Three sightings

Three sