My summer holiday

My summer holidays were great. I went to the zoo and saw elephants, giraffes and tigers. There were monkeys with big pink bums which was gross. I took my sister, but she must have escaped as she is still peskering me.
When I went to summer camp it was great too. There was a pontoon on the lake and we did bombs and had wrestlings. One time I was the last one to stay on and I won a chocolate bar. I stayed on the top bunk which was good because Toby was on the bottom and he wet the bed twice. He’s such a baby.
One night we had a fire and I ate a whole bag of marshmallows, pink and white. I didn’t feel too good and my teeth buzzed. My spew was real pink.
When I got sunburn it was cool. It stung for ages but then when I was peeling I grossed everyone out so it was worth it.
My grampa came to stay at our house and he smelt funny. He slept in the daytime and snored.
Mum said he wasn’t well but dad said he was a silly old bastard.
I didn’t see much of Matthew because his mum moved and took him too. He said his dad wasn’t going with them because his mum was getting a new dad.
Once, when it rained and I couldn’t go outside, I went around the house and lit all the candles.
I hardly got any wax on the carpet or the tables at all, but you wouldn’t know it by the way mum looked when she smacked me and sent me to my room. Dad said it was her fault for leaving the matches where I could find them and he was heaps right. If they didn’t want me to do it they shouldn’t have left them in the draw. They had said I was never to go near them, but that was when I was as little as my sister. We lit heaps of stuff on camp, leaves and stuff.
One night I couldn’t sleep so I went to the kitchen for a drink.
I could hear mum and dad talking through the door. They were talking about what they were going to do with him and I thought they meant grampa.
But then they said stuff about stuff that I done, not bad stuff just stuff when I get bored, like the candles and that thing I did with the toothpaste that time.
They said stuff about a boarding school which would be cool cause then I could stay up til I wanted and not have them grumping all the time.
But they mustn’t have decided I could go cause now I’m back here in this dumb class and have to write this stupid assignment on my summer holidays.

Hopping mad

It's not really a hop you know. We use all of our feet, not one, not two, but four. Twice as many as you get around on, yet you say it's us that's hopping! A hop is on one foot, and whoever saw a bunny get along on a single foot? And while we're on the subject of our feet, I do wish you would stop collecting them for 'luck'.

You must realise we regard it as extremely unlucky to be caught a foot short, and you could at least show a little empathy in such regards. We wouldn't expect sympathy, as we know you don't feel in the way that we do. You can, at best, try and identify mentally with what we're going through, but that's the closest you will get. Mind you, it's decidedly unlikely you'll even go that far, caught up as you are in these silly little concerns of yours.

Once, it was different. We didn't have to worry so much about what you did, provided we kept a low profile when you were around. Now that's simply impossible. You're everywhere! Breeding like the proverbial, I see (and again you point the finger at us).

For all your supposed awareness of the world, half of you can't even tell us from a hare. As though you would be so forgiving if we called you monkey ape gorilla! We're quite able to make the distinction, but then we're also able to do a lot of things you seem unwilling or unable to do. Get by without eating everything not tethered down for one, managing to get through a meal without savaging a warm-blooded beastie.

Now where was I? Oh yes - hopping. We leap, bound, jump, occasionally we may run race or rocket. We don't hop.

Vinyl Diaries II: Joanna Newsom

The meadowlark and the chim-choo-ree and the sparrow
Set to the sky in a flying spree, for the sport of the pharaoh
A little while later the Pharisees dragged a comb through the meadow
Do you remember what they called up to you and me, in our window?

Harp lightly plucked, that voice.

Then the strings...

There is a rusty light on the pines tonight
Sun pouring wine, lord, or marrow
Down into the bones of the birches
And the spires of the churches
Jutting out from the shadows
The yoke, and the axe, and the old smokestacks and the bale and the barrow
And everything sloped like it was dragged from a rope
In the mouth of the south below

How to follow up a debut both scorned and adored, critiqued and criticised, with almost exactly the same phrases - some fawningly intended while some used utterly pejoratively?

By diving in, embracing the elements that were teasingly hinted at in The Milk Eyed Mender and creating a work of sheer majesty and breathtaking scope.

'Ambitious' is almost a dirty word in some music circles, and such circles would find Ys a work of utter indulgence. But too much of music today fails to truly push any kind of envelope, the middle of the road being far safer than the road less travelled.

Newsom, here, is not even traversing such a road - she's awander in forbidden forests, tasting of fruits that would emperil those of lesser talents and allowing them to influence, but never losing sight of her journey.

You came and lay a cold compress upon the mess I'm in

A 12-minute paean to sisterhood is not how you're supposed to begin your 'difficult' second album, nor to segue, then, into a picaresque tale of a monkey and dancing bear escaping from their servitude, only to develop a relationship with similar subservience.

The musical vision is quite astonishing, working to match the flightiness and surprise of the lyrical twisting and soaring, swarms of sparrows in a twittering spin.

While these works set sail to the winds, Sawdust And Diamonds anchors the album firmly in gentler waters.

I wasn't born of a whistle or milked from a thistle at twilight

Just voice and harp, it harks back to Mender's more intimate moments, but with a broader vision and palette of pastels that are more complex than ever - broader brushstrokes that embrace, even with the unearthly yips and squeals that many find too affected to get past. Their loss.

There is nowhere to go, save up
Up where the light, undiluted, is weaving in a drunk dream
At the sight of my baby, out back:
Back on the patio watching the bats bring night in
- while, elsewhere, estuaries of wax-white
Wend, endlessly, towards seashores unmapped

Only Skin warmly winds its way into your psyche, soaring in Kate Bush moments but bringing it back to a more earthed and earthy place. Its 17 minutes pass by in a whirr of beached whales, shelled snails and window-wounded birds being returned to the sky from treehouses.

When you ate I saw your eyelashes
Saw them shake like wind on rushes
In the corn field when she called me
Moths surround me, thought they'd drown me

The album closes with Cosmia, containing its most vocally ambitious, or abrasive if you prefer, moments. While the shortest of the works (a 'mere' seven minutes), it's also the most urgent. The harp is plucked with more of a sense of danger lurking, the orchestration is more unsettled, less assured of its relationship with flow of the piece, but turns out for the mini-climaxes punctuating the track.

And I miss your precious heart
And miss, and miss, and miss
And miss, and miss, and miss, and miss, and miss your heart
But release your precious heart
To its feast, for precious hearts

Almost screeched, in Newsom's unmistakable old lady/little girl delivery, it's a potent promise that her emotional journey, as with her musical and lyrical, has been as exhausting and stimulating as has the listener's. It finishes fairly abruptly for such an epic undertaking, but that simply leaves us aching for more.

Shattered glass

Bellevue to Waterloo, midnight unicycle circumambulations, chewing nails and dodging snails seeking their sweet sucklings.

A television set waiting for the little green man, then crossing, dangling its tail to the ground. Sparks fly upward. It's just been lost or found, either way it's too hot to mind, time to simply smell the honeydrip sky and enjoy this most Indian of summers.

Glass shattered to a tiny dicing, clarified musing on trouble's own paint-stripped doorstep, a back-lane pheonix overlit, shining too high, too soon. Each holds the germ of an idea, the promise of a secret, the extraction of an elementality.

Diffractions reflections subjections projections - none of these apparitions and salutations are necessarily real, recollections of seeming insolvitude drawn stretched coaxed to taut precision. Yet here they are one after another end to end a seamless faultless impression of complexity that couldn't be simpler. Simply could not.

Then this: the re-auditioning mannequin lost the chance to play his own part in the movie of his own near-life - tears well in the pits of his hollowness, he'd long longed for this role, hoping to make amends. He fluffed his lines.

February clouds

Glare and relief, hide and go seek, chasing their own tails as they scroll to the horizon - February's clouds hang just beyond reach. They stand lofty though not aloof, conduits for blazing Sol's more astringent treats.

Widening thickening scars rent the sky, a sheet shaken to disperse the crumbs, drifting laundry.

Whiter than whiter, brighter than bright, they billow balletically and weep as they sweep.

Fat round drops spatter window patter roof splatter road. Hissing, mercurial drenchings, whispers of swirling steam hanging suspended, eager to regroup yet afraid to miss the show. But, too eager, they regather to resoar retumble resoak.

Taste of rose - sweet thorny soft hidden dangers - far far far from spring grass autumn lemon winter mint.

Cake

The accounts department ate my birthday cake. Well, it wasn't my cake as such, but I was due a piece. I'd baked it for an immediate colleague, a colleague from my department, who lives in a neighbouring cubicle - although they're not quite cubicles as such, more dodecahedral, with three sides granted to us each. I'm lucky enough to have two; one for working on, one for putting things on that I don't feel like working on. It's fairly and increasingly cluttered that one, but I digress.

There's very little interdepartmental cakebaking as far as I'm aware, and I wasn't about to blaze that trail. Well not that I'd realised.

It was Jeanette's birthday. Not just any birthday, but birthday number 30. I baked a cake. Middle Eastern Orange Cake, Claudia Roden inspired. Two hours of boiling the oranges. Six eggs. A cup of almond meal. Some sugar.

Baked to perfection if I do say so myself - a light tan/orange, ice-rink smooth, sprung from its pan without a blemish. Transferred to a plate. Plate in a box. Box safely carried down 63 stairs, through five doors (six if you count the car). No major disasters at lights or going around corners. Safely extracted from car, carried through the office, placed in the tea room. Placed just past the fire extinguisher, but before the microwave. Candles placed atop it for ready lighting at the appropriate juncture - birthday o'clock.

Never have a birthday on deadline day. Well every day is deadline day when there's daily publishing, but some days are deadlinier than others. This was such a day.

As birthday o'clock drew nearer, it became clearer that coordinating an appropriate number of wellwishers and cake nibblers was going to prove difficult. Editorial staff were coming and going, on the phone then out the door - we were struggling for a critical mass to get the Happy Birthday choir going.

The long and the short of it is the deadline crunch crunched the birthday out the window, for that afternoon anyway. There was always Wednesday morning though, and the Claudia Roden inspired Middle Eastern (CRiME) cake would keep well.

Mid-Wednesday morning was moving very slowly towards 11, the designated Cake Take Two time. Yet soon after 10, an intrepid photographer returning to the office remarked that it was disappointing that we had not saved her a slice of said cake.

We remarked in return that not only had we saved a slice, we were still yet to produce the cake and the cutting and the singing and the general birthdayly hoopla, to which she remarked that there was perhaps then a certain oddness in there being a solitary slice of said cake on a desk in the Accounts department, through whence she had only a moment but passed.

We too remarked upon the oddness of such an occurrence, and an expedition party was assembled. As cakebaker I was elected expedition leader, and selected for my party the no-longer-quite-birthday girl and the intrepid photographer.

We formulated our plan of attack and made our move. The Accounts department was deserted. "Hark" I did utter, for a clattering and a cluttering could be heard from the tearoom. The sound of a running tap and the unmistakable chink of the cleaning of crockery could only mean one thing - they were hiding the evidence. A dilemma: To rescue the solitary slice of cake from the desk, where we spied that it still remained, or to confront the cake-absconders while they were still cake-handed.

I decided we were best splitting up and I sent no-longer-quite-birthday girl and intrepid photographer off to the tearoom. I approached the cake, wary that it may be somehow booby-trapped. It was by no means a generous sized slice, but perhaps still large enough for a candle to be placed atop.

I stared at the cake. It stared back at me. I took a step forward...

"We found out who the culprit was!" said no-longer-quite-birthday girl triumphantly, bounding into the Accounts department, holding aloft the severed head of the payroll lady.

"Hey, what's that on your lip?"

"Hmmm? Mnunfinnn. Mnunfinn aw awl."

Vinyl Diaries I

This is the first (well second technically, but the first with this thought in mind) in what will be an occasional delve into a matter fairly close to my heart - the world of music. It will no doubt jump all over the place, according to whatever whim takes hold at the time, and may well prove painfully dull and dreary. But we'll see how we go...

It will be by no means chronological, or any type of logical i'm aware of, but for the sake of getting off to a start I may as well start at the start.

***

My parents liked to host parties. Late, long, loud. Not ideal for producing a bright and bushy schoolboy, but it did sow musical seeds that have long since taken.

