Under the bridge

After my haircut

rain cools the back of my neck

beats against slumped heads of geraniums

shines the trembling leaves of the creeper

in the dusty cobwebbed wall.

Thunder grumbles in

and a silver downpour.

I run faster than I have for years

feel my shirt sticking to my back.

Under the dark arc of the dripping bridge

I stand within 

a minimalist sound scape

of abstract music. 

Jewel raindrops 

wait to fall from broad blue girders

landing

with sounds like consonants

from a mouth cracked with thirst

long silences between.

A curly brown dog shakes it's coat

into a wayward spinning blur

nails tapping on the flagstones.

From today's journal

One of my favourite writing spots. A groyne labelled No. 10, built of concrete just wide enough to sit on with legs outstretched. Far enough away from the steps to be out of sight. Above the high tide line for most of the year, I can sit here in all weathers looking out into all that space. Leaning against the promenade wall, beneath the railings, the slope fits my back like it was made for me.

Low tide. Friday evening. Calm seas. Grey skies. No boundary between water and air. Sea becomes sky where there should be the certainty of a horizon. The waves whisper to break, call and response style, onto flat welcoming sand. None of the heaving of stones, two steps forward and one step back, none of the relentless futile and inevitable sweeping up and sucking back that percusses this coast daily. Tonight there is silence between the waves.

This is a different beach because of that fragile strip of sand at the sea's edges. Low tide opens up a huge new plane to view, to walk along, to play upon. 

I love the rogue seventh wave tonight. Wait for it each time. Lose count. Then find it again. I love the way it dumps and slumps it's crest down far out from shore and how it gently breezes in, like it is taking all day to fade into a final curling lip of bubbling and disappearing froth.

I am walking the curving path of that lip, barefoot. I look down, mesmerized by it's evolving line.

Beach shots

On the seaside bench, a huge seagull chick chunners in delight. It's beak drips smeared pink ice cream that he has scooped and pecked from the shallow paper cup abandoned there with some remnants left to enjoy. The liquid pink drips through the wooden slats onto the speckled concrete. Behind him, in a bright circle of acidic yellow left by the circus Big Top, shoulder hunched adult birds face uniformly into the wind.

A suffocated stunt kite plummets out of the sky, lands with a sound like belly flop contained in a tiled pool. It's nylon threads are stranded at angles around the beach huts. A man walking his square cornered plodding dog doesn't see the taught wires across his path and they slice and cut his check below the eye. He is swearing to the wind as the dog looks up at him, head to one side. He turns back into the wind, taking determined steps, holding his hat in place. 

I sat behind a groyne, away from the relentless blast of the wind, watched a purple sky gathering itself into a high bank of darkness. Shakily chalked on the wall beside me was a comforting smiling figure. Possibly a portrait of Humpty Dumpty, but more likely a proud drawing of someone's Daddy.

Sepia ink

It's been in a dark and forgotten corner of the cupboard for years. A gift I always meant to use, but put away. Somehow too fancy for my everyday use. Looking too formal, too special, too expensive for my sketchbook scribblings all done on the hop and in a wonderful swoop before the hands of the clock reach the half hour. Impractical for that, when I have no time for letting things dry before I turn to a new page, no time to waste remembering where I put the blotting paper, no time to scrub my hands clean before I have to get back to work.

In the midst of decision making, mulling things over, clearing out the cupboard, facing up to sentimentality that wants to hoard things, I found the tiny bottle again. It is so small I can almost hide it in the cup of my hand. For something so tiny, it seems to hold so much - so much that I had avoided. 

Associations grotesque and Gothic fly through my imagination like a moralistic story stokes the red heat of guilt in a child. 'Drink me', it pleads, and a flood of Dali illustrations for 'Alice in Wonderland' tumble through me just like I have spilt them with the ink across the floor. It looks medicinal, like it holds something slightly sinister beneath it's stained cork stopper and the brittle seal of aging wax. Poison for a pen, perhaps? It looks like something from the times of Dickens.

The wax shatters in my hand, snaps away from the glass, hard edged. The stopper is creaking in the neck. It emerges with the suck of gorged and satisfied stained lips and with a vapour that could hold and nurture a malicious genie. Something salty about the smell, a high note that rushes to wake you up in a place deep in behind the eyes. It hits as a slightly bitter pepper to a place at the back of  your tongue, where breath must plummet deeper before it falls over the edge into pulsing darkness. 

