In The Night Factory

Skids and Blurps

2008-07-21T13:06:00.003+01:00

I cannot really think clearly due to being surrounded by gamers making bleeps and skids and blurps and chatting about their image maps, viruses, about re-installing, installing; “Where is the Fog?” “Who downloaded the Fog?”, all around me the skid of pixellated cars. The ones that screech around the corners ride on meticulously constructed roads and when they pass a certain point in the landscape a simple tune screeches quietly from the speakers with the signal “SCORE TWO POINTS” centrally aligned on the two inch screen.

We are to be infantilised. We are hoarded into these rooms that even though air conditioned have the feeling of a prison about them. We are not given anything to do. Unfortunately for the supervisors there is the internet so most of we so called “clients” spend time playing virtual snooker, Umming and arring, grinning into the screen and acting as if looking at a successful incentive award scheme. Admin staff clomp to and fro, trying to avert their attention, appearing like rabbits from holes, flitting from secluded office to office, chatting, mixing, mingling, in an effort to normalise the experience. Concentrating on the abstractions of filing and shuffling, hiding inside of paperwork systems, shielding themselves with the aid of the open lid of a photocopier, glancing occasionally at the clock, attempting to kill time.

Out and About

2008-06-08T12:33:00.011+01:00

Surrounded by the twitter and sliding whistles of hidden birds. The waving meadow sprinkled with buttercups. I sit, on an old wooden log, long dead, gilded like the elegant decoration of a tall mans tomb by a group of energetic nettles. They carry on guarding even as I sit here trying to stamp them out in case I get stung on my exposed legs. The ground is cracked and at selected times the odd beetle or ant crawls up from it's hideaway to give me a glance.

Whilst dangling from a tree lavishly, like a lion or leopard in the shade, an ant crawls up wild terrain of my index finger. Held up by the cross of branches, I angle my head to caste gaze across the hills and valley. Little toy houses bunch together amongst groups of pimply trees. It could be 1969, it could be a secret place. It could be for a Secret Seven. But I just sit in a natural seat, watching the ant crawl all over my white rectangle like it were football pitch, testing the grounds. The sun disappears, now just a luminescent glow fading towards the skyline. A coolness draws down on me and the buttercups go still. Telephone poles turn dark grey and I turn into just another shadow surrounding a log. The ant is blown off my hand. I elongate my legs and proceed to lurch over the long grass towards the dark corner of the field.

Inside

2008-02-26T16:32:00.014Z

The wind is rushing about outside and I enjoy closing the windows to it. It quietens to a dull whistling breeze shifting the curtains slightly. I like the quietness; I like it that you can hear every noise as though inside a film, the creek of the floor and the drip of the piping outside. I turn off lights and turn small lamps on. Still, like candles, the lamps spray shadows across the magnolia paintwork. Everything adjusts to the new ambiance which is soft and delicate. As fine and outlined as I want them to be, devoid of any description from outside. At night the real-time worries, plans and purposeful noises fade and all that is left are the shapes of things when left with no purpose. The wind and the rain patter on the streets. The night is crowded out.

My place is here in my bed, the covers surrounding. The whole scene is straight out of some tale, with a knock at the door, my eye darting towards the handle; streams of water flowing through the dark streets. Putting my arm out and hanging onto passing lamp-posts. Being swirled around corners and being swept down into underground stations platforms.

Dreaming of Sounds

2008-01-07T15:10:00.000Z

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Laughter in The Woods

2008-01-07T14:57:00.000Z

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Purgatory (Treasure Island)

2007-10-22T03:32:00.000+01:00

I go from one room to another and there is no sign of the terrors lifting. No sign that the events that have befallen me will not continue to befall me until I can find the deepest, darkest refuge in which to crawl. Even then the feeling of safety does in no way completely encase me in its charm delusion. I find the air dank also. The surfaces rough to the touch. It is at least quiet now, thank god. The screaming was sending me under. Pacing up and down the pavement outside, traversing the outside walls, trying to bore a moat around the castle with my feet. Looking up at my fortress, the drawbridge being lowered, I knock the board with my workmen's style shoes before cautiously stepping onto the bridge. It lifts again soon after I had lay my last step. I hear the laughter from across the waters and then and there I stubbornly decide to make my time in that timeless building, take them for all they were worth. Nothing was going to spoil my ideal, my quest for a better life.

As I stand and think at the threshold to my new life I look down noticing the numerous books being lowered by crane onto the ferry at the end of the now distant waters. Merrily the boat chuffs its smoke at my very calling. I wave. The villagers peered over the moat walls. Strangely they are allowing me to make my voyage unharmed this time and even my luggage seems all intact by the binoculars. I see no tears nor bent spines. Glory it will be to unpack my great discoveries. Miraculously they have already rid my investment of corrugated Amazon card wrapping. Pity that, I was so looking forward to doing it myself.

The Empty Space

2007-10-21T06:17:00.000+01:00

Put those things, those events, those misfortunate happenings, those guilt inducing memories all together into a lockable box. Put that box inside another box. Then into another larger box. Then inside another this time with a turn-dial lock. Shut it away inside a cupboard. Then put that cupboard inside another cupboard and then another cupboard. Place the cupboard in the corner of a room out of the way. Ignore the cupboard. Do not bring the cupboard up in conversation. You find that you begin using that particular room more and more infrequently. Even though it is the natural to enter this room as one enters at the front door you still guide them past. Unintentionally you in part create the mystery of that room, the door, it's locked nature; what is it locked for, what is going on in that room? Where do you sleep, Is that your bedroom? No it is just the work room; "Clive likes to keep it locked as it contains many of his expensive tools". It becomes generally know that the door must not be opened. "Oh, Bridget’s house with the door, the door house, the crazy house!" Bridget now smiles, portraying no effects of stress or worry. She guides visitors into the kitchen. “A cup of tea? A scone? Have you seen the weather?" Phew it's not even December, hopefully not another cold one like last time."

On The Sofa

2007-05-18T22:26:00.000+01:00

My guitar is leaning and waiting against the middle of the sofa. The stereo is crunched up between a queue of disinterested comic books. Plants grow leaf by slowly developing leaf. Bits of drawing material sit together on crispy layout paper next to me. I can see where I have sketched lines into the underside. Disks and history books clutter down the sides of cushions into the valley, the light sky glinting on their sides. No homes are fully showing through the window frames as usuall, their horizontals and verticals edging casually around. Lines upon lines of slate cutting into the isometric facade of weathered rectangles. Best to go and sleep, shift things out of the way, dive away under the mass of covers, protect myself from the web of encroaching things.

Fall In

2007-04-14T14:53:00.000+01:00

The phone rang and afterwards there was a long silence. Only marching soldiers are heard outside an open window. A fresh breeze blows the grey curtain away from its resting place on the green ledge.

Chief Commander Roberts instructs his fellow sergeants to stand to attention. "Welcome to the new world men, future generations will thank us when all is said and done, but remember this; tell them only the good things, the career prospects, the life of action, helping of poor and underprivileged refugees like, not killing them or anything nor manipulating their plight for queen and country and OKay, got that, eh Mr Jones? (Shouting in Jones’s ear) Have you got that Mr Jones I say (eyeing him closely, faces nearly touching). Superintendent Jones here, he is the company historian, isn’t you Mr Jones, “Yes Sir” who is employed to sort out everything out nice and tidily isn’t he, Mr Jones, heh. “Yes sir.” (Turning at last towards the lined up men, standing to attention) Go give it your best boys. We are outmoded. We are cannon fodder. When I die I will just be replaced by another? We will be heroes when we get it, typical of the M.O.D. that one, all their spin in’ it? Our helmets are made of cardboard and tin, our armoured vehicles fitted out with not enough protection for all the dangerous situations that they place us in. Yet men, we shall never complain, those are orders, but just remember, you've signed up for five years. Just thought I’d chuck that last one in to cheer the guys up, heh. Right, Fall out.

True Bombs

2007-04-13T01:57:00.000+01:00

True bombs never land on our home towns. No missiles will land on our domiciles. Then there are the so called terrorist projectiles, passed through hands, placed secretly onto trains, riding with the passengers, cosying up to and resting against your under-sides. Every journey you get closer to bombs. Bombs, bombs everywhere you look. No bomb is a bomb until a bomber decides, then you get fragments all inside you and over you, hundreds and thousands of metallic messages. The evil menace then becomes flashed up on many news reels, political campaigns run with it, documentary retrospectives inform you about it, loosing its impact, loosing its steel. But there are always more out ready to re-new their charge, competing with the terror exchange; learning from experience, hiding on your journey home, watching where you rest and where you clatter on your computer desk. You think bombs can go flying and come to rest, in your tea and down your string vest. You fidget and scratch but that itch is still there. Itch, itch, itch, and then boom bam boom! Another person’s life is, sadly, and needlessly, over too soon.

The Policeman Who Fell to Earth

2007-04-13T01:55:00.000+01:00

There is a new Mad Max film coming out. Set again in the desert at an unspecified time in the future and gangs roam the deserted landscape, adrenaline pumped and mega-death music blasting through their ears. In this version the police are the enemy, arrived recently from a distant planet, desperate for fuel and economic resources, with the aim of seizing control of earth and 'policing' the occupants into submission. Whilst siphoning off the worlds resources the bogus police demand legitimacy for their actions from the various tribes in the area, seeking to divide and rule they instigate a civil war amongst the various ethnic populations, arming and instructing various sides in order to establish their version of 'stability', i.e; the illusion that they, the alien police are a force for order and peace. The Alien police sit back and watch as the populace war with each other instead of with their own forces, being unable themselves to fend off a full scale rebelion. They want a national government on their terms, not the local populations, to secure their dominance of this vital resource area in the Universe. Until this happens no nationalism (dissidence) is allowed to sprout and grow out of control. Popular opinion is important to the these police, both on earth and on their own distant planet as this supports their legitimacy as a force of good. To this end the media is tightly controlled so as to 'shield' the public from the truth of what 'our brave men' are doing and why they are doing it. The 'police' are working towards 'democracy' and liberation for the earths people.

Incontinent Ordnance

2007-04-13T00:17:00.000+01:00

A surgical strike. They write their names on the bombs that roll out on the carpet, falling finally, ultimately, gloriously, across the towns and cities and people, not having time to run to the hills, to deny the enemy their assets. Admittedly some confusion was caused by areas by incontinent ordnance, the Germans and the Italians, oops sorry, the Americans and the British, unable by some logistical error to deliver their missiles to theatre on time or in the correct localities. Media outlets confirm: eighty percent total collateral damage.

The coalition verges on collapse with 'international' allies held back by an angry public at home. There will only be small demonstrations around the world reports government channels, only ten percent turn out, the rest staying at home and believing the news that we tell them on their TV sets; of heroes saving captives from nasty totalitarian leaders, whom we must hang, of the success of democracy and the failure of terror, of there being winners and losers and enhanced credibility.

The Vanishing

2007-04-12T00:27:00.000+01:00

It began as a normal office; large windows and areas of sectioned flooring running the whole length the ground level, rooms set aside for the purposes of induction and basic training, with a main reception at the end of a long hall. All tables and chairs are cleared, replaced by hard wearing de-constructible types, easy to fix, looking just like the normal emptied out business spaces, now being been transformed for quite a different purpose. Squared intersections hide large winding snakes of packed electrical wire connecting to hidden cameras, security alarm systems and air conditioning units. They exit at flap-up electric socket covers every few meters. Water alarm sensors flash, remote controls beep, push button speakers are checked for use at entries and exits, and are all working well, ready to receive, to accept the first intake, the sixty odd people estimated to be travelling from all over the county that week.

Clients in their homes, nervous about the induction procedure, phoned in to check on the correct times; “no need to bring anything, just yourselves, alright Mr Hargreaves, Miss Plummory, Amy Inglewood, Trevor Harp, Billy Name, make sure you get here fifteen minutes early, it pays to be early.” The phone clunked down. A shrill shiver perhaps running down their spines, “that’s what they think, they think we’re just cattle to be herded around, prodded and poked around into stiles!”

“She, he, is for CDG!” ran the company saying. With quiet excitement, over the photocopier or printing machine, letting a laugh or a shared giggle mix with the mechanical paper shifter or the hoarse scanner repetitively etching A4 copies into the tray. The two women processing new applicants looked forward to the change of faces, the new clients for the corporation to guide towards righteousness, a valued place on earth. Satisfied in their world of official social security make believe, incarcerated high up there on the tenth floor of the work and pension’s administration office building. “Hey, look at him, do you think you’d give him’ a job - I wouldn’t give him a job (giggle), glancing at the latest mug shot to be positioned onto the A4 glass.

Certain people would disappear overnight from their homes. Nobody in the community knew where they went. “They’re not missed” neighbours would say. The T.V. news proudly proclaimed low government figures for the month. People were overlooked, not thought about, vanished from local towns and villages, sent to special camps, travel paid, told by officials that they are to receive special employment training. “Get there on time, don’t be late. We know you’re not used to getting up so early so remember to set your clock for nine. Time waits for no man; we'll give you extra money at a fixed rate.” The phone went down clunk.

So

2006-12-22T20:18:00.001Z

Waiting for the fangs of time to sink into my vital veins, cutting off all supply. Hands are numb and are no longer able to draw my eyes open. The front of my head closes down with a slide of a bolt and a clang of metal that rings out across the floor. My Jawbone cracks and a zip slashes across my mouth.

Now I am thrown across a cold table, casually discarded, hands, elbows and feet over the edge. Then slapped to the ground. Gravity stamps on my stitched and bloody carcass as it flails about ridiculously on the floor.

Specks of rain hit the fire, sending sparks. Closer now, to burning in hell.

A hollow wind blows through the shattered glass. Rain flows with it, trampling steadily across the hallway and into my room, drenching the richly woven carpet, filling it up like a swimming pool, weighing the carpet down, threatening to submerge the carcass of meat. Some material underneath breaks and falls into the black, as if through a mirror, propelled like a magnetic lump of carbon into an endless pit. There, the other fallen lay about, some will never have left, the oldest now moulded into stones.

Acrid air eats into my constricted lungs. Grit grinds into my teeth to dust. My hair travels across the sand, held up by insects

Behind Closed Doors

2006-11-25T17:16:00.000Z

We live with the objects of our past; the worn out toys, ornaments that decorate the ledges and mantles of our rooms. Old clothes that remain at the end of the racks, compressed into the corners of our second-hand drawers. Items worn from trundling around with us everywhere, shuffling around from one rental room to another.

Books are piled up to keep the door open or to hold the computer screen at head height, else leaned on to form a shelf. These things induce the hoarders’ guilt of not wanting to give away or borrow for fear of loosing; feeling the urge to keep but not actually re-read. We create a familiar space, maintaining the order of a familiar world. Perhaps I delude myself that they will have some use some day in the future when I am dead and buried and gone.

Uncaring men or women wearing government uniforms will in the end be allowed to enter and clean the rooms, rendering my complex storage system that I have striven tirelessly to construct over the years meaningless. Unmarked trucks and cars will drive up next to the black mark scribbled on my door. A silhouette of cut-out people will be seen to fold out across the garden path, forming a chain. My things will trundle along from outstretched puppet arm to outstretched arm towards the back of the vehicles. When the job is done the men retract themselves backwards, clinging on as the vehicle bounces them back up the hill and away.

Due to a continuous neglect of layers, objects sink gradually downwards. They submerge and are gradually compressed into a peat bog of time. Nobody but the owner can prevent this process from happening. Particles dissolve to form a thick encrusted layer at the bottom. Dark figures pass through the drawers and cabinets snatching items and passing them from hand to hand, piling them up into a mountain of things. The tables finally begin to break, crumbling under the inevitable force of gravity; the slow motion demolition of a tower block, wavering awkwardly before finally crashing to the ground. What looks like a cloud of volcanic dust is in fact millions upon millions of human hairs drifts up, forming a dense cloud that disperses its content across a the wide area, killing the nutrients in the soil, spoiling the vegetation, killing the cattle for miles around.

Resuscitating Friends

2006-11-25T15:23:00.000Z

Ladies and gentleman, I have before me a person whom I had once befriended in the past. His name is Gary I think I remember. I knew him for quite some time in the eighties. You say that his face is not real but I say that that is not what matters. You see him lying there on the table with his eyes glazed over, a wooden doll you think, a mannequin, one that you might find in shop windows but no, watch this, watch my actions now. I begin projecting my thoughts onto him like this look, waving my arms like so. You can see immediately a small flow of blood beginning to run through the veins there, just there, look, where I'm pointing. The inert object will then miraculously become alert. Look! his arms, they are grabbing the table. No need to be alarmed, he won't hurt you. He is harmless, really.

I have now shown that I can project my memories onto limp body of a friend and resuscitate it temporarily to life. It is next my aim prove to you that it is possible to carry out some unfinished conversations or indeed say in reality what I had wanted to say long ago but could not. Now, with him there breathing in front of me, I can reflect upon bad ideas and apologise for my being so insensitive in situations past, no questions asked. I will take him for a trip out and around my home, explaining about my life now and how I’ve changed, how I’ve altered my clothing style etc. We will probably have to cut the odd sentence short, you know, try not to fall into the same old behavioural patterns. We attempt to break the strange new silences. We launch into familiar conversations, argue, fight, but then you cannot expect old habits to die just like that on the first night.

Finding that I have less common with him than I had thought I find trouble capturing neither quite the same atmosphere of rebelliousness nor the intensity of emotion that once first drove our friendship. Trying in vain to remember and recreate crazy situations that have been lost in memory we get increasingly frustrated. Inevitably, towards the end of the day he will get tired and slowly loose breathe, crumpling to a heap, head crashing loosely against the floorboards. In the end there is never enough time to say what you want to say. I place him back safely inside the cupboard, lean him up against the side like so. He will be O.K. there till later when I will probably resuscitate him again. Even though I know that it will not be successful I still try. Until, after a while, he no longer re-awakens and keeps perpetually falling to the ground.

This Man

2006-09-29T19:49:00.000+01:00

This man can walk around all day without a worry about when the end might come or how he could get the workload finished. He can let his mind be distracted by learning to play the guitar say or maybe watering the plants, that is if the leaves are drooping or the soil has become too dry. He can take a part in his own life and can consciously get involved all of the thoughts dancing around his mind, and comments; hasn’t that tree got an interesting texture out the window and is not the sky up there a shade greener this hour and if I record the sound of that man tapping his shoes then repeat it via a loop machine will I be able to edit the resultant base sounds to create an interesting repetitive thud over which I could dub a high pitched monologue. He makes tea, sees what’s in the fridge then boils potatoes, switching the microwave on but it is in the lounge that he thinks up the new narrative idea. Nothing can prevent this man from seeking out new areas of thought because of course his conceptual space is limitless. He knows that he can always walk outside if he wishes but opts to stay inside, searching now for Ballard or Orton, Philip K Dick or stuff by the Marquis de Sade on his bookshelf. Fiddling with the lapel of his shirt he casually turns to see if his computer has finished downloading the latest intellectual material. Everything is possible; This man can dream and create models for future developments, write plans for necessary projects and maybe the plan is the work and there is nothing else that needs doing to it; the end result an open ended structure that leaves the viewer free to imagine his or her own encapsulated world, fixed only temporarily to the original idea, leaving them free to unlock their pouches and pocket the art, carrying it along with them along their winding paths.

Fold-out Mountains

2006-09-29T19:45:00.000+01:00

Standing behind the lady at the hotel balcony I was pondering the difference between the mountains in the distance and the mountains pictured in the fold-out postcard that she held close to her body. It was difficult for me to lean over and take a look for any satisfying length of time before she shuffled off once more and I had to follow her surreptitiously to regain my vantage point. Each time I peered over to take a look the apparent distinction between the two visions of landscape grew ever more blurred. Their tinted ice blue slopes and whiter than white peaks glowed in the thin air. A cloak of trees hung as if a large crayon had haphazardly scribbled itself with increasing density around the uppermost tips, dropping to fill in the valley floor with a carpet of loosely stippled vermilion gestures, adding layered marks of burnt sienna and viridian green to give textured cover to over around about I’d say fifty percent of the white postcard background.

After chancing a closer look I think I interpreted some far away figures wandering in the distance; tiny clusters of opposite colours sprinkled like confetti across a faded blue horizon. From a distance Skiers maybe, possibly holiday makers.

She looked up at me as I lurched away giving me a look of sharp indignation, apparently perturbed I thought by my increasing scrutiny of her paraphernalia. With her hand wrapped in a velvet glove around the series of mountain ranges packed together again she swiftly removed them from my view by slotting them into her jacket top pocket, whilst staring at me with a look of deep suspicion.

Moon Dust

2006-08-09T03:37:00.001+01:00

If one was to go on one of those bizarre fair rides where your whole body (upright) revolves around a central globe; your feet on it’s mottled surface whilst the rest of your body is moved around various different axis points at tremendous speed, your head would be very like the moon, a moon with hair drawn from it in direct line with the Y axis. The craters of the moon, if one rakes ones fingernails over it, can seem painful and sore. The moon dust that falls is of a flaky texture that melts into the atmosphere and one will find a light covering like sieved flour on the various work surfaces inside your space.
The lines of hair, when grown too long, need cutting back, this is key; If grown too long fingers can then come and attack hair, becoming twisted and even causing strands to loosen and fall to the ground. The smoke of this is dust that can drift towards those darker, more vulnerable surfaces.

Room Traveller

2006-08-09T03:30:00.000+01:00

The rooms had become unfamiliar to me, drifting off to discover their own separate identities. I moved now from one enclosed space to another not knowing where to tread, sometimes getting completely lost, as if I was instead crossing the borders of previously undiscovered towns or countries. I struggled to keep up with the ongoing conventions that were continually attaching themselves to each individual space I entered. It was becoming impossible to keep a track of everything. The changing cupboard spaces and seating arrangements required constant alterations of my body configuration, indeed if a chair or large ornament were moved then that room’s space would then become an entirely new area complete with new feelings and ergonomic demands upon me. At times it felt that I was surely being coerced into becoming a foreign traveller in my own home, my role now being reduced to tidying up after it and attending to the routine menial tasks like washing up and taking the bin out.

Yes, I could move around in whatever way or which ever direction that I wanted to, but then, out of intuition or merely by accident, I would find myself knocking into the jutting angle of a newly placed book or a casually laid box dropped awkwardly across a low lying coffee table. I would find myself falling, having to angle my body out of the way of objects in order to direct myself towards the horizontal carpet, landing like a giant Godzilla actor onto the artificially lit model landscape compiled of pens, pencils and heaps of dust covered papers. After first stabilising from the shudder of the impact, looking left and right to gauge my position, I would raise my chin up to assess the corners of the space above me. High up there amongst the light shades and light bulbs a new space would be caste into being, narrower and taller than the incarnations of the room that I had previously noted. My mind would then instinctively process new rules in order to secure the area.

Police Incident

2006-07-26T22:34:00.000+01:00

Some scuffling in the corridor, a clicking of heals and the distinct sound of those below being questioned? Door to door salesmen I think. I receive a knock and my attention darts to the door and I wait inside the darkness of a side room, for them to go. They take their time. I hear feet tapping and then a brief silence. Up and down the stairs they go, rapping the letter boxes and getting no response, each resident I think hiding, waiting, having first scrambled over to turn their stereos down.

I hear the distinct sound of police radio’s echoing through the brickwork, ear pinned to the wall, a sound for condensed electrical cheering comes through from their little hand held gadgets. It’s definitely the police or children with speaker mobiles. Already they trace me; I suppose they must have my details from work; flashes of a possible Trial cross through my brain, the exposure, the humiliation! I know that the next time thy knock I will be too curious to hold back. I will not be able to help having tea with them out in the corridor to drill them on all their activities and before they are finished I will be blurt out a long self-confession of all my crimes in my life thus far. They will cease their inquiries right there and then and begin looking at me with a newly focused intensity; I will come across so suspiciously that my case will become a priority ‘down the yard’.

They seem to be lingering in my corridor, knocking and fiddling with the handle of the opposite door, clunking keys. The rectangular block of my door shakes with yet another knock, I lift the latch tentatively, receiving a flood of light, reflections bouncing from the white floor panels, the corridor open and cold. The policeman stands contrasting the white glare, his mouth expounding muffled sounds through the haze of my newly awoken hearing deficiency. I break the harsh light by digging my knuckles into the corners of my retinas before crossing and raking my misshapen hair. What are they staring at me like that for? I stand there a while focusing on them, their eyes of course focus on my facial signatures, logically fitting a mug shot of my features together; is he a suspect or not, we must take into account his dishevelled state. They talk at unfamiliar speed, the interplay between the two officers hard to analyse and understand in the instance of my just having opened the door, still in my night clothes, wondering how I was going to respond with sufficient confidence in the required dialect, to cohesively knit myself into their speech pattern.

- Hello sir, do you know the man at number eight?
- No never hardly see him, he’s never about or I a mean, I never see him, that is.
- Can you remember the last time you saw him?
- Er, I dunno, about a month, maybe a month ago. What’s happening, what’s happened?
- We’ve had an enquiry, just checking it out.
- Enquiry?
- His mothers asked us to check on him. He’s not answered the phone in a month and she’s worried.
- Oh, hmm.
- OK we won’t keep you. We may have to force the door in so if you hear anything.
- OK, right, OK then, I understand.OK, Bye.