Many a night was spent reading and drifting in and out of sleep to music of a particular time - the 80s had arrived, but this playlist was stuck fairly and squarely in the 60s and 70s.

By day I would take out these albums and examine the sleeves for clues as to just who it was I was spending my evenings with, from whence these amped lullabies came. Men with bad haircuts crossing a pedestrian crossing. Blimps and too much brown. Prisms shooting off a rainbow.

By night there were no sleeves, just drums basslines riffs wails.

It was a fairly typical cast of suspects - The Beatles, The Doors, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and, of course, Pink Floyd. Other nights may be spent with Yes, Van Morrison, Neil Young, but it wouldn't be long before the status quo was restored (perhaps in the form of Status Quo themselves).

Abbey Road was an early favourite - there was something about that bass bounce-to-slur when Come Together kicks off the album that is just so instantly gratifying - and who could fail to be won over by old flat top, grooving up slowly with his Joo Joo eye-ball and hair down to his knee? Certainly not little-me.

I was quite taken by Ian Gillan's vocal dexterity - scatting and scaling the most remarkable heights, it seemed beyond the realm of what anyone should be capable of doing. Even then Smoke on the Water never really took me, I preferred my Deep Purple more out of control, careening at breakneck speed with the always present threat of a beautiful carnage.

Roger Waters has his own way of freaking me out, and I think that if it was The Beatles that first tought me about music's playfulness and storytelling (however superficial) it was Pink Floyd that was my first taste of its electrifying doom. The downbeat paranoia and panning dystopiascape of Dark Side of the Moon may be a farly cliched touchstone, but it's an album I can to this day hear in my head from start to finish; its spaced out claustrophobia and deadpan detachment the perfect soundtrack to an 8-year-old's growing fascination with the universe beyond this rock he lives on.

These are albums and eras I rarely revisit as such, but there must be something of them in my hardwiring as they haven't left me to this day. Many a stepping stone has since been hopped across, and my current listening is oft found a million miles away from such beginnings, but there is certainly a soft spot for these old, dried-up, drug-ruined rockers and their Faustian flirtations with the devil.

Night

By night, she is herself. Free to be what she was born to be. Their mutual yearning for each other hidden by day, her infinite depths now whisper to her lunar love. But, even by night, it is never truly consummated - despite their slow and silvery dance. Their distance draws them together yet keeps them apart.

You turn to her seeking... what? Home? Mother? Unity?

Wind drops, birds nestle in, the sun's distracting glare has long since moved on to wake distant cousins. It's her turn.

You smell her. The salt of the ages, yet a fresh and freshening sense of surprise, of birth. A hint of her secret garden, pleasantly pungent seaweed set adrift, escaped from its bed and wandering as tide and fate dictates.

You hear her. Listen long enough and her language grows clearer. Untranslatable, yet she needs no translation. From white noise emerges her voice, a surging whoosh a crack a thwump as she rears breaks tumbles, spilling in a shock of sudden release. Then; a sucking slurp as she returns, coaxing with her the fine sand, the crushed shell, the rejected rock.

You see her. She is black, smooth, ebony silk, a thick, used oil; tar. You could walk on her as though down a road, following the moonlit trail to her outer horizon, then up up up the beam to the moon herself. Yet this is myth - she's no longer black, she's now white. She's writhing, prostrating herself at your feet.

You touch her. She's warm. She's cold. She's wet. She's gone. You step nearer, she slides away. You step nearer, she rushes back. A collision course. But she hasn't seen you, she runs on up the beach. She leaves you again, as though you had never met. You plunge in. Under. Through. You are of her. You cherish her weightless embrace, her power over you - she sweeps you off your feet. Away from her edges you are lifted, but know she shan't let you go.

You taste her. She is on your lips, a tingle of salt's hunger. It's water that burns, slowly, imperceptibly. She finds your tongue, passes the tip and caresses the sides. It's not pleasant of itself, but it's real, it's her. It's us, it's you.

It is night, her night.

