In the black boat

Sheltered form the wind that cut in at the side of her eye, she huddled in the upended boat. And as the high tide ran close, leaping onto the white lashed shore, her mind wandered into the patterns of slats and curves of this boat and listened to the stories it had to tell. 

Like a flood tide under a low and heavy moon, the stories flowed out and under and in between each other. They told of fine wood being shaped and made ready for a lifetime at sea, of calico sails eager to snatch and catch every breath of wind, stitched at a fireside by rough and quick hands. Years of fishing, in calm golden seas, in fuming maelstrom, in times of hunger and times of smiling overflowing plenty, eating and trading, all these things were told with quiet pride of this ancient livelihood and the community around it and within it and behind it.  

And as the rain fell in heavy through a ragged crack, the boat reminded her of times when crews were lost and boats never found in the ruthless fury of a pursuing storm that swallowed all in it's path and spat nothing back, of wood that was smashed open and boats like this one, thrown back onto the beach, and recovered empty by men who dragged her up the shore and decided on a blue tearful morning, not to mend. Now it knew only the cruel hands of onshore weather that planed it's church-like black paint into lined grey, then bare brown, then bleached bone white. And it listened, collecting the daydreams of tourists who now sat in this old boat made into a seat.

It's just that

He liked to look at shadows cast on walls. See what he could imagine in the patterns and shapes cast from familiar objects. It was an old habit from times spent waiting. Long ago now, but still strangely haunting after all these years. Times spent waiting to be collected from school, long after his friends had scuffled and kicked a tired football home. 

Later and later, often 6 or 7 before she arrived, with no more homework to do, no more biscuits to eat, no more nervous parents to observe as they waited to see the Head, and no more patient and concerned staff there to check he was still safe. After the lights came on in the draughty corridor, he knew that he would probably be the last person to leave. 

Often, he drifted to sleep in the sighing drone of the floor polisher in the hall. It floated in the hands of Pearl, the cleaner, who always sang hymns softly with her eyes half shut as she worked. He could hear her broken phrases in the waves of drone that swayed away from him, those sways that left a space for 'dark vale I feel no' and 'my cup overflows', her voice like the liquid beam from a lighthouse, reaching across an empty night.

When his Mother arrived, at last, always a rustle and bustle of panting and brushing her hair back into place, her sentences were incomplete like the lines of Pearl's hymns, except they usually started awkwardly and with a capital letter. 'Sorry, sorry, so      It's terrible of me, I know, but it's just that'                

Blue seam

Tracing the ragged line of cliffs

a lone Swallow

follows the foaming edge of land.

Unpicking a blue seam

with needling cries

it spools into endless sky.

Starlings and Hawks

While making soup - chopping the onions, sweet potatoes, garlic, a couple of carrots, adding a generous pinch of favourite spices and a bundle of thyme, I am wondering about three ingredients that are stewing in my mind. Images of Icarus, Elton John and Bernie Taupin's hit - Rocket Man, and Yves Rossy who flew across the Channel on Friday with a jet-propelled wing on his back.

Elton sang about it being a long long time til touch down after his flight in space. Well, he was going a long way. 

Icarus over did it and ignored mission control instructions and common sense, leaving me wondering about how long it might have taken him to flap and glide to the next island if all had gone according to plan. 

As Yves showed the other day, technology is bringing the ideas of sci-fi into our reality. He flew across the English Channel in less than 10 minutes, riding in like a speeding Hawk, totally in it's element and driven onwards by a storm.

Looking out across the street as I ate the soup, I noticed Starlings congregating to splash in a sunlit rooftop puddle, all flapping peck and stabbing claw. Their joyous announcing of such a wonderful find brought in more and more of the flock, who landed on top of the crowd like a reckless ambushing pile-up.

How would most of us behave if we took to the skies with jet propulsion? Starlings or Hawks?

 

 

Brassicas

Before I closed the gate, before I had even set foot onto my own plot, they locked onto my track with tunnel vision. Cabbage Whites rushed towards me. Dancing around my frown, they flooded in, urgent to joyfully propagate the next generation on the new broccoli seedlings I held in a tray. I cursed as six butterflies found the cool undersides of frilled purple tinged leaves, despite my frantic and useless swatting.

Invisible in the blink of an eye, they fold themselves along the thin edges of vision, with all the stealth of a clever magician. Even in the mesh cage I have built, they always find a place to sneak in and shimmy. And today, as I stooped to plant the seedlings out in moist black compost, one of them had the nerve to flirt with my unhappy cheek.