With too slim a neck to take my dip pen, I pour the ink out into a shallow dish. Not what I expected. Time has softened this earthy sepia into leaf green. It is a beautiful shade, similar to one of the favourite paints I use most. Set free from it's shady vial, I scrawl and write nonsense with it, draw with unusual rhythms and repetitions that surprise me. I rapidly use up what I have rescued from evaporating into the ether and play across the welcoming page.

A god and a goddess

Drumming, chanting, flicking tiny cymbals with every syllable of the mantra, they danced and twirled their way down the busy lunchtime street. Devoted to lifting up his voice in worship of a holy name, the singer in pale and creased pink robes, wore shoes that saluted another powerful name. Nike.

Migrant

Low tide. 

Miles of sand to wander

barefoot. 

Tides pull and drag me back here.

Fling me onto my home beach.

In all this space, 

under all this sky,

I listen

to silences

around each gust,

each distant wave breath. 

High in a waving cage of Marram 

that slices the view,

feet swallowed by warm yielding sand,

I scan the rippled and brushed shore.

Moving towards me,

is a word being written

on a pale page of sky.

Strange dance of wings. 

Fluid. 

Alone. 

Not a native.

Not one of the flock.

Swept here, ecstatic. 

Now blown off course.

My eyes capture your silhouette, 

your markings,

to check at home.

Still wondering about poetry and prose.......

Low tide. Miles of sand to wander, barefoot. Tides pull and drag me back here. Fling me onto my home beach. In all this space, under all this sky, I listen to silences around each gust, each distant wave breath.

High in a waving cage of marram that slices the view, feet swallowed by warm yielding sand, I scan the rippled and brushed shore.

Moving towards me is a word being written on a pale page of sky. Strange dance of wings. Fluid. Alone. Not a native. Not one of the flock. Swept here, ecstatic. Now blown off course. My eyes capture your silhouette, your markings, to check at home.

GPS maps

In the shop window. Down a little narrow back street I had never walked before, though I don't know why. I used to walk past it twice a day on my way to and from work. Not my sort of shop, I thought. Lots of old prints, like you see in a solicitor's office. No prices on view. Polished windows that show too clear a reflection of your image.

It was in the front of the window furthest away from the door. Placed like it might not sell quickly. I caught a glance of it, couldn't believe my eyes. It had to be one of the most interesting things I had seen. 

Black ink on the smoothest white paper. Square format setting it off perfectly. Like a tracery on lichened wood, it suggested the movements of tiny creatures who live a life hidden from ours until the light catches their pathways. It was like a record of spidery steps taken across a web to check on prey and upkeep, made into an embroidery of lines with a slightly tentative hand. It was like a line inked over all the pathways I have ever walked in a year.

Artwork as distinctive as the tube map, but more flowing, more fickle, looking like chance discoveries had been left on this page rather than smoothed out and made neater round the edges. 

No A-Z. No famous landmarks marked. This was a new map of London.

This piece was inspired by seeing a print by Jeremy Wood - London GPS map 2006

Not digital.

Out on the jetty, on a precious finger of solitude away from ice creams, running dogs and deck chairs, he held his breath. He was waiting for the exact moment when the liquid sun would run down the metal rails of rays into the dull flat plate of grey sea. Headless in the black canopy of the camera cloak, he stooped, back complaining, ready to click and catch the moment like in a scene from back in time.

Always someone behind him waiting to chat when he emerged. He knew they were there even when he was buried in the velvet darkness peeping into a stark frame of light, could sense their shy fascination. Their questions always struck him as strange and he tried not to be rude to them. But when that guy asked him was it a digital camera he wanted to throw his head back and laugh out loud.

Why did he always go home with wet feet?

Writing bug

Lost in it. Head down. View of the world reduced to a blank white page rapidly filling with loose black words pouring from my pen. A familiar voice asked with playful surprise - "Are you writing a book?"

Took me a moment to come back into the real world. I looked out at tanned feet in sandals below indigo jeans, lifted my head to see the friend I had been waiting for. So good to see each other. Been too long. Smiles. Hugs.

As we walked off together, linking arms, catching up on news, I still had the image in my head, of me sitting there on the park bench moments ago. I write every day. I have a couple of bigger projects on the go. Why had that question touched such a nerve? 

It hit me with a mixture of excitement and dread. Maybe it's time for me to raise my game?

Melting pot 6

• On my coffee table - Two caravans - Marina Lewycka, Haweswater - Sarah Hall, Findings - Kathleen Jamie
• On my iPod - The protecting veil - John Tavener
• On my music stand - Partita in d minor - J.S.Bach
• From the allotment - baby corn, beetroot, runner beans, courgettes, french beans, dahlias, new crop lettuce and rocket

Wilberforce

He wailed, distraught. She brought in his cruel playground enemies whose grey socks were falling down bruised skinny legs. Mopping his tears she whispered - "Hold your head high. You are named after a man who changed the world." Those powerful words resonated in him for the rest of his life.

Cardoons

Long greying arms wave

in celebration of the sky.

Bobbing spiny stars

like church bosses

carved in ancient wood

support your heads into Autumn.

Silvery leaves crack

multi jointed

like stick insect limbs.

Thin unsure fingers 

prickle around something forgotten

that has slipped away.

Your choke has faded

this blue bee heaven

is sucked barren.

Now a hairy tuft

spun erratic at it's edges

like an old Terrier's eyebrow

it brushes the breeze.

Reptilian bracts

protect a globe.

Quiet tongues listen

to your purple heart.

I've just had a fun hour of playing around with words on screen. It was tempting to post several versions of this poem as it made it's way into this finished form, however, I think that is probably of more interest to me than anyone else, so I will spare you the repetition! However, my current fascination with poetry is to do with the actual reading of it and how that can change the sense and the meaning of the piece. I knew that 'Cardoons' was going to be a poem as soon as I began it, but given that I usually write prose, I wanted to post this version as well. Interested to see which version speaks best.

Cardoons  2

Long greying arms wave in celebration of the sky. Bobbing spiny stars, like church bosses carved in ancient wood, support your heads into Autumn. Silvery leaves crack, multi jointed like stick insect limbs. Thin unsure fingers prickle around something forgotten that has slipped away.

Your choke has faded, this blue bee heaven is sucked barren. Now a hairy tuft, spun erratic at it's edges like an old Terrier's eyebrow, it brushes the breeze. Reptilian bracts protect a globe. Quiet tongues listen to your purple heart.

Not at the desk

We bought you a new basket, lined it with your blanket, freshly washed. You sniffed it suspiciously, circled it eight times in both directions and slumped down with a huge sigh of satisfaction on the grassy and sandy doormat in the hallway. 

I have a new writing spot. It waits for me. I look at it a lot, walk past it and see if the urge takes me. Then I run downstairs, kick off my shoes and do my writing curled on the sofa in a heap of cushions where I feel more part of the day to day. 

I am more prolific if I lean against a wall looking out at the sea with my notebook pages flapping as I balance it on my knees and shift my sacrum away from certain stones. My writing is more imaginative if I am out under the sky, with a polished apple in my pocket and dust in my boots. 

Truth is, I am often happier writing at the kitchen table in a precious squeezed in hour of solitude before the next thing, looking at the vase of red orange and pink dahlias brought in from the ravaging wind with petals opening like hands, my open expectant diary, cast aside sea sprayed sunglasses, a half written shopping list, an abandoned handful of loose change and yesterday's creased train tickets.

My new spot is lovely. The table top is clear except for a few inspirational books, a blue glass paperweight that looks like a delicious boiled sweet, a plant that sits in solitude without me. But in it's calm silence and stillness, there is an expectation looming. I have sat there with notebooks and pens in hand unable to put pen to paper. Sadly, I am acknowledging that it is still a desk, a place more suited to me doing my accounts and work plans than to wayward flights of the imagination. And I am starting to see that the writer in me has a wilder nature than I thought.

Eventually, the cat moved into the dog basket. Not every day and certainly not if anyone was looking. If you came down for a drink of water on wet and stormy nights, he would be tucked up at one end, arms over his head, upside down in smiling ecstasy. He would chirrup in disgust and run off after being discovered there. 

The dog didn't care. She still slept in front of the draughty cat flap.

This piece is reminding me of a song from childhood. Lots of verses. 

Seems to connect with what I've just written, somehow.

I had a cat.

The cat pleased me. 

I fed my cat under yonder tree. 

The cat says fiddle i dee

Shelling peas, again

This is a little piece I wrote the other day as an afterthought to my post on the 17th and as a little experiment into the world of poetry.

Shelling peas

they drop into the colander

with my tears

Merry go round

Takes a while to catch the tune. Bells clatter over the cadences. Holding tight to the golden gallopedes we glide around towards a sunset horizon we will never reach. 'All the nice girls love a sailor' mixes with snatches of conversation left syllabic back there as we circle on and on and on.

I just catch sight of it before we are taken around again towards the sea and the freedom of the open sky. All in that moment, it happened, a frightening snapshot that made us all overreact and duck for cover. They run out of the beach shop, delighted with their gifts. The girl is waving a spinning whirligig windmill. Her smiling brother aims a machine gun at us with ruthless intent.

'Liberty Bell' trips and stutters as we climb down the wide curving planked steps. The boy waves the gun over his head in glory. Two girls dressed identically march by in time. Laughing out loud, they salute him.

3 poets

Too rainy to walk home, I'm on the bus, coming home late. Among hordes of foreign students who still have wild energy to shout at midnight, I have your quiet words in my pocket. Upstairs and down there is unison screaming as we go past the pier, at it's glittering diamond show, dramatic against the black backdrop of night sky. 

I take out the little book you gave me from my jeans pocket, begin reading the last page, so that I leave my favourite poem for last. Each page is a little world to wander in. Each time I read these poems, I discover something else, find something I had not seen before. I turn a page and the day starts anew and I am seeing things with different eyes. I read, gaze, read some more, watch the streams of people pour into and out of this bus like it is a silent film happening around me.

Room to breathe after the station, and more space for thoughts. As I struggle to climb the steep floor as we head uphill home, I think about how the radio has introduced me to other new poets this week, in the interval breaks in concerts - poets who are very much alive and creating. It has been a week of words, words speaking out in beautiful stark glory, a week of voices communicating so much with such economy. I ding the bell and there is a click of recognition in me that maybe I should try writing some poetry. Such a simple and obvious thought, it feels ridiculous to have had it. 

In the dark tree lined street, puddles hold scraps of reflections with ragged edges. Coltrane drifts down from an open window like blue smoke and I am going home to write some more.

Alps

In the blue twilight, my eyes are wanting to close. My stomach lurches from the pinch and clench of too many hairpin bends and the torrential shrapnel of roadside gravel. 

I leave behind the festive lines of German bikers and pull over into the entrance to the snowplough station. It's all boarded up, locked tight for the Summer, polished and swept clean. To stop myself from being sick as my feet come to stand on an earth that feels like it is spinning too fast, I count the 18 tall columns of pale pine logs neatly stacked along one side of the cabin.

Away from the swish of passing traffic, I park beside a huge yellow water tank, eat syrupy apricots straight from the tin, grab a thick tartan rug and my sleeping bag and lie down at last, on a fragrant bed of thyme.

Dawn is a pink and silent slow motion spectacle. Before the traffic has climbed up from the lake, all I can hear are waterfalls in surround sound. At the barrier at the back of the plot, I look down and down to the pale valley floor and the fast snake of white river. Towering faces of mountains all around weep waterfalls. The valley echoes with the sound of water thrown out of rock.

Shelling peas

Shelling peas. Splitting open reluctant shells. Their brightness always a shock to the retina. So green, it tears through to the back of my eye. I remember flying low over Galway, looking down from the plane window onto a mosaic of green fields so bright it almost made me gasp. 

I push the peas out of line, thumb them from their bed, ease them away from the shoulders of their neighbours, hear them drop into the metal of the colander. Against the mirror of stainless steel, the punctuation of black holes, they would make for a dramatic still life.

As the compost bucket fills with the strings and stalks and shells, I am back in a stone floored kitchen, years ago, listening to the voices of my cousins as we all pop the pea pods we just picked from the garden. It's the first day of our holiday staying with them. Still swaying from the long journey, and with the rhythm of the rattling train in my head, they sound like they are singing words I will never understand. They sound like the poetry of endless flat fields full of skylark song and dusty summers.

At the sink, I rinse them, tumbling them around the bowl. I hear the sound of a hare galloping across hills. 

The waitress

"My days are always better when I'm wearing a blue shirt" she told me, as I carried her large cup of tea over from the counter. She had on a thin linen shirt that matched her eyes. It was still polka dotted by raindrops from when she had run in from the silver shining street in another of those downpours that had the door rattling in it's dark wood frame and the front windows steaming up.

August. It had been a month of wet feet in sandals, selling out of soup every lunchtime, mopping the floor, a near empty tips jar and the dark endless monotony of un-peopled afternoons wondering if we could close up early without the boss finding out. Now the sky turned black as doom. The shine fell from the brass shelf hinges and lamp fittings. The whole place sank into a gloomy scene of sticky tables, shabby unpolished wood, and limp greying dishcloths.

The lone man in the corner, a regular who never takes off his raincoat and never says much, was doing the crossword. Frowning, with glasses perched on top of his head, he ordered toasted tea cakes in a serious and whispered tone. Their spicy sweetness wafted through the room behind me as I carried his plate. I resisted the temptation to toast another for myself. In fact, I resisted the urge to toast one for everyone in here, was dying to give them away free, cheer us all up a bit, fantasized about running up and down the street flinging them out joyfully like frisbee giveaways, shouting hallelulia. 