I close the door slowly, not wanting to do it too fast so as to not cause suspicion; “er could we also search your flat sir, just procedure in these circumstances sir, nothing to worry about, nothing to worry about here, is that your rug sir, buy that yourself did you sir? I wandered about the flat trying to act normal, sit down, try to think about comics, check plants have grown, count the books. I just couldn’t concentrate somehow, with the police still roaming around the hallways knocking on doors; it was eleven in the morning, nobody in except me and that fact could being suspicious in and of itself. Must manage this situation delicately I thought, not wanting to fall accidentally into any wanted list, get trawled in as a percentage case; fall into a new personality category, where they are ninety percent certain I could have done it or if not now but likely to do so in the future given the correct circumstances, motivation, etc, etc. Get me on a charge enabling the interrogation to carry on yet further, plant something in my flat, create a muffled tape confession of someone that sounds like me, my twin brother. But that said, that man across the way, it must be serious, and would they come and find me if I… no, my circumstances are quite different. That man had a suite on, a grey pin striped suite. Was he the one who the family at number 3 persecute mostly on Sundays with vile language out of their window for slamming doors way past curfew time and is he the one drunk and growling at me for staring as I wait for him to go first and not get in his way and therefore mind my own business on the way to my flat just a cross the way from his, I didn’t know that.

Another knock at the door; I recognise the officious tone of it, my excitement grows, I speed, I try to get there before they burst in with that iron door bashing machine, that I’ve seen on TV. The policeman stood directly in the middle of the door this time, his partner to the right, eying me with more apparent interest and concern.

- Sorry to bother you again but can you give us more detail about the man at number seven.
- Have you found out anything?
- I’m afraid he has passed away.
- Oh, dead. God! Oh, what, suicide or something?
- We can’t make a judgment on that until forensics have been in there. Did you know the man at all.
- Well to be honest I um, not sure what he looks like, I’m sure we’re talking about the same person though. I think he drives a…(looking out of the hallway window) Which car’s his?
- The one in the middle.
- The large grey one.
- Yes, I that’s it.
- Sort of quite large build.
- I know him, well vaguely, yes. Hardly ever see him. Last time he seemed a bit agitated about something, angry or something. Oddly he had a grey pin striped suit on which seemed most uncharacteristic as if he had been to an important meeting or interview, I don’t know, just vague memories really.
- Bit of a loner was he? The policeman casually aired as if it was the most normal thing to say, expecting an instinctual agreement, casual response.

I did not answer, feeling that the pigeon hole had just there been blocked by those last words, feeling the oppressive atmosphere created by a stereotype; a loner, the loner, two words conjuring a whole array of negative image types, denigrating the grey man in his grey suite to the back pages, gossip column spaces, that mostly end up in disagreeable court cases.

- Can we have your name sir, just for the record?
I gave him it; I had become one of his records for that day.
- Do you know about any other tenants who might be able to give us more information, next door neighbours? Who lives below, above?
- Well, there’s a family downstairs, number three I think that is, they I think would know more about him, been here longer than me, upstairs just kids I think, students,I’m not sure about anybody else.

They had the look of wrapping the case up, flapping the notebook shut, one of them already at the staircase waiting to go. I did not focus my eyes in time to catch their name labels, a couple of sergeants.They went away I closed the door after saying OK, right, that’s all then, right, Ok, Bye.

Only two hours later I heard in the corridor, a lady, could be a cleaner, could be from forensics complete with white powder and cameras, talking with familiarity to the policemen, who were still hanging around. A clatter of a trolley as it wheels past my door. Amongst the inane surface chatter, the police gossip, the weather, what time are you off type banter, I hear the distinct sound of a bag being zipped. It was a long zip, perhaps for a long bag, a coarse zipper of industrial strength, sweeping the length, the sound coming to a definite stop. The final closure, body bag number 451, heaped onto the trolley, to be parcelled off, filed away, slide into the cold metal draws at the morgue to wait dispensing. I wonder how many people would be at the funeral. How many people during the past five weeks had phoned him or sent letters, knocked at his door while he had laid down dead on the living room floor.

Flat Rap

2006-06-09T12:34:00.000+01:00

What kind of child am I?
You’re playing silly beggars with you’re lies and deceitful spies.
Press down upon my door step, stand on my door mat
Tell me that in no way are you going to pay
So get out of my flat, look
Get out of my flat, a matter of fact

The trouble with your sort is they keep coming back.
They keep coming back your sort,
They keep coming back,
Get out of my flat.

Since when you came to town I’ve been drowning with dept
Not two pennies have been met and every day having to drive you and your pesky mother and you’re flipping brother down to the dept.
With a ticket for my trouble and the road charging double and the doctor saying there is no green light and no way for me out of this restricting bubble.

And there’s nothing for me with not two pennies to rub together, that’s what I say. And you better bloody believe it because it is my car, my electrocution table and administration cabinet all together chattering about all my behavioural records.
Don’t touch those recs, give em ere unless you want to be electric-cuted.
Because they won’t understand, because they shine a light on my hidden secrets and they just won’t understand.
Well you might let them finger through my papers and convict me with the fine blessing of the magistrate, but let me tell you, you can put me in bands of metal and close the clasp shut, see if I care.

The trouble with my sort is I keep coming back.
They keep coming back, my sort,
They keep coming back.
Don't step over that mat
and get out of my flat!

Unchecked Minds

2006-06-06T01:21:00.000+01:00

I had been out of work for thirteen months when there came the time when I had to join a course for my self improvement in the areas of CV making and general job search activity. This was of course not due to my own divining but instead was as a result of certain initiatives laid out by the work and pensions department. It was yet again trying to revamp the welfare state into a more streamlined and efficient organisation, its various organs working as hard as can be expected to invigorate we job shy youths, and some old, to pass our time more actively in the work area. Their version of work being of the paying and full time kind, our form of hell that is. Our ultimate betrayal to a lifetimes studying at the table, fending off cries of wastrel and layabout from relatives and old fashioned old men with long moustaches and old ideas about a days work and the fact that they pay taxes - codswallop! We have the right to walk the streets like anybody else. The maintenance of a well stocked pool of fit and efficient non workers is our mission, not the passive submission to a scandalous work ethic contradicting the real need for activity in the work markets. Work being in reality a social control acting in much the same way as school, the training place for work. That everybody should file in and line up and be at attendance otherwise how could they possibly control us? What would people do without work? They would lounge about and do pointless activities just in order to pass the time. Their unchecked minds would run riot without the sensible and firm controls of leadership only to be found in the rigid structure of the workplace, full time not part-time.

I walked tentatively through the double swing doors. Before meeting the course leader I stood taking in the scene that lay before me. The first impression was of the smell, the room being used, I found out, as a public bar in the day time and stank of stale beer and fag smoke. The sound of constant singing with awkward drumming backbeat came through the semi-permanent left wall, under which you could see feet moving. On the makeshift tables gathered in the long room lay strewn around an array of newspapers taken apart and half read. Towards one end of this display before me lay, or sat, a woman with her head and arms sunk downwards in a heap across an open newspaper, making no sound, in the midst of some sort of seizure maybe, as if having dropped dead in mid read, gravity had caused the front of her forehead to fall upon the beer ringed formica coated chipboard table. I turned my head slowly around, eyes passing the worn out nicotine grey sofas, a landscape of neglect strewn all around me. Suddenly I found Bob the course leader up close and in my face, standing and introducing himself with interview like formality, beckoning me towards a scruffy looking moulded plastic seat standing opposite a desk, informing me that he would explain how it all works and everything, thanks for coming, I’m waiting for two others, no point starting till then.

Fields

2006-06-02T01:11:00.000+01:00

They have cut me up into their convenient squares, have rolled me over with their loud rickety industrial machines and chemical sprinklers, trampled upon my battered hide so that it is now marked with all manner of cracks and abrasions. To cap it all off the intense rays of a harsh sun also beat unrelentingly down upon my dry baked skin as I lie in wait hoping for it to end. like the weather it must pass and go away. Only a matter of time now.

I keep saying to myself, reassuring myself that this is just passing phase, just a temporary altercation. This plague will die away and be replaced by a more benevolent occupier; the land will go back perhaps to how it was before when there were forests, gullies, large hawks and giant dinosaurs that wandered around and stamped reasuringly upon me. Let the ants take over that’s what I say, that’s what I say, or the trees or the vegetation.

You can rest assured that there is no death in me, I will merely change and morph into other forms along with the environment. You see I have that ability, I know what I will be like in the future, like stone or like sand and then I will be able to cruise down through the mountains again like once before. I know these things. Of these things I am certain; because the whole thing repeats itself.

The occupiers sometimes forget that I have lain here for thousands of years. Layers of peat and earth having gradually engulfed me, pressed me down further and further, flattened to form a layer at the point where I now lie. I have decided that I must deny the present and try to think more of the future. I will try to think that it is for the best that this has happened. I do not bear grudges. In the thousands of year that it has taken for this world to form me whole species have evolved and died away. The planet can get restless sometimes, whose logic is beyond every species that have ever lived upon it. The only thing that I can rely on is the fact that things will change and carry on changing for time eternity, which is the only saving grace.

They have slain me and dug me, then rolled me over and over, reworking my de-forested soil. They have chemically enhanced me; have plagued my arching back with tons upon tons of poison thrown from planes. Could they not leave me fallow at least and leave alone my friends the insects and familiar habitations nearby that over the years I have come to be like friends to me, just take me, leave them. They have suffered; the worms, the centipedes, the beetles and the grasshoppers that travel through me, in me and over me, keeping me irrigated and ventilated. The plants seek their darkness, spearing through me, pushing me further down, sucking at my residues, nitrifying my soil, what could I do without them.

Fish Sounds

2006-05-15T16:19:00.000+01:00

I am like a sea creature lurking in the depths of the sea and my bulbous eyes are constantly revolving as I watch slimy bodies swim all around me. Waves of sonic currents flow across the sensitive Antennae. Deep down there across the flats amphibian fish scatter as they sense a shadow creaking upon their ceilings, the currents shifting, a potential predator hovering above.

I swim low, wagging my elaborate tail. The little Escipodes and Flinchpods take one glance at me with their dots for eyes and sink further down into the gloom.
I do not say I am nosey but I do want to know what is going on, my ears alert. I concoct my fictions around their every movement and muffled vocal sounds. Each sound could be a new fish. Some fish are hidden and rarely come out and just appear as a faint shimmer of grey on the sea floor, hardly noticeable at all.

This evening I take a thirty degree diagonal trajectory straight down into the depths, letting oxygen seep slowly from my breathing apparatus as I fall. The large disc shaped salamander arhchipodes rest upon the sea floor like giant almond slices decorating the hills and crevices, their joint sound of hundreds of coughs, splutters and lettings off of wind becoming louder as I swim deeper, the bubbles rising around me, oxygenating the water. I touch one by accident and it nearly swallows me. I block up my air holes with my right fin which causes me to rise out of danger.

I press hold of my ears when I am passed by a glowing anti-worm with its spiralling horned drill tail using the strength of the current to pass through the water, drilling downwards, causing impromptu sounds of combined lawnmower and hand drill effect. They are so keen on mowing around this area. Every fish has a drilled tail to show off, a primax 300 or a detax 900. Competition is fierce.

The layers of apartments tower up into the sky but also plummet downwards towards the ground from up here. The echoing sounds layered one on top of the other scream past me and through me. Sandwiched as I am in between them I am entrenched, with the plasterboards barricading my head while occupants go about their daily activities.

Flat One

2006-04-30T15:38:00.000+01:00

The mother takes the odd trip to the family car and that is all, there is no need to venture further, the home is where the heart is after all. I once glimpsed her taking a trip to the post-box across the road, moving along on her heavy haunches making those tiny strides, one by one, up the gradual incline of the pathway. Once there, then the trip back, maybe a sit down and a rest, turn the TV on. Who knows what the reasoning is, I shall hold my tongue, my irreverent, unknowing tongue. I hear the second part of an Eastenders trilogy blurt out below the floorboards. Just then I angle my ear amongst the litter of dust and hairs, fading in, Dot is doing the ironing, father Ted is dead and I can hear the kids mumbling. Some rough Asbo children are vandalising the front door as Dot speaks so there is no other course of action! Dot reaches for the phone.

The father, a van driver, has a sitting job and depresses his seat more than the average vehicle maintenance officer, according to the statistics at the office that is. The daughter also, bears the signs of never going out, unless it is to sit in her new second hand car, waiting for the time when she can drive her dad around to the shops and back. She sits, hidden beneath the hood, turning the wheel and arranging her hanging teddy bears and rolling the windows up and down, turning the seat to various angles.

The car, it has been sitting there in the car park all year and has not moved. The tax disk has been replaced twice and it takes up a crutial parking space but nobody has mentioned it, the windows facing stare blankly down on the tarmac.

We have all observed the girl playing with the steering wheel, polishing the dash board; the father comes out and plays with her, opening the boot and putting things in; sometimes the whole family get in so that the daughter can gain experience; they talk about going on journeys and telling her to turn left, turn right, switch on the lights and try out the hooter, and does it need oil and how do you get the petrol cap off?"

The old man with the flowing white beard comes to take her away in his mini Datson, the wheels rolling around and out of the closed community of car spaces, with him leaning over to talk to her in soft tones, “now don’t worry the examiner is just going to sit here like this, and fold his papers like that, and hold his pen like so.”

They wash it and polish it. The father, after the mother has had one of their familiar rows with her daughters: Don’t swear at me; treat me with a bit of fucking respect!” (southern accent as if she is at the same time trying to eat a pair of heavy walking boots), he takes the girl out for a trip in the car, opening and shutting the doors, talking to her in the driving seat while she turns the steering wheel, it is on auto-lock. She fiddles with the gear lever, shakes her body in frustration as if riding a horse and the car shakes in return, she taps it or slaps the dash in order to get the right car response.

“Don’t get upset now, it’s only your second test, your mother took it five times”. Puts more things in the boot from her bedroom, there are now several dinky toys hanging from the inside of the windows and it’s like a second bedroom with blankets and clothes on the back window ledge. One day she will move out of the flat and into the car. If only she could pass her test then the whole thing could get moving. As it is they stay, moored in the corner of the car park, the odd hooter sound echoes around the flats, putting off the time when they have to go back inside and face the mother, give her some more respect.

Flat Two

2006-04-30T03:19:00.000+01:00

Any kind of noise attracts them. The slamming of a door emits such joyous ecstasy that it positively sends them into fits of crying, that is until the next slam and thud that is. They alter their activities from attempting to carry sections of a car, bonnet, wheels, front axel etc. down the stone staircase one by one at odd intervals, purely for the slamming of the door each time, to the activity of chipping away at the holding walls, trying to create more open space and increasing the reverb of their repertoire of sounds that regularly shudder through the concrete supports of the building. They spend time testing the sound of a bouncing ball, first against the wall and then against the bare floorboards. The acoustics of ball play is amazing, awesome.

If for a moment they stop and there is quiet, and aware that no noise is being made they promptly make up for it by turning their very badly balanced CD player up to airplane engine noise levels. Inter-cutting all this is the son experimenting with music on the Computer; the repetitive droning interrupted only by sudden robotic drum themes, changed by milliseconds each time, repeated throughout the day, left on even though they are taking no notice of it.

At no time do they ever pause for silence. They wear the super heavy heals on their oversized orthopaedic shoes that make a devilish clang on the stone floors in the hallway while they try to stamp out an outbreak of rodents under foot or something like that.

Flat Four

2006-04-24T16:00:00.000+01:00

I do not tell a lie because what I see is what I see and I cannot pretend to be effected by fashionable trends and so this is what I see and hear and so must be true etc, and of course you do believe, don’t you? My ears are sensitised and my eyes always alert, nose twitching, and I hear the neighbours rocking on the wood above, making the boards rumble. Echoes of pots and pans hitting stone floors, metal bolts rolling on hard Formica covered chip board surfaces. The cockney screeching and Geordie grumblings create a Steptoe and son like atmospheric confusion all around, “Harold! Where are all my pans? You’ve moved them haven’t you? you’d do that! you swine Harold?”.

Inland

2006-03-24T02:07:00.000Z

Clouds drift over, moulding the flat horizon. The first specks of rain hit my window. Black swallows swoop down into a cluster of trees. They've been planted upside down, the heads, been dunked into the soil, roots up in the sky. Dim light inside my room now darkens a shade further.

Slabs of hedge have been carefully placed by private home owners to prevent public space invaders from crossing over miniature bridges into their tidy nests. They position their round white plastic balls along the barriers and pop into life when young types from the neighbouring estate angle past waving home-made stick-guns in the air, the bodies projected as silhouettes behind a thick curtain, a blip floating over the radar screen.

Garages like loading containers that have been mistakenly docked inland, stare out blankly at the newly tarred and flattened entranceways. An assortment of bush structures attempt to match up to the hedges along their sides, blooming their winter flowers.

Half a window juts out from the edge of the flats. A sharp edge of a roof meets with the horizontal drainpipe and then with the strict horizontal pattern of bricks that make up the terraced brown side wall of my outlook. This space reduced in turn by the parallelogram of a slanted rectangular bedroom window frame.

I then see me, standing, looking with squinted eyes through my binoculars at the black and white striped bird springing across the grass below me, the tail entertaining me with its delicate flickering feathers. My eyes rush to keep up, as if having stumbled upon a rare exotic find, jumping about like an electronic gadget that the Japanese could have built, on the grass, just there in front of me.

Google Poetry

2006-03-24T02:03:00.000Z

Accidental arrivals:

trampled head under pedal
mechano kits
pig stile
what is southsea like
picture factory floor at night
old factory glass light shades
theatrical faces
cleaning meat packing factory
getting rid of tubular wasp nest in window frame
factory camo dipping
how to be more social when you are completely unsocial with people
illusions stare into the room what do you see?
night visual illusions
landscaping damp grounds

Night Shift

2006-02-28T16:39:00.000Z

The nightly employees filed in through the double revolving doors. Lister, remembering to get his card ready to punch in the hole of the machine, stood in line ready, card tilted between thumb and forefinger. The tin metal receiver signalled its acceptance with a clunk-click and the rectangular card emerged then from the dark interior of the shiny reflecting lips like it had gotten its teeth knocked out. After sliding the slither of card back into his jeans pocket Lister shuffled towards the corridor, he pointed on the map to Zone B452. Lolloping his number five loafers along the gritty floor he gazed at the glitter of rough sandy particles. His head casually barged the aluminium door, nudging it with his shoulder. The door slammed behind, its sound travelling, echoing throughout the dark interior. He walked over to one of a row of steel lockers lined along the side of the room; with a key attached to a chain inside his jacket pocket Lister clicked open locker number 857. Inside were his boots and a boiler suite, neatly folded. He pulled the oil blotted material over his regular clothes, and placed his number fives in the locker, clicking the tin cube shut, making his way then towards the workman’s entrance. Walking, eyes fixed on the floor, his eyes noticed the firm, regular strides of a familiar figure striding towards him;
“Hey” it was Jim just on his way out from the day shift. “Where’s Ed?”
Off sick, said he got the flu or something.”
Well you’ll not be doin much tonight; we’ve just spent all day fixing the bearings on Ruby 6. She’s huffin and puffin, but… it’ll wear off. Keep a close eye on her…tell us how doin’ int’ mornin, right, you know what you’re doin’ right?”
“Sure Jim, anything you say, er, you got the report, yeah?”
“All jotted down for yeah in the office. Don’t worry…right I’m off to bed, see you later”
“Right, OK”
Lister didn’t have a clue what Jim was talking about but it was good to nod and make the correct signs. Being new in a job meant one had to be duplicitous, make the right sounds and noises till you knew what they all meant. He looked down at his map for Ruby 6 and imagined a machine shaped like a giant woman with six nostrils.

Refuge: a graphic novel online

2006-01-27T13:02:00.001Z

Click here to view my new online comic. I will be updating this comic every week from now onwards.

Visit 'Refuge Updates' blog to receive weekly updates as the narrative unfolds. The story is going to be approximately 700 plus panels long and reads horizontally across a continuous page (use arrow keys on your keyboard to navigate). Currently the story is split up into six chapters.

The first part of chapter one is now online and will be followed next week by a further part of the story and so on and so on...

My Grotty Chambers

2006-01-26T19:39:00.000Z

The things that I pile up in my secret place are not saved for just anybody to look at I now realise. It is clear that many people do not appear to see the things the way that I see them. I have in the back of my mind, whilst keeping myself busy and occupied with important work, really, sub-consciously I mean, I have been marking time, waiting for a certain innocent and not too critical person with a sufficient left of centre turn of mind and an inclination towards the outlandish, the type with a good appetite for rummaging and digging discriminately through all things obscure. They will come in and inspect my mountain of things, dig out the hidden collectables that I have piled here with me in the grotty chambers.

Whether my things are suitable or not, about the right subject or not, contain decipherable language or turns of phrases to the prospective viewer or not, I can only guess at. All I can say is that I have collected and stored these things here and I continue collecting them, not unlike the way a small furry animal scuttling across the forest floor searches for correctly shaped sticks for its artfully sculptured dam construction. For then, when the visitor comes, a visitor that dreams of good stuff and intelligent finds, then I will be able to rest and relax, sit and read a paper, let them climb up my mountain, inspect the hills and just generally wander around while I glance over pointing towards them now and again.

Each time I complete a section I sit gazing at the vast accumulation of items, wondering if the mole will come and if not that's OK because I have all these wonderful experiences to look back on, don't I.

I have all sizes, all shapes and colours, you’ll see, some so obscure so that you will no doubt disparage me and maybe take offence. Pick one up and I will tell you all about it. If you were to open one up and look at its various sections you might find your imagination drifting, your hair loosing gravity and falling to the ground, but that’s OK. You will then ask me questions about where to go now and what happens at the end? Don't worry about that I say and urge you to pick up another one and another.

When you come back down from the mountain I will introduce myself, and then you will to me and after these preliminary rituals we can engage in a proper conversation. We can return language back to itself. We can feverously prepare words, make up sentences and pour the finished lines into our hungry mouths. We can find the best words and mix them together. We can take the best sayings and keep them for ever. We can dive around in search of the correct responses. We could travel years and not be bothered, cross the continents with not one penny on us!

Caught out as if I were the fake that I feared you thought I might be, I then begin grasping at straws, fighting against a slippery bank. My feet slide on a large rock and wash me down into a vast river stream, the current taking me away into a deep blue sea. I swallow gallons as I try to scrabble up the slopes of the ocean floor. You cry out that you don’t understand, drowning, hands thrashing about in the murky water, twelve fathoms down and away.

You hand it to me and I hand it back, insisting, earnestly pointing to try another instead and this time with great reluctance you peal off the seal, open it up and look in. It would greatly satisfy me to see you flipping through the pages with a frenzied curiosity, but instead your claws rasp at the edges with sudden animosity.

Lying Down

2006-01-26T19:15:00.000Z

A long white sinewy fluffy cloud reaches over the hillside opposite, endless in length, it slowly slides through the background of a framed panel conveniently constructed by the criss-cross of the curtains and a horizontal section of the lower window. The upper section of glass rises up to the top and is covered in a smooth glaze of frost, broken in areas by branches of dribbling condensation.

The red blocks that are the curtains squeeze the daylight towards a thin horizontal strip, floating out a line of golden shapes on the hills of my lower half, swimming as I am in layers of bed covers, swirling about in a spaghetti of orange loops.

The creases of the hair encrusted mattress-cover are gently flattened as I slowly steam roller my body across to the left. I meet the plug socket as it peers over from the wall, its switch like nose angled now towards me as if staring. These things have utility without question. A quiet nothingness without concern. They are just things but exist and hold no anxiety or aspirations. They are made, survive and are replaced at the end of their use. That is that, no quarrel, no argument as to the meaning of it. They need no looking after.

Country File

2006-01-19T14:17:00.000Z

I lie in bed listening to shot guns firing off at random intervals in the distance. Are they people attempting to kill themselves every five or ten minutes as you imagine people doing if you believe what the papers say, or even sometimes in unison, missing each other just by seconds, the noise coming from various directions. Either that or city types visiting to register their country squire credentials, taking pot shots at the astoundingly numerous, strangely doped, awkwardly moving wildlife that are kept in stock throughout the year by locals, regardless of the season, changing the landscape into one gigantic firing range.

I open the curtains and the cool afternoon light brightens the pages of my book and catches the side of my head when it stoops to read the first paragraph. I am of course instantly spotted by a resident through a window across there up the hill opposite, on Crown Crescent; he is frowning at the irritating sight "What's that man doing up there lazing in bed looking at a book, he's reading of all things, struth!" rushing straight out to flick the safety catch off his Kawasaki two thousand hedge trimmer and pointing it up at me. I see no hedge to be trimmed. I have to lie down and wait untill the drilling sound stops.

Post drops like rubble down a hillside and through the letter box onto the hall carpet, triggering my movement across and into the hallway to sift through it, sorting the fifty percent junk from the bills and chucking them in a box next to the heater. After the drilling has stopped I get down once more on my bed and resume reading, more tentatively this time. I think it is OK, I have escaped notice.

