Aklo letters, or the Chian language, or the great
beautiful Circles, nor the Mao games, nor the chief songs. I may write
something about all these things but not the way to do them, for peculiar
reasons.'

Arthur Machen, The White People

Sitting on the sofa at my friend's house on Southover Street, enjoying the luxury of a free morning. All is quiet - I suspect the others have all gone to their various workplaces (two, Jude and Vicky, are carers, the third, Nick, works at the Uni in IT services). Occasional traffic noise from the street outside, a passing chatter of voices. Silence. This is England.

Awoke early before my alarm. After lying in bed a few moments I remembered that the Zen group were having their early morning sit around 8ish - if I went NOW I could make it. I continued to stare at the ceiling for a few moments anyway; my mind still partly in another dimension. Then, something clicked on - up, on with clothes, down stairs, face wash, banana, bike, bag with cushion, cycle cycle cycle... I arrive at ship street gardens, the wee alleyway where lies the Meditation centre, to find the door locked, and me a half-hour late.

Such is life sometimes. Came back and spent the rest of the morning reading 'the White People' by Arthur Machen. I came across Arthur Machen referenced in a collection of stories by HP Lovecraft, the American Horror writer. Machen is one of his primary influences, and is similarly interested in hidden spheres and realms beyond the everyday that sometimes impinge on our consciousness; the uncanny, the darkly suggestive, the subtly, insidiously creepy. 'The White People' is about the diary of a little girl living in the Welsh hills who is taught mysterious secrets by her nurse, which may or may not be connected to Witchcraft. (OK, they are connected to Witchcraft).

The best thing is the way which she relates in unselfconscious, childish language things which she is only partly permitted to describe. The way she suggests things without going in to detail really sparks the readers imagination, as in the above quotation. I love this kind of playing-with-the-reader deliberate coyness. If I ever write a novel, thats how it'll be. Mischievous.

Anyway, so I'm having a wee breaky. Spoke to my supervisor yesterday who basically encouraged me to do the same. So I'm gonna hang out, read, talk to my friends and enjoy Brighton a bit while I have the chance.

Monday, 1 February 2010

New Blog for Sierra Leone

http://daveinsierraleone.blogspot.com/

xx