When I cleared his table, I saw a neatly folded fiver on his plate beside the black crumbs and tiny golden drops of butter. In all these years, he had never left me a tip.

I made a mental note of three important things - blue shirts, toasted tea cakes, generosity.

12 red notebooks

Remembering another flood of words - a few years ago in August, while I was staying in the Languedoc. The little cottage had a marble floor that welcomed my feet as I wrote every afternoon, always a precious time in heightening cricket song shimmering under the full tilt of the sun.

Just like the locals, I had learnt to keep the shutters closed from late mornings onwards. I had altered my days to be more like theirs - walk at dawn or sunset, sit by the fountain to chat, splash water on your feet in the stream, follow slow cats across the cobblestones as the shadows start to disappear from the square, go indoors and stay there a while.

So after lunch each day, I wrote. Filled pages and pages of large red floppy exercise books. I had brought a dozen of them with me. I wanted to be free to write what I pleased and felt intimidated by serious hard covers and stitched seams. I wrote until the delirium of the afternoon stilled into a black unbearable throb, until the book slid from my lap, until my head gave up and fell forward into sleep. 

I'm sure my pen must have carried on writing once I had hit the darkness of my siesta. Strange worlds were evident on those pages - like it wasn't written by me. But I had made a space to pick up a pen again and now it seemed like I would never stop. 

The sand sculptor

Missed you today. Low tide on the Thames isn't quite right without seeing you in that strange temporary arena, on show in that wet corner of high sand where the wide beams of harbour wall sit next to concrete.

For the first time ever, I walked there along the shore, following a dirty ribbon of swaying beach litter, the furthest out from the banks I have ever been. The soft sand didn't make me welcome. It sank beneath every step and held my footprints as dark sloping gritty pools. I walked past rounded chunks of bright red brick, many lost and lonely shoes, and a stark scattering of washed out bones, including a thigh bone longer than my own, looking like a cartoon weapon.

Further up the beach, I saw your absence. In your place, a small boy was running, making a circular pattern of footsteps in the sand while he sang aloud in Spanish. His grandma, surrounded by shopping bags, sat on the first step of the wall with her shoes off.

I stopped to sit near the old mossy chains bolted to the river wall. They were swinging heavily in today's stroppy breeze. If you were here you would be well into your creation right now, knowing the tide only gives you a brief and precious time. Smoothing out the arms of the sofa and brushing away the excess crumbs, you would be on the lookout for just the right kind of skinny twig to make a TV aerial and shaping a low coffee table in your imagination.

Maybe you are on some warmer and sunnier beach today, pretending to be asleep with your arms behind your head on another sand sofa? I like to hope that your thank you flag is gathering coins from another little crowd of admirers.

As my feet crunch away, I realize that I am walking on bits of broken, ground down, lost and rejected bits of London. It is not a beautiful stage for your humour or your cheek.

Dots before my eyes

I've been noticing that the street has been very quiet these last few days. I don't live on a main road. I live very close to the town centre on a street where there is usually a bit of traffic and people coming and going. Anyway, given the current ghost town mood, what I am wanting to know is, have most of the neighbours gone away en masse all of a sudden? Are they all staying indoors watching the Olympic Games?

Coming back into town, we got caught up in a huge unmoving traffic jam. Suddenly, the streets were packed with stationary cars full of people going nowhere. After gazing out of the window at home earlier wondering where everyone was, I now discovered that they were all right here with me on this road. After forty minutes still in the same spot, I was tempted to abandon the car on the kerb and walk home. 

Internally, I screamed with full fury and instantly felt better. That bit of catharsis over and done with, I started to think about this overcrowded corner of England, and how many of us live in its towns and cities. Drought measures so easily come into play here. Gridlock ceases up the roads. More and more new buildings are heading skyward just a street of two away from the centre of town.

I was imagining a large scale map that showed us all as an individual dot or a oddly shaped blob where we live. My street would be obscenely covered as most of the houses now hold four or more flats -in fact, the whole of Brighton would be. There would be few surprises if you looked at the blobs across the UK. 

But what I was also thinking is, if there is a only certain amount of the land on this earth that is reasonable to inhabit - meaning not a volcano or an ice flow - then how much of the earth's land do we as a world population take up? And also, miraculously, if overcrowding and bad housing and shanty towns and refugee camps were banned by world decree and we all contentedly lived a reasonable distance apart, would there be any room left? Would there be any vast expanses of wild land?

