Sunday 24 February 2019

Bobbing and Weaving to Focus my Specs on the Sign Warning me of the Aggressive Dog.



Bobbing and weaving to focus my specs on the sign warning me of the aggressive dog that will “definitely bite” I step backwards into a pile of shit.

On the rare occasions that the cold swirling wind dies down it’s quite warm. The cloud cover is not particularly thick, just thick enough to keep the sun from getting through. The wind is whistling through the plastic topiary of the Burton bubble. The innards of the steel lampposts chime against their casings. “Good morning!” Shouts the man in the puffer jacket who is walking a small dog. “Good morning!” I shout back as the fine mist of rain slowly coalesces on the lenses of my glasses and the jackdaws hide away in the belfry.

The life-sized plastic gorilla at the school house now has a baby gorilla sitting on its knee.

I follow the dotted white line of bird-shit that shadows the phone wire and continue up the hill past the apple tree with the shadow of mouldy yellow windfalls.

Above the roof tops in the village, a pair of crows are giving a big red kite a hard time. Directly below them, a man wearing a black gilet and grey jogging pants climbs into a Daihatsu Terios and drives away.

The wind finally dies away and the weather brightens. The couple in gilets who are looking in the window of the sweet shop have been reading out the labels on the jars to each other for about five minutes.

Young whippets, John and Trevor have tied their owner’s legs together with their leads next to the Peugeot 308 with the flat tyres. The big woman who is eating from a polystyrene container with her fingers is laughing at them from the bus stop.

Consecutive windowsill dioramas: 1. Two 4” high models of Castle Hill tower either side of a model of an African elephant of a similar height. 2. A 3” high brass pig (Berkshire?) 3. 12” high ceramic Egyptian cat. 4. Two 4” high ducks wearing Edwardian costume and a slightly taller statuette of Tobermory from the Wombles.

Donna Summer’s Dinner With Gershwin is playing across the shop floor at the Co-op. A man in black combat pants is inspecting a jar of hoisin sauce. He looks very disapprovingly at it, scowling angrily before tossing it into his basket and wandering off up the aisle singing. “I wanna have dinner with Gershwin. I wanna watch Rembrandt sketch. I wanna talk theory with Curie. I wanna get next to you. Next to you, yeah yeah”.

Monday 11 February 2019

Caught by the River Calder

I'll be reading from The Most difficult Thing Ever / Round About Town at this Caught by the River event at the Trades Club in Hebden Bridge, West Yorks on March 30th. 

"Caught by the River Calder, taking place at the Trades Club, Hebden Bridge on Saturday 30thMarch 2019, is split into two separate events – a daytime session centred around readings and conversations from some of our favourite writers, poets and long-time contributors – and an evening event focusing on music and field recordings, with performances by Hannah Peel & Will Burns and Erland Cooper. Heavenly Jukebox DJs will play between and after the musicians and into the night."