The light streams through the gap in the curtains once again. Somebody is out there in the fields creeping between the weathered old trees; no dog on a leash so he must be wandering, enjoying the country smells of pesticide and the strange dung droppings that you can find here abouts. The shapes of modern estate homes with their jigsaw of angular roofs contrast sharply with the industrially scoured hillside rising above. What is left of the trees look like rows of old used mops thrown into the ground upside down with some of them having missed and fallen out. The grey clouds drift towards the right side of the sky as if burning oil wells were sending smoke up from behind the horizon. Telephone posts are stuck in like pins and spun with a web of wires linking the numerous towns, villages and cities.

A waste land, seeming empty and open, is in fact clogged with artificial manure and glutted with rows of irrigation channels, the wildlife being stocked as if it were a free range larder of meat ready for the chopping and the packing.

A wandering deer, lost in between two forests that are now as small as country home back yards, rips its hide over a thorny hedge; its hooves scrape across a road, narrowly avoiding a passing car, headlights reflecting in the animals uncomprehending stare.

The white frame of my window gets whiter and the cold hillside opposite darker, under the shadow of a now smoke filled sky. I close the curtains and turn the light on, picking up the book once again, the continuous mad cries of the birds effecting my concentration; I fear they could crash into my room at any moment.

Visual Illusions

2006-01-18T02:10:00.000Z

- Excuse me Doctor Caverley but I haven’t been feeling like my self lately, I feel cramped and claustrophobic inside, I am having strange headaches, a constant unsettled feeling you know, as if I’m somehow being watched all the time, I know it’s silly but, hallucinations I think as well, look, look, over there, tell me what you see.

- I see just a normal car, what do you see?

- I saw a flash just when I turned around by the settee, at this point here. Like that with my arm over the top like that. What do you make of it?

- Er, any other symptoms?

- Yes, sometimes, in the morning, I find a figure at the end of my bed, and then as soon as I look away it, he, disappears, sort of floats off into the air. I thought it was like an angel but it’s not..

- Do you experience these, these apparitions regularly, I mean every hour or only at certain times of the day?

- No it can happen at any time doctor. They seem so real that sometimes I feel that there is another element in space and time that I am tapping into, things that are really happening but we can only rarely experience them, like a switch flicking the brain onto a different stratum of reality. Our senses are so annihilated by society’s media bombardment and um, well, I don’t know it’s just that I can see these things. Perhaps I am gifted with some extra sensory perception, what do you think, in your professional opinion?

- Well, Hmmn… (tapping shoulders and knees, checking heartbeat) there are no physical signs that I can see. Stare straight into this please?

- Physical signs, what, do you mean it could be something that affects my body!?

- We have been given new guidelines as to how to deal with symptoms that are similar to yours, look here and here, good.

- Anything wrong? I know somebody who swears they can see lazar beams coming into their living room, and they say they need several layers of curtains to protect themselves from the floods of people distracting them in their living room. If people in the street can just walk in then that leaves you nowhere to hide. Perhaps I need one of those safe rooms where I can be me and have no distractions.

- How would you say these ‘experiences’ are effecting your daily routine Mr Biggs?

- Well, I think it could be affecting me at work. There's a figure that I see every now and again, a man dressed all in dark walking past my classroom window, and then he stops to drink a cup of tea out of a saucer and while he is drinking the tea from the saucer he slowly gets down to sit on the pavement slabs. He sits there all day, until I go to the car and then he walks over with me. When I’m inside he’s gone, I look around, he’s gone. When I get home I find him laying about reading in the lounge or sometimes painting on my cushions. It’s very unsettling.

- Yes well, would you now please put your arms out to full stretch please against the wall over there?

- What, what’s this all about?

- Just do it would you. It’s a normal procedure, back straight, head up, that’s it. (Takes measuring tape out of coat pocket).

- And anyway when I look into the mirror now I don’t see me, I see him.

- Doctor Caverley stops suddenly and steps back a pace, looking Harry in the eyes. “Him, what do you mean him, did you get a good description.

- You know, the guy I’ve been talking about all along, dark hair, thick set, um I think he has like quite deep set eyes, frowns a lot.

- Did he look like any of these (flips open a string of I.D. photos from his wallet)

- Umm… no, the one of the left look slightly like him but no, sorry. I mean I come home, turn the television on and he’s there, sitting next to the television, looking at me. I tell him, what the hell do you think you’re playing at. Get the hell out of my flat. He does go, but then he comes back again. I’m resting on the sofa and there he is again adjusting the settings on my drawing table.

- (Doctor gets out notepad and pen and starts writing) Alright, carry on.

- Sometimes, when I look out of the window I could swear I see him hiding in the red Renault over there, underneath that clump of clothes lying in the back, spying me, and then as quickly as the idea arises I dismiss it, I mean, some things are ridiculous, aren’t they.

- Well Mr Biggs I recommend that you take a break, you are obviously under some stress and I believe a term in say a rest home may be what is called for. I will arrange everything. Some people will visit in the morning and give you a lift to manor park rest home. It’s over the hill there. Pleasant and peaceful, it will give you time to wind down and then we’ll take it from there, all right, Mr Biggs.

- Do I need to wear anything special?

- No, you'll be fine as you are.

Southsea

2006-01-14T10:18:00.000Z

I wandered, crunching through a hundred thousand pebbles.
A ships purple silhouette drifts silently by in the suns haze.
Froth is accumulating at the rim of a wide ocean.
Single mothers and children cover themselves up and atempt to throw their hair back against the unfettered wind.
A life float sticks up like a lollypop amongst clumps of seaweed, tied to a crumbling post, viridian waves lapping at its feet.
Tankers curdle their way back and forth through the water, back and forth, to and fro, from various buildings that seem to be constructed on tiny stilts. Openly they deliver their goods in full view of the people strolling along the shore having their day out, walking their pets, not embarrassed at all by their bulk nore their mysterious cargo.

Just a short swim away and the steel vessels barge their way through the water, moaning like whales as their vertical fields of rust scrape against the concrete legged platforms, water swirling around, gargling and swelling with the physical efforts of the two metal dogs fighting blindly for port space, their sonic reverberations echoing down towards the depths.

Some look like rockets, some like big fat thatched cottages, making up a series of small communities facing inwards from the sea, forming a circle. It seems like the more the midday haze lifts the more the city of forms becomes clearer.

I See You

2006-01-11T11:56:00.000Z

I live in a hole in the ground together my dog Petre, and jimbo the cat. Never in the time we have been living down here have we thought about or been interested in contacting those above ground. This explosion of blogs that you talk about has given me the chance now to pass coded messages to the populace at large, regardless of the ever present fear of being caught for all my previous acts of disloyalty that I shall not mention here. I will chalk you up on the wall here so that I remember. Petre says hello but Jimbo has gone to fetch wood for the fire and he says he'll be back soon. It gets very cold down here when the iceman visits and I'm constantly scraping the window. Please don't come too close, that's right just there, where I can see you.

The Man Who Lived In the Loft

2006-01-10T04:59:00.000Z

There once was a man who lived in the loft and I could always hear him walking about at night; his feet thundering across my boards and I would sometimes see him in his hobnailed black boots and diamond patterned socks, walking close to the wall, half enveloped inside his shadow and he never once looked up to greet me. Every time it was along that wall and around that specific corner I would see him, always in a hurry. I never once noticed him either coming in or going out of the loft itself but I knew it was him; the boots, the coughing, the snoring through the floorboards at night, the glimpses of his great bulk slumped on the floor and not on the bed through the gap under his door. Did he sleep like that or did he just drink a lot, I sniffed the air - no alcohol. The snoring had been coming through like a low drilling sound, warbling through the hollow boards; I'll have to do something about that monster rolling about on my roof, I thought. What was he doing, what had he done and what was he going to do now I wondered as I peered through the gap beneath his door, dressed only in my night gown? There, he is in, he is in, I see him, his shadow moving. I hear the clump of his boots as they pace towards the door. It opens. I stood there looking up from the steps, I could see right up his hairy nose. Hello, um, sorry to bother you but you don’t happen to have a coin for the meter do you, only I’ve, you know, ran out. “Um no, I have no money on me right now, and whom might you be young fellow?” By the way I live down stairs, below you, so, nice to meet you. I did not lean forward to shake hands. He did not lean to shake mine. He stood and knocked his boots together, I supposed because of the cold. His ragged none-descript clothes gave him the air of one who does not wash or buy new, nor care what other people think or do. I wanted to know what his interests were, why, oh why did he live in this way and do the things that he did. What were his friends and where was his family? He walked a pace forward and gestured towards me. No’ I’m OK here. He had his, like marching music on in the background or something. In my self interested way I asked him what his interests were, was he interested in art, he must have an interest as everybody has an interest, interesting. What sort? “In art. Er…” he says and picks up a book from a small shelf, here look, a book on Monet. Ah yes I said. “Yes” he said, flicking through the pages and finding the picture with his broad thumb. “Look!” The picture was of a train in station, one of a series, by Monet. “I like trains”, he said, moving his head in circular shape and It was then that I noticed the posters, cards, stickers and other railroad memorabilia exhibited around and about. Any other artists at all? He looked at me and shrugged. What do you do? I asked as if he had to be doing something, in his long walks out, he had to be going somewhere, to do something, an occupation of sorts? I can’t remember the details… just a job. What did he say - underground?; he went off mumbling about something; Divorced… err… split up… with his wife… he had sons… England… somewhere in England… lived for two years around the area of Manchester… rough. Oh yes I once had a friend who lived in Manchester - rough! Maybe that’s why he sleeps on the floor…oh and of course the bed is too soft, so he‘s not used to it, that must be it. This must be like paradise compared, with these nice smooth boards. Taking time to acclimatise, getting himself used to life outside of the Men’s hostel or maybe he was in the army, the Queens royal railway division or something, and it was disbanded because of the privatisation so he found himself a nice loft room, on top of me. He stood there and I stood down at the door. He let off wind, like it was just another occurrence, every hour, even minute of the day and he just carried on and I tried to prevent my nose from showing its consternation with rubbing my hand on it, and cleaning and then I noticed that he had a combination, of clothes on and his bed had no covers and no duvet so I briefly muttered that he could borrow my futon, as a kind of good will gesture, similar to being on the ground but more comfortable than the wood, for you to sleep on? I think he took it quite well, it went down well, but said no. He started towards me and I said to him that I did art in my room and it’s in a bit of a jumble at present, space at a premium you know, otherwise you could come and err…visit, maybe…yeah, later maybe, not now though, not now.

Incommunicado

2005-12-28T19:36:00.000Z

- Have you ever thought of wearing a mask or a Burka like those women in Afghanistan and Iraq? Go about incommunicado like?
You know you could hide your creativity under the robe, protect yourself from the personal jibes and misunderstandings that you say people are making about you.

- Are you trying to be funny!

- No, no. You could go onto the streets and yet still at the same time hide away and retain your dignity, that’s all.

- Oh yeah, a cross-racial, cross-dressing introvert with extreme religious beliefs, I’d be shot on the spot!

- True, you would stand out a bit, what about wearing just the hood?

- What, a hoody, Then they’d probably restrain me with a truncheon at my throat first and then they'd shoot me. Anyway I don’t want to become an even bigger object of curiosity; I get enough ridicule as it is.

- Well, er… how can you go into the street expressing your personal ideas without getting shot or manhandled by special police...mmn... you don’t half make life difficult for yourself don't you.

- I think expressing yourself in any way is getting more difficult now.

- Can’t you go out in just your normal bog standard Christio/Capitalist outfit, just once in a while?

- I can’t, I’ve tried, I get too jittery. When I’m confronted by the people I find then I have to rush down into the underground and dive onto an empty train, one that runs to a disused platform, where there are no guards on duty. Then I just sit there and wait for an hour or so, then I step onto the next empty train going back to the surface. Again and again I do this before it becomes so tiring that I stumble off somewhere in Zone four, hours later, exhausted. And so much work time wasted! I know all the stations by now, because You have to know the places, to keep away from those people.

- Well that’s because they know, they know the kind of work that you do. There must be something else you can get involved in like Taxidermy or Military modelling, something practical and inoffensive yet retains some of the same structures and innate impracticalities of what you're doing now.

- Military Modelling!?

- Well OK then…Scrabble, That’s becoming like chess these days, or maybe stamp collecting, that could be a good one - people get really into that now you know.

- Do you realise how hostile you are being to my beliefs, do you? Just don’t understand do you… oh what’s the point, I need to find real people with real interests, who are sympathetic to my work. Maybe I could put an Ad in the paper or something. There must be other people out there with similar beliefs and ideas. Maybe I need to emigrate to a different culture, one that takes their religious beliefs seriously.

- Are you not interested in western culture at all then?

- Of course I am, in some ways.

- Then why do you hold such extreme views? Everybody knows you need to compromise just a little, to get along in life.

- You can't believe only half heartedly in something?

- Yes but you don’t have to spend all day long doing it, like you know, split your time up between doing this and doing something a bit more socially active. You are not going to be able to carry on doing this much longer anyway, where are you going to get the money? Have you ever tried selling some of your work, to see if there genuinely is a market out there for it?

- I suppose you think that I should put myself out on the stock market, and rent myself out in shares so that each person can take a pick at me. This is not simply a commodity that I’m making here; I don’t want my work to be associated with this bloody craze for pragmatism and free racketeering. You have to build your strict set of principles, a set of codes to counter the constant pressures to give up and join in. And anyway I’m not very good at anything else, what do you want me to do meat packing, join a gnome making factory?

- I don’t say give up you beliefs completely, I wish you wouldn't take things so personally, it's just I don’t think that you are doing yourself any good with this self sacrificing lifestyle, it’s just not healthy, you need to think about yourself a bit more.

- Here we go again, this insane culture of the self. That’s what the government relies upon, just think of number one, and of course there is a criteria surrounding your notion of the self, what the self should consist of, what we have to do in order to think of ourselves as valued individuals, independent, a part of the community, respectable, mature, important. All these aspirations pushed onto us so that we feel a little bit included in the world, so that we can feel a little bit a part of society, it's all soul distroying. But if we could resist those pressures, just imagine the possibilities, the creative potential.

- Yes, and the despair and the anxiety?

- Only if you are worried about what people think, you have to be your own boss.

- Well don’t you want your work to be a part of society, aren’t you interested in attracting interest in your work in this terrible society.

- We call it a society but what does it really consist of, what is the glue which holds us together; No religion, no respect from the politicians, no set of values that people can look to and hold up. Politics is increasingly about control and managing the effects of global market forces, what ever works. They've divided us up in order to rule us, each of us in our own little box.

- All the artists that you like are in that market and are propped up by it.

- Yes but they have been able to resist the pressures to sell out and are usually determined people who have held on to there principles in the face of market forces encouraging them to do otherwise. In fact I've joined a group.

- Aren't you going against all your principles?

- This is different, we’re holding a rally in London on Saturday.

- You? Have you forgotten what happened the last time you joined a social gathering?

- Er, Well, We've decided that We're going to act, at last.

- We, what do you mean we? You don’t know anybody.

- There are people, I think. I don’t know who’s going to turn up, but you have to start somewhere. We're hoping for about a thousand people turning up.

- I bet they're just a bunch of extremist outsiders who feel rejected by society so they have to make up some religion that serves their anti social needs.

- Look, we didn't choose this religion, it chose us, I've been talking to some and we all seem to have the same you know, desire.
We've always known that this god existed really, intuitively, subconsciously, but only now has it becoming really clear in our minds. Funny really isn’t it how a person can exist their whole life without realising that some one is out there, watching over you, saying "that George, he has followed my preaching in the truest sense and has sacrificed himself in a way that no other follower has."

- I bet you see yourself as above everybody else, what with your creativity and stuff. One day you are you going to climb down from your mountain or up from out of your deep chasm to join the rest of us?

- Who? You? Rubbish, I can do what I like. You are either with us or you're against us. My fellow believers and I are trying to start a community based upon new economic and social ideas, the details of which I shall let you know of if you wish when I come back from the meeting.

- A meeting?

- God, I've got to get ready for it now actually, the meetings in half an hour, God, I forgot (starts taking clothes out of cupboard).

- So where abouts is this meeting?

- A secret location, somewhere in London, gotta keep stum.

- You're not wearing that are you?

- What's wrong with it, I always wear this into town. It kind of gives me extra protection.

- You're not going to put the zipper up, how are you going to navigate around?

- Oh, you get used to it. It gets a bit hot in the summer in the Tube rush hour but it does the job. I have inserted a webbed grill, see, on the side for looking left and right, it's clever don't you think. Loads of hidden pockets, it's great.

- It looks about four sizes too big, the hem's nearly touching the ground.

- It can get very chilly in the Tube at night.

- You look like you're going to treck across the south pole or something.

- Are you discriminating about my choice of dress? Most people wear such boring stuff, at least I got a bit of imagination. Anyway, got to go, just check the street, hang on...OK, all clear...see you then.

- Bye then. Remember I want full details when you get back.

- Right you are.

Psychiatrist

2005-12-27T19:49:00.001Z

She wanted me to say in a very sincere way that I was victim material.
Ripe for the investigating
Wanted to know just enough to suggest, to imply, to present gaps that she could fill in with her academic archaeology.
Her eye contact was very good, so was mine.
She sounded Canadian but I found out that she was actually Irish by blood.
Did you have a happy childhood?
Um, no.
I am not required to ask for details if you don’t want to give them - pause.
They don’t need to know, it just helps with getting some kind of background so that I can help you.
What do you think of all this.
This what.
Being sent here, by work. What is your attitude, I’d like to know, what you think about it.
Well they told me that they thought that is was a good idea, that they wanted to help me, that it was good, for my own good.
What do you think?
Well I had no choice really, I feel that if I didn’t go that they would think that I wasn’t willing to deal with the situation. And anyway I’m only going to go through with this unless 'She' does it as well. 'She' is doing it as well isn’t she.
She? Um, er, well that hasn’t been sorted out yet, er I am trying to find time in her timetable to fit her in, I'll check on that, yes, yes.
Well I was led to believe that 'she' was doing this as well.
Yes, 'She', I see.
I’m not doing it if 'she' isn't doing it, you see.
I’ll get in touch with the college in the morning.
I mean, as far as I am concerned I mean it's really not my fault really.
So how are you finding your job at the moment?
What do you mean, is there a problem. I don't see any problem. I mean I really don't know what this is all about...

Just a Minute

2005-12-26T23:15:00.000Z

- Just a minute, I'm a bit confused, do you do your work and therefore you have to believe in your god or do you believe in your god and therefore you have to do your work?

- My god and my work are inseparable; I haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about.

- Alright then let’s try another way; do you do your work, or believe in your god, because you are not social or are you unsocial because of your god-work or whatever.

- Eh, but I’m not unsocial. What you say implies that I have an aversion to socialising. I have no aversion to socialising. In the right context, with the right people, I have no problem. It’s hard to find the right people who believe in the same things that you do.

- There are others who believe and still manage to get out, aren't there?

- Yes but they can't be doing any interesting work can they. To me and those like me, we have no argument. And it does say that followers must not seek to be distracted from their faith.

- And what else does your god not allow you to do then?

- Well, I don’t celebrate Christmas, that’s not strictly a religious thing just my personal choice really.
Er, and um…

- And?

- let me see…I don’t participate in sports… but that’s mostly because of the dodgy leg really.

Anything else?

- Hang on! Hang on!… Well relationships can be difficult.

- Yeah, but you're safely tucked away in a steady, ongoing, potentially child rearing, public partnership aren’t you?

- Finished.

- What, completely, dead, gone, buried, finished completely?

- Yep, I'm afraid so.

- Well you didn't tell anybody.

- You didn’t ask.

- I thought you were getting on so well, since when?

- Friday, she’s moved to my mothers for training in advanced gold digging and man bating, having now been adopted, it seems, as the hoped for daughter my mother never had. She now phones me up just to let me know that it's all my entire fault, my mother that is.

- Well maybe this is the final shove you need to get out ther and mingle. You must start right away. No hesitation.

- they'll be trapping some other unsuspecting male by Monday you’ll see.

- Look you’ve got to get out and face the world. How are you ever going into another relationship if you don’t make the right steps?

- She’s after a certain kind of lifestyle; all she wants a secure and safe income, that’s the only thing that matters to her, she has never considered me and my beliefs.

- Hey, have you got any staff parties to go to. Now, you’ll need to spruce this place up a bit. Urgh…what’s all that dark stuff in there…urrgh!

- She owes me money actually, god I’m so glad I got out of that trap, oh the claustrophobia!

- Hey listen to me! Where’s the brush and pan. Have you ever thought of employing a cleaner, this place is a mess.

- Can’t afford it.

- Sure you can, with your…

- I’ve quit.

- Eh, what, quit, Nooo…?

- I’ve been thinking of doing it for some time, it's like a huge weight off my mind.

- But how are you going to survive? That's all you had left. You can’t just throw your life in the bin just because of a hiccup in relations, are you mad?

- I just feel like is a complete break, you know get back to concentrating fully on my work. Angie, that was never going anywhere, we were just wasting each others time. From now on I am going to be very careful what I get myself involved with. No messing about at all from now on, I’m going to give myself up fully to my beliefs, I think it’s time.

- But George, the way you’re going you’ll end up like that tramp guy who runs around town scribbling abstract marks on the roads. You’ll disappear off the radar, for a few principles and you’re so called religion. Look, George all that really matters in life is happiness, to achieve happiness, that’s all people really need.

- But this is happiness, I am happy, look at my smile, look, see. Well anyway happiness is overrated, if happiness requires being consigned a list of duties that have to be performed unless you are not considered officially ‘happy’ then I can’t see the attraction, and anyway you can make your own equivalents you know.

- Well society just knows now what happiness generally requires, after hundreds of years of sifting through millions of peoples lives for nuggets of joy they are now having the highest yield percentage ever. Happiness is now stamped down. I mean what do we know; we’re always messing about and changing our minds, we need the external structures to guide us.

- What if you don’t happen to fall into that percentage, what do you do then?

- Well you make believe you are happy when you’re not really. Either that or you go out there and find it, in people, things, objects, it’s amazing the things that you can buy these days.

- Yes you try and fit the pattern.
Or else you can find it in your beliefs, you can set up your own structures, after all people are only made happy if they are given a stamp of approval, well then I can invent my own stamp, with my own special mark on it, like a signature.
After all, I know when I’m happy and when I’m not.

- You might be able to get yourself into a position, you know, where there is all kinds of potential, you know, if you meet the right person, and a job using your skills you could rise from out of this precipice of anxiety and doubt. Then you will realise what life really has to offer.

- I am happy, I am happy, I'm bloody happy OK! So just stop it with the lecture will you. I like it here. What do you know anyway? Everything is going in the right direction now, I’m on the right road now with what I’m doing, I have a good feeling about all this, everything is going to be fine. All that was needed was probably the time and lack of distractions to really have a good go at it.

- You have to think of the community as a whole and not just think of yourself. Think of all those people working their fingers to the bone, toiling away on forty eight hour shifts with families to provide for and debts to pay off and here's you with your fantasy schemes not willing to do your bit. Don't you feel in the slightest bit guilty or anything.

- Enlightened is more like what I feel. People need to turn around and look about them and try to be open to alternative lifestyles. Jobs can really tie you down you know. People need to think less about acquiring money and status and more about developing spiritual wealth, something that is not so visible to the community, it is not acquired in the shops, it requires time alone with your self to open up more space for contemplation and creative thought.

- Like you, now, in here, doing this? Is this what it all comes down to? Sitting around in a room fiddling with pens in little squares?

- You just don't understand the language I'm working with. Hey, don't look to close, I haven't finished that yet, it's personal.

Oh God

2005-12-16T09:27:00.000Z

- Why don’t you wash George?

- Because it is not required by my god and in any case I am too busy at my work.

- Your work?

- Yes the work that I do for my god.

- Who is this god of yours that is so important that you do not see to your daily needs and slave away for night and day?

- In my religion we believe that every day should be taken individually and we shall not look into the future but keep closer to the present, not wandering very far from the work at hand.
The work we should do should have no singular practical aim but should open up the mind to endless possibilities and potential interpretations. Inevitably this type of work will require the utmost concentration and will allow no other type of occupation, to prevent the work from being corrupted or lead astray into practical or commercial considerations.

- Your clothes, your clutter, the floating hairs onto the beaten up sofa, you believe in a god that lets you live like you’re in the gutter?

- These things are the sacrifices that the god says that you must make in order to cleanse yourself of the world and its distractions.

- What is so important about this work that you do anyway? All you do is sit down at that computer all day, like a monk tapping away at his tablet. Is this god such a sadist that it has his subjects forfeit themselves to repetitive strain syndrome? What about life, the world outside, air brushing through the trees and the smell of -------- in Spring time.

- That’s all well and good but what meaning is there in all that. We are but flesh and bone, our senses of trivial enjoyments have no meaning besides the flow of history and time. One day we will be dead and gone and then there will be nothing. We must seize the moment and not let trivial distractions get in our way.

- Who is to say what is trivial and what is not. Meaning can only be established in the context of society and people. How can you hide away and at the same time say that what you do has meaning and authority, god or no god.

- I believe in a secular society where individuals can choose their own path and construct their own sense of meaning in the world and seek out those with similar interests. We have to be strong and independent to forge new meaning in the world. Our sense of existence in the world is only truly realised through continuous recreation of meaning, of reinterpretation of the world around us. In order to do this one needs quiet and solitude and of course it helps my concentration.

