St Wulfrans

What’s yer favourite church?
I was over at St Wulfrans in Ovingdene yesterday.
a splash of yellow daffs outside the front porch, a yew tree, crows cawing.
I fell asleep. a snooze in the sunshine in the graveyard! Something to do with those commands to ‘Rest in Peace’.
Jumping Jehosophines!

I really like the fact that i can walk out of my front door, through East Brighton park, then, up, up, past the chalk Whitehawk, over the golf course and be completely in the countryside.
there are these amazing plough shire horses, enormous hulking beasts bigger than Sherman tanks!

I’ve never been inside St Wulfrans, always locked, but i really like the name which is blatantly Saxon and maybe part Red Indian
the church is a typical Downs one, built from Flint, which you always find lying about amidst the chalk.

…after the church i bumped into Suzy a dreadlocked mum from the school (her kids called Jacey Blue, yep, they all have weird names), whenever i see her i always think ‘face like the back of a bus!’
actually she’s beautiful, but also one of those people who appear on teh side of Brighton buses, you know, the ones with a slogan, encouraging you to dump your car.
It always spooks me out, when her bus goes by, to see her fizzgog, 12ft high!

…aaah i am rambling about my ramble.. onto the Kipling gardens in Rottingdene, an ice cream and stroll home along the undercliff path… home… just in time for the antiques roadshow

aidan: For a while I was haunted by an old flame adorned on the side of the buses. It would always give me shivers when she would appear, 8ft high right in front of me at a crossing.

12ft high images, kinda reminds me….
….of when i spent a winter in Sheff, in a sprawling student house which backed right out onto Meersbrook park.
The house was full of climbers, pupeteers, artists… and me
everyday in the kitchen, huddled around the 3 bar electric fire, drinking endless cups of tea from a dribbling teapot
Theresa, the artist, her work was figurative, so she spent a lot of time just sketching us all.
Whilst sketching she’d always be asking lots of personal questions ‘tell me all about your first love?’, her theory being that when people talk about themselves, it shows some of their soul.
Felt a bit unfair to me, as she knew i fancied her, just a teensy bit.

In may i went to visit her in her studio, down ‘blast furnace lane’,
a big, old, near derelict victorian warehouse… nowadays, i ‘spect, it’s yuppy loft flat appartments… the whole of the north of England , so i hear!

I brought her a large bag of cherries, so we sat in 2 deckchairs, chomping, then spitting out the pips.
Looking up there was this huge 12ft or so canvas, apparently of me.
Just the head and the hands in detail, the rest barely, faintly sketched in, she claimed ‘the renaissance masters only ever painted teh face and hands, they left the clothes and the backgrounds to their apprentices!’
I was more ‘but he’s got a big nose… he looks nothing like me… he’s, he’s well ugly’
she responded ‘that’s because it’s a representation of your soul… not a likeness of your physique’
ha
Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Sailor, Rich Man, Poor Man….

not one of her piccies, but similar, continuing the cherry theme!

RB:

sleep walking

once i was staying in a hostel in Barcelona, big old mixed dorm room with lots of bunk beds, everyone had been out drinking and was in a boisterous mood.
got woken half way thro’ the night by some oaf stumbling about, looking for the loo. He was clearly a bit drunk and a lot sleep walking.
He stopped and p*ssed all over the poor bloke sleeping in the lower bunk!
Once finished he clambered back into bed, straight to sleep.
Half the dorm was awake by now, flabberghasted, but the bloke he weed on snored through the entire thing.
The next day nobody had sufficient gumption to tell him what had happened. how can you?!

Reminds me of the first cub camp i ever went on, Jeremey Rudge who was in our tent peed in his brand new sleeping bag. Unfortunately the dye wasn’t fast, so the next morning he emerged from his damp, sleeping bag cocoon… and he was bright blue from head to toe!

kite plodder

last weekend my brother and i went with our gaggle of kids away to the jugs in Kingston, theres a play park for the little ones, a lovely 12th Century church and even the chance of pintage
we were flying kites, a stunt kite (fantastic, but a bit of a palaver of rope and string), and our trusty rainbow kite, with the merest puff of wind this one merrily spools away, cloudwards
Sofia whose only 4, accidentally let go of the rainbow kite, yikes!
away it flew , but luckily the handle became snagged in a tree.
rescues and derring do!
my brov hopped up into the tree, but couldn’t reach. A passing local type, very kindly ran off and got a fishing rod. So my brothers got the long long pole and prodding recklessly at the kite handle
I’m on the ground comforting a couple of crying little ones, the melodrama!, but also simultaneously thinking, ‘the branch will never hold his weight’ and remembering a Seamus Heaney poem.

My brother is fishing in the river of the wind that flows through the branches of the trees

Finally the kite is prodded free, zoom it’s off over the roof tops, heading for the downs
I’m hot hoof after it, a Kite runner, well Kite plodder at any rate, getting bogged down on a muddy footpath, then hopping a barbed wire fence into a field.
Then theres the kite, right in the middle of the field, multicoloured wreckage. I stride over to it, feeling much like a world war 1 flying ace whose just crash landed
The kites been rescued by a couple of 10 year old boys, they were suitably amazed, ‘we were sitting in our house, and this thing just flew over’
Together we bore it back in the triumph of rescue!

oh the snippet of heaney (scribbled on a scrap of paper in my wallet)

The Riverbed, dried up, half full of leaves

Us, listenning to a River in the Trees 

sunset

what glamorous weather!
yester eve i watched the sunset from the marina wall
the sun dunked in the ocean, a perfect plonk, complete with sizzle
supple colours, a mood of modulation twixt turquoise and tangerine

praise god for dappled things

Luxor

a response to a luxor post
……….