It was tempting to eat these tender broccoli leaves myself, stir fry them in a little soy sauce and garlic, savour them before caterpillars have any chance to start chewing the crop that will feed us through next Spring. They have refined taste, these butterflies, homing their offspring in amongst one of the most delicious and expensive vegetables around. 

In the tough arena of growing vegetables without having all the creatures of the world eating them first, and avoiding one spray kills all known pests, I discovered that venomously repeating the word brassicas is very cathartic. I stomped home, still with my frown. 

After dinner

Like an opportunist pet, left in the quiet kitchen alone, he turned into silent scavenger. He couldn't resist. After all, they had left the door open. Sucking on abandoned chicken bones, mopping up the last of the coleslaw from the bowl with a ragged crust of bread, scraping up the moist lemon cake crumbs in his pressing clawing fingers, and draining the last dregs of every wine bottle into his upturned desperate mouth, tonight he consumed more than he had in the last two weeks. 

Instant drunken euphoria. Life pulsing through his chilled veins again. He stumbled out into the wet garden. As he pushed through the dark raining hedge and emerged into a haunting moonlit field of corn stubble, he felt blessed.

Sou'wester

In the blue between dancing rain

he walked West,

watching a screenplay 

of racing clouds 

in the drenched mirror

of the promenade.

Blackberrying

Blackberrying, in the buzzing blindness of surprise sun. Newly shorn stubble cracks, hot raffia white, beneath feet that want to escape shoes and run again in the grassy meadows of June and endless twilights. Cobwebs span hollow blue shadows. She licks the slow stream of purple from his tanned wrist.

Feral

The pale dawn rises frenetic with congregating voices of geese out on the island. Their furious black fussing shades the mirror lake - inky scribbles from a tormented hand. Gathering here all week, this same week of every year, they unsettle the dog, make him tread too close.

Today is the day. The tension is a swaying aeolian harp, humming taut like a stretched and twisted wire. The dog's eyes are caught over his flinched shoulder. He is poised contorted, like the birds, for that strange feral signal. 

In a flood like a ragged fuming breathing cloud, they suddenly rise, jubilant with cries sung out of time, lifting over the black wicker of the chestnut wood and the remnants of it's burnt orange skyfire. The dog bursts out, full voiced, regains it's true shape in the splash and bravado of flying into the mere after them, snorting as if to expel their enemy scent from his nose. They circle high, to find the pull of the South.

 

The trumpeting fades distant. Scrawled v shapes fade and settle into signature beats, pulsing them across a sea and a far continent.

When she was in the papers

There were more tracks left in the dew on bright mornings that Autumn. More humans. They walked in restrained paths, she noticed, usually following wiggling lines at a steady pace. They came with books and paper sheets, climbing up the same sort of route from the road in the valley. Some brought children who ran, joyous, whose skipping feet looped away and back over the rise. And sometimes they brought dogs who raced and galloped to map the whole hillside in enthusiastic zigzags, threading over her contours, missing no inch of her curves, covering the ground with all senses on full alert. She could hear their lolloping ecstatic heartbeats. Loved the small thunder of their paws.

More people. That was the only change. She listened and watched and welcomed as usual. Gazed at the turning of each wonderful day, felt the gradual pull and dive of each season beneath the blue dome of night skies. 

She didn't know that she was being talked about, that she, who they called Mynydd Graig Goch, was big news. The stream plunged over rocks and became gurgling waterfall, the lark rose to pour metal song down from the sky. She listened to the endless symphonies of gathering breeze, to the low pitched rage of heat somewhere deep beneath her. Arching her back in the last caresses of September sun, she felt the topmost rocks inch closer to the cheek of the sky.

A Welsh hill has now been upgraded to mountain status after it was discovered that it's official measurement was incorrect. It's true height [609.75m] is now six inches over the magic 2000ft that qualifies it as a mountain. Go and climb it!

Missing Jo

These last three weeks, he had been avoiding her. 

She had turned up in his writing like a stray pet, uninvited, and had made herself instantly at home. Now he had cast her aside. All his own fault. 

He had got caught up in shaping a story for her, in DOING IT HIS WAY, when he should have just let her get on with this magical life where it happened to meet his, and to let the story unfold. Too much thinking and scheming had taken a destructive bite out of something that had an easy way of it's own making. He had been too impatient to let the story find a way to shape itself into words.

So today, after a third week of standoff, in a gesture that arose from desperately missing her, not knowing what else to do, and being unable to bear it any longer, he talked to a frail vision of her turned back and downcast head. He expected to sound like a madman ranting, but it took him by surprise. His words flowed like a spacious mixture of prayer and confessional. It was a quiet monologue, unemotional, thoughtful, or perhaps heartful - if such a feeling existed - because he was aware that these words didn't arise from his head. 

He told her everything, left nothing out. And when he had finished, when the silence after his words had sat for a longer time than the words themselves had taken to be spoken, he went and sat on the back step and cried. He cried in the sun there, in the solitude of his high walled yard, because he knew that she might be gone when he went back inside again, and that he might have lost her forever.

How?

"How did you write this?" 

His question surprised her so much that it took long freeze frame moments for her to respond. She felt dry lipped and caught in a vast clear space between blinking                                   and blinking again. The silence waited, patient as an old faded clock. 

When the words came, she listened with interest to what her mouth had to say. She trusted it's threaded connection to her heart, but sometimes it's plain honesty arose from somewhere more passionate and primal. Her guts fed rich food for thought that upset the neat plans she had laid out in the closet of her sighing ribcage. 

It sounded flippant and it might have insulted him, but she said, simply, "I picked up a pen and I started to write."

Eavesdropping

Diggadaggadigg  digg  daggadigg  daggadigg   daggadigg  dagga  dagga       dagga       dagga       dagga. He liked it best when the rhythms hooked up with his resting heart rate. 70 bpm or thereabouts. Body rhythms merging with the swaying of the carriages made for the best journeys home, he thought. Not hypnotic enough for a snooze, but close enough to enter some kind of semi conscious state, the deliciousness of speed and swaying, percussive stabs of rhythm and a good conversation to listen to, made him smile. 

He relished the challenge of having to listen carefully. Eyes closed, of course. He loved holding the vocal lines like they were close beside him, cherishing their rises and falls, the harmonies, the overlaps, the unfinished phrases as if they were a Mozart duet. It was an odd pleasure, he knew, blanking out the dull hollow rattling of the annoyingly loose door and the high pitched surround sound of vague electric buzzdrone, but it made him look forward to his journeys, helped him cope with the push and shove of squeezing himself into the packed train at the start and end of each day. Above it's relentless and erratic clattercacophony and all the polyrhtyhmic digga daggadigga riffs that recurred in different placements, he was discovering that certain voices rose with phrasing as surprisingly delicious and melismatic as his favourite operatic solos.

Virginia Creeper

Tina's open hand rose to wave back. Couldn't help it. It felt like a natural reaction. She was smiling. It had made her day. As the wind gathered breath beneath a sky the colour of newly split slate, many down turned red leaves waved. 

The next day, they were gone.

100 posts

In a playful mood today. Brace yourself!

Come on, hands up, who remembers those school day questions that made us all groan - all of us, that is, except the spookyswats who always knew the answer before being told all the facts. 

Deep breath. You are about to build a fence across the Pennine wilderness to keep the cattle off the road and have to order the exact amount of fence posts and nails. The area to be crossed is 38 miles East to West from Bog bound corner to Hole in the thicket. How many fence posts would you need to build such a fence, placing them 1.5m apart? Remember to allow for a gate of 2m to allow the farmer access to his land. While you are at it, can you also calculate another fence that will go from from York to Whitby with the posts set at 2m apart that doesn't cross any streams? How many nails would the average worker bend out of shape each day while being blasted by a force 4 Northwesterly, soaked to the skin and dying for a pint at that pub 6 miles down the valley? How long would it take him to walk back up the valley against the wind to resume work after consuming 2 pints and a cheese and pickle roll?

Sorry. Think I just got a bit carried away in all of that. The questions weren't ever THAT complicated, but I always got caught up on the other side of the story when I should have just been doing sums. Whenever it said , "Show all your workings," I winced at the amount of extra claptrap that was alive in my head, and decided it was best to keep all of that to myself. 

Practical as such calculations might be, in my various travels, I have seen a lot of cattle and sheep unbound on the moors with not a fencepost in sight. And we all know anyway, that most sheep in their right mind would jump such fences to wander down the middle of the road to sniff out the right sort of sandwiches, if the fancy took them.

We also know, that for most of us, the thought of such calculations is likely to bring on a severe phase of daydreaming and wondering what's for tea. So now I have made everyone start to yawn and nod off, I will get to the real point of this post, which is - Ta da da daaaaaaa!! THIS IS MY 100th INK HAVEN POST and I am very happy. 