- So in order to truly exist you have to retreat further and further from the world. It doesn’t seem very appealing to me.

- Well nobody asked you to join me, did they? In fact I didn’t invite you over here really did I.

- Hey, but didn’t you phone me last night. Said you hadn’t talked to anybody in weeks.

- Ah, yes, so I did.

- Said the lady at the supermarket had trouble interpreting your speech when you asked how to get a trolley as you had no money for the slot.

- Yes, yes. Well, I couldn’t understand a word she was saying either. I had to climb over the barrier to grab a loose one.

- Well, you know, I think you’ll have to practise your social skills a bit more.

- I try to get out regularly and integrate with people. It's good for my work, for stories and that. It’s just that sometimes I feel like a fox that has to duck from the farmers gun all the time, it becomes a bit stressful after a while having to keep up the appearances. I just want to do my own thing without having to feel as though I am being watched all the time.

- I did wonder why you had all the curtains closed. You can't hide from the world you know.

- People are always watching and having opinions and bumping about on the ceiling, you can never fully escape. I don't think that I'd be able to survive all this without my god to give life meaning.

- But there is meaning out there, natural meaning, just as many rich layers of complexity out there than in anything you could create by yourself in this room.
You could live it and breathe it, be a part of it.

- I am being a part of it, just in a non participating kind of way. The world is about psychology and interpretation. What do you think about the world out there, how do you communicate what you feel? I'm just as much a part of the world in here as you are out there. I am building a language that can communicate how I feel. A person can travel to all the countries in the world and still essentially know nothing more than they did when they started out. I look into my cauldron filled with the bubbling froth of techniques and tools and ideas swirling around and if I look hard enough and concentrate, sometimes, out pops a bit of magic, which energises me much more than any 'socialising' could possibly do.

Word Comic

2005-11-21T00:36:00.000Z

The Horse That Passed Me By

2005-11-17T14:48:00.000Z

Walking down the corridor I hear a clopping sound standing out from the usual revving of car engines in the street. A horse maybe. No, can’t be? The sound continued as I walked towards the window and sure enough, there, passing by on the road in front of my window, was a large four legged animal. Larger, much larger, than the cars that were carefully swerving around it to give it space, actually having to ride out into the oncoming lane, being careful not to disturb it with the noise of their carbon emitting engines. It had a chestnut brown coat of well brushed tightly knitted hair like it had just stepped from a race course. The rider simply rode, having no special grace, rocking with the motion, the horses head pointing up, eyes fixed on the distance and not looking down at the cars below that appeared clunky and immobile. The drivers, I thought, looked up at the shear mobility of the animal, hidden as they were beneath their flat tin roofs. The options that this animal had at it’s disposal, reigned in by the strapping around it’s nose and midriff. The horse and rider combined to reach almost to the height of a double-decker bus.

It trotted along the lines of the road running at ninety degrees to my flat window, I followed it with my gaze like a Muybridge camera, clicking off a sequence of set moments in the trajectory of its walk, measuring it with an imaginary ruler, wondering at the uncanny size of the animal in comparison to the cars moving past it. The experience induced me think back to the diagrams that I had drawn as a child in my Geography exercise books at school, displaying the relative sizes of dinosaurs that existed during the Cretaceous period, such was the surprise at the vision of a horse against orderly suburban gardens and pathways that face onto my flat. In my exercise book the time scale showed the different dinosaurs and their relative sizes together with the time of their existence on the planet earth, as if all of the various gigantic animals had walked horizontally in the same direction and on the same pathway throughout time.

The fact that you could buy a plastic toy replica in the shops and put it on your desk together with your pencil crayons and writing pens, the moulded plastic version being similar in size and colour to the one that I had drawn in my diagram, seemed exciting at the time. I imagine that this experience must have brought the history subject down to a manageable scale for me. The pre-existence of another world where these long tailed, overweight beasts wandered around waiting for extinction with their contingency of eating or be eaten, ice ages and flying meteorites, probably escaped my notice on the whole. I concentrated on getting the yellow ochre’s and viridian greens right, using layer after layer of pencil crayon to hide the lines of my exercise book pages.

It occurred to me that all that regalia around the head and body formed a restriction to this creature’s natural bounding freedom of movement. The horse had now disappeared down the road and out of site from my viewing angle. That great big animal had been strapped in and saddled as a means of transport and given a price to be paid for and comodified. It had looked so obedient and trained with its shoed hooves clopping a regular beat along the road at a parralell to my flat window.

They say that the dinosaurs became extinct suddenly due to the earth being hit by a meteorite and not a slow gradual extinction. Of course now that I had seen this horse passing me by, as if by some magic the industrial revolution had rewound itself to give me a view of how things could have been, as things once were, the animals roaming in the streets. I now saw horses every where; in the park, around the back, there were various rides in the like of horse models. In the gardens of pleasant houses children were rocking the metal horses and playing giddy up as if that's what you do to a horse, shouting whoa! and Yeehaa, pulling at the straps, of the horse, that then rocked obediently.

Afterwards, when the image of the horse was reduced in my mind from a carefully stepping animal from the fields, nervously entering the streets, keeping to the lines only with guidance from its rider pulling at the reigns (sometimes needing blinkers), it's bold figure became blurred in my mind and gradually became replaced in my imagination with images that I had seen in films and on television and on the stickers that I had stared at, being pasted upon the many horse carts that i had seen being towed along on the M1 motorway. In the end the only understanding that I was left with was of an ever widening gap between truth and reality, between horse and comodity, together with a growing nostalgia for a fictional past represented sometimes in westerns and in the occasional horse that passed by my window.

In the Road

2005-10-19T12:50:00.000+01:00

Strange changes of mind have been happening to me recently. It seems like every time I venture out of the door something happens whereby my original plans are thrown out, replaced by new ideas and intentions. I have just sold my car and this has meant that recently I have had to make more use of the local paths and roads to get around.

I had decided to go out into town to get some essentials and when I was there I suddenly made the decision, without any real reasoning, even though I had not yet bought the list of things that I had intended to, that I wanted to make my way back home and not wander around town any longer.

I paced up the road on the way back feeling the rain clouds slowly closing in on me and my wish to get home became ever more urgent. With every step of my boots the gradient of the pathway seemed to increase in steepness, to a point that when I passed the school at half way I had to stop and take a breather.

Sitting on the bench, looking around, I spotted a women spewing out a full bucket of soapy water onto the road surface, its suds trickling on the slopes, her head disappearing as quickly as it had appeared behind the tall walls that formed a part of the roadside. The water made an expressive mark, dribbling across the road.

I felt the urge then, to step out, into the road. For the moment I thought it was all clear.
Once in the middle of the road its flow of bumps and patchworks became more evident. With one ear to the sound of a roaring engine behind me I inspected the river of marks and abrasions lying stiff and dormant at my feet. The earth had moved below the tarmac and a series of ripples had formed. I spotted signs of movement in the different coloured patchworks and recently laid sections of tar. I felt that people had marked out certain areas as if for special consideration, to designate that area or this area for future plans, to further the development of the road surface.

The fluorescent yellow colouring of the grid might have meant that it was only to be used in emergencies, that take place at night time, the pattern of the top attempting to mimic loosely the structuring of the surrounding gravel, muck and stone-inlayed tarmac. Workmen, for their part, had obviously attempted to leave a mark by pressing boots into the recently painted grid before it was dry, in 1995, for time immemorial.

Many variations of shadow and texture made up this lower grey deserted area, marking out a history of incidents and accidents, of gouges and pot holes covered up and pasted over, being continuously re-knitted to form an ever larger and more detailed patchwork.

The scored surface was pressed into to make openings like an advent calendar. Strange puppet heads could appear when lifted up? Some clue perhaps in the top markings, a mystery language to mark out one ductile plate from another. The ground is hard and stubborn under foot yet appears moulded like as if it were made of wet toast or worn leather?

Could there once have been a melting and a pouring, then a spreading all over being topped off topping off with sewn-on plates varying extravagantly in size and dimension?

The molten material had perhaps engulfed everything in its path and descended, as a river of dirt, down the hill. That would explain the apparent chaos of the undulations and the odd bits of clothing still showing through the surface in parts?

The clouds above clustered together and turned a darker shade of grey with the sunlight burning through, glancing off the wet tarmac, welding together the fine pores of the surface that looked, at that moment, quite like the texture of a well done cake just pulled from the oven.

The hill becomes steeper and my slow walk peters to a standstill. My legs are so tired that I feel they are going to drop off at any moment.

Standing there, I close in to inspect the grade A metal that is stamped into the Autumn ground, scraping away the leaves.

They have underground people in New York don't they? I was expecting a figure to pop his head up at any moment and shout a greeting. He had left his folding knife by the doorway, which a stranger might perceive is an insignificant piece of cardboard.

I framed some passing strangers through my lens but then changed my mind.

Glad to get past the worst of the hill. I was now just around the corner from home, looking forward to getting in, all these unnecessary detours had worn me out.

I dumped myself inside and having taken my shoes off and put my aching legs in the bath to soak, I started thinking about getting something to eat.

Early Morning

2005-10-12T12:34:00.000+01:00

I go to the end of the road and back and take pictures of various spots, plodding along in the yellow light of a dark early morning. A car turns out from a side road, passing my body stooped behind a tree. My self looks funny in the odd hours of the morning, a stalker, staking out the houses, peering over hedges, wandering in parks.

My first mistake is to turn the flash off on the camera, thinking there is enough light coming from the street lamps.

Across the horizon the glare of headlights rises and sets upon the reflective surface of the roadway. An early morning worker blurs past me and dives into the country road, it eats him up.

I can go almost where ever I want, I think, although I am careful not to disrupt the people asleep, behind the windows of the houses on this road on the outskirts of town. I cannot go in the fenced off gardens or wander into the gated and locked building site with signs fixed to the wire saying keep off and listing the degrees of fines or penalties for trespassing. They have locked the door to keep me on the roadside. The little area with its one man trucks and miniature diggers, road drills and chain saws lying about. It is an experimental workshop secluded from the surrounding school and residential areas by a thick set of bushes, a gate marking the entrance positioned in from the road for large lorries to provide raw material in the day time. These are the signs of an expanding town, developing new constructions. A busy town with figures rushing about.

Behind a wild hedgerow that runs all along the road are positioned an array of what looks like out-buildings of various sizes; Six Caravans and two long tubular constructions like nuclear bomb shelters, the windows opaque with the build up of grime. The grass has grown about them as if they haven't been lived in for a while but it is difficult to tell in the dark and not being able to get up close. Some form of temporary accommodation perhaps, travellers passing through; not around here, they could be shot by groups of marauding farmers, I've seen them roaming the hills. Maybe they bought the land and couldn't afford to build so they just moved in one of those do it yourself house kits or even an ex-army portable type construction and as the family got larger they extended the space out with caravans. That seems logical.

I look at it and think, if only I could buy a piece of land, I could start off with a tent and possibly build on top of that, put a fence around the edge, everybody needs a fence it seems, that's civilisation for you; fencing and lighting, lighting to be able to build a fence etc. The pictures are'nt going to come out. The view finder keeps shows a blank, it's too dark; This camera doesn't have the sensitivity to pick up the reflections, the deep and rich textures that I am glorying in all around me. Nature flies under the radar of modern digital technology. Well, just take them, what ever.

I try out the flash and I immediately feel as though I am part of a crime investigation scene, imagining the chalk outline of a dead man that had been shoved from a passing car. Inspectors all over, ruffling in the grass, sectioning the area off.

Starting to rain again. My outfit is getting ruined!

The dog is kept in by a seven foot fence, so says the sign. Wooden slats, just one more style. I hear no sound, probably out and about in the neighbourhood, they have night sight don't they?

The country road reaches far into the unlit countryside, its insides swathed in dense black. You can move your arms around in there and remove yourself from the physicality of your body. The cracks in the trees show light but where you are the dark is impenetrable. I sense nothing but the gentle breeze waving the branches all around and a feeling of floating around in the middle of it all. A black curtain that you can run and disappear into, away from the lights and the gateways and just feel the rough tree trunks and gravely road under foot. The deathly quiet is hallucinatory. I can hear my breathing loud inside my head. I reach towards the light. Is this the way. This is the way? If a car was to crunch up the right road now would I have time to dive out of the way, or not?

My trainers splash on the water logged steps leading up into my flat, back to finish off my sleep. Inside I can see below the lights blurring. Those singular people in the cold wet stillness of the morning stride habitually to work. They take the short cuts and the cars jog along the tractor trails, loose stones flying out at the grazing sheep, bouncing off their layers of damp wool.

The black, that has veiled everything, thins out to a deep blue and the light begins to press through into the day unveiling rain drenched greens and reds. More vehicles roar up and soon there is a chorus of growling engines. Children take diagonal routes across grass and muddy their feet, up onto the pavements, through the back alleys and out towards the main gates.

I go to make some coffee and open the window for the steam of the kettle to pass out into the morning chill.

The sky brightens in its lavender mist that clouds the roads and hovers quietly in between the houses.

It Rained...

2005-10-07T07:42:00.000+01:00

It rained, I could tell before as the clouds were coming over. After a week of hot sun at last some liquid to cool the air. The puddles were receding and I decided to go out with my camera. I saw a documentary about Tarkovsky recently and one of Tarkovsky's close colleagues had observed the director one evening during a freak thunderstorm. The rain was hitting the windows with force and a puddle was forming inside a door in the house they were staying in. Tarkovsky stood watching this build up of water until the storm had finished its flashing and pounding of the building. The clouds dispersed and warm sunlight slowly entered through the windows. Tarkovsky stayed by the window to watch the puddle that had formed recede and dry up over a period of a couple of hours. In this time the wet mark changed its colours, fading until the floor was as it had been before the storm had begun. The seeping of the water into the house and receding back into the atmosphere fixed Tarkovky's attention and he stayed staring at the area long after the water had gone.

The water had seeped in under the shelter by several feet. A mixture of the opening sunlight, the rain and the spongy quality of the surface had created an unlimited number of subtle effects on the slabs, thin canals of green moss flowed in-between. The moisture illuminating the years of usage, the fine grained layers of interaction seeped down into the concrete, making up an almost visceral scaled effect.

Edges of constructions where government road teams had made errors, although the pleasure of filling those frames of stone with a flood of tar and then to watch it dry and grow old with time like the battered skin of a drum, must have been interesting. The shingle of grit and fag ends creates textures that are highlighted by the receding moisture of the rain.

Where the man had ran out of wood stain and the rain had run the bird muck down.

On the pavements of the back roads where the people live on the outskirts of an average town, the rain had come down. Then the sunlight appeared like a grey glow through the misty clouds, natural lighting effects for the timeless man, stepping from his flat, wandering around on the grassy knoll. Peering over garden fences and through windows, getting down on hands and knees and trying to look like a property surveyor. I can hear the phones going now - for the large frowning chap leaning across my rose bushes sergeant!

The bins are kept in their own room in the flats with its own wooden barn door to the outside, a metal grill helping the rotting smells drift off into the damp air outside. The insects had built their lives around this place where I hold my nose and trundle my bin out slamming the doors and breaking several webs and flattening spiders as I do so. An insect lays fixed to the wood, looking alive but not moving and had been there for days. Who knows how many minute living things are trapped in the gaps of those grill lattices.

Just before the rain came down the grass had been cut, the machine had come running around the sides of the hill spattering tiny particles of chopped grass, causing texture like the stuff you might buy in small plastic bags at modelling shops. It mimicked the splashing of water, rotting into the ground or being blown away.

Meantime

2005-10-01T19:07:00.000+01:00

Meantime, a film by Mike Leigh. Released in 1983. My unreliable memory of this: The drab colours inside the dark smoky pubs, streams of foggy light entering through the mottled window pane. The pub with its side rooms has a separate atmosphere of its own and a hatch to pass pints of lager top through. Skin heads in their bomber jackets and underage kids in duffle coats taking it in turns to go to the bar. At home the houses are fitted with simple angular technology with no 'Bass Expander' or mini-disc nor CD player. The white metal washing machine with has bare shiny metal edges and a Russian porthole for a door. Through the window children are seen rolling marbles into the gutter. The streets are grey and wet, the housewives scuttle around the angles, through the shadowy underground passes and into the indoor shopping centres, on their way to shop, some wearing exotically coloured head scarves. A young Gary Oldman dances along the wall that lines a litter strewn walkway, screeching and barking in the cold air. He opens up a pale blue door and asks if somebody is in. His tall figure, fitted with bleached jeans, bomber jacket and bobble hat, is seen to step inside. The dingy flat on the second floor of a block of flats is decorated on the outside with a regular viridian green in flat squares punctuating strips of wet grey wall. The sky threatens rain as the grey clouds encroach to seal the vision of a run down London estate where there are long queues outside the benefits office with an officias lady behind the bullet proof screen at the counter - 'sign your name there love', the young man clothed in layers of oddly fitting jumpers and greyed drainpipe canvas trousers, squints he eyes behind his broken national health glasses at the form moved towards him across the wooden desk where the varnish has worn off and where he pulls at the metal chain to grasp the shiny black pen, scribbling his name.

Between Night and Day

2005-09-21T20:14:00.000+01:00

(I fetch my bucket of water from the well and duck my head inside it. While doing this I attempt a handstand, my feet waving about in the air. I survive by drinking all of the water so that I can then breathe. The bucket is cold inside and rattles against the rocks when my head moves. I loose balance and fall with the full length of my body falling flat, my boots clubbing the rough ground. The bucket roles away, drawing an arch across the sand, stopping against the side of the well. Refreshed, I get to my feet, brushing myself down. I tell myself to remember this well for the way back, lucky I came upon it, what a find, just when I was feeling thirsty. The flies re-emerge and continue pestering my salty skin.) I think that I am tired and need to go to bed. I will have a drink before I go. Why so thirsty? I don't know. (The morning beckons with a brand new landscape with green seaweed and war ships armed to the teeth waving about on a choppy sea, sailed by postmen with nosey next door neighbours. A fish is caught and is passed straight from the lagoon onto the fisherman’s plate. Whitewashed buildings cram for space inside the castle walls towering above the cliff edge and threaten to topple over onto the sands below. Nesting albatrosses glide down from the walls to hover above a surfacing shoal of glittering sardines.)

The Big Game Live

2005-08-17T16:42:00.000+01:00

When Archibald shapes to head the ball from a Dingleton cross which loops and curls into the 'danger zone', the keeper, Inglethorpe together with a gaggle of disparate defenders attempt to bounce the leather-cased swollen balloon from the area while at the same time standing on the feet of the hopping Red Eagles to put them off. The ball, deflected by a header outside the area and the cross bar, powerballs off the wooden crossbar as the result of a cleverly aimed shot disappearing into the crowd, giving the Pembleton Rangers relief.
This rest was only momentary, as after the goal kick had been struck into the middle of the park a giant centre forward from the Eagles team stamps up to the half way circle showing off his special oversized silver boots, making the shiny ball appear like a tiny marble at his feet. He thumps the ball with his right foot and the ball swerves through the air aided by a strong wind and tipps into the corner of the Subbuteo netting just at the last moment. In despair the opposing team, now being harassed by humiliating chants from the crowd, make a last ditch effort, they kneel to pray upon the ground. They pray for the strength to overcome their Golliath of an opponent; may they overcome this great injustice and with god’s help be able to scale all injustices that appear before them…'May the ball god provide us with all and lead us not into relegation... hollowed be thy name... Amen'. A solemn mood now filled the arena. Quickly assessing the situation the Rangers goal keeper quickly ushers his players into a circular huddle to discuss tactics. On breaking they run to stand in their four - four - two formation, fealessly confronting the giant opposition gorilla/keeper now resting upon the crossbar of the opposing goal, smiling smugly with a two – nil lead, legs joggling in and out of the netting. The Rangers keeper lays the patched leather ball onto the centre spot for the kick off. The moment he laid it upon the white spot it's normally rotund shape immediately altered, changing to a plastic horizontal disk, flopping to the ground in front of him. Curious, the keeper attempted to lift at the edges, his gloved hands fumbling about on the grass. A cardboard cut-out photo of a ball? Puzzled, the keeper signalled the ball boy for a replacement, he mumbles to himself; “this always happens! These away games!” his voice lost amongst the roar of the crowd. Out popped a replacement ball from the side line, coming bouncing into the pitch and stopping near his feet, he went to touch it and again, it flattened itself, the same as the before, into a flat plastic disk. 'OK then' thought the keeper feeling the pressure from the crowd to get on with it, 'you want to play it that way!' He picked up the flat ball thrown in and pressed down heavily with all his weight upon the stiff shiny plastic, the ball flipped up high into the air and landed amongst the throng of players, each vying for a header, unable to grasp it as it disappeared under their swinging feet. Fights broke out amongst the players in frustration and a chaotic pile of players developed on the pitch. The referee blows his whistle and demands that each player be given a separate disk and that each team should have a different colour disk so as to tell them apart. The keeper of each team is to quickly train his side in the flipping technique. After a brief practise period the crowd started to cheer as the ball was flipped from one side of the pitch to the other with the players growing expertise, the giant monkey dancing about from player to player in frustration at not being able to grasp at the elusive ball. The players surrounded the giant ape like ants laughing at him as they bent down to press upon the flat ball, flipping it away from the giants reach. So frustrated was the ape that he began thumping the ground with both his feet and arms, and when he found that this altered the course of the ball, began to employ this as method of play, repeatedly stamping and shouting at the players in order to put them off, shaking the ground around the auditorium. The giants aggressive antics, whilst disorientating the players also sent the ape himself into a dizzy state and drunk with motion, swaying into one of the spot lights, accidentally knocking the stadium into complete darkness, only leaving the stars in the night sky to shine a faint glow over the rectangular playing field. In the ensuing blind confusion the ape sustained a giant calf injury that would deny him play for the next two matches and the Red Eagles side their main striker. Dragging his foot around in the dark he gamely attempted to play on, knocking over and trampling upon players in the process, stumbling around whilst swiping at the white shiny disk flipping through the night air. Disks were flying this way and that and the crowd became angered at the apparent shambolic performance of their favourite teams and stormed the pitch. Pandemonium broke loose and the match officials eventually decided to call the game off, the players in the end fighting to get through the players exit, chased by the limping ape roaring and beating his chest, the loud echo ricocheting through the tunnel and throughout the stadium. In his post match interview the giant said that the experience would be good for his international career and he had been playing well, he thought, up until the ball incident and this had, for him, seriously changed the flow of the game. The manager of the Eagles has apparently called for an independent inquiry while the FA are considering fining the ape for deliberately confusing players and a misappropriation of players facilities in the locker room after the match, under procedure 715 of the FA 'rules of conduct'. The national sports paper 'On the Ball' ran with the head line; 'Giant confused by tiddly winks in Eagles blackout'

Fire and Stones

2005-08-12T04:23:00.000+01:00

My plants are growing at speeds undreamt of until recently. The sun and the glare of street lamps helps to keep them fuelled up. The growth of those plants, I don't know their names, are the fastest thing happening around here. The shelves are standing still and the ants and beetles are able to hide behind and upon my collection of museum show cases. The rough carpet, hidden by as many rugs as I can afford, shows the accumulation of dust and hairs like a hair dressers salon. The heater hides behind the sofa and I know that it is not quite happy but anyway I have to sit on that side to get the view of the distant hills for eye training. On either side there are neighbours and I imagine they are absurdly cheerful maniacs with an obsession for opening and closing windows at various levels for fresh air and to fend off condensation. The families of the mentally disturbed swear and shout and tell their children to get out of their flat! A man talks loudly out of his window having come back from his regulation weekend night out. He swears and mumbles obscenities about tenants that he does not name and slams the window shut. The corridors are full of people peering out and checking if other people are around, then walking towards the stairs quietly so as not to make a noise, running back up at the slightest pin drop. The cars on the fore court are guarded by the short tempered ground floor people who are able to run out at a moments notice to fend potential young ball players away, keeping there vigil, eyes darting through the gaps in the blinds.

Children play and are turned away. They pretend to swim on the uncut lawn, ruining their new clothes. They kick walls in frustration only to be smacked across the legs and led home. Monday morning crows line up on the grass like policemen with black rain coats searching for today’s dead bodies, spading the soil with their pointed beaks.

Adrian's Car

2005-08-09T00:19:00.000+01:00

Adrian jumped into the car and threw his work bag onto the passenger seat. Thank god he was back once again in his faithful car with its familiar clunk of the door shutting tight and nice ergonomic controls ready at hand. Each of Adrian’s movements of a leg or an arm would nudge up against some familiar control button. The steering wheel or foot lever would give him an instant feeling of support and a kind of benevolence from a car that had at first seemed alien and mechanical for he had never much liked power tools or fiddled much with Mechano kits, it had never been his area of fascination.

Adrian had owned the vehicle now for over five years and his body had an imprint of itself on the foam cushioned driver seat. The brake pads showed the faded tread warn down by the constant prodding of his size eleven shoes. There were subtle indentations on the steering wheel showing a history of near accidents and scrapes with some idiot or other along the road, signs of his physical integration with the apparatus, of time inside a car travelling from one point to another, in between places, a space that he alone owned. He was protected from the rough gritty road by the thick impact resistant layers of metal and hardened glass. He’d seen those crash tests on the television where the front panel crushed into the dummy from different angles, the metal framework folding inwards as if welded by a nuclear blast, the crowd whistling with delight. It gave the tough car surface the impression of being vulnerable, as if it too was subject to forces like the test drivers that dismantled and fixed them. Adrian had often fantasised about pressing his face down on an inflated airbag in the event of a crash. If an unexpected pedestrian were to fling their soft fleshy body against the wind shield, causing him to flatten the brakes, the large blow up air bag would explode on the dash board, a sign that the car was taking control of the situation, had seen the danger and was reacting. His face flying into it and then from sudden panic would come relaxation, the car accompanying with some calming music, to sooth him down.