me! me! I’ve been to Luxor, Thebes, Phoebe.
I’d just reccomend what all the guide books will say.
Get up before dawn, hire a bike, then pedal along the banks of the Nile, Water Buffalo and Fallukahs, as the huge red sun rises.
Head along the road to teh desert and pedal along to the Valley of The Kings.
It’s fantastic, before the heat of the day and the plague of tour buses, a genuine spook creepy powerful place.
Perfect for all your Indianna Jones needs!
Or just sit ina cafe with the old men, a strong coffee and try one of the Shishkas, a Hubbly Bubbly, where you balance your burning charcoals on the Honey roasted tobacco, then serpent suck, huge plumes of smoke and smoke rings. a condor/hamlet cheap cigar moment
oh, Cleopatras needle in London is from the temple of Karnak, it’s a really fascinating tale, what happened was…. achhh

ancient email hieroglyphs…

once, when i was about 22, i was in the kings burial chamber of the great pyramid of cheops (an important giza geezer)
you follow a stone lined corridor, deep, deep into the heart of the thing.
For about 5 minutes I was totally alone in the central chamber, there I had one of those fairly typical, bogus travellers moments, you know when your thinking ‘wow here i am alone in the 4000 year old heart of the most sacred hugest stone tomb ever’ and kind of willing yourself to spiritually commune with them long dead incest interesting pharaohs, but in reality you just feel totally knackered, from not having slept properly for days and the whole place smells of camel dribble!

The central chamber is totally plain and unadorned, not like those in the valley of the kings, where it’s wonderfully ornate, crammed full of hieroglyphics, sarcophagi and just baroque over the top, kinda Las Vegas Liberace Tutankhamoon. King of Bling.
the pyramid chamber may well be sacred pscho geomacy alligned with Orion and Sirius, but didn’t do it for me.
..Anyway i’m meditating merrily away, when a cold breeze blows through, we are buried in the middle of a squillion tons of stone… then i hear the clump, clump of boots approaching…. a huge looming shadow is thrown forwards and into the chamber.
Goosebumps, curse of the mummy, Scooby dooby doo!. Yikes!
in comes… Cleopatra!
Heavens to Betsy.

Cleo, dark dark eyes, black hair, breaks into a big smile, opens her gob and says ‘ciao’
ciao bella!

She was actually a very friendly 17 year old Italian, lovely, she kindly squired me around old Cairo for the next 2 days.
from Milan, very swish, high fashion type, some kind of heiress, in Cairo for a year with only her parents for company.
we were both dreadful lonely, but also just got on like a house on fire… she was a hoot!

heres an egyptian joke i made up,

My Sphinx has got no nose
How does he smell?
bloody awful!

portslade

response to a post about portslade


Southwick Marina?! that’s near port slade?
you know, that funny little clump of pleasure boats opposite (D’oh) Springfield/Shoreham Nuclear power station
Theres a really nice Tapas bar (la Cala?) which has a platform area where on a sunny summers sunday afternoon you can sit out, down by the water.
take a fishing net and a bucket and the kids will be entertained for hours, leaving you to get on with the important business of beer and the nattering!
last year they only caught one tiddly fish, but lots of those near translucent water shrimp, bug like creatures…. and jellyfish… a whole trifles worth!

It’s a pleasantly weird post industrial landscape, reminds me of a bar in Hamburg, right down on the sandy beach by the river, you’d sit in a deckchair cocktail in hand, looking up, the backdrop would be these huge heron like cranes and drifting past the most humongous tankers

…back at southwick, you can cross the water there, on foot, over to the power station using a network of jettys and swingbridges. A great rat run.
I always imagine myself to be sword fighting my way across!

… usual decay into doggerel…..
….. past lock and dry dock, jinx of jetty, a poltroons hop, to the other side, on pontoons, the sway, the swagger, rigging of sail boat, cough splutter motorboat…

equinox

spring equinox. balanced
also the start of the astrological new year

nearly easter i really like the fact of a wandering easter, the equation to work out when it will fall is:

‘the first sunday, after the full moon, following the vernal equinox’
which gives it a Terence Trent D’Arby neither Fish nor Fowl feeling

ie. it’s a Lunar festival based on the roaming moon, but is tethered to a solar year event.

today!

woke up singing my fave Bowie song, which somehow manages to be ridiculous, pompous and emotionally moving, all at once

David Bowie – Memory Of A Free Festival Lyrics

The Children of the summer’s end
Gathered in the dampened grass
We played Our songs and felt the London $ky
Resting on our hands
It was God’s land
It was ragged and naive
It was Heaven

Touch, We touched the very soul
Of holding each and every life
We claimed the very source of joy ran through
It didn’t, but it seemed that way
I kissed a lot of people that day

Oh, to capture just one drop of all the ecstasy that swept that afternoon
To paint that love
upon a white balloon
And fly it from
the topest top of all the tops
That man has pushed beyond his brain
Satori must be something
just the same

We scanned the skies with rainbow eyes and saw machines of every shape and size
We talked with tall Venusians passing through
And Peter tried to climb aboard but the Captain shook his head
And away they soared
Climbing through
the ivory vibrant cloud
Someone passed some bliss among the crowd
And We walked back to the road, unchained

“The Sun Machine is Coming Down, and We’re Gonna Have a Party
The Sun Machine is Coming Down, and We’re Gonna Have a Party
The Sun Machine is Coming Down, and We’re Gonna Have a Party
The Sun Machine is Coming Down, and We’re Gonna Have a Party
The Sun Machine is Coming Down, and We’re Gonna Have a Party.”