The real reason for rambling will become clear in a minute, I hope, because I am actually hoping to have lost a lot of readers by now! When I set up this blog, I said I was curious to see how my blogging adventures unfold. WELL, what an adventure it has been! I have received all sorts of strange spam and offers of all sorts of err ....... things. Occasionally, I receive comments that MEAN NOTHING at all to me and seem to have no relevance to anything I ever wrote. I don't know why anyone would bother to send them, unless I am totally missing the point, and have had some vital snippet of blogging wisdom pass me by. Wonder what will happen now that I've had a moan about all of this!! 

Whilst all of that is of mildly amusing interest, what I am really interested is the good stuff that having this blog brings. As I have said before in these pieces, it has been great and best of all has been the space to explore new ideas, have some different viewpoints and to connect with new people. Each time I have a browse at my favourite blogs, I am totally astounded by some of the new work I see. Thanks for the inspiration, be it words or images, comments, stories, crafts, beetroot...... Thanks, X Spot 

Ps. There are no prizes for the right answers to the fence posts questions. If you get them right, then just be happy!

Froglet

As I trim the waist high grass in sudden brazen blinding buzzing sun, you leap out of a gold and orange forest of runaway nasturtiums who aspire to the jewel meadow of the hillside. Silent, unmoving, I watch your arched flight plunge into the green depths of the rain catcher.

Prom

Sun, hot on his long sleeved shirt and through to his overdressed skin. The first day like this for ages. And now that he was out in it, after clearing the chores that all seemed to turn into cans of writhing worms, out in the flooding luxury of the breeze and the sighs of low tide breakers, he could feel the other side of his temporary freedom pulling at him. 

His work schedule, like a wanting child, was unable to stop pulling at his hands, even though he was keeping them deep inside his pockets, just in case. It was an old habit from school, one that often saved his knuckles from the smash of a ruler. 

The unyielding noise in his head, that relentless going on about something. Mithering, they used to call it. He could hear his Mother's voice now, in response to his continual asking for sweets whilst tapping on her arm, on their way home down a road packed with dock traffic. "Stopmitherinme, willyer!" Not many pauses for breath in her speech, except when she was praying. Sometimes, when she spoke with her sisters, he thought they were speaking in tongues, couldn't understand a word of their fastportcitytalk.

Mither? Myther? Moither?Moider? Irish origins? Slang? Or just Scouse spoke fast?

Off at a tangent. Good for him to stroll along thinking about something else, though. What he wanted most right now, was to keep walking into this beautiful afternoon, to freeze time here somehow and have it on repeat play. He wanted to walk by these gorgeous waves until he couldn't see to put one step in front of another, and the need for a sweater or a beer pulled him, willing rather than reluctant, indoors.

Worth waiting for

As the light suddenly faded into an unhelpful twilight, she put down the brush and stepped back from the painting. She caught sight of the kitchen, framed by the doorways and angles across the white hall. It looked like a chaotic still life, with everything sitting exactly as they had left it as they had finished lunch and said goodbyes.

She'd been painting since then, cold cup of tea untouched beside her, oblivious to the passing of the long afternoon into a pale blue evening. Deaf to the ecstatic buzzing of a drunk bluebottle who was held mesmerized in the mirror world of the oily salad bowl, and not caring about the accidental red wine bleeding into the grain of the table, she had missed the long drawn out drama of the left over Brie that had slowly wept onto the breadboard.

The thin silver song of a distant blackbird span through the house, like fine thread unravelling into all the corners and suddenly she felt the dragging accumulated weight of a relentless working week that had offered no space for creative musings, as it pulled down under her shoulders and behind her eyes. Kicking off her shoes, she climbed the stairs to bed.

Wake

Rory was walking the dog down every back street he knew. Avoiding going back home, hoping to feel the ugly weight of his workday sink into the damp tracks of his footprints, with every step he took, he was imagining a quiet phase creeping across his mind like a silent tide. He knew it might take a while, but so far, despite him crossing his fingers, strangling them around each other, tight in his pockets, he was still prey to the erratic seasick roll of looping thoughts hitting him in a dark place deep behind his swaying belly, somewhere grabbed by the throat and slammed up against his spine. 

Maybe it was the exhaustion getting the better of him, the stress of a day packed with the emotion of too much expected doom, or perhaps he was sickening for something? 