The release of stress when entering the car after a nullifying days work had become so great that on odd occasions he had found himself turning into his garden drive without any recollection of the journey that had gone before him, such was the anaesthetic brought about by his sense of freedom and ease of movement inside the car. Having achieved his destination and heaved himself out of the car, once again the gravity pressed upon him and the transfer from car door to house was like a short lunar rescue mission floating from one pod to another, with him impatiently fumbling with the keys to permit entrance into the temperature controlled isolation tank that he called his home, shoe-ankle hooking the wooded rim of the front door, hands digging keys out of his front pocket and shouldering his way through into the house as he never would have dared when entering the college. Once inside, having sealed the door to the wind, he would usually fall down flat on the sofa and try to start a dream the would block out any work related thoughts from entering his mind, to fend off a headache.

Had he remembered the M3 and A287 motorways or had he gotten so numbingly used to the same old roads that his body no longer sought to ask his mind about turnings or junction stops, thoughtlessly following a narrow pre-programmed route etched onto his skull by the constant re-treading of the same area.
He was surprised to find that his anxieties about himself and his own precarious existence, carried over now to the road vehicle that he had parked now outside under the trees; running about, scaring off the wood pigeons that took pot shots at the black shiny paintwork. In the warmth of his central heating he would always remain aware, at some level of consciousness, of the Volkswagen standing out there in the rain, wind and hail. The horizontal line of the lower rim nearest the ground, he thought, was slightly slanted towards the front wheel. Sometimes he saw it and it bothered him and at other times he attempted to deny these thoughts and tell himself that it was a sportier look, but he didn't want a sportier look? Lying down on the tarmac of the car park every angle of the car seemed off kilter, he was sure the engine sounded sound wrong as well, peering down the exhaust for any obstruction. Could the previous owner have been too hard on the brakes perhaps or maybe it was the result of an accident, a head on collision expertly covered up by the garage that sold it too him resulting in a reduced font suspension? To Adrian there was a mystery to the past ownership history. On the papers certain dates were blurred and this made him question whether the car had had a disreputable past life with the previous owners; could its identity be marred by a long and sordid history? Could Adrian ever find satisfying answers: he thought probably not? "The car is OK, it is fine. I no longer need to worry about the thing, not at all."

The cars wheels were very large for the car, fixed on supposedly when manufactured at the garage. Were they just another attempt by the garage to lift the car further from the ground? Somebody had mentioned this when he had a puncture once and had sent it into local garage “You’ve got big wheels!” which frightened Adrian into thinking that he had bought a defective cartoon like car and he started to imagine that the mechanics were in fact sniggering inside the garage at his obvious naivety and incompetence at falling for an obvious sales mans trick. Maybe he driving around a trick car?

Every time he went to work and back he seemed to get more used to the comforts of the cars interior, the soft architecture moulding itself around him, the umbilical of the gear lever and the sensitive foot peddles connecting him to a smooth roaring engine. Adrian did feel uneasy about this because the freedoms it offered were ones that he found himself reluctant to free himself from. All it had started with was the simple need to cover the distance from home to work and had now extended to his own personal need for a cradle of support that the cold, unfeeling, mechanical device waiting for him outside, unaffected by wind, rain or cold, now seemed to provide. He would walk out there in all weathers in order to maintain it, checking again upon the dip of the front towards the wheels, always seeing if it was any worse now that before. Maybe it was his own fualt, it was his own braking that was doing it? Had he shut the windows properly? How could the car resist such downpours of rain without leakage somewhere? Did temperature changes really not affect it? He couldn't help feeling that the caar was vulnerable in some way, as he bent down on his knees to inspect its dirty underbelly, the fog of rain protecting him from the twitching curtains inside houses across the road.

Now that the car had become a near virtual extension of Adrian’s own body it gave him an extra layer of protection to the outside world, rushing past him at sixty miles an hour. No longer had he to think about navigating a tricky corner or stopping at the red lights as these things just happened intuitively and effortlessly while he wondered at the magnificent sunset on the horizon or in fascination at free ranging pigs snuffling in the grass.

His driving instructor would have been proud of him. Using the mirrors as just extensions of his eyes, giving him extra senses and once the doors were closed the sleek bodywork would mould itself around him giving him extended abilities. He became ten feet long and five feet wide with a travelling speed on average of eighty miles per hour, a monster gliding through the toboggan run of valley roads, working the gliding motion of his car through the minefield of bumps and pot holes along the winding route.

He had found that using the car now instead of the pedal bike that he used to use, although now he got to work a lot quicker and in far more comfort, he had begun to gain some weight, more weight in fact than he had ever put on in his life so far. Nothing too dangerous but he had increasingly gained weight over the past months and getting out of the car and in again was become a strain on his legs. The very point where he stepped in or out he had to rely on the one leg to lever himself up, not helped by the fact that, being 6 ft. 5 inches tall the seat needed to be set at its lowest point and even then he had to duck his head under the top of the windscreen and peer through the side window to look up at traffic lights and high buildings. Sitting in the car he was almost at ground level and heaving himself up from a resting position after a long journey put enormous strain on his knees, especially when he had to put one leg out first onto the gravel, taking his whole weight on it. He now felt a constant ache in the joint of this knee cap and was meaning to drive into the local health centre as soon as he had time for a check up.

Maybe he wasn’t meant to drive a car, his body just wasn't made for it. He did not fit into the regular size of person that all cars were modelled upon. Like shoes, shirts and trousers he would have to look around for a special garage with customised cars for tall people.

Often he marvelled at having a car at all? Suddenly he was able to stroll down luxuriously through the wide lanes, passing the unfortunate ones on the narrow side paths. He now parked in special zones, using all the acres of conveniences that were laid on especially for vehicle owners. Looking at his life as a whole it might seem as though he had advanced from simple walking to biking, then to car driving; what evolutionary state of living had he arrived at? Being able to jump into his luxury toy and drive around in it all day. Perhaps cars, lorries, jeeps, caravans, etc. were supposed to take away the tinge of drudgery from work life, to lead people into a false sense of control and prosperity. Perhaps this was the 'progress' that people spoke of.

Got a job? Then you can afford to buy a car to roll around in all day, why walk? Only a quarter of your wages is going to go on its upkeep and fuel consumption. Get into that car that extends your presence on earth by at least five feet by eight feet. You need no longer trespass upon the roadways of the privileged class, wander around disorientated in petrol stations, ride your cycle dangerously down highways, peer vacantly down from flyovers at miles of dotted concrete. You can belong to the exciting driving class that zooms past. You are now allowed to weave your way between the poles and find you way around the maze on your super charged four-wheeler; only of course you have to pay a road charge first and take part in the depletion of the earths natural recourses, contribute to pollution that causes cancer at increasing rates, its a lot of responsibility. Once out there though in the sea of concrete where there was no turning back, just a lot of strange people in cars of their own, knowing their way around and beeping you if you ride over a line or take too long at a junction.

He had remembered his mother and father and what they did inside cars but neither of them were very good, sidling up embankments and regularly scraping parked cars with abandon. He watched other drivers punch the air or turn to talk to their passengers, pointing at him in the dark shadows and reflections of their windows, imagining them swearing, waiting anxiously for him to get out of the way or speed up. He imagined the terrible deadlines and emergencies that troubled these fraught individuals as they reflected in his rear view mirror.

As often happens a friend or relative would need a lift and he would let his door open and watch to see if they slammed it or not. To Adrian, if they slammed or did not slam, this was the question. If they slammed they appeared no to have the proper respect that using somebody elses car demanded. Adrian would have to drive with his eyes strained to the back seat to see if they were buggering up the automatic windows or scuffing the carpet with their dirty feet. He smiled when a pleasant passenger clicked the rear locks into place with gentle respect, his anxiety relieved. If he found that he had a hostile crowd in the back there, slamming the back doors constantly, Adrian would have to twist his body away from his control position and give them firm guidance in a kind of laughing, jocular, it doesn’t really matter, kind of way, but he wouldn’t mind if they didn’t, type of thing.

Adrian did not have a house that he actually owned himself but rented one like everybody else he knew. Adrian had had little experience personally of the effects of serious ownership. He had always rented, never having enough money in the past to afford anything big. And the fear of being tied down was a menace that followed him around everywhere. Maybe now was the time, he thought, to settle. A bit more money now than he was used to. Maybe fate was imploring him to buy, to step onto the consumerist conveyer belt.

Him, the first time buyer, at Thirty three years of age - shock horror, “You mean you’ve never driven before?.” A heresy some would say. It was almost like Adrian was not a complete person without this signpost of maturity, without a car! "Surely he can’t be in control of his life! How does he get about? On two legs, what century is he from, surely this is the convenience age, isn't it?" The life saving kit of House, Wife, Kids and car are there to stop people being victimised by the shocked hand to mouth people who are always around every corner. Those closest to home stand first in line of course; Mothers, fathers, brothers, uncles, and all the rest; Adrian could visualise them all lining up with sarcastic swipes at hand. Adrian had just bought a car simply to get to work as his house was quite a distance away from college. He was able to rent at quite a good rate as it turned out which more than made up for the cost of petrol.

Adrian turned the key and the automatic ignition kicked in. Automation, car, it was like driving a dodgem. Foot down and off you go. All you needed was a long pole sticking out of the back with a flag on the end. Adrian could even move it when his feet were off the pedals.
He was disappointed that even with all these new fangled novelties included in car riding, that the fun was always weighed up against certain horrors on the road from which he could not avert his eyes. Deer, countless rabbits and badgers crushed onto the side of the road. Sometimes they hung around in the middle and Adrian had to swerve to avoid bumping his vulnerable front suspension over them. It was like the animals had been travelling at sixty miles an hour and had skidded suddenly, taking off half of their underside, squashing the intestines into a raw flat burger across the tarmac. A Badger was still there on the return journey, staring into the road with its red wine soaked fur sunken into the mud.

It was almost too large a thing for him to handle, the new world was too complex. He was used to a confined set of familiar parameters where his life ticked along without any intrusions.

Grey Mountain Train

2005-07-27T18:27:00.000+01:00

My eyes move from my screen and crease up at the rectangular frame of light that the sun has projected on the window in front of me. The flickering rays test my aching eyes and make me raise a protective hand to my forehead. A burst of cold air from the door reminds me of an approaching headache, the inside my head now starts congesting and fills my skull with the usual heavy concrete, its rough dry surface scraping against the inside of my cranium, my vessels pulsating, being blocked of any exit from the brain. I already feel what I imagine to be a green yucky substance assembling inside my upper nose, pressuring my blood vessels and causing the face muscles to stretch out, widening the mouth and slitting the eyes. Could it be the glare of the computer, some fresh air perhaps might help?

I stand gazing at the path beginning at my feet and swerving out and around the undulations, disappearing amongst the waves of grass, the surface puckered with a thousand speckled dots. I walk along and as I do so my shoes tap on the tough tar granules steam flattened to a smooth mush carefully cut like dark grey marzipan, loosing its fine edge here and there amongst the thousands of sprouting grass blades which carpet the surrounding hills in a duotone of viridian and lime.

The way seems all clear but then what do I find along this path but ‘muddy’, ‘muddy’, and ‘muddy’ like I really want to bump into them again, how irritating! I am swerving off to the left to avoid them, they mustn’t come in the opposite direction; this path was only made for me! I think of going off the path but no, I keep on going as they have now meandered off to the left for some reason, to the dim light over on the other side of the hill, their silluetes disappearing over the curves.

I am now travelling in open country. I cantor to the midway point but then two cars suddenly pull up in the middle distance, big black saloons with their hoods and bonnets shining brightly in the sun, wheels bumping on the uneven grass, turning to swerve down towards the lake, masked by a stream of pettles and dots dusting the air behind. Entering a lake they now are like beavers with their silky smooth skin making the sparkle of waves in the transparent water, I spot fish darting away below. I shrug this image from my mind and skip on. Mirage, mirage, a mirage, I tell myself.

The grey mass of gravel heaped in the middle distance turns out to be a mountain after closer inspection. I am looking forward to sampling the cool air from the arched tunnel burrowed into its side. I imagine a train could run out of it and knock me over, its chug and rattle thundering out from the core. Wheels would spin, their controlling arms moving in short spasms, causing a spurt of red and yellow sparks that dance along the rusted track. The chimney snorts dirty pixels that develop into smoke rings in the air. Short puffs from the engine spray droplets of oil on the grass, powering the heavy cargo into a backwards motion. In this way the train curiously seemed to be being restricted by the mountain, a mysterious green glow now tinting its grainy (model railway) surface.

I imagine the mountain shooting out and retracting its mechanical tongue, whipping the ground, with the resulting dust hitting me with a force that nearly knocks me over, blasting my front side with a layer grey toned granules. I imagine myself flummoxed like a cartoon character waiting for the axe to fall down and split my body in two.

Recovering almost instantly I rush through the long grass towards the tracks that must now be hot from so much steam. I observe streams of oil and guck in orange streaks along its surface, and planks of wood splintered where nailed into. The bars stamp into the long grass at regular intervals, snaking over the shallow hill gradients, eventually dissolving into the split colours of navy blue and grainy yellow that make up the horizon. Blinking, my eyes strain to cut through the floating animation of dust still left from the actions of the train and I peer at the compressed jpg of oddly aligned colours in the distance; the upper horizon is a central gradient of lemon yellow with the occasional bright white dots flickering together, aligning against sea green and then bleeding heavily downwards on the cold blue. There then comes a definite line of earth wire brown and the viridian green grass flowing in perspective, textured with dirty washes of brush in broad zigzagging strokes, blending finally in a crumpled mass at the rich stalks near my feet and then onwards, jumping out in an animated dance in between the regular stamps of the railway tracking.

I stumble, hampered by the long grass, slashing at it with my legs, making deep troughs that parallel the lines of track running straight beside me. I glance at the ladybirds and butterflies as they dart from the tops of tall strands of grass, like dinky plastic toys their bright surfaces shine and glitter, clicking and whizzing through the air about me as I plunge on, sweating diamonds in the mid-day heat.

Angular Shapes

2005-07-07T18:44:00.000+01:00

The nosy inquisitor moves to the end of a long room. The smoky darkness hides two angular shapes. The conversation has gone past the cumbersome intros and returns and is now moving on to a more direct level. Just at the right time, at the most profitable moment, when it is most expressive and in sync with their simple narrative, they move into position A, moving about carefully to expose their limb connections, set at precise degree angles on the cushioned props. The body’s journey through the dream of presentation, the need for satisfaction and press button accuracy, they move from step to step in synchronisation and without mishap, each landing at the correct place and assuming the corresponding angular pattern of the other. Moving and changing position with self conscious attention to detail. An uncontrolled glance occasionally escaping the theatrical faces, grimaced into expressive contortions, those accidental moments like sparks flying from the scraping metal. Soft rubbery skin makes the curve of attention; a hard cardboard scapula is focused on when crushing against a cushioned hip joint extension. A set movement is enacted with repetitive ease in the spotlight glare. The music drowns out their theatrical miming. I click the cursor over the corner cross and it disappears into the night.

Stat-man: Ritual Meeting

2005-06-28T21:06:00.000+01:00

He stooped awkwardly to place his load upon the platform, opening the lid of the tin box and lifting with both hands what seemed like a large scroll, with lines of text written along it. He slowly unrolled it and lingered there for a short while in front of the now silent crowd, his face concentrating downwards, indulging in the script. Perhaps a last check for errors was also part of the procedure? The crowd waited patiently until the giant placed the finished scroll upon the slanted pulpit-like top of the plinth, manoeuvring the stone edifice to face the audience, this last gesture causing a thunderous roar from the crowd, the stone slabs of the square beginning to quake beneath hundreds of stamping feet.

Just beginning to be satisfied with work done, he unexpectedly slapped a hand to his forehead, signalling a false start to the crowd, rushing to the plinth, sliding a pen from behind his ear as he did so and began to hastily correct a section of the text. He eyed the script closely, head travelling from side to side. The giant worked furiously making final edits, aware of the impatient grumbles from the crowd at his rear. Finally he stepped back a few paces to kneel before his finished work, the crowd making fanatical clicking sounds that echoed throughout the square.
The giant then stooped his creaking frame, having to strain all his various joints in order to pick up his baggage and then moved stiffly towards the door, banging his fist upon it whilst clamping his load awkwardly between right hand and chin. A visible gap appeared and the grinding metal door, flashing sparks upon the cobbled stone, at last created enough space for the giant man to pass through.

The towering figure of the giant had disappeared inside, the doors having swung back together, banging closed with a dull thud. The stage was now bare except for the plinth with the scroll displayed there for all to see. The crowd appeared to be steadying their natural impulse to rush towards it, waiting for a sign, a signal or something to mark the next course of action.

The tension in the square mounted again when the church bells sounded the half hour mark, a signal for the first line of figures to take their places upon the steps.

Once inside the doors Darrus collapsed to the ground, his legs falling in a disjointed heap beside him, boots like boulders tumbling across the hallway.
“These bloody stilts are killing me. I’ll have to remind myself to make a new, more comfortable pair.”
After he pulled off the last buckle, he let out a deep sigh of relief and pushed the wooden contraption away, resting his aching back against the wall. “Never again, never again, this is the last time. I just hope that this one goes smoothly than before.”

Even though he was tired and really felt like collapsing upon in his bed up stairs, Darrus kept himself awake with the hope that some person in the crowd outside would at last begin to read his work, having spent so much of his time on it. He would, of course, inevitably fall prey to the temptation of visiting the control room yet again; he had converted it himself from the downstairs toilet, and it did the job well enough, receiving information from a customised treadmill placed just before of the plinth. Readers had to step onto it in order to read the material and then he would reel in information from the dials, watching the red pins nervously flick back and forth inside their dusty windows. He had improvised a wooden board was over the bath, on top of which was piled several graph machines of different sizes, recording the incoming data, their metal encasements rattling each time a new visitor stepped onto the treadmill. Darrus had removed these outdated machines in secret from the local hospital, his previous workplace, having broken in there in the middle of the night, using his spare keys to open the store room in the Electro Cardiac department where there was easy access to the heart monitoring machines and defibrillators. He had linked all the gadgets up with the use of the old wiring and broken fixtures he’d found lying around on the factory floor.

Sitting himself on the toilet seat he busied himself by flicking switches, eyes fixed into the home made periscope that slid down from the ceiling, where upon it tunnelled through the brickwork and emerged along the front side of the chimney, its swivelling lenses spying the visitors, scanning names of figures as they moved up and down the front steps.

Engrossed as he was in drawing up pen portraits of the most regular customers Darrus wouldn't have heard the handle of the door unfastening and the sharp heels of his mother stepping up behind him, only noticing when he felt a hand grabbing hold of his shoulder bone.

“Thought you’d be in here again” she said with her high pitched voice blaring into his ear, making his body jump up, eyes popping out of the service goggles, the periscope tentacle quickly zipping its segments back into the ceiling.

"Are you crazy woman, you can’t just drop in like that unannounced, in the middle of everything, can't you see I’m concentrating. I was just getting into it.”

"If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, don’t bring strangers back to this house. If you don’t get them to go away I’m going to phone the police. The dogs gone missing as well, he hasn’t eaten any of his food”

“You know all about this though mother, as I’ve explained before, these are my friends and they read my writing and stuff, It’s OK.”

“What writing, I never see any writing, all I see is you lazing around, fiddling with these knobs. I’m waiting for you to get a proper job, then we can have a bit of space round here."

“Well, you said I could use the bathroom.”

“Only temporary, only temporarily I said. I thought it best to keep you occupied with something, but this is going to far.”

His mother stood there, hands on hips, all her weight leaning over and pecking her finger down at Darrus’s dwindling form, eyes frowning, her white lips pushed out to a point, scrunching her hook nose, staring at Darrus in the face ”Right, in two minutes and I want you washing those dishes in the kitchen, is that clear.”

“Oh, mum.”

“Don’t Oh Mum me; get into the back there before I skin you. Look at the state of you”

“I’ll just have to get some new legs, those old ones are killing me.”

“Don't think you can impress me with your costumes. Remember, I know you like the back of my hand Darrus Floyd Wheelan. You don’t fool me? You and your writing, you're going to start pulling your weight around here right now!”

“But mother, I need to check the plinth, to see if they’re reading it."

“Get in there and do those dishes and I hope your going to put those things back where you found them?"

"Well, they're er… very handy you see"

"Don’t blame me if you get caught, I know nothing.

Now come on…” She stood back pointing the way for him to the kitchen."

"Oh, can’t I do it later? You know, they’re all out there and I’m missing vital statistics, for god sakes!”

“Don’t swear at me.” She said pointing him in the chest area. “Look, you can play on it later for a bit, when you’ve done your dishes.”

”Oh, I wish you would take this thing a bit more seriously, do you know how rare it is to get this many visitors at once?”

”I’ve read your writing and and I don’t know why you bother.”

”Mother!”

”I’ve got a good mind to go and tell that crowd to go away. My roses are getting ruined with all their trampling feet”

“Don’t worry, I’ll clear it all up when they’ve gone.”

“What - you’re going to grow my prize specimens back are you Daz”

“Mum.”

"Right, come on, out!”

“Oh…if I …I suppose I have to.”

Darrus trundled his aching body reluctantly out from his monitoring studio, hobbling along the corridor and into the kitchen, grabbing a towel to start on the large pile of dirty dishes standing there.

“Here, put this on” She handed him an apron.

Putting the noose over his head, more submissive now that he was inside his mother’s arena, he picked up the first dish in the pile. He stopped suddenly, his ears pricking up and twitching at the sounds in the hallway. He thought he had heard the faint sound of heels tapping up the iron staircase, heading up to the first floor window.

“Mother… Mother, is that you?”

“Just doing what I should have done a long time ago Daz my boy.”

“What, what are you doing Mum?”

“Never you mind, this lot are going to have a piece of my mind”

Darrus 's dropped a dish to the floor, shattering fragments across the stone slabs. Ignoring the mess, he walked hurriedly to the staircase shouting up. “Mum this isn’t the right time, Mum, Mum!”

His mother had scaled the staircase and was inspecting the Square outside through the landing window, rubbing the dust off with her apron, peering out, face pressed against the glass, eyes squinting into the light. “They all look very suspicious to me, and what’s happened with all their faces?”

"They’re just people Mum, just people I’ve contacted through the network. I need an audience, you know, for my work. Mum, close the window; it’s got nothing to do with you."

"We’ll see about that, young man. I notice they’ve ruined my magnolias in the front patch! I’m going to go out there and tell that crowd off. So this is the company you keep.”

“They’re intelligent thoughtful individuals Mum. You can’t just go and barge in, it’s a sensitive situation, and anyway I’m not going to let you.”

”Thoughtful, thoughtful, since when are they thinking about me and my sinus problems, it’s giving me a headache all that humming and buzzing all over the place. Can’t they keep it down a bit?”

”There’s nothing I can do. Once you start these things you’ve got to go with the flow.”

“Well I’ve had enough. I don’t like this going with the flow business, you can’t trust anybody in this world.” She said pulling the window frames out."

“No. Mother no!”

“It's got to happen some time.”

Darrus grabbed hold of his mother and tried to drag her back, pulling at her arms, but she forced him back.

“Get away, get away, are you mad” She said, her sharp tone rising to a hoarse screech. “You’re using my connection and I want to use it too. Let’s have a look at your favourites then. Which one's Rubenavista?"

"No, there’s not one of them there, nothing there. Please mother, Come away from the window, come on, they’ll see you."

“Don’t you come way for the window me. Get down there, go on.” With that Darrus’s mother took a swing at him with her hand bag. Darrus, slow to duck, met with the full force of the fat and bloated bag, full of miscellaneous objects, his head hitting the wall with an audible thud, body stumbling along the corner panelling, holding his head in pain.

“There, that’ll teach you to talk to your mother like that, out of my way. I’m going to give this lot a piece of my mind.” His mother pulled the window further out until she made sure that she was in full view of the crowd, her bright yellow rubber gloves clasping the outside edges of the frame. Sections of the crowd were in the middle of formal proceedings; Rubenavista was just about to step onto the treadmill.

“Now listen you lot…”she shouted, her shrill voice echoing around the open space. Darrus managed to stop her momentarily by grabbing hold of one of her thick legs on the ground and pulling with all his strength, slowly heaving it backwards.

“Mum, you’re ruining everything! It’s taken me ages to get this far. Mum, Mum, come away”

He struggled to hold his her back, hands grabbing at the spotted red and yellow piny, but there was no stopping his mother in her present mood.

“Now listen…he hasn’t got time for all this writing business, he’s got lots of tidying up to do in his room, also there’s the dishes, which he’s just about to do, isn’t that right Darrus?”

“They don’t know my real name, say it’s not my real name!” said Darrus, crouching in the corner.

