bird swirl starling swoop

a lovely piccie!

and, if you fancy it some words. futile yet exuberant
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do the starlings still do their sun down dance? beautiful
you know the waft… and the weave …and the weft of complex patterns
the bath water swirl as they glide across the $ky

where do they live?
you know, now that the west pier has burnt, a sparkler fizzled to a rusty coat hanger remnant
i know some have taken up residence down the further ruffian end of Rugby Place
others i’ve heard over the water, beneath the Wetherspoons at the marina (cicada chirruping for cheap beer?)

what is a horde of starlings called? gaggle of geese. coven of crows

Once I was hitch hiking home across France, got dropped by a cathedral at sunset.
Metz mebbe? le’s say Reims – bubbleicious
free, but encumbered, fulcrum of mood, excited yet knowing no-one, with nowhere to sleep for the night
Quasimodo, back pack hunchback across the square, head back, look up
zut alors!
marvel at the full laden swollen belly of grey rain clouds. apricot and rosé tinged fringes
there swooped thousands of starlings,
beautiful,
yet somehow brain numbing, like doing difficult sums in your head
the liquid gyrations of quadratic equations.
err .. programmatically incorrect… yet totally Boolean Dude!

…. after a response

aha a murmuring of starlings, thanks aidan
i think tho’ i’ll stick with my original ‘horde’, mostly because it makes me think of a barbarian rabble, Attila the Hun
(Atilla the pun in steves case)

I once discovered that the huns warriors outfit was actually made from voles and field mice, loads of them all fiddley patch work stitched together!

huh.. not so scary now, are you Attila!

… one of the kids at the Steiner school is called Attila too

on the beach in Thailand

…..response to a post

kissing frogs is probably bad enuff.. but snakes. yikes!

well… i would recommend books utterly nowt to do with thailand or travel
wherever you are books should be portals for escape, passport for daydreams… that sort of malarkey!
so if your somewhere exotic and sunny, lounge sprawled in a hammock, it’s good to read about rain and grey and post war austerity britain
when i was in asia, i was more like a pack mule portable library, what with the burden of literature, my toy collection and the inflatable frog, impossible to travel light, used to take at least a week to summon the gumption to pack my bag up again and hoik hoist it back onto my back. ever loathe to stir.
somethings i read back then:

‘The biography of malcolm X’ – malc and that bloke who wrote Roots
‘Tess of the D’Urbevilles’ – the endings a bit hammy
‘High Windows’ – poems by Pip Larkin
Herzog – Saul Bellow
‘The Secret Agent’ Conrad, Victorian anarchists blowing up the Greenwich observatory

maybe Siddhartha

there a suitably glum selection

buckle me swashes

might well have been mentioned afore
All invited to drinks in the Sidewinder after work on Friday, traditional, it will be PeteC’s birthday (bowls playing Richard Briers lookie alike in the web team) and Huw is leaving and Jen leaving too (awww!), Epic will sadly be completely devoid of it’s quota of Canadians.
Like Ravens at the Tower? i ‘spect the building will fall down

i was 42 yesterday ‘Life the universe and everything’, cakes all round tomorrow.
that would also be my double 21st birthday!
…..just an excuse to waffle about what i was doing 21 years ago
from an old email
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…..the Sydney Swans were an aussie rules footie team, aussie rules was only really ever played around a wallow in the mud of Melbourne, but the Swans were set up amidst much Razzamatazz to bring the game to Sydney

I was employed as one of the half time entertainers, dressed as Zorro, I got to prance around the pitch in front of 40 000 people at the Syney Cricket Ground
twirl of cape, swish of sword. what a delightful hoopla!
30 bucks, free scoff, as much beer as you could drink …and you got to watch the game
the only problem being that everybody fancied Queen Cleopatra, my friends Darth Vader and Dracula nearly came to blows over her!