Lord Berkelouw

Lord Berkelouw was an owl most foul
you should hear his oaths when gushing
when in full flight
it makes quite the sight
leaves the roughest sailors blushing

When Lord Berkelouw this owl most foul
fell into any form of trouble
he slipped in words
that scared whey from curds
and made all his trouble double

To be seen at large with Lord Berkelouw
was regarded so very dimly
any lady spied in his company
was talked of rather grimly

It may start quite fine but it would not take long
for him to produce a most distateful speech bubble
from this moment on the damage was done
her reputation reduced to rubble

Now Lord Berkelouw this most foul of owl
had what you might term certain peccadillos
it was oft his wont to write in inflammatory font
letters to wilt the hardiest willows

with a sharp 2B and a cup of tea
he scribed missives to all the press
but i must confess
they'd be in quite the mess
if they were published for all to see

What's strange for those
who knew Lord Berkelouw
when he was but a but a wee lad of an owl
is this -

his mouth would never have melted butter
his thoughts were a long way from the gutter
he was never prone to thunder and mutter
never a rude word was he heard to utter
in fact had quite the nervous stutter

yet now:

he spews words most foul
even for an owl
can be found on the prowl
and wearing a scowl
barks in a growl
or sends out a howl

and why?

You'll have to ask Lord Berkelouw
(I shan't consort with so foul an owl)

Death by dictionary

He reads dictionaries, voraciously. He loves roots, Latin traces, archaisms. Pours through every chance he can.

He knows amygdaloid means shaped like an almond, writes poems about amygdaloid eyes.

Discovering bacteriophage to be a virus parasitic on bacterium, he seeks out pubs where lab assistants may drink.

The discovery of cheongsam sent him to Chinatown, of declivity to the ski fields (though he hated the cold).

His search for an epergne for the dining table took him further afield than the nearest epeirogenesis, though he could bare not to leave without clarifying the meaning of his voyage with a little epexegesis.

By night he fleetingly dreamed of fellmongering, but by dawn he thought fichu might be more his thing - the weaving of lace he felt closer to his mode of weaving words.

He felt a pang of guilt at Godwottery, it cut a little close to the bone; but by harquebus he was quite off again - shooting off at the mouth with abandon.

His search for a tuff of ignnimbrite proved fruitful, a back alley deal with a gent with a dark coat and a bad limp. He was relieved it meant he need no longer catch an ignbis fatuus, its fleetingness a headache best avoided.

By jactitation he had a small scare, it was Godwottery all over again. He tossed and turned quite restlessly, Word Fever quite flaming his brow. His temperature soared and his belly near burst, with all the words he had devoured.

The fleece of a young karukal was his next quest, taking him to the peaks of Kathmandu. His luck had seemed in, but soon it was out, a laparotomy deemed to be the only thing.

It seemed his penchant for swallowing any word that came by, for gobbling with such wild abandon, had ultimately had what could only be called an unfortunate malefic effect. The doctor told him his soul was a natatorium awash with language's detritus, then launched an opprobrious attack on his habits, demanding his communication be delivered, henceforth, pelucidly, with none of its usual pullulations.

His quadragesimal hospital stay soon came to an end, 40 long days and nights without a word. But during this time his mind's ratiocinations failed to find a position to support the doctor's call.

Thus no sooner than out the door had he gone than it all became simply simply too much. The skating rink across the road teased him sorely with salchows as a lady passed by in samfu, a masage parlour offering tapotement.

"I must get out of here, before I go mad!" yelled the man as he stood in the street, "I can't stay around here with so much to name, I must simply head ultramontane!!"

When crossing the Alps, the Swiss but of course, he felt a moment's relief, but this soon gave way to terror as he felt the first pangs of vasoconstriction put pay to his dreams of wassail. He reached over and seized the most xiphoid item he could find, an umbrella with quite the honed point. With his mind on the Yggdrasil and its threat from malevolent serpents, he knew he must now make a move - plunging the point through his word-drenched heart he wore a smile, ending his life with the ultimate zugzwang.

Drips

She could hear the bubbles fizzing into nothingness, the clockwork drip of the leaking tap. Sticking her left big toe up into the spout, the drip seemed momentarily to stop, but soon started again, this time off her heel. Her head throbbed exactly as she liked it, while the mist gently wafting around the ceiling formed a spiral and dropped – tiny particles that she could see separate but that were too wispy to catch.