He made one more circuit of the parish bounds, following the streets like the funeral procession he'd seen a week earlier that was led by proud horses that looked like they were dancing. They had made him smile. So had a ridiculous thought about everyone having a knees up on the way to the grave, never mind at the wake. As he looked down from the office window, he was expecting a fiddler to stroll out of the pub playing a heart wrenching lament - one of those old Irish airs that seemed to play in time stopped still, full of ornaments and swooping intervals that caught your breath and made you remember. In the spectacle of it all, he thought he could hear the gathering chaos of a reel that couldn't help running away with itself, laughing high on the whoops and spins of girls who had kicked off their shoes, and the inevitable racing towards the tumbling notes of the jig. But it must have been some green light-footed ancestral ghost passing a hand of welcome over Rory's knuckles as he gripped the edge of the gritty window sill. He didn't know why this felt like such a happy moment.

It was still fresh in his mind when, behind Woolworth's, eight loud and round girls in the pink stetsons of a hen party hobbled past on the cobblestones, flashing their knickers and throwing soggy chips.  An elderly man, stood on the corner, watching, holding a sign on a long pole. "The end is nigh" blared down from a height like a raucous fanfare from out of tune horns in close discord. Rory guessed that the man must have been waiting all his life for this very day, wanting to drink in every moment, every drop of it so as not to miss a thing, reveling in his superior knowledge. 

In the absurdity of it all, the dog suddenly turned all twitchy on it's paws, like it was walking on spilled and scattered tacks. Before he knew it, they were running back towards the hen party girls, back towards the man with the sign. And just like in some unplanned party game that gets out of hand on the squeals of children, they were all running through the black edged street in a long stumbling line - the shocked and offended man with his sign of doom, eight screaming girls, hats and handbags flying, a galloping dog on a long red lead, and a buoyant, laughing man who felt, at last, like he was stepping into a real life. 

Sisters

"Well, I sat down expecting shimmering beauty and magnificence, and WONDER," she told me in far too loud whisper that made a crescendo right through the phrase finishing in a sudden shout. As she finished her mortifying comment, mouth shaped into a slow O and then a gaping long U as he dropped her jaw in her last word. I have to admit, I was rather fixated on the strange enthusiasm that came over her mouth! Took on a life all of it's own it did, like those awful shocking cartoons they do of politicians in the paper, all bodily functions.

Anyway, I thought it was rather interesting, this percussion piece. It all sounded like it might not be quite the same next time, like some of the soloists just got carried away and hit everything in sight. Must be very cathartic, all of that. Anyway, Pleiades, it's called, by someone whose name I can't quite recall. Hmm ....... some name pronounced like Anarchic. Greek, of course. 

Well, everyone looked round at us. I blushed when I heard people shushing. And then she said to me right against my ear with those macabre lips, " Sounds like someone making a bloody racket in my pan cupboard," and started to shake with withheld hysteria, eyes clenching hold of their tears. Well, I closed my eyes in shame. Albert Hall and all, you'd think she would have known better and just had a bit of a daydream in the intellectual bits and kept her common thoughts to herself. 

One of the things I always find interesting, is to hear what people think of new art work, whatever the genre. This piece was inspired when I was listening to tonight's Prom which included Pleiades by Xenakis and the memory of some phrases I once overheard at a concert of first performances of new works by avant-garde composers, when 2 quite elderly sisters in the audience had an enormous row with each other in the middle of a piece. Pleiades is a constellation of stars, commonly called Seven Sisters.

Tony

Relaxing on the beaten up leather sofa, Tony had his feet up on the broad coffee table. A lack of early customers meant that he'd been able to sweep and wash the whole floor without anyone walking on the wet bits. Now, the only sensible thing to do was to sit here and watch, marooned on a little island, as the shiny parts of the floor dulled into a sea of flat matt tones. Pray that no-one came in for a while.

His eyes fixed upon the odd star pattern of broken glass in the bottom left hand corner of the largest pane. It's shattered shape had been there since the day he got this job. That was exactly three weeks after he had left school, at age 16, not knowing if he had passed any exams or not. It was the same amount of time it had taken him to discover that life without the routine he was so eager to leave behind, was actually pretty meaningless. 

When he started working at the cafe his friends had all laughed and told him what a loser he was. Most of them still spent their days hanging round on street corners. He hadn't intended to stay this long, but now at age 23, he was beginning to want to broaden his horizons.

He often looked at that shattered star, thought that it was like him, stuck in a corner, low down, only reaching a tiny part of it's potential, while there was a whole world out there waiting.