Dots before my weary eyes, speckling shadows from the trees overhead, the shimmer of heat from the car bonnet, behind us the gut thudding of a bass line without the rest of the song. Five minutes from home felt like way too far. 

First plate of Runner beans

Simple perfection - this Summer's first plate of Runner beans with three twists of black pepper cranked across a thin sliver of butter. I eat as the blustery sky turns pink - crusty sesame bread, a bowl of steaming garlic mussels, a glass of chilled White grenache. Now I need a maid.

The walking man

Something about the rapidly fading light with the evening coming close in. Something about driving along the lonely road and the long thin line of puddled pavement that ran like a wayward silver lane singing it's way along at the field's edge. I thought I saw him walking there.

Someone from my childhood, someone my family had known of for years, and the neighbours, the locals, the commuters on that route along the coast. But none of us actually knew him. 

He was the walking man, the man with the sideways hang of head who spoke to no one, the man who walked 20 miles town to town with his limping black dog along the main road one way and then turned right round and walked back again, rain or shine, heat or blizzard, daylight or darkness. Every day.

Once, walking my own dog I came up close to him as I came out of a side street at a bit of a run. His face had a leathery tan. His eyes were half closed. His dog and mine exchanged sudden snarls and flash of fang at the extent of their leads. His dog had one milky blue eye. The man didn't seem startled by the sudden aggression. He just kept walking and his dog curled a tight lip as it eyed us over it's shoulder. His walk was in a constant parallel with traffic, and although there were interesting places along the way, this was someone intent on a mission to get from A to B. 

I remember coming home late from one of my first paid gigs, years ago, now. I was trying to appear grown up and not hold my breath as we swung and swayed round the bends in the ill fated woods near home when we all cried out at the same moment, and swerved to miss him. It was close to midnight, heading east, and he just stepped out and walked across the road where the pavement runs out on one side and you have to cross over. He flashed across the curved line of cat's eyes as slinky as a creature that only knows the night. The dog's eyes turned hollow, transparent, luminous in our headlights. In the cover of the darkness behind us, they were walking invisible again and our hearts were left pounding in our ears.

Similarity of situation. Driving home late on an empty road after a gig. Music still playing in my head. A long meandering pavement for someone to walk. Fields and trees turning into the monochrome tones of night. The sort of landscape that longs for his silhouette.

A bit like a nest

Beside the window in the cool flood of morning air, I might need to find a sweater in a minute, and socks. Geraniums sway outside. I catch their prickly scent somewhere at the back of my throat. Reds and pinks are raindrop jewelled, bright like cut outs against the white homes opposite. Silver drops shimmer along the railing, like they will fall at any moment. For now they are still holding on, shivering until their moment of freedom comes. Already, this is a little sanctuary, a quiet corner away from the alluring distractions of phones, diary, radio, kettle and computer. 

I've sat here so many times before, but today this feels like a new space, a new venture, another positive step - one of many taken this Summer. I just moved my little table back to where it used to be last year, before a row of palms and ferns lined the window. I put down my writing journal this morning to rearrange this space. Been meaning to get on and do this for weeks - one of the things you get round to doing in long stretches of time off. Very satisfying, partly because it is so long overdue.

This small table - I guess it is more of a chest - has no room to tuck legs beneath it's drawers unless you open up the side flaps and double it's length, but I love it's glowing rich cherry wood and the old brass handles that fold silently and snugly into their recess. From when I first saw it, it has always reminded me of a ship, of the kind of furniture in a captain's creaking and sloping room, back in time, of economy of space for only the barest of essentials.

Bought from a pavement junk stall on a lunch break stroll, I had them deliver it to my workplace where my colleagues all downed tools to come and admire it and stroke it before the boss returned. It came in a rattling dusty open backed truck. A yawning Border collie was tied to it's leg with a faded blue rope. Later, I took it home to my yellow angular kitchen where it started every morning with me when the weather was too wet to have breakfast outside.

In the highest and brightest part of my home, I'm away from my music work space downstairs and all it's nagging associations and expectations of job, career, making a living. Less hemmed in by those concerns and with the doors wide open onto the balcony, I look around me. More like a den, this is a play space with my inspiring notice board, bookshelves, sketchbooks, a stack of unfinished canvasses, more of a personal space than the rest of the house. Precious territory, it feels like a huge comforting support for my creative journeying - a bit like a nest.