Putting her hand up to grab them simply threw them off their path and whipped them back up to the ceiling again, a loose and expedient alignment. She left her hand in her gaze, observing her fingers, each wrinkling in, trying to touch itself. The candle gave off enough light to see them fairly well, its steady orange glow occasionally flickering, sending her shadow dancing over the tiles.

The cd was playing through for the second time and she drifted along to the delicious slow-burning tension of her favourite Berg string quartet. It took her back to a time she now recalled as though someone else’s story, a paperback left behind on a park bench, revealing a tale she had assumed like castoff, ill-fitting clothes – a man’s overcoat worn in quiet defiance of something even the wearer never quite understood.

Planting her feet flat on the bottom of the bath, she let her weight shift into her hips and pull her under. The music dropped out but silence did not come. The drip was now inside her head. Plopping with the metallic ring water has when heard from within. Gently blowing air out her nose, she felt the bubbles roll up under her cheekbones and over her temples. The sensation was pleasant but shortlived.

As her breath passed out, her stomach dropped and she slid deeper, the first sense of calm for the day passing over.

Time II

Slips slithers slides through fingers stretched hands cupped hats extended buckets placed can't be kept hard enough to find.

Stolen from us, usually, occasionally though rarely stolen back. 'Stolen moments' we call them, we hold them close, but even they still leak away (in time).

I know where it goes.

I've seen where it gathers, collides, coalesces.

It talks. Time talking with time, whispering about places it's been, spaces it's seen. It brags about the merry dance upon which it leads one and all, the tantalising times it has teasing us with its turnings.

This, in time, I learn - it needs us. Even more than we need it. We are its mirror, its sense of self. Every line our aging adds, every thought exploding in a million shards of light to regather as action or emerge as dream, it uses; uses to groom its own sense of self, of being. Without us it measures itself against itelf, splintering into nothing less than nothingness.

It can be tamed, Mother Time. If we ignore it long enough, its need to be needed grows too strong, at first a whimper and soon a wail - returning to us and begging forgiveness.

We can't help ourselves, we give in. Embrace it. Succumb to the latest of time's masked tricks.

Time IV

ain't 'nuff.

Beirut

I wake from another of my dreams of Lebanon. Beirut. Beyrouth. Berytus. I've never been, but I know her like the back of my hand, like the milky smell of my own mother. She and I are entwined by something ancient, thicker than blood.

Swaying with her palms, I succumb to her summer somnalance. My veil filters the dust, but it can't keep out the street - the unfilterable life spilling from her doorways, the teeming tumult of her inhabitants.

The smells are what I use to find my way around - I follow the rosemary as it follows the lamb, I dance towards the sizzling garlic, float into homes where bread lasts only as long as they children are at play in the street below, but they too are drawn in the same way I have been.

The music too - ferocious in its blind and blinding adherence to patterns that run deep, its form changing but its pirhouetting dreamscape vivid and palpably heartwrenching. It's this I follow tonight, it's the spinning, soaring heart that spills from its seams that I can't let go.

I'm once again swept up in her dervish spirit, once more transported to her outer edges, tasting her ravaged skin as it brushes my lips. She spins, I spin with her; I grow dizzy, but she grows reckless. My throat is parched, my words will not come. They don't see me anyway, they couldn't hear me if I tried. I understand their talk, I know what they think. I sense their hunger and long to embrace the children, dab at their encrusted eyes with my hem.

There are times both good and bad; it is, of course, a life like any other. A dreamlife, but no less real for it. Once, they could hear me. I could touch them. I belonged, you see, I was one of, one with. But it couldn't last.

This home, this returning, is my secret. I return each night. I grow bolder. Tonight, I resolve this - to be seen again. To speak. But, once more, I stay silent. Alone.

I wake, the taste of salt on my lips.

Snow

I walked into the snow or perhaps it was the snow walking into me. We walked into each other I'll say. I was on my way to the shops which is to say I was on my way to get something from the store that they had that I needed, which is what they do. They have, we need, they give, we give. It seems to work for everybody, though I'm not sure how they know what we're going to need. Last time I was there the lady at the counter seemed to know who I was. She said hello Mister Wallace and I smiled, though I was nervous that she knew this name my parents gave me; well I suppose it was my father as he gave it to my mother too. They gave me another one as well - Peter, or perhaps it was Paul. I don't use that one a lot. I did at school, but then it helped to have different names at school - one for the teachers to use and one for the other children. Our names are a very personal thing and I wasn't so sure about how I felt that this lady in the store used mine so readily, that it slipped off her tongue without a lot of care. It could have fallen under the counter or behind the lolly stand, but I've still got it I think so all is well.