I became a regular, my defining roles were:
once as a furry penguin, I had to waddle race against Joe Bugner, up and down the pitch, both of us pushing giant inflatable balls.
Joe Bugner, a british (brutish?!) boxer from the 70’s had once fought Mohammed Ali for the heavyweight crown of the world.
having emigrated to Australia he’d obviously fallen on hard times.
I took an early lead, but then recklessly decided to ham it up… just a teensy bit, jumping up and down, flapping my wings and waggling my tail feathers at Mr Bugner.
‘It’s a Knockout!’ no, not from a punch, but i tripped, sprawled on the grass and Joe rolled his inflatable ball straight over the top of me!
ha

oh and the other one was when i had to dress up as a mad axeman executioner, we had to dance with the Sydney swannettes, the cheerleaders to the Rocky Horror picture show song

all together now:

It’s just a jump to the left.
And then a step to the right.

With your hands on your hips.

You bring your knees in tight.
But it’s the pelvic thrust
That really drives you insane.
Let’s do the time-warp again.
Let’s do the time-warp again.

burqa

whilst having a sarnie on the beach by the pier at lunch, there was this wonderful burqa clad woman.
she lay down on the pebbles, then just rolled sideways, down, down the slope of shingle.
At the bottom she just hooted with laughter, with great dignity got up, back up the slope, then did the whole thing again. guffawing the whole way down!
Then other people began to join in.
I had a bash. It was good fun.
$ky. Pebbles. $ky. Pebbles. $ky
glimpse of blue, muffle of beige

all the while the shussh, the teeth sucking sigh of the waves.
waves, in subtle mimicry, jam roly poly up the beach

what next Skateboarding nuns?

taj

oh a taj superstore has sprung up at the bottom of st james
it’s great, smells delicious, i did 4 laps up and down the aisles at lunch, fantastic food and healthy hippy types
i left tho’, obviously, buying nowt due to being skint

if i were to have any dosh, how ethical is it? are they a brighton based co-op like infinity

balaam

oh i bumped into Nick Cave t’other day, prob nothing unusual in that as i think he lives in Hastings
but i’ve been listenning to one of his songs ‘breathless’ which a friend had bunged on a compilation cd. cranky odd and tuneful fun.
Nick was very dapper, goateeish beard, odd suit, but looked a nice bloke
he had his two young sons with him and was in flustered busy dad mode. ha. so i rolled my eyes at him in melodramatic empathy.

must be odd being a celeb in Brighton, the way everybody is just too cool and polite even to look at you.. kinda gently deliberately avoiding your eye
It almost seems politer to point… and gawp!

what was that book i never read which he wrote. any good?

‘Three greasy brother crows wheel, beak to heel, cutting a circle into the bruised and troubled $ky, making fast, dark rings through the thicksome bloats of smoke.’

good places in europe

… reply to a post

… nope no use whatsoever.. but i fancied a witter

Napolii

when i was young and interrailing we decided to camp out at Pompeii, thought it would be spooky cool to roam the ruins amongst the moonlight
i think we hopped the fence ok but after an hour fled on account of a couple of huge howling baying hell hounds,
that and the fact we were being dive bombarded by voracious mozzies.
caught the first train out… to ..to ..Belgrade.. as you do when interailing

years later i was visiting a goth friend in Napolii, she took me on a late night tour first up and down the funny peculiars (funiculars) then about the alternative nightclubs,
the Italian goths were called ‘the darks’ or something light that, great fun boogeying the night away to Bauhaus and even ha! the Cure

I was impressed that the local gay community at the time had sneaky graffiti painted every lion statue, throughout the city, a pleasingly gaudy pink
hard to be a proud ferocious king of the beasts in your pinkitude, each snarl becomes a gurn!

my grandad tho, who always had the best tales (if not always scrupously truthful),
he collapsed the year i was born in Napolii, a blood clot on the brain
apparently the doctors said that falling and bashing his bonce saved his life, the force dislodging the clot
He was Nursed back to health by Dame Gracie Fields!
Gracie who? .. well think, like she was the 1940’s version of… umm Beyonce…but from Lancaster
She lived on the goat isle of capri and her Florence Nightingale stint was because my great aunt may was the chairperson of her fan club!