Wild places of their own

Late, after the final rumblings of thunder had moved on, I came downstairs for a glass of water. I could see the grey shapes against the rich wood of the piano, where I left them to dry on thick pads of newsprint overnight. I sat in front of them in the quiet darkness and could just make out some of the textures and stronger lines that seemed to have taken on a life of their own.

Thinking back, it was a precious time, yesterday. I worked differently, on small canvas boards, 5 simultaneously. Inspired by a page from an old sketchbook with tiny thumbnail ideas in scratchy tentative pen, I sketched these boards out in the soft black of pencil, just a few pointers. Then I got messy, squirted glue from a squeezy bottle to follow some of those lines, though not perfectly and leaving any mistakes where they fell, and finished off the session by throwing sand across the whole thing. Tapped off the excess and left them to dry while I went scuttling down the hill to buy bread for lunch.

Later, I scooped up gesso from it's cool pot and smoothed and scraped it into the surfaces, moved it in the general direction of my ideas but gave it a bit of spontaneous freedom as well. Cleaned up, left it all to dry again while I went for a tea time walk along the blustery beach listening to the spurts and splutters and myriad colours somehow made into sounds. Britten cello suites on my iPod.

Couldn't wait to get back home to pour diluted left over ink across the sketches, blue black and gritty from twigs and pens, tried not to make too much mess as I dripped over a tray, tried not to brush my hair out of my eye with blackened fingers. Then, I rubbed the ink into the grain and texture of the surfaces and wiped most of it off, like I was polishing them clean in the unflattering rapidly fading light. I left them to dry again and went off to open a bottle of wine and make dinner while blue lightening closed in and flashed, illuminating the room.

Wide eyed from splashing cold water on my face, I opened up the curtains this morning and threw the ruthless light of clarity onto you, while drinking my first cup of tea. I sat and looked from across the room, aware of runaway grains of sand against my bare feet. These pieces make up for me not having painted while I was away on holiday, and though not of anywhere in particular, it is no surprise that they are reminiscent of mountains, hills and valleys and heavy skies looming low. More representational than abstract, they are not of a real place. Wild places of their own, the more I look, the more accidental detail I see in them, somewhere unknown. Grey, elemental, textural and moody - these are unlike other work I have produced. It is tempting to leave them in their shades of grey, but my paints are almost bursting out of their tubes.

Into the dark

Walking the dogs, late. Paddling in the suck and pull of pebbles. Kids in flip flops, smiling and silent, boogie in a promenade line dance. I gaze into the indigo darkness as burning Chinese lanterns drift overhead, crackle, fizz, vapourise. Next morning's headline read - Record UFO sightings along coast.

No visitors today, please.

Across the piano lid that makes for a lovely useful shelf when not being played, a row of open sketchbooks, pages folded back. Odd looking back at them, this themed selection of drawings and scribbles from different times. Some were sketched from life, some from imagination, some sketched freely with eyes close to sleep, not really looking at the page. 

Somewhere buried underneath them is my open diary, still turned to last week's busy schedule. There's time to enjoy creative chaos this week and I've turned off the phone.

Across the window ledge, leaning to dry, splattered with sand and glue, a series of five sketches done quickly, brought to life after finding a page yesterday that I had forgotten about. Looking back at the original sketch, I have an odd feeling that it wasn't really done by me. Mulling them over as I finish my tea, lines and textures, no colour yet, I know they all need to have a certain kind of blue in them. My sleeves are rolled up ready to open up the wide mouthed pot of cool gesso, see it mark the crooked paths in my hands as I level it into a mosaic like fields in a white winter landscape.

I trip over my shoes, left where I kicked them off as I came back from driving home alone after a performance on Saturday, needing a beer. My violin still sits behind the door, unplayed since then, needing a bit of spit and polish and a new string.  I cover the floor, plan where I will be making a mess and letting the paint run in happy streams, where my inky fingerprints will touch. 

A dark pink geranium with heavy heads nods in the slice of cool morning air at the window, only open an inch today. My half eaten plate of strawberries looks out at the trees swaying, the white plate creates strange dark reflections of water droplets. 

My journal is open, left mid-sentence, pen held in the valley of a steep page that wants to turn over too soon. A few sides are filled with free flow lines of loose handwriting done earlier. A crumpled back of envelope list of ideas from yesterday's beach walk, rescued from a jeans pocket, reminds me of something else I want to come back to.

Practising

Tyre track teeth cut notches into windows of sky. I gasp at the new angular buildings that fill more of this space week by week, shudder at the thought of so many homes and offices and hotels that seem so unsuited to those who might like the quirky in life. Shoe box stacks reach up and up, just like in the dusty high shelved back room of a store.