"Friends who don’t know your name, well I never…you down there, stop drawing graffiti on that wall, this is a protected building.”

"A comment? Hey Mum, out of the way."

“get off me Darrus…this is all for your own good.” She shouted back inside towards her legs where Darrus was pulling and scrabbling about on the floor in desperation. His mother had a tight grip on the window frame though and the more he struggled the more stubborn she was to hold on to the ledge, her squawking voice turning into a high pitched scream. Darrus’s resistance was weakening.

“Don’t you listen to him; he’s a phoney and a crook. You’re all wasting your time; go on be off with you. And mind those roses on your way out; you’ve already knocked over my magnolias. Go on beat it the lot of you!”

“Don’t listen, she doesn’t mean it!”

The commotion by the window was causing a stir in the crowd; Rubavinusta and Deadcat could be seen hesitating near the foot of the plinth.

“Mum!”

“Go to bed, your grounded now…the way you've treated your own mother, it’s so disrespectful”

“Please Mum, Get away from the window; they don’t know about, you know, family and everything.”

"What, are you ashamed of your own mother? After all those years slaving away for your education, how dare you! And look what you’ve got to show for it.”

She turned again towards the crowd; “you enter my font garden without asking with all your humming and clicking business, I’m telling you now go away or I’ll call the police…. Darrus… dishes. Now!.”

She swung her handbag around and landed it firmly on Darrus’s left cheek. “Get back and do some housework like I told you…get down stairs, go on."

“They think that this is my site.” he mumbled sheepishly.

"Well it’s not; it’s mine - and you young man, you need to learn some manners."

While Darrus was nursing his wounds his mother leaned out once more towards the crowd; ”See what you’ve done, it’s all your fault, he never used to be like this, he used to be a good boy!”

Darrus ducked from another swing of his Mother’s arm. She shouted down at him:
“This is my house, and I don’t want you taking it over with all this shenanigans, It was alright as a hobby but now it’s just gone too far. I want you to stop hanging round with those strange looking people. Get yourself some proper friends.”

The sound of the thick leather bag hitting Darrus on all parts of his body grew louder and more insistent and Darrus’s retorts could be heard travelling across the corridor and down the spiral staircase towards the kitchen.

Bash Bang…beep… Bash Bang-beep!… ….bang-beep!… ...bang-beep!... …bang-beep! ...ba-beep! Ba-eep!...Beeee…p!... The alarm system that Darrus had set up to alert him when somebody enters hammered away on his desktop. He slowly turned his heavy head over on the stylus pad, shielding his eyes from the red alert sign flashing up on the screen. He lifted one of his left digits and let it flop down over the return button on the keyboard. The customised handbag on the inside of the screen stopped it’s banging, the exaggerated fastening button giving the option of 'snooze' or 'get up'. It seemed funny when he had downloaded it. Darus was barely awake and hardly able to open his eyes to function properly. He half consciously clicked through the windows to the ‘recently visited’ section. He looked towards the pixelated square and at the latest addition at the top of the descending list of data. What he saw enabled his mind to tick off a box etched deep on the inside of his brain. “Right Deadcat, Deadcat, right that’s how many..mmmn?
His head slumped back again onto the computer tablet, hand raking over the keyboard to land on the arm of his chair. His subconscious eye surveyed the remaining boxes in his head, wondering what new data would flow next through the wires.

Stat-man: Darrus & Owen

2005-06-15T20:25:00.000+01:00

- Have you been looking at my blog?

- What do you mean – I haven’t been there for ages.

- I ask you again - have you been looking at my blog?

- What’re you asking for?

- Just asking, that’s all.

- Er, no, I have not been looking at it. Why?

- Are you sure you haven’t?

- Hey, what’s going on with you? Why are you asking me this?

- I have certain information that tells me otherwise, that’s all. Let’s say I know a thing or two about your recent travels, past experiences, the paths you have trodden…

- Come on Darrus, what are you playing at? What’s going on?

- …Your foibles, your changes of mind, your secret decisions to take that route not this route, appearing to be happily searching and playing around with the World Wide Web, tapping through with ignorant pleasure, taking no heed of the spy software that could lurk dangerously in the shadows.

- Are you trying, in your customarily bizarre way, to tell me that you’ve found some software and have enlisted yourself as some sort of sinister spy on the web?

- Ur, I wouldn’t put it quite like that.

- Oh yes, what is it some sort of ripped off freeware rubbish?

- Oh I think you are underestimating the power of this new technology Owen, you would be quite impressed.

- Impressed by what? What has it found out then, eh?

- Oh, I don’t know. One or two little morsels of info, that’s all.

- What have you found out? What incriminating evidence has your beady little machine sought out? Come on!

- No need to seek it out Owen, no, it is all there. Anybody that goes through my site leaves their trail behind them, their country of origin, their route to the site, the address; I think I could make a pretty good picture of my inhabitants. Interesting cultural types you know, artistic, well read, that sort of person.

- From what little titbits of information did you get that idea? Are you sure you’re not exaggerating the importance of these statistics Darrus?

- Hey, it’s got graphs and everything, pie charts, plenty of comparative data. I’m not sure how it gathers all this info but it’s a real eye opener, I can tell you. People are coming in from all over the world.

- What do’ you mean eye opener? What can this information really tell you other than the fact that you are an obsessively analytical nut, fantasising about a bunch of abstract data floating about on the internet? I bet there’s nothing concrete?

- So you’re alternating between Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers now then?

- Hey, how did it get that?

- It’s got it here. You come in with the name Monkey, sometimes Iguana, and here I’ve got you as Golden Boy for some reason, I don’t know.

- What! What a stupid…what, are you sure? That’s weird; I really do need to sort out my browser.

- That’s just a small section of what I have here.

- So there’s more stuff about me then is there?

- Some.

- You’re having me on, I don’t believe it. Ur…Wh..What can that thing do, exactly? What information than can it really find out?

- I don’t know all about it yet. There’s all these buttons and I’m not sure what they do.

- So what does it say on top of them then?

- Ur…job history, financial situation, family tree, er…home statistics, stuff like that.

- Home statistics? You mean they can track you to your home, where you live!? I can’t believe that all this information is legit, it just can’t be. There are privacy laws, public rights, things like that. You can’t get away with it.

- I looked into one of them before but it all looked a bit complicated, I’ll leave that until later. I’m not really interested in your personal details anyway.

- Yes but this thing you’ve got is freeware, any bugger can get hold of it. They’ll be tracking me and my trail of information must have spread across continents, be lodged in search engines across the world. My logins and passwords will be used to open gateways and pass through firewalls everywhere. People in poor countries will be desperately trying to work out my online banking login codes. My computer and electrical equipment at home will be bugged by advertising companies, endless pop up windows and interference on my TV, break ins, murders, child abduction…

- Hey, look who’s exaggerating now...hang on a minute; did you enter my site for fifty one seconds just recently?

- Why?

- Yep, you’ve been looking in my comments, what could that be for? It all fits into place now? All marked on my graph on the wall - that’s about the average, fifteen minutes twenty three seconds.

- On the wall? Are you going nuts. You’re taking this stats business a touch towards the extreme aren’t you?

- It’s a serious activity. There are people there and they are contacting my site on a pretty regular basis. This is a cultural exchange going on here. Hang on, there’s another one, he or she has just entered my space for a total of 25 seconds! Where’s my pen? I can sense their ghostly presence floating about the computer. Somebody stayed from there yesterday for an hour, thirteen minutes and eighteen seconds at Five fifteen pm, on my blog? It’s funny you know when I’m looking at the stats I imagine the actual people moving their cursors around, gazing into the screen. It’s hard to say that they are looking at me but I can imagine them walking about and talking about my site, you know. He’s a bit shifty this guy.

- Who?

- Rubavenusta.

- Could be a nice girl or a single lady?

- No really - there is - there’s somebody. Hang on I’ll just…there they are again, the Risler Cooperative. There’s a ring of computers at that place I’m sure of it; Rubavenusta, Lutea, Kakome and Jawela. These people are talking and discussing my site, sitting next to each other, like in a row of computers I reckon? The thing is they never leave a comment and never travel away from the home page, it’s weird.

- I’d try and get some rest if I were you; it’s nearly two in the morning. When’s the last time you looked out of a window or stepped out of the front door?

- Oh, it’s OK. Anyway we’re in English time; Americans are five hours behind us. To them it’s nearly nine o’clock. Just in time to log on and search blogs. I gotta keep onto this thing; I need to follow the various patterns of behaviour. You should see this graph, everything’s happening so fast.

- You know you could be just tracking repetitive machines programmed to sift sites and throw them into directories. I’ve read about this sort of thing somewhere.

- No I think that these are genuine people I’m contacting out there. I just wish that I could find more information about them. Some further sign of their actual presence.

- There is a one in a million chance that a stray internet surfer will land in your area, you do realise that. I have this mental image of that Ruba bod. A kind of robotic number crunching machine digging trenches through the multi layers of internet resources, sucking the blogger sap that seeps from the fields of information. A kind of automated machine programmed to engage and replicate itself throughout the blogger systems.

- Hey you know, maybe it’s a person, with a name and everything.

- Called Rubavenusta?

- Well…er, maybe that’s just his password…or something.

- I doubt it.

- You’re so negative. I think that there’s a whole array of people out there, real people, with real bodies investigating and thinking about my work. The only thing is this software has trouble telling how long people stay in the site, reading stuff. Twenty seconds isn’t long enough. I got this Skype thing online that lets you actually talk to people free. I could speak to those people if I could find em.

- They might be trivialising it and calling it crap to their mates. They could be putting a block on your site coming into their browser. Hey, that’s an idea.

- They wouldn’t do that?

- Of course they wouldn’t, you know so much about them don’t you?

- Enough, you ought to have more belief in humankind you know Owen. There is such a thing as blogging etiquette you know.

-Who knows they could write one thing and say another, couldn’t they?

- There’s this person from Jackson City. At first I thought it was like a search engine or something y’know, automatically loading my page every week, but I am beginning to think that it’s actually a real person. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a regular reader?

- Probably programmed to have reader-like characteristics, it would make for a slightly more intelligent android for your collection.

- The ‘Deadcat’ person has popped his head up again. That’s three times this week. I’ve come to the conclusion that it really is a kind of search engine. I’ve Googled it and er, I’m pretty sure. Also he arrives at exactly 2.14.66 pm every day.

- Told you. Replicants the lot of them.

- Owen, you’ve been watching too many Sci-Fi movies.

- Ah, but they hold the real factual data Darrus.

- Wait, wait. Just a minute…no, it’s OK, it’s the same. God I thought I had another customer there for a second…

- …Darrus…Darrus, are you there!?

- Er…just been on a little exploration. Hang on a minute…Do you live in Cherry Blossom way, Athens, Georgia? I thought you lived in Chiddsworth, South Sussex?

- Well I find that it’s sometimes best to – what!?

- That explains it then. And you say you’re twenty five but you don’t sound twenty five on the phone. Owen, tell me now - are you really twenty five?

- I am fed up with this. Right, I can’t have conversations like this any more Darrus, this is crazy.

- What! Oh, no, this is interesting…

-What? What is? What are you doing? I don’t know why I’m even listening to this.
All I know is that little numbers continue clicking over in your head in direct unison with that stat counter that you play with, replicating spurious information like a virus, hovering over every conversation we have.
I really do think that you should give this thing a rest now; you’ve been on this thing for days now, non stop. Every conversation I have with you is now dominated with you rushing off to check your statistics; it’s like your life has been taken over by this thing. All your talk these days is related in some way to the figures that spurt from that bloody machine. You haven’t been out of the flat for weeks, you’re not eating properly and you’ve lost weight apparently! I’m scared that one day when I phone your voice will have dramatically changed pitch and your conversation will be limited to what Lutea is doing, whether ‘Deadcat’ has visited yet, how long did ‘Potbelliedpig’ spend on your site?

- Don’t be silly.

- Well, you know what I mean. I suppose you either become a hunter or one of the hunted.

- Or both.

- Yes, well, it seems like this is the world you step into when you go online.

- Yeah, I think I’m going to switch off now.

- What, go to bed?

- No, switch off the computer.

- Switch off?

- Yeah, I’ve had enough. I’m feeling a bit tired. I can feel a headache coming on. All my visitors have been in today anyway. I’ve marked them on the graph; from two thirty till five in the morning is the rush hour. Only ‘Noderick’ hasn’t come in today and I’ll find that out in the morning.

- Right, goodnight then. Remember my advice is to get off that thing; one day you’ll wake up and find yourself physically changed into a remote mechanical device, unable to un-flap your navigation tools and roll from the bed and down the landing platform towards your workstation. They’ll be tracking you from Mars.

- I can’t stop it now, I ‘m just getting into it. It’s kind of like fishing in the sea you know. You throw in your line and the bait floats out there on the surface bobbing over the waves that crash in towards the shore. All you can do is stand there imagining a million different varieties of life swimming about in the endless ocean depths. What chance is there that one will investigate the disguised morsel that you have dumped into their path? Will they or won’t they bite? What size and what kind of fish will they be? When will the orange float bob up on the surface as a Sea Bass clasps its jaws onto the dangling hook and how long will he stay for, before dangling and wriggling themselves free, disappearing back into the dense blue nothingness? That’s the attraction Owen, curiosity for the unknown. I just hope I get a better catch tomorrow.

- Er…Yeah, Um...see you then Darrus.

- See you, bye.

- Bye.

“Oh I’m going to shut down, I am going to shut down!”, Darrus said to himself as leant over th desk to search through the stat-counter windows. He was going to try and stop himself from repetitively clicking onto the stat software and put an end to his habit of endlessly staring at the graphs and pie charts, but kept putting it off as there was never a right moment. "Where have they all gone, oh, fifteen instead of fourteen? Right, projects, graph icon, Michigan, mmm…, a search engine! I really need something to do while I ‘m waiting for new stats to come in, lets have a look at the referring link, what, Brains, manure, goldfish? They typed that and my page popped up, fourth from top!? Oh god! Right that’s it, time for a break, have a cup of tea and put some toast in. Bye, bye, software, see you later."

Darrus reluctantly shifted from his swivel chair and crossed half of his body into the light of the hallway, stopping there and hesitating momentarily, turning to look back, leaning one arm against the door and directing his tired eyes at the deserted computer screen, its rays shaping the soft plastic folds of the keyboard and the smooth fractured shell of the mouse casing. A window with it’s own light source, not coming from the sun or reflecting from the buildings and clouds around the flat but from a different kind of world containing different forms of satellites, surveillance cameras and information systems. How would Rembrandt have painted this scene, thought Darrus, would the light emanating from a computer screen be the source which he would use to sculpt a self portrait, swirling his white paint around? The wires sidling down the wall behind him would be hinted at with a few quick brush strokes and then pushed back with dense layers of dark brown glaze. Rembrandt’s easel would partly mask the fur coat and the intricate folds of his clothes in the painting, the electric light from the screen casting down upon him, open windows exhibiting the data graphs and pie charts.

Darrus turned his blinking eyes towards the fluorescent glow of the kitchen, his fingers pressed a real button on the wall and clicked a real switch on the kettle, but it all seemed the same somehow. The same electricity flowed through every vain of the flat, and ran through each appliance arranged in the room.
In the study a collection of closely linked black casements contained the computer hardware, the disks purring and electricity humming underneath the Ikea desk, wired in together with everything else. The computer had gradually developed a presence in the flat beyond the sum of its parts; wires spreading out and traversing the corners of the room, their plugs like sucker pods bleeding into the architecture of the house. linking to unseen wires, like thick veins ran just below the surface of the walls from the main arteries, flowing into the street, streaming information out to form small trickles of data that in turn joined with the open sea of electrical information.
Part of the rear casing of the computer had been torn away revealing a mass of tightly nit wires tied like string into bundles, their ends flowing into small streams down towards the darkness where the motherboard lay quietly feeding, a foetus in it’s womb, linked to by a swirl of black cords feeding a grotesquely oversized, unblinking eye lying tilted up on the desk, beaming it’s incessant glow upon the surrounding forms, rays torching the dark sediment of hairs rising through the dense atmosphere.

“Right, Kettle on, toaster on to number five.” He stood around waiting for the appliances to heat up and for their self timing mechanisms to explode into action. It seemed a longer time than necessary to wait, usually taking about two minutes thirty seconds for the circuit switch to flick over, connecting the wires and making the button pop up. Darrus let out a deep sigh of impatience. "Well, I’ll have tea in a minute but first I’ll just check what’s going on while I’m waiting."

All of Darrus’ daily activity’s now were interspersed with trips to the stats site to ‘check’ on any visits. He was hanging on sluggishly to the familiar processes and habits, beating the same path to the stat-counter time after time. To take away the repetitive nature of it his statistical investigations developed further into more obscure territory.

The reality was that Darrus didn’t bother to turn up for work after the summer holidays, things had gone too far. He’d been going in late nearly everyday now anyway, and what with the threats from his line manager and not being able to concentrate he felt it was only a matter of time anyway. The college had sent an envelope to him but it stayed in the pile at the door. Darrus knew what was in it but didn’t want to face the facts. These weren’t the kind of facts he was interested in anymore.

"Mmm..check the stats, see what’s happened. I know it’s only five minutes, but what the hell. OK. Come on start up! This things bound to conk out soon, plastic nightmare."
Walking around and pacing up and down the hallway of the flat; "I’ve been to their sites, now what makes them pop in and say hello to mine? I suppose it’s nothing special. I’ll have to tidy it up, make it look a bit more presentable."

As less and less figures flashed up on the data window, Darrus’s graph changed gradually form a nice high mountain range to a single horizontal line crawling the bottom of the ocean. This lack of function within the process i.e; nobody visited the site, instead of dampening down Darrus’s enthusiasm only fuelled it towards new artificial heights. Darrus’s habits became more pronounced as a habit with no real meaning attached. Repetitively entering the site it seemed for no other reason but to satisfy his need for, at least the potential of, some traveller visiting his hidden space. What new methods to entice the hoards could he conjure up?

"Right ten minutes has gone now, must check the stats."
Darrus habitually now moved his curser towards that particular favourite stat counter button. Sometimes without even thinking he would find himself in the site, his browser having automatically entered his password and login. Deciding then to - what the hell, may as well, check the graphs and data lists, prowling down the lines of information.

Darrus was at the point where he was making up excuses in order to travel to visit his stat counter. Each time there was the insane thrill of not knowing whether a fragment from a star in the far off galaxy would fall and land in his ever widening catchment zone. More often though now it was just search engine fodder, the offshoots of searches for ‘moth repelling light bulbs’ or ‘British Albino Ladybirds’, and the search engines sending out bogus links to his site in order to bump up their customers statistics.

If there was no change in the hit counter then just as worthwhile would be the Country/state/town area where a pie chart dissected the percentage of Americans, Australians, Canadians, etc. that entered the site. The sense that there was a world of possibilities to be tapped into, to familiarise ones self with and believe that the work was for a reason, enabled him to search and communicate, even at this great distance, to the world, via these apparently logical abstractions. There were occasionally times when Darrus did began to realise the growing limitations of his software, how much he did and didn’t know about the visitors to his site, to a point where he realised that he knew nothing at all really. At these times his imagination normally went into auto pilot when it no longer mattered about the accuracy of the facts, all that mattered was their ability to justify his absence from a reality outside which was becoming increasingly more difficult to deal with. He thought up ever more extravagant excuses to wipe away the guilt he felt with spending so much time at the computer, neglecting himself to the point where he was no longer shaving or cleaning the flat. He had unhooked the phone and now connected with people only through a network wire via ‘Skype’ with headset and mike hovering by his mouth. He didn’t answer the door, the newspapers were piling up and he had not worked on his comic for months. The square flat computer screen began not just to take more importance in his life, but to completely dominate it. It was difficult to notice when the final switch happened from his previous life to one of subordination to the network administration tasks that now consumed his time. It had been a month since he had last phoned Owen, him having now become just another piece of data, in amongst the ever increasing list of statistics arriving onscreen inside his stat software window. All he knew was that Owen seemed to come in at exactly three fifty six, every two weeks, the software recording; ‘browser unknown’ and ‘no referring link’.

Stevenson

2005-05-27T23:49:00.000+01:00

Stevenson craned his head, neck and vertebrae, hexagonally to gaze at the pavement slabs in front of him. He tried to play imaginary hopscotch on the different sections, weaving about, jumping between one and another with the numbers popping up on the jagged squares and disappearing the moment he clapped and slapped his feet upon them. In this way he travelled around corners and up busy main streets filled with the hustle and bustle of noisy people milling about in front, with their voices swirling in the air and then fragmenting into the crowd behind. Taking his daily street exercises, moving his creaking leg and hip joints and bending his clicking back, aching from days of inactivity and indulgence after sitting upright on the backless chair in the flat, fearing loss of composure, having to square his eyes upon paper in the lamplight of the still night, in that silent but peaceful enclosure.

Once on the road it was a different matter. Those fragile days cooped up in the warm nest, listening to the grate of joints caused by the bending of limbs into a limited number of positions to navigate a short list of habitual spaces, had ended. He was now Stevenson outdoors, a different kind of animal altogether. Once a month the narrow public spaces of the small English town were briefly turned into a wide open adventure playground in which to flex his legs. A bright circus of activity and a fairground of surprises awaited him as he stepped from the door at 3 Walnut Place, to walk at his usual pace, into a fire cauldron of potential encounters.

He was a regular feature on the old flint stone road in town, legs motoring whilst arms stiff like toy soldiers at his sides. If observed from close quarters by local types he would be seen to be marking off posted lamps…one…two…three…four…with the left eye squinted, cocked up and swivelling inside its socket, the other being kept rigidly alert for cobbles and cracks while scanning for straying pedestrians accidentally venturing into his path. Walking the streets in tightrope lines and leaping towards one marker post, then towards the next.

Sometimes a casually wandering shopper who happened by chance, to glance, in a certain second, they reckoned, a strong and straight legged person swinging, a winging his way, with his legs as fast as a flicker and a flutter of the eyelids, wide open and aghast at the frowning, swerving hunch-backed figure flying past, "like a chariot" said Mrs Marriot from the shadowy interior of her fortune telling tent. "A perennial menace" said a stiff and strutting suited young man hurrying, he hoped, to meet Mrs. Ruttle for some tennis.

Marched with thunderous strides up bluebottle Street and swerved sharply at Cottage Road. Rushed through Blind Man's Alley only to stutter and skid against the rocks and boulders along the side path by the ladies green paint chipped frame, you could see she was out and the man with the blue and white umbrella was in – "Could this mean rain?" He stopped all of a sudden, staring blankly in front. A herd of people ignoring him and also the person to path-wide ratio, flaunting the hidden rules of ancient road law, set about to confuse Stevenson.

He had no option but to turn back and anxiously skip around the corner in search of a clearer track, one hidden from these rapscallions of the roadway. Galloping down to another end point and then peering around, searching to find which way was next, looking west, looking east, hoping not to find confusion along his path this time at least!

An excitement would boil up inside him and the urge was to stretch limbs and pulse blood and not look around and about, nor see who was ambling beside him. It was the result of a natural swelling of need he would think, crashing into labouring shopping haulers and hypnotised window gazers. Even the most avid bargain trackers would eventually fall away once they realised that Stevenson was hell bent on his own separate way.

Stevenson had walked these pavements many times before but each time it seemed they had changed. The slabs and cement lodged between them were aged and fragmented, chipped at the edges, worn by the stampeding rain and baked dry by the unfettered sun beaming down upon them. The general trampling of stiletto heals lodging themselves in the grooves, sliding and ploughing into the narrow troughs, gouging lines in the weathered asphalt. Sometimes you could believe the ground beneath was shifting slowly in indefinable movements. How could one tell sometimes, when racing forward, that the earth beneath him was not moving at least an inch? Did his rushing movement not have some physical impact upon the stones, not even if he leapt from one to the other? Maybe if he pushed hard on the stone behind the wheel would start rolling and he would be stuck at that point, rolling for ever?

It was while walking down the main street after doing several turns of the central square that he did suddenly stand to attention with his face frowned in worry. He did this in his customary manner not unlike a Mir Cat spotting a predator across deserted Quarry. Head held aloft from the steady stream of heads fielding an array of different hair-cuts bobbing in a tired march up the reclining road, nose pointing and eyes glaring, standing straight, one hand to spy into the distance and the other held strong to withhold the current. Across there in the distance a familiar bony and emasculated face was hinted at beneath a mop of reddish brown hair breezing around the attached scrawny shoulders. Three quick jabbing movements of Stevenson's head quickly scanned the nearby roadway for exits. Panic stricken, he was getting too close, he realised that it was too late; all alternative routes were blocked off! All he could do now is prepare for the inevitable, the meeting to strike. The fact that Stevenson had forgotten the persons name added to his discomposure as he moved now, with the crowd, drifting towards the fearful encounter, unable to hold back. His heart raced but he couldn't look away, "oh look there's some interesting oranges on that stall, those there!" Thought Stevenson.

He knew what was coming from experience, knew this person too well. He'd be standing there waiting to get going, and listening to Thing-a-a-me-jig's excited descriptions of his latest creative enterprise whilst all the time trying desperately to think his name, a simple language tool that must be the foundation stone upon which all conversations were built. First the name and then the rest followed naturally. If a person neglects a fellow's name then the structure flounders and wobbles and ends up flopping uselessly to the ground, splat! Bloody hell! Thought Stevenson.