Melting pot 7

• On my coffee table - People I wanted to be - Gina Ochsner, The irresistible inheritance of Wilberforce - Paul Torday
• On my music stand - Sir Duke - Stevie Wonder
• On my iPod - The silent truth - Toni Kofi Quartet
• From the allotment - 2 enormous pumpkins, courgettes, runner beans enough to feed a small town, beetroot, lettuce, baby corn, baby carrots, new season purple broccoli, dahlias, raspberries, blackberries

Runners

Piled in the trug like discarded consonants with graceful copperplate curves. Lowercase c, l and r. Serifs like wiry earrings. I love the shadows created against the table as I draw them in dark blue ink. On my page, they become captive fingers from thieving hands, reaching for a knife.

Today, I picked enough runner beans to feed a small town. They took on slightly macabre features as I looked across the table at them in the fading gloom of another dark afternoon. 

Sprechgesang

The words screamed out one by one after long silences, like sounds from a strangled bird squeezed tightly round it's fragile neck and desperate to regain the freedom of flight. Each series of sounds ascended a strange modal scale, agitato molto crescendo, rising to a breathy birdlike caw for the final note, tremolando. 

Like the work of a careless tape editor wanting to cut and run, coat flapping, to catch the next train home, the silences ruthlessly hacked off the final stresses of syllables refused a resolution. It was phrase book talk that made no sense to the locals. The words were slashed at and mutilated.

Everyone who walked past you stepped closer than they wanted, so as to avoid stepping into the uniting streams running from the top of the hill after the downpour, but they avoided your eyes, looked down or away. 

You sounded like Schoenberg. You were barefoot.

Enclosure

September always had the same taste to it. Dull and bitter, from the rounded surface of an old molar filling. Inhibited by creases in new work clothes and the high enclosure of collars and ties, always it seemed like the blue kite of Summer had been hauled in too soon.

Hinterland

As parallel lines of speed blurred across his face, as the dragging twig rattle and leaf rush of itinerant forest scribbled behind the last gasp from the suck of the late 18.45 express, he watched those dry remnants lose flight and fall into the oil dripped shale. He wondered what it would be like to have no past, to be without a memory, to travel through life without an unstable artillery of baggage and the weight of expectation in the deep sagging pockets of a heart. He waited for the slow train that would take him back into the heaving city and ached for the openness of a wild hinterland where he could look out at life as something untainted and new. 

Past midnight

Wrapped in yesterday's clothes, he sits in the low crescent of warm light cast by the hob lamp. Purr engine on fire, the cat jumps in from the black hoop of night to greet him. Eyes half shut, he holds the fragile threads from the dream and starts to write.

Walls have ears

Behind the pub, a potholed car park of sharp cornered loose flint leads you there, into the welcoming fold of workshops. Two low stories with uneven planked stairs, pale green wood, faded and cracked that looks like it was once down on the harbour in the full blast of sun and salt spray. All quiet, sheltered from the street. A row of spaces that each hold their own wonderful worlds.

I stand looking at all the scruffy closed doors, hastily scrawled numbers for the postman and handwritten messages to drive away unwanted visitors and nosey pokes, feeling at home.

When you show me your new space, I feel I am somewhere I always wanted to be. A large mostly empty cube of a room, a smaller studio with work desk and equipment and a tiny live space where I will play. All calico and brown paper.

Something cave like and elemental about the space where I'm playing. A floor lamp casts an orange glow across a stretch of white bare plaster that looks ancient. Even before I put bow to string, I know the room is already listening. We won't need any trickery here, just pure sounds. 

The first take sounds good, but then you ask me to turn a certain way so that the back of the instrument is facing that wall. Suddenly, heaven floods in and I can feel the sympathy between this little room and the instrument in my hands.

I feel the violin throw open it's voice, let's the music take flight and all in the same moment, this strangely beautiful old wall embraces those sounds, yields to their fleeting touch. I am dizzy on these sounds, lost in the blurring optical maze of soundproofing zigzags seen up close that cushion the other walls.  As the second track knits in with the first strange harmonies begin to emerge, harmonies that seem to resonate with their own history, and not mine.

Within the hour I am out on the main street, out in the rush and push of noise and traffic, job done, everyone happy. Already, I'm wondering when I can return, knowing that the wall has drunk in my sounds, absorbed them into it's own resonant body, made them part of it's own history that will shine out in our music next time.

New blazer

A dry Autumn flurry swirls in as he opens the front door. It matches the chaos in his guts. Holding her hot hand, they walk. Trying to smile in the silence, he dreads saying goodbye at the gate. The clock terrorizes his day. At 3.20, he's running from his workshop.