Then I see a ball fly up high, hear a child counting and clapping beneath it's fall. Barefoot with unbrushed blond curls, he is working hard on learning to catch on a black diamond of space between trucks parked slanting on the corner outside the artist's studios. He misses each time and the heavy ball splats down.

When I walk back this way from the bank an hour later, he's catching every throw.

Sleep for 100 minutes

At the allotment, scooping up a handful of glossy purple french beans that I had left in a shady spot to pick up before locking the gate, a fat and jagged splinter stabbed into my finger. Blood and tears poured. A shard of cruel wood had managed to find a spot right on my fingertip under the nail. I squeezed hard there, cursed my trim left hand violinist's fingernails as I braced myself to hold still enough to try to pull it out. Impossible.

Upstairs on the bus home, I cried behind my sunglasses as I kept the sorry finger pressed tight against my thumb. Boiling the kettle, sterilizing a needle, pouring salt into a bowl, I was putting off the moment, anticipating a sudden gut clenching yelp each time I tried to find the right place. I stood in the final momentary clarity of a shaft of afternoon sunlight, that intense golden moment just before a tall chimney stack blocks out the direct light here, and with a deft flick of the fine sharp I had it clean out of me. A thickly dark sphere of blood rose after it.

On the sofa later, I got lost reading the same line over and over again and entered a magical world full of echoing incantations and poetic repetitions and ramblings. I slept for a hundred minutes to be awoken by the sudden thump of my book falling to the floor.

The twirling of men in kilts

I drove against the festive traffic crawling into town. Feather boas fluttered out of car windows. Roadside stalls were setting up in odd places. Men in kilts crossed at the traffic lights. Girls dressed in cowboy hats and not much else were shouting and flirting across the street at each other. Drag queens tottered on high heels, fluttering eyelashes. The air buzzed. The place was grinding to a halt for a massive crazy party. 

In the midst of it all, the street sweeper scratched and scraped his broom along the gutter. A human chain threw sack after sack of buns from a van straight through the vacant open hatch of the burger stall. A postman with a long quirky feather in his cap emptied the letterbox on the corner, rattled a monstrous chained set of keys and slammed the narrow creaking metal door like he was intent on sealing a door to hell forever. The lights changed and I was on my way again.

On smooth and empty roads I rushed past fields of wheat so endlessly wide that it felt like I wasn't moving at all. The music on the radio reminded me of trains, of journeys, of pushing ahead, of days spent like this. I curved round slow forest bends in the rain and started thinking about the music I would perform today.

Pieces I am revisiting. Well loved, like old friends. Music from the European folk tradition that has largely been passed from musician to musician, singer to singer, fiddle to fiddle. Music that would have been lost centuries ago if it hadn't been played again at parties, dances, celebrations and more sombre gatherings. Music that thankfully has finally been written down so that we can keep it for longer and embellish it without forgetting the roots.

The musician I am playing with is an old friend too, someone I don't see often now. But when we begin, it is evident that our old magic is still alive. As the church embraces our sound, mysterious resonances come into play. The music takes on it's own life again and I am imagining workers in a high field of yellow wheat chanting and singing in time with their repetitive actions, of travelling musicians riding into town on a cart pulled by a long maned snorting horse, of feet stomping on a bare and chicken pecked patch of ground, of dancing way into the night and the twirling of men in kilts.

After the gig

Clattering over cobble stones with my gear. Uphill for just one more empty street. I percuss my way home with my amp trolley, aware of every bump and change of texture in the dark pavement. I try to go gently, wondering if this nocturnal neighbourhood of open windows and breathing thin muslin curtains is hearing me against the silence of the night, while inside my head, strands of my music soar to jostle and play like they will never sleep again. 

I fling open all my own windows, hear the purring of a lonely taxi waiting somewhere round the corner, and kick off my shoes. Wide awake but weary, I eat a bowl of cereal, flick through the paper without reading it and wonder if I should just stay up all night. 

How it went tonight, the enthusiasm of the new bar staff who applauded our sound check, how we played the edgy new numbers, the surprise conversation I had earlier with a friend when I came off stage and her arms were suddenly around me, the ripping energy of the solo that stunned me as it came to life out of my instrument like it had a life all of it's own -  all these sounds are running in me like parallel trains heading for a distant stations. 

I go and have a quick shower, and as one day swirls and washes away down the plug hole it seems like the spray and the splashes finally overpower the hyper sounds within me. I switch off the alarm, turn out the lights and slowly drink a tall glass of water, knowing that music is going to be playing in my dreams.