"A name, a name?" he thought. "Rumpling…Dumpling…no! Bri…Brin…Brinner…um…no. Oh it's useless!" Like an unexpected guest he would pop up as if from nowhere amongst the crowd, hailing Stevenson over. He did not say Stevenson's name and Stevenson did not say his because they had both forgotten. The two beings staring vacantly at each other and trotting out the functional pleasantries while at the same time their thoughts were strangled by the search for a correct name. A lost name could be lying deep somewhere within the hidden estuaries of everyone’s brain, thought Stevenson.

Night Flight

2005-05-10T22:34:00.000+01:00

“What’s that noise? I hear a noise! It seems to be coming from over by the cooker? Right, if it’s those mice again, I'm going to get those ungrateful swine.” I get up and switch the light on. The naked sixty watt light bulb illuminates the fuzz of hundreds of hairs floating, a whole universe of glittering particles thrown up into the air by my bumping and creaking across the floor boards to investigate the rattle, now coming from the direction of the window. Then I suddenly realise what have I done; The light is now on, the window is open and the whole flying insect fraternity will now be alerted for take off, on route to my room in one encroaching mass. Hurriedly I rush to the window to cut off the only entrance. Just in time to see a growing bulge of stippled dots busying themselves away out there at house number six, readying for the charge. I take a lunge for the window with both hands to stop the surge, sending a cloud of white dust up into the atmosphere as I go. The frame sticks and so I force it harder, squeaking down the rail, scraping fragments of dry paint and dust onto the work surface to settle on various jars and plates strewn around. As I push down to the last inches my right eye takes a look out through the window and spots a white flicker of movement in the darkness. Before I have time to think about it, it is upon me and rushes into the room like Concord, arriving in one straight line at its destination, nearly hitting me in the face in mid flight. I am awed by its speed and size, shaking my head. My memory rewinding and playing back in slow motion; the wings are seen miming flight through the black silent night as it passes through into my space and out of sight. “You drift like a ghost through the smallest of gaps, wings flapping. I look at the clock, I look at the time. I was just about to go off to bed! The night will give me no peace, if I do not rid myself of this beast.” I mutter these words and many others, as I stand crouching and gazing questioningly at the room’s new occupant, my hands still clasping the window.

Its furry underside shone in the lamp light, the grotesque swell of the body, obscured by the incessant machine gunning of wings blurring. Seen from a distance it takes on the form of a crazed power ball jerking about at speed in the air, amongst the hair. As a comet following its trajectory across the star strewn galaxy, so this freakish thing has been delivered to my room, travelling along nature’s path to the hypnotic globe fixed to my ceiling. I decide to take action to defend my territory and begin at once to dance about my light bulb shaking my large unwieldy baton of a TV magazine. This is a tough one I say, missing with every swipe. You the master foilsman, a fast and nimble fighter, your figure casting a giant shadow at war with the soldiers patterned on the wallpaper, dipping and swinging while orbiting around the globe, charged by your attraction to the fantastically bright sun. "Fly in the golden wind little Icarus bird, you won’t escape me."

I find that this is the biggest one that I have ever seen. “Never seen you before? Not as big as you? You’re looking out of the window? You can go if you want to, go on. Maybe you would like some help with the frayed end of this weeks magazine would you. I’ll get you and I’ll make just one more smear on the window if I want to. Now just stay still there, come on!” The fur covering your body makes me wince and freeze still. Your soft feathery wings flutter with mad excitement and bounce like a space man against the phosphorescent glow. I could slowly move, as if making the slightest noise with my size elevens could alert its attention away from the bulb and send it battling in my direction with a few near misses. Then lift the window to give the animal an opening and while keeping an eye on it passing through the gap, reach around to place the world into darkness with a quick flick of the switch.

While stumbling, I feel a soft movement of wings somewhere and I blindly usher, what I think it is, out of the window slot. Ughh – the blasted things in my ear…ugh – ah – makes me shiver and flap my arms wildly, knocking into desks, finally coming to rest, by luck, on a chair in the corner, rubbing the dirt of the tiny mite off my upper arms furiously, shivering as if cold. I am now imagining wiping the grease, gathered from every dingy black hole in the planet, off every surface of my body.

The midget albino bird creature is now still in my room refusing my earnest gestures to rehabilitate it into the outside world. I find it attracted stubbornly, frustratingly, obsessively to the sixty watt bulb. Strangely intelligent the insect hangs around waiting for me to renew the source of its pleasure and will lie dormant. After a while I get fed up with knocking about and not being able to find things and the moment I reach one of my palms in the direction of the switch and press down - out of the silence goes the buzzard and around and around the bloody bulb it goes, “bugger”!
After a while of flinging my arms in soft human slowness at the laughing bestial imp I recognise the need for a rest in the proceedings. Let the moth play for a bit. "Only for a short while mind! I need to give some of my time to the washing of the dishes. But later, there will be none of these cat and mouse games, you understand, you horrible little sprite. You see this here towel, its straining at the bit, I’m telling you, straining at the bit. Twitch a muscle, move a wing!"

Job Scout: Cycle R

2005-04-30T23:08:00.000+01:00

On the way to open my new account at the social security camp site, situated carefully on the edge of town and decorated with the bright primary colours usually associated with a Macdonald’s Burger bar, I stepped briefly inside a church. What attracted me to this place of spiritual healing was that it was standing directly opposite the Social Security Centre, with both halves of its ten inch thick arched wooden door left wide open in the wind and clattering against the sides of the entrance. After admiring the splendid stained-glass windows and simple no-fuss architectural design I wandered around inside for a while. I walked over towards the pulpit where nobody seemed to stop me from flying into a raging sermon for the disadvantaged and their new social security home across the way, sparkling as it was in the dazzling sunlight, attempting to enliven the imaginary crowd before me. Tiring after a while of strenuous arm waving and getting bored with the echo of my own voice I walked to the entrance door to survey the newly refurbished building opposite. I decided to give it closer inspection and dived across the busy road, narrowly missing an accelerating truck careering towards me!
After spending a few minutes shaking myself off and swearing at the now distant lorry driver I moved to within close proximity of the Social Security Venue. Its various plastic sections had been slotted into rows of tall rods plunged in to the ground at short intervals, the roof merely placed on top, fitting together as per instructions.

Inviting myself into the shadows of the walls I adventurously peeped through the tinted windows at the newly formed Formica interior. I tried carefully to keep below the windows, my head bobbing up to catch glimpses of the people who, after all, could hold the keys to my future finances. The workers' silhouettes shifted and ducked and disrupted the solid outlines of filing cabinets and photocopiers, breaking the smooth lines of the office carpet. 'You can gain employment now via the use of an automatic machine just inside the main door', read a notice framed on the brickwork outside. And there it was, a black curved mushroom shape standing in the entrance foyer like a giant game console sprouting from the ground with its buttons lighting up alternately. I walked too and fro, waiting for the opening time, studying the petrol station to the left which will be my refectory, the church my future waiting room and this security venue could act as club house, emanating what can only be described as a scout hut sense of grandeur.

I asked myself whether the automatic door open to the left as I go in or will it slide with an electronic regularity to the right? These were important questions and I was taken with the destiny of this mechanical device. The rabbit hutch door could open to a feasible gap and then I would slide on my back, rolling in on a specially designed trolley to perform my job-identification tasks from a horizontal position, seeing to the under body, the oil covered jobs slime down upon me while my shoes poke out from the entry hatch. I keep the queue of patient people waiting; just a moment I feel a job here, pass a screw driver! ...Spanner...Forceps!
After a long time waiting, they at last opened the hatch, which to my surprise, simply folded outwards in three sections, stretching back out once again when I had walked past an invisible line on the floor. I stepped back then to see if I could make the device function repetitively and witnessed it expanding and contracting and doing as it was told merely by the slightest movement of my body! I then saw it as my job to identify the point from which the laser signal was coming, moving slowly in towards the door and then out in a repetitive fashion with my right shoe. I learned to develop my technique to a point where I could stop it anywhere along its travels, the opening and closing parts mimicking the bending of my knee, having achieved contact.

Soon after, when I was just getting used to being inside this strange interior and now able to control the door I felt a light but firm hand upon my shoulder. Due to the experience of being torn from deep concentration and then the effort in having then to refocus on a uniformed figure now standing very close to me, I was unable to speak at first. However a quick glance up and down told me Security Guard. I even saw a holster with a weapon folded in the black leather case hooked onto his belt.
“Excuse me, you have a reason to be here?” he said.
“I want to sign on.”
“Excuse me?”
“Sign on?”
“What d'you mean?”
“sign on's what I mean.”
“Oh, you mean make a claim!”
“Oh, that's what the new jargon is, is it?” I was then told to wait in a red chair near the corner with my back to the ladies at desks, while the guard signals my entrance to the required people. I dropped to the seat pointed at with a fellow job seeker seated next to me: She claims too? Don’t you think this place rather over staffed for just the two of us? Perhaps they were expecting some sudden serge of people. Reminds me of those times in town when just before a football match when suddenly there are hundreds of police watching and waiting, expecting trouble or the threatening army of baton clad officers gathering to ‘fend off’ a harmless protest march. Do they need guards at the door? I take it the desk staff do not want to meet us or shake our hands? Perhaps they have tried to devise something for the old chaps to do. It’s hardly customer service though is it? That guy he could have just walked in off the street, he had had no manners! I say these things in my head but my fellow job seeker just looks away.

I hear something in my left ear, a faint calling, getting closer each time it was repeated. I slowly realised that it was my name being called. I look round quick to see who it is – where, which desk - I spied the lady in question. She saw me. I launched myself from the low reclining seat with a heavy sigh and taking the hard desk seat, sat staring at the women who was, in turn, staring back at me. She flicked her eyes back and forth from the information screen in front of her.
"New claim?" she said.
"Yep."
"Let me see…Joe Blakelock?"
"Er, yes,"
You have been sentenced here by Her Majesties service due to your flagrant lack of employability. We are forced to remunerate you by some ancient law seemingly immovable by all parties due to the strange workings of this countries industrial system. We have entered you into the non working, supposedly job seeking pool of vertebrates that seek to survive on this island even though they do not join in and can prove that they are not able to fill in straight forward application forms and follow simple orders from their gently spoken well mannered line managers. There are a range of contestants competing and we have regular aptitude tests, psychological training etc, to support you in the efforts that you will make. We give you training sessions if you have not spring boarded yourself into a position of status within the first six months. Then Mrs Brey over there, behind the boards, checks your forms, who has been especially developed for this task at head office. You notice the special crook in her neck and those sharp fingernails rasping at the stack of forms in front of her. You must understand that we never intentionally neglect a form or request things again and again that you have already sent us. From time to time our system of organisation may seem out of date and dysfunctional but that suites our needs. We know that half the people who apply don’t really need the benefit anyway and the delays are all part of the incentive training you see. Nobody gets anything for nothing in this world.
I sat up and realised that I hadn’t listened to a word this woman had said. She must have subliminally entered information into my brain for a moment there without my noticing. I woke from my dream talk and tried again to listen to what she was saying.
“You know we are the only country where every citizen can claim even though they haven't paid up in tax! You get a much better deal here, you know, than in other countries”
“Yeh, in other countries, you’re on the street aren’t you. Places like India and South Africa.”
“Um, yes. They think we’re…”
“We’re lazy yes I know, it’s pathetic really isn’t it. I once had this conversation with an Indian lady while passing through Birmingham on the train and she couldn’t understand what she called ‘the British and their welfare system’, she said…”
“I’m sorry but we have to get on with the meeting Mr Blakelock. Here are the forms that you have to fill in. Shall we set your next meeting for the 4th, you're able to make that, right. Remember I am only passing information on to you from central office. I am trained to merely pass on any complaints to another address and they take such a long time to respond!”
“Hang on just a minute surely you’ve forgotten the housing form, aren’t I claiming housing benefit at all?”
“Oh no Mr Blakelock, I’ve looked through your details and I’ve decided that I don’t think you will be successful.”
“Why not!?”
“Well the information doesn’t support it. With your job history you usually have savings and it’s ten to one your claim will be dismissed.”
“Well fetch me a form and then we’ll see won’t we.”
“Well in my experience…”
“Can you get me the form, please! Where's your manager? That her, over there?”
“Alright, alright …er… Just a minute.” She moves from her desk and over towards Mrs Brey. I catch a few words from the distance; “do we have to give them this form. We don’t usually give them the housing forms do we…“
“Here you are, and if you fill in just the smallest bit wrong we send it back to you and that delays your claim, so you must concentrate, understand!”
“Yeh, OK, Right, well why couldn't you have given me this in the first place?”
"It doesn't matter now, see you on the fourth then?
I’m sure I noticed a serial number appearing on her fore arm underneath the cuff of her blouse. If I uncapped it I might find a mesh of wires. Would they charge her up at night ready for the day ahead? If I opened that cupboard in the corner over there would I be shocked to find a row of replicas shaking with their arms attached to the wall sockets?
“You may go now.” A sharp look crossing her face.
“I may go, I may go, right, OK then. Bye?”
She makes no reply. She is not required to. I hear only the faint hum of information spinning around in the hard disks, my information being passed through the computer network.
As I make my way out a layer of grey shaded my immediate surroundings and I walked as if through a tunnel, out of the building. I felt eyes staring at my back as I shuffled past the guard and the folding door, not looking at anyone. I clung on to the forms bunched in my right hand and tried not to let them go in the swirling wind. On the other side of the road the church appeared older now and more timeworn. Someone had closed the doors and locked them with the aid of a large rusted iron bolt and chain. The road back seemed longer, and when my aching legs brought me at last through the door of my flat, I sat down and stared at my forms for a while before bothering to unfold them.
Then I stared at them again for a while before reluctantly starting to fill one in.

A Mountain Of Things

2005-04-24T11:10:00.000+01:00

I found myself trudging along down the ever ending network of corridors, flinging open the rows of doors that lined the sides, trying to find my way, by habit and memory alone, through the darkness that filled the air around me. Only the smallest amount of light had found its way in between the gaps in the various curtains that hung along the side walls, lighting up dust particles floating through the air. I eventually stopped my searching at the end of a particularly long and narrow corridor, the thick dust that filled every cube of space slowly cleared so that I could at last make out the faint outline of a cupboard and the jutting shape of its door handle. I have come thus far into the untouched areas of this labyrinthine dwelling in order to at last start afresh and not again to dwell upon the past and be confined by the melancholy of this space, I told myself. After several tries I gained what looked like the correct key from the iron ring attached to my belt and tried it in the hole. As I turned it against the resistance forged by its years of unmoving rigidity, like stiff bones it cracked in stubborn jutted movements to the half past the hour mark. I felt a jolt as the key scraped past an obstacle and into a comfortable slot and it was like the door has come to life and was now free to open. Pulling the heavy wooden door towards me caused a semicircle of ploughed dust particles uncovering a rich and colourful pattern on the once grey carpet. Tugging against the friction of it and forcing it back with both hands I at last was able to lean and peer inside this forgotten vestige of my interior. I gasped in horror at what I saw, standing back in order to fully appreciate the size and complexity of the structure that was heaped there in the darkness before me. Years of disregarded fragments had seemingly congealed together to form a mass which had completely overtaken the ironing board and other cleaning utensils which for centuries must have been settled peacefully in this long forgotten place. And to my surprise and disgust the heaped collection of things began to move forwards using an odd motion clinging or sucking itself to the ground to maintain its upright form. How the circular bowls and boxes half filled with nails and bits of ripped clothes, the old letters half torn and fretted at the edges, crumpled paper and broken canvas frames fitted together to give the creature structure was unclear to me. I braced myself against the side wall, hands grasping at the door rail as the mountain of objects slowly heaved itself past my trembling body and across the floor, its shape and form seeming to change and reconstruct with each movement it made. My possessions arranged about the floor were strangely attracted to it's large mass and began to move towards it of their own accord as the thing made it's way slowly past, strangely energized by some magnetic power. Slowly it slugged its huge bulk past me giving me no notice and heading away down the corridor growing steadily larger in the process. My eyes stared at this strange nocturnal animal as it started, in its own way, to digest the objects that lay about it and across its path. I looked back into the cupboard, nothing at all, they had all come out. For how many years had I neglected this particular area of the building and had unknowingly let the situation develop towards this perverse state of affairs?

The Two Steves

2005-03-26T09:56:00.000Z

The two Steves have moved in and now there are three. The fridge is full and the rooms seem to be packed with the presence of people. The Moths are hitting the lampshade again. Clothes clinging like polythene, arms sweating beads, the pen slips from between my thumb and fore finger. The dark brown interior is holding off the bright light from outside for as long as it can and it still feels dull around the house. We now have an upturned bed standing eccentrically on it’s end piece. Big metal bars and springs facing you as you come out of the kitchen. The mattress lapsed in folds at its feet, exhibiting its lack of sturdiness and bounce. It obstructs my Picasso painting so it has to go. Brown in colour of course, it emits the kind of depressing aroma that you find often in industrial wastelands. It is part of the house that has become dislodged; old and tattered, a chucked out piece of furniture that nobody wants. I write with my back to it but still I feel its oppressiveness. The air has changed and something awkward looms at head height that constantly reminds me of living now in a house that is shared. The chair is here too, from the next room; a pink oddity with a small bottom and a scoop for a backrest. All covered with that crinkly pink felt the colour and kind that you can only find in second hand markets. I can no longer stand it down here. I have to go upstairs and to my room, I feel as though I’m in a strange cave with monsters that I don’t know.

"Jones!"

2005-03-26T09:24:00.000Z

The Landlord’s dog ‘Jones’ is a little muscle bound bull dog type, tree brown and short legs. It takes tremendous force when pulling on its lead to stop it going where ever it wants to go. I run around the house going to and fro, following the scent of food scraps hidden in places only dogs would put their nose. It runs around like an iron ball in a pinball machine. At certain points it has weird fits of sobbing and then suddenly recovers!(emotionally unbalanced). It does not have fur or hair but sand-blasted skin, stroking it is a kin to running your hand over those miniature landscapes they make the model trains run around. Unnaturally hard and solid, he is a constantly moving, tightly knitted bundle of meat and bone chugging like an engine. His mouth pattering hot air mechanically across a leather like tongue, frontal section dipping along floor level to lap up sweet corn hiding behind the legs of the sofa. I hesitate to pull harder on the lead in case I block its air valvs. Landlords wife says; “He’s lovely with the kids.”

Summer Time

2005-03-26T09:13:00.000Z

We are camouflaged by the long grass walling the sides of the square sleeping bag and the shade from the trees and the movement of the washing creating dots of light massaging our bare legs and feet. I lie this way, she lies that. The ruffling of the leaves making a convenient block to the rattling of voices next door. Waves of cool wind flow over us. A plane glides over as if to nowhere in the clear blue sky. Tiny creatures are swarming through the tall stalks of grass. Ants are ascending the highest peaks, attempting the toughest angles. Several wasps hover over and then disappear.

The spots on the concrete mark the rain and the peach colours dim as a dark cloud threatens above. Ann is talking about ladybirds or something; laying down on her multi-coloured sleeping bag, moaning because she has discovered she’s brought out the wrong ‘What’s On TV’. She goes in and comes out with her wonder lust book, turning about uncomfortably on the ground and then settling her self down to concentrate on the soap page. She quickly gets fed up with this and folds herself up into a legs-folded position, her shoes with the ventilation holes placed on the concrete slab next to her. She now gets up and moves the sleeping bag so that it folds up the wall and sits, arms folded, with her back against it, knees together, bare feet out. We sit, I in my chair, she next to me on the ground. The plants growing tall between the rectangular slabs, a whole catalogue of types, some spindly, some with leaves spreading out and folding over the edges like open pages.

Next doors lawn mower has broken. The old lady has broken the blade on the edge of the lawn. This leaves me in peace only leaving the light sound of shears now skimming the grass, a blessed relief! Now erupts an argument with the old man. She kneels complaining of the effort; “Where’s the little shears?”. The old man is deaf as a post. It’s as if they are talking to themselves. I’ve just noticed our bush or hedge or something is getting rather high. Soon it’ll be encroaching on my window space and I’m on the second floor. The loose branches wave around in the breeze. The school across the road is dead for the summer. Their grass has been cut by one of those cutting machines. It has changed now from an untidy ruffled mess to a smooth green square edged by wall and wrought iron gate which is always kept locked with a bolt.

Concrete Jungle

2005-03-24T11:51:00.000Z

God it’s muggy! I keep the window open and have to suffer the odd wasp wandering in. I think back, I don’t want to write anything that could be titled memoirs or anything. But I did go through an interesting patch a while ago. Something I should put down here should it loose itself in time as I grow older and out of reach. I hear a bird or animal or something making an odd noise outside, like I’m in the tropics or something. I can hear cars roaming around the house on all sides. Somebody clipping a hedge. Not ours, you can’t get out of the front garden now; The hedge has now covered the entrance and is poking into next doors garden. If the neighbours knock I’ll just give them the landlord’s phone number, let him sort it out.
I live here in a house left to its own; all of the bushes and trees in the garden mingle into clumps and the grass has started growing its own assortment of weeds and dandelions. The cats flatten deep paths in it and you find little nests hidden in corners where a feline has curled up. Neighbours hate it of course. I don’t pay it much attention; all shared houses are like this I find. Ann’s is the same. Nobody really wants to bother, least of all the Landlord. I have no utensils to mow it, no shears to clip the hedge. I just have to breathe in to squeeze past the narrow gap in the hedge every time I want to leave the house. It’s a bind. I look at everything around me as if it is somehow distant and unreal. I just exist and these things happen around me of their own accord. I have no power over them.

You can’t help but develop a kind of morbid curiosity for it all though. It’s like an adventure when you’re a child and you take over a derelict house and make it into a den, a secret place. You put up with hardships, lack of certain luxuries. It’s all part of the spartan existence that you lead when you’re an outcast, on forbidden territory, hiding out from the police. Making maximum usage of the interior space, watching out for the other side. You go out occasionally hunting for food, suss out the locals, blend in to the environment. You could be an outcast of the avenues, a true introspective voyager into the tribal territories. The battered wall outside seems to have had things done to it that no other wall has had done to it; Concrete spread over it so that it can be chipped away. Bricks of different shapes lodged in at various angles with thick pastes of concrete spread over in selected areas. Somebody at some point has had the exiting idea of making the house into a sculptured shape using concrete and then had second thoughts.

The paint stops on the edges of the window frames as if applied with one stroke all the way round.

The paved part of the garden looks like it’s been used in one of those disaster movies where earthquakes up heave large segments of motorways. It is crumbling away with large fractures defining the angled shapes, broken earth underneath swelling up like welts of molten lava.

The bin bag sits patiently awaiting its removal. Cold rainwater dripping in spots from the harsh sheen of its surface, creating a strange kind of order, or lived in quality amongst the catastrophe of the garden. The actual bin which stands close by is frozen solid with concrete for some unknown reason. It merely exists to amuse visitors and is too heavy to move. This is a non wheelie bin area so I have to shift the bin bags on a Thursday to the outside of the back garden where everybody else lines theirs up. I have to wade through the grass to do this. Thick grass with unwieldy knots you have to pull yourself out of.

Large exotic looking weeds thrive happily and seem to have been around before the concrete was laid. The builder has left convenient spaces for those octopus type things to prosper and little channels for the ants to run along. It is an environment made to measure for wild overgrown plant life and all kinds of insects and small reptiles. Not for humans at all. A safe-house for all battered plants and unwanted carnivores. A small haven in a cruel world and I am its warden, flailing my arms around to fend off the bands of flies. I throw the odd bowl of dirty water in the general direction of the garden feeding several plants at once. Stroking cats who guard the fences.

The shed in the corner looks as though it was used in the same film as the concrete patio. Squares of orange fluorescent paint mark the areas on its moss green wood ridges where I’ve been spraying my work. A great place for hamsters to live in but I’m afraid not much use for anything else. It looks as though it fell from the sky to this exact spot, plus everything in it. A thousand miles up and it came down spinning and with luck hit the ground on it’s base. Nothing inside of any use whatsoever, regardless of what the Landlord says, it’s all a load of junk. They must have been flying batches of sheds full of useless garbage over-head and one fell out. I’d better report it to the lost and founds. It looks like a boxy shaped jumble of nothing specific, with shed looking bits leaning against four sides.

Something inside my stomach is rebelling. It's creating all sorts of problems for my system and I feel pains building up as if vital fluid is squeezing itself past an obstruction and then bubbling into a vacuum. In my mind I’m running through my daily diet. I’ll spare you the details. My dinner plate lays before me; burnt bits of dinner lie in a group on a section of my plate where I have moved them, unconsciously nudging them to this particular spot as I shovel and slice through my meal at the centre, leaving at the end a fascinating complexity of marks with the left over source that went with the space shapes. Left on the side like industrial waste discarded on the edge of a network of motorways. My knife and fork lie regimentally across the middle forming a kind of bridge structure.