So I walked into the snow and wished I still had my coat, the one with the pockets with holes in them. Those pockets were great for keeping my hands warm, i could reach down and get some of the spare heat from my thighs. I worried that without my hands down there to get some of the heat, the heat could get too much. If I wasn't taking it away, then it must still be there. If I can't find my coat I'll have to work something out.

So I walked into the snow and step after step I listened to that squeak that wasn't really a squeak, but wasn't really wasn't either. It's a funny one that one. Maybe it's what they mean by a squelch, but maybe it doesn't have a name at all. Which again makes me nervous. Things need names to be things, to talk about them and know about them and know what to do with them.

I walked through the snow and thought about how my father used to collect words. He would collect them and rearrange them and send them out again, but in new ways. His name would be in the newspaper above the stories, or sometimes at the end of them in a leaning over way, and I used to like to cut his name out, because it was my name too of course. I would cut them out with scissors and line them all up next to each other. I would borrow some glue from mother and I had a piece of paper I would glue them to, each day when he brought the newspaper home. I never missed a day and it grew so I would be very worried if he was late, as I couldn't go to bed until I had cut out his name and afixed it to my paper.

I walked in the snow and tried to remember where it was I was going. I knew it was some place I needed to go and some thing I needed to do, but it's not always easy to remember these things, and old things as well. Often the old things will pop into my head and the new things, that I tried so hard to keep in my thoughts, would be squeezed out. I wondered if it was something to do with the old thing, that something about the new thing had made me remember the old thing.

My father. Was I going to visit my father? He passed away a long time ago, but I do go and visit him at times. I see where he lies beside my mother, and I look at where I, too, will soon be.

I walked through the snow and I reached the cemetery where I buried my parents. My father, long ago, my mother, not so long ago. I kissed their stone, their name. My name. I lay down beside my mother, in my spot. Their son, forever.

Apocrypha

He's happy, he thinks. He must be - he has a window office.

He reads the canon. Has started Don Quixote, got some way through War & Peace, even managed a couple of chapters of Ulysses. They look great on his bookshelf.

He trusts the Masters. He knows they could paint and he knows they're not trying to trick him. Monet's his favourite - such lovely colours.

He listens to the classics. Beethoven is pleasant, though it's hard to tell when he's finishing. Mozart can be a bit out-there but is listenable, Wagner a bit rambunctious but some of it's okay.

His dvd collection is exemplary - Casablanca, Citizen Kane. He doesn't watch them a lot, comedy is more his thing - Adam Sandler especially. But he keeps these on the bottom shelf, a guilty pleasure. He deserves it, he works hard.

He has a window office.

Vinyl Diaries 0: The boy without the Arab Strap

So, Arab Strap are to be no more. The passing of an outfit that may or may not be in their prime - that may never have had a prime as such - often seems to illicit different reactions in different people.

Arab Strap hailed from a-town-nobody-has-ever-heard-of in the rainiest part of Scotland. While quite enjoying recent outings, I have a feeling Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton know their best work together is to be found in the back catalogue rather than in any future endeavours. While they were still creating perfectly workable music, it's perhaps for the best we don't see too many albums where they are simply sketching pale imitations of their former sozzled beauty.

But their break-up has sent me back to the A shelves, and I pulled out 2001's The Red Thread for another spin.

'The Red Thread' is an Eastern belief that you’re connected to your life partner by an invisible red thread and by that you will always find each other.

The Red Thread opens with the thinly stretched canvas of 'Amor Veneris', where every scrick, scrape and slide of Malcolm Middleton’s cowering guitar highlights the voyeuristic element of peering into these sad sod’s bedroom. A patient ebbing sets the low-key and patently lo-fi atmosphere, promising nothing yet delivering more.

In 'Last Orders' the music sets a scene whose finer points are brushed in with deft strokes of grey by the lugubrious tones of Moffat’s unapologetically Scottish muttering. The dreary underbelly of urban (though not at all urbane) Scotland is explored, the hollowness of the drum loop and the fizzing guitars reinforce the monotony. Damp walls, musty tangled sheets and lifting wallpaper appear as the moribund backdrop to a relationship of convenience, of drinking to dull the dullness where “we’ll get pissed just to watch the telly”.

'The Devil-Tips' meanders past in its own good time, stretched over painfully sparse and sluggish percussion and pointy pitched guitar notes. There is such a slow tempo it threatens to wisp away, to disappear into the ether that it has loosely bundled together.

Epic highlight 'The Long Sea' washes in over a ceaseless buzz, a near narcoleptic substratum that foreshadows dis-ease. A gentle riffing and slow circular build would alert any Dirty Three listener to the ominous portent it is. The nautical allusions are in abundance – the cymbal splash, stumbled tom-tom, and swaying intemperate tempo. Needless to say, it all gets a bit grisly.

Following this drainingly climactic point, 'Love Detective' offers temporary respite in the form of a loungey, Stereolabby upbeat groove. Yet in true Arab Strap style the tale and the beat sour, lose their carefree spin, grow tainted around the edges and warp. The classic territory of sexual paranoia has Moffat waiting for his girlfriend to leave the house so he can read her sex diary, in which her infidelities are documented in lurid detail.

'Infrared' works on simplicity – a miserly machine beat, a downtuned guitar tumble, a blurry bass murmur; metronomic without being monotonous, relentless rather than repetitive.

'Screaming In The Trees' finally lets in a squinty hint of light, the guitars on an upward waltz, dropping a few notes away shyly at the end as a caveat against getting too cheery. The strings slide across rather than along, the piano chooses to entwine with the flow.
'Haunt Me' is a dreamy, lush, evocative wash, as though sampled from an old Hollywood film.

By the time the album fades with 'Turbulence' you realise you’ve hardly left the bedroom, let alone the house. Yet it is somehow because of this bedsit navel-gazing, rather than despite, that Arab Strap connected.

You didn't need to spend every Friday night sticking to beer-soaked carpet and accidentally pulling the ex to appreciate this warts-and-all peek into the true heart of Britain; of life. They did the dirty work for you.

Papyrus

She put on
her paper dress
her paper shoes
her paper hat

Her paper cat
came and said
that paper hat
upon your head
the one you found
on your paper bed
is mine

She put on
her paper wings
her paper dreams

Her paper knees
fell to her paper rug
for her paper prayers
to her paper god

Her paper cat
said there is no god
you'll have to cope
with your paper hope

She took off
on paper wings
dreaming
dreaming
paper dreams

It

It starts with an itch.

An itchy itch that burns from both ends, that entraps with its ticklish need - need for release, escape, freedom.

It's not really freedom, it's an illusory freedom, a new entrapment. But it's certainly a real itch.

It begins lows, beneath the threshold of must, but subaudibly thrums its way into being.

And then.

It does not reveal its name, its true nature, its unquenchable desire. Desires. It waits until you've become tangled in its thralls before it does this. Waits until it's too late, too deep, too a part. Entangled ensnared enmeshed.

It's more you than you. It knows this, holds this over you. If you don't allow it to breathe, occasionally, it will smother you. Without blinking, without thought - it will sniff out your weakness and snuff out your light.

It's calling now. It waits for nothing.

Endings

Things occur in ways that perhaps could be clearer, but then we have little say.

A certain certainty raises its head only but after, at which point the knowing element will have been superceded in the primary instance anyway.

At which point we begin and conclude:

This is the point of the schism, at which working back will render exactly the same sense-function as working forward, for it shall reach the same endpoint - the beginning.

Of life, death; of death life. Thusly...

Encounters with bones and murder, cancelled from the library of the department of industrial relations.

Chocolate milk, toastpoppingseed, apple green.

Silk of sock brush carpet. Cool, shoes off. Flip-flaps of Polly Penguin. Clocking on.

Ligeti's puppets and wrecking yard poetry, wormwood and blackened pillow.

Prior - blue felt, fused glass, rasberries just so.