Red Lion Ambush

2005-03-23T18:38:00.000Z

He said with great pride that he was in the sniper core. In and out like a flash and run off into the hills, loose himself in the deep forest or bushes. Couldn’t say where, couldn’t say when. Sworn to secrecy. Much better than building ditches, rebuilding houses. Snipe from a distance. Magnify to that fine point. The pointed crossed circle, gliding, roving amongst the camouflage jackets and black boots, take aim, fire sounding like a soft thud. Much more respect. “You know you’re somebody. People treat you with a bit more, you know - you ‘re different.” Pushing his chest out and broadening his already broad shoulders.
“You should join the army” To my friend Patrick sat opposite. Trying to be overly polite. Keeping him cheerful and at the same time being strangley interested, like reading a trashy war book and ‘seeing what some people read’.

The young man breaking into our just begun conversation.. Sidling into the chair with soft violence. Shaven headed young boy sitting snug, talking about his all consuming subject. He offered us fags: “Take one go on” as if we had to.
”No I don’t smoke, never have sorry.”
Patrick takes one after being forced to a few times by a shoved hand and an open packet, the tubular orange tipped bullets poking from the neat folds of their silver and white encasement. Forcing a peculiar brand of army bonding upon us. Crude but direct and we were trapped. Netted for that brief moment. Reluctantly in his world looking for quick exits. A closed world of structured togetherness and a long string of activities. Having to do them in order to form mates and not to be ridiculed and left out. On the whole a method imaged by ranks above, a reduction of individual worth to fit yourself like a mechanical glove into the hand of her majesties regiment. Held out to shake. Just as he, this prematurely bald chap, held his hand out to grab ours and our arms jogged with his, with our polite smiles, occasional glances at each other and then to the ceiling. We had to be on our guard. A young naïve saddened man/boy clinging on to probably the only structure that he has had in his short life so far. Talking like a mate, quickly initiating us into his nothing world of guns and bullets, threats and bullying. Even though the camaraderie on our part was forced, one could easily imagine him close within his regular platoon enjoying pints and handshakes, sniggering at jokes, talking about women as if they were toys along with Mechano and train set, Action Man and Dare Devil Doll. Women would have awkward bendable arms and you could say anything you liked, swear, chat it up and then fling it down on the carpet when bored. “Ere love what’s name?”
“Anne” she says, surprisingly.
“Anne, do you want to sit with us, come over here. I’ll buy you a drink, me and the lads here.” No response.
He then turns to us lads;
“Are you sure you don’t want a pint? Have a pint go on! I’ll get you a pint.”
“No, half a lager shandy will do me fine.”
“A lager shandy?!”
“Oh, and some lime to top it up, thanks”
He shrugs and gives a look of irritation. The glasses he insists on keeping on the table when we’ve finished “so that we can see how many we’ve had”.
“That’s five shandy’s so far, hmmn”
I tried to physically melt into the wall, to disappear. Trouble is he was squashed in next to my thigh. I was as near to him as a squaddie in the locker room. I now knew what it was like to be in the army. In the army. A cold shiver ran through me.
A small room crowded with shaven heads, the noise of heavy metal belt adjustments, the loud clicking of equipment. Then they, and I, pile into the back of a helicopter carrier and fly until a dot in the pale blue cloudless sky. Crowds of blokes ruffle about inside. Knocking over each other trying to get parachutes on. A jumble of khaki and black shiny boots. And off we fly into the distance towards the target. I missed the exit training at Head Quarters on the Saturday and my body flies out like dirty washing inside a machine swirling about in the sixty mile an hour wind. I find myself tangled up in my chute, flinging about in a desperate attempt to unwind the death grip the cords have on my neck. Ahh, al last I wind free, I check canopy and all is inflated. Floating like a toy action man with parachute, chucked from the second floor window of a little boys house. The patchwork quilt of green, brown and yellow squares below me quickly reduces to one brown one and I land in it, legs flailing about in the mud. The canopy drags my body like a plough turning the wet soil, gradually grinding to a stop due to the fact that my head is stuck into about three feet of manure enriched top soil. Back at base they’ve got me down as a fatality due to the lateness of the canopy opening. Lifting my aching, mud caked body I attempt to pull at the heavy wet material like a drunken puppeteer pulling at his strings. Suddenly the wind takes hold again and I am forced to wind surf across the sea of mud, finally getting stuck in the hedge running the side of the field. Enduring the pain of thorns digging into my flesh I somehow manage to stagger towards the target in the next field. The circular markings faded by the tramplings of standard sized service boots.

Mr and Mrs No!

2005-03-03T14:59:00.000Z

I answer the door and let them in. What can I do, I have to. They will start pestering me by bloody email if I don’t. Do I need to have my flat inspected all the time, I don’t know? They sometimes catch me by surprise. Not having time to pile the dirty dishes in the cupboard and throw clothes under the mattress. They pass by my book shelf rolling their eyes at the dust piled up on the ledges.
"How much do you pay rent again...and you chose those rugs?" Expecting a tour around the rooms they cringe at the chaos of the work area.
"Oh, comics? How do you find time for that!?"
"Er, it's taken me ages to get that far, I do bits when I can."
"How’s your job? You do still have a regular job don’t you?"
"Yeh, fine yeah, I’m enjoying it at the moment. The students, you know, they’ve got exams coming up, very busy."
"You are doing a worthwhile job and getting paid - excellent"
"Yeh."
She marks it down on a bit of paper.
Mr No:"We will keep checking up on you at regular intervals, we know what you're like. Listen! You mustn't go back to your old ways, hear me! It makes us worried, and we get headaches, especially when you waste time on all that arty stuff, yes! You must be seen to be doing your share of proper work."
Mrs No: "Nice to see you’ve made an effort with the toilet this time" while peering behind the shower curtain. A glance to the right sees Mr No pushing the bedroom door open! I duck my head in and try to explain. His lips curl in horror! hurrying to the corridor: "We have to go now don’t we Mrs No, things to do?" They then begin whispering and taking notes while standing in the middle of the living room. I busy myself by turning on the oven. I think I could eat it all myself if they don't.
Mr No brings his new digital camera out and starts pointing it into each of the rooms. "We need to collect some reference material?".
"You have technology? I have technology too, lets talk about technology, we can talk about that instead?" I say.
"Why is there all this hair on the floor?"
"I don’t know, it just comes out of my head."
Their bodies deflate in a long sigh, both now sitting near me on the living room sofa.
"Stop that, get off. Bloody hell!" Mrs No irritatingly rubbs off a mark she has found on my sweat shirt with a piece of tissue paper, getting her guey salivor all over me. I am playing with toy cars in the corner and chopping spiders up.
"Mmn…that's better!"
"Did you have to do that?"
"You must look presentable. We don't want you looking like a tip?"
"Right that'll do." Says Mr No still writing down in his book.
"Something to eat then?" I say. I catch them briefly exchanging glances.
"Er, now we best be off. Time is getting on. We desperately need to get back to the safety of our road vehicle. We are so used to the air conditioning you see, and Mrs No's cooking of course."
Mr No hands me a note: "Here is a list of things we feel that you shouldn’t be doing and on the other side things that we would prefer you to do because that makes us feel better, and how do you survive otherwise I can’t understand. This to back up the subliminal messages I have already imprinted on your mind hopefully." Turning towards His wife: "Do you have the planned route map love?"
"I have it, it’s in my handbag somewhere." scrambling furiously inside her shoulder bag.
Mr No: "You can’t go anywhere without your printouts. What you have to understand you see Neil, is that there is no such thing as freedom. Ha Ha Ha. Yes. It’s in your own interest to follow procedures as best you can. You'll soon begin to realise this yourself. And we wouldn’t want to get Mrs No upset now would we?"
"Er, no, of cause not Mr No, no never."
"You need to get a file started which we will expect to see next time we come. Perhaps a desk as well with a comfortable chair to sit in so that we can go through it properly. There is a big inspection coming up and you’ll have to start getting your paperwork ready. Just treat it like a driving test, it'll be fine. As long as you do what is expected everything will be cosy."
"Can you give me a template to work from, I’m not sure…?"
"Don’t worry. Don't worry, although, it might be best if you get rid of any evidence of the artwork and um just as it says there, on the list(pointing to the list), yes, number three: Show evidence of having a job and display more optimism when talking about a life of employment, yes. Special attention should be given to the getting married and having children section naturally. Mrs No often gets upset about that one, mmn. Anyway I’m sure you’ll feel much better once you’ve attended to the list. I know Mrs No will be pleased and of course, then I'm pleased too, you see."
He stands resting his large bulky frame against the side of the front door, one arm rested on top: "Neil, you know, I would like to understand you better but under the present circumstances, well, I’m afraid it’s just not possible. But you know it's only for the best, don't you. We have to go now because we have a whole list of people to cover today. The station is hectic at the moment! Come on Mrs No, lets get to the car."
Mrs No turns towards me: "Neil, you must listen to what ‘prompt payment’, I call him that, it’s kind of a silly joke really, listen to what he says! He knows best. He’s been in the army after all, therefore he knows a thing or two about these things, right. OK then, we must get going, the people at the hospital are expecting us at 5.00pm for the special injections and shock treatment ceremony, you can come along too if you like?"
"Er, no, think I'll give that a miss. Just resting from work at the moment, you know."
"Well, see you then, bye, bye, Say goodbye to Mr No Neil."
"Bye Bye, see ye...bye Mr No".
"Careful how you go." They wave. Mr No jumps up and flies over the car floating like a bird through the roof window in one smooth motion, landing comfortably strapped and snugg, opposite the front console. Mrs No starts crazily slapping the sides and top of the car, shouting "thank god! thank god!" Her body crawling over the bonnet and roof, then being quickly sucked into the front side door, slamming it shut with supernatural speed. The windows mist up and the moving figures inside receed in clarity till they become siluetes and then slowly fade away to white. The suspension raises the car into action. The wheels crunch and spit stones as the Ford Mondeo roars away towards the motorway slip road.

Hieronymus Hedge

2005-02-24T12:25:00.000Z

Out of my window there is an obstructive square block of green taking up fifty percent of my view. It is the Sky scraper of hedges, the monster of home gardening. The house to which this solid block of weed mass fronts is only of secondary importance to the overshadowing monolith that reaches up to its first floor windows. This chopped and chiselled prickly wall is presently being given a short back and sides by a team of landscape gardeners. Two trucks are needed for the clippings. Huge industrial saws and a giant sucking hose attached to a battery pack for collecting the bits. The men dwarfed by their task. Just giving it a light clipping. I was thinking that they might want to chop the whole thing down. Perhaps they would need permission to do that though. The next door neighbours to be evacuated to safer housing, that sort of thing. They must need a construction crane to clip the top. I have never seen it done though and it always seems to appear quite neat and tidy. I can imagine it done by the occupants holding giant shears out of the upstairs windows. They could be growing it big in order to cut it into an extravagant shape to impress in a hedge competition? It has a small front garden and they can’t fit many cars behind it, the rest of the garden laying bare. Perhaps it costs less to shave it down occasionally than to have it chopped down. I’m not looking forward to the day that they decide to chop it. I could’t stand all the upheaval. To suddenly see the image of that house and those people and their windows facing me would make me feel as though I had an audience watching me all the time, through the large door windows that run along the side of my lounge! Presently I have a cosy forest green view, a blank space to hide behind in the morning when I get up and have to open the curtains. Everybody mentions the hedge when they visit my flat: “My god, what’s that?” when first entering the room facing.

The figure of the hedge looms large in this small town, overlooking all the houses near by. The day it is finally sawn down will seem like the end to an era. I have grown comfortable with it. The security it gives me. Allowing me to wander about my flat while not being self-conscious or effected in any way.

Counting The Cost

2005-02-23T14:29:00.000Z

The cost of working in a job. What is it worth? What price do I pay for treading the daily mill in the office or whatever? The cleverest disguise or ingenious strategy cannot protect me from the accumulating forfeit charge. The depletion of my self esteem does not enter their account by direct debit once a month, it is not televised. The true knowledge of it is waiting for me in the car at the end of the working day, glad to be in my own space again. This accumulation of particles cakes the outer casing of the brain. I open my pockets to it. Give everything and then what change do I get given? The money which I gain I save or spend on things external. What is my proper activity, my real reason? I have a flat and furniture, DVD player and mini disc system. Then I must be satisfied. My watch is ticking faster now than before. The manager is pressing with growing frustration! They know you don’t want to do it. Your face doesn’t fit. You don’t belong here. We all know it’s only a matter of time. I bet you’ll be glad to get out of here.

It’s good to do something you like. Even if it means throwing away the things that hold most meaning to you. Do it in your spare time. You get holidays! See it as a hobby, a part time activity, secondary to your main job. Just do it now and again, when the feeling takes you. It’s difficult to concentrate I know and you feel very tired most evenings, yes, but that doesn’t matter. It’s not really important. You work more than the set hours as that is what’s expected. My god you earn enough money! I now have enough money to be able to rest in the evenings and weekends.

The snow is swirling outside as if it were blowing about inside one of those artificial air tunnels at medium strength. Viewed from my small rectangular window the particals look like bits of white sand being thrown about by the force of the sea current. The distance fields are obliterated by the blizzard mist. The grid of roads below lies quiet and untouched save for vehicles with company signs on them, fog lights on, eating the dots along their pac-man trail. The doors are shut to the rest homes, abandoned for the day: breading grounds for future employees: tax payers, cigar handle moulders, book sleeve laminators, carpet cleaning chemical distributors, deep sea diving insurance salesman, tropical fish installers, animal cell cleaners, underground bus drivers. A plane (I cannot see) swooshes past the flat, making a sound like an oncoming nuclear explosion, first the force of the blast, then the burning heat. But no, it went, and back to quiet again. Industrial tourist advisers, reality TV show instructors, theatrical street sweepers, humorous ticket collectors, miming helicopter landing signalman.

The Day Job

2005-02-17T03:02:00.000Z

People are constantly asking me where do I find time outside of my regular comics to do other things like bar work and driving taxi cabs.

I tell you my friends its not easy but I try to keep the dull and repetitive work going when I can even when I'm cabbing till the early hours. Some people call it an obsession but really there doesn't seem to be anything else at all that I'm good at. I occasionally get comics posts to pay my way and keep the social off my back.

I like taxiing at night because if I get caught doing it in the daytime people might gossip and I don't want the family to find out! The streets are so quiet what with everybody drawing comics on their own in their rooms these days; it's easy to get found out. Only just the other day a man was in court being charged for not carrying a comic characterisation of himself inside his wallet. That was in the Planet funny papers I read that.

I tell you, I was having a chat with my friend Jimmy the other day and we were both criticising this country for its lack of interest in public transport. Nobody bothers to go out anymore! Who needs a taxi? They're all too busy drawing and reading comics and graphic novels. I mean the taxi trade and other old occupations such as bus drivers, street cleaners (who needs to clean a clean street, nobody goes out!). I sometimes wish everybody was a whole lot more outgoing like in America, they got a whole transport industry over there. If things persist as they are I think I'm going to emigrate, go where my taxiing skills are more appreciated. OK, there are some small self employed (unlicensed) taxi cabers floating around out there - er, me being one of them, but will the transport system ever take off in this country, who knows. You do see some taxi's riding around with what look like passengers in the back but it's always foreign owned firms!

Oh I dream of one day getting a passenger, maybe a chatty sociable person who simply has to get out of those extreme, creativity inducing, conditions. Get away from the monotonous job of developing panel after panel and drawing the same characters again and again. He or she could maybe risk a breath of fresh air and act as if they're briefly sauntering into the back streets and hey presto, into the back of my cab! I have one of those new silent electric running engines. So lights off and round the corner we go. Even If the client stops there and gets off to rush back to the building it would be something, a bit of taxiing, I gotta keep it up. Anyway, back to my room to carry on with the comic. They are supposed to come out quarterly. Drawing materials are handed out now on social benefit. Prime Minister Groening is now on a record third term in office. The way things are going I’m thinking of taking up pizza delivery!

Front Room

2005-02-13T02:10:00.000Z

A room was strewn with old clothes ready for the jumble.
Tea stains gathered on the tinted glass of the coffee table.
The settee, worn from years of uncomfortable sitting.
Armrest, a fixed wooden block showing through the thin corduroy worn from years of lying with head nested into the corner watching a late night film or the final of some eagerly awaited sports occasion.

All quite, quiet! Hey, shut up you! The javelin is launched and tares into the evening sky, flying dangerously near the crowd, hanging in the air for eternity then turning to spear the damp ground.

Shades of muddy brown make up the rectangular form, covered in sparkling grey dust.
Turned stone dead with only Nineteen Eighty Three programmes left static inside the fish-bowl. The ribbed front a primitive instrument to be raked over with a Kitchen spoon.

The rich ruby red/brown texture of the carpet scouring knees while trying to navigate around with the bright red and white toy car. Running it through the tunnels and around the coasters, vroom, vroom.
The jeep is better and can go over the metal strips in the carpets.

The papers would be spread out at various angles and piling in parts to cover the books. Loose shards of paper are pointing up and casting shadows across the floor. The jam jar forming a crater of balanced pages. Reaching up towards the hanging glass light shades which refract the light into a hundred pieces across the white sheets of paper strewn about.
Peering at the round knobs fixed to the side of the imitation teak record player: A smeared plastic coffe coloured see-through lid protecting the multiplayer turntable holding an imbedded tape player with microphone attatchment, never used. The thin red dial of the radio tuner lights up then the top vinyl disc slides down the metal pole and begins riding the turntable. Wooden camels of various sizes gather at the foot of the stereo deck, an oasis of sound. The DJ clicks into action, introducing the top forty run down, shouting out through the interference for a while and then stopping with a sudden thump! The electric buzz popps, the light bulbs flash once and turn off. The room fades to black.

The net curtains shake as the sound of the door is heard slamming hard! Footsteps? A moving shadow is projected across the flowery wallpaper in the hallway.

The Woods

2005-02-13T02:01:00.000Z

"Right, see you later then"

"OK then.” His mums’ voice shouted from the kitchen. “Where are you going again?”

"Oh, uhm, just going for a walk. It seems like a nice day… you know."

"See you later then"

"Right see ye."

David closed the door and the framed glass window clattered inside its wooden frame.
He walked away scuffing his feet onto the sidewalk, shoes clobbering the ground, the sound echoing in the quiet Cul-de-sac, wearing jeans and a black t-shirt. The grey slabs of concrete, kept clean and dusted, drew a heavy white outline against the pressed black tar of the pathway. He walked quickly to the end of the road wanting to get as clear from the zone as possible. The end of the road was knocked off by a concrete posted fence hammered into the edges of the school field opposite. The patchy grass was worn from the daily scrapings of the local children. The posts stood seven feet tall but the jump was manageable due to the edge of the street being raised and two feet from the top. The webbed posts pressed to the edge. Just the right height for David to jump down comfortably. After a brief pause worrying about the height and the impact of his feet on the ground he took off and landed with a ground shuddering thump. Looking around he saw a stile in the corner over which he planned to cross and walk across what he remembered was a farmers’ field in the distance. He remembered being too afraid to cross into the field as a child even though other boys did and came back with exiting tales of scrumping apples from the nearby orchard. The orchard was now an extension of the Brent Hill housing estate. It was now lawned and walled off. Pleasant kids now resided within organised confinements playing with bright shiny toys and parents who called them in with soft pale skin and polite friendly voices.

He just wanted to walk and not think, just smell the air and get away from things a bit. He had come visiting his mother and her husband Eddie but the more time he spent in the dense atmosphere the more he gravitated towards the windows wanting to be out there. Strange how just walking out of the front door brings new life to body and mind. Stressed out by piles of neatly folded and stored clothes, ornaments displayed in nice order, careful talk about jobs and money. The mock furniture and low hanging lights that seemed placed to knock into his head as he walked around, pacing up and down. He didn't want to sit and have a ‘discussion’. He could feel a headache coming .

David walked in a straight line towards the style, making a diagonal route across the field, walking past the football posts, eyes gazing at the white paint flaking off the warped angular wooden structure. Walking over the bare patches of earth where studs had scalped the grass and had laid bare smooth craters of dry mud he spied ants scurrying around and diving down into the cracks where his fingers prodded.

Memories of knocking footballs against the post, of leaping and headering crosses, of a by now idealised sense of childhood when he had time to play.

The clouds were smudged like dabs of margarine across the blue sky. Nothing moved but a distant plane, the small toy figure squeezing a curved white line of paste into a semi-circle shape.

Trudging through the long grass in the corner of the field, the tips standing as swords charging in a wave of green reflections.

David stepped over the old wooden style with no problem, his long legs swinging over and managing to avert the prickly hedge. Up there at a higher level he caught a brief glimpse of a gathering of trees in the distance.

Paint it Black

2005-02-03T22:28:00.000Z

A break from comic, panel mania! The rumble of Fennesz and the smooth symphonic fluctuating sounds now coming out of my aesthetically placed speakers on the wall. The grit and grazing. Is Herbert Missing? I don’t know! That piece of metal there and this electrical interference here. An orchestra of grainy tubers. Now an elephant enters with an incredibly stuffed nose: A low pitched snortle carrying on for ever. It makes me want to get all my old black vinyl records out and listen to them with that old piece of fluff on the needle scratching around. Now I’m entering a factory with motorcyclists revving and rolling around those spherical cages you get in some circuses. The purr of a lion merges with the low roar of a B52 plane. The tone when the phone in unhooked, Super Feedbacker. Somebody has turned the electricity off slowly and now back on again. Now he’s trying to imitate some sort of drum riff by rubbing match-sticks together? Then licking stamps and sticking them on hundreds of envelopes one after the other at incredible speed! Inter-cut by ripping of sellotape. Now a tweeting bird being slapped against a table until it loses its’ song! Rubbish being piled into a aluminium tube and placed in the back yard wearing slippers made of kitchen foil. The inter-stellar noises of the next door film studio Star Wars remake is making watching the TV while flicking the channels very difficult. The light sabres are finally switched off! A frog now turning the dial of the phone loudly while a giant bee bangs itself against the living room window. It is now dieing and dragging itself around the floor, its intermittent buzz causing the wood built house to start burning and crackling. I must make some tea and I drink it so loudly that it drowns out every other sound. The garden dogs are barking. I must try and find out what it is that is in the next street. The tank is still rolling. Now the bees are in my head and filling up quick! What pleasant sounds.

Diss - ability #1

2005-01-19T18:16:00.000Z

"Give me some sign before you enter please. You’ll disrupt my work process. It’s difficult enough for me to concentrate as it is without you traipsing in and out all the time!”

"Yes but you never let me in here."

Without moving his eyes from his laptop Alex gave out a deep sigh. “I am actually working on something. I can’t show you now because any criticism at the moment would ruin it, I’d loose track on everything.” Minute things were happening on Alex's screen, pixels switched place as he moved the mouse across the desktop.

Lucy, knowing that computers were just something that she did not know about and that her partner had the habit of concealing from her anyway, automatically gave respect for his knowledge of the unfathomable. How did he do it? It looked so complicated. why did Alex never let her give him a comfortable life, he didn't need to get himself stressed out over such work. My god he found it hard to merely get up in the morning, why put extra pressure on himself. He seemed to want it, to need his web design work and the occupational therapist did say to keep it up, it would be good for him. Every time he switched that thing on it turned him into an intolerable tyrant, always telling her to get out and do this and do that. Her, she, it, his very own girlfriend stroke maid stroke secretary. The one person that he relied upon most of all.

"Just go and do some of your cleaning or something, I gotta finish this coding, go on, you know that I have to do this, now, go on."

The house and cleaning and tidying and putting things in their right place had become so habitual that Lucy no longer thought about it, it was not as if he could do anything, so it was in a way her unquestionable role in the relationship, her area, he needed her there, in this place and she in some ways was happy to be there for him. It was only...

“Are you going to finish soon?, I’ve got to Hoover”

“Just leave me to it would you! Couldn’t you leave the Hoovering until later. God, I can’t do anything without being interrupted!”

“OK, whatever you want, if you want to live in a pig stile that’s up to you!"
She swivelled the door to a close and made sure Alex heard the firm snap of the lock clicking. Lucy could hear through the walls.could hear the squeaking his chair around the room, knocking against the woodwork and swearing.

“I think the drugs are wearing off!” He said through the thin panelled walls of the study.

"Not your hip again?"

"Agh - yes!...I will need another injection soon…”

“But we can’t afford it”

Alex glided smoothly out of the hallway, belying the stress and strain of his body, fitted into the seating with the aid of a landscape of especially formulated plastic moulding, affording him a degree of comfort but ultimately rendering him paralysed from his jerking arms tendons, tautly stretched and unsure of direction, to his puppet-like feet strapped into the metal plates, at the mercy of the mechanical support system. He navigated the cubic chunk of his Storm electric chair electronically murmuring around the ground floor flat, his head twitching up and a bulging eye swivelling towards hi s partner, curving a path through the disordered room furniture. “This is getting impossible!” He swore as he went over the lump of coiled shirt lying with its arms splayed across the floor, impeding his chair to a point where he had to momentarily go on two wheels.“Alex! don't do that! Stop it!”

“This house is too small, I’m suffocating“

"It’ll be all right once the lift is fixed you can travel around a bit more then. Why don’t you go out into the garden? It’s nice and fresh out there.”

“Because the bloody bugs keep biting me and flying up my nose, it’s so irritating.”

“I’ll rub some sun cream on you.”

“Oh if you insist, go here, go there. I’m always being shoved around.”

“I think some fresh air will do you good.”

"You’re not my mother you know.” The dull clunks and mechanical buzz of the electrics could be heard now struggling over the uneven grass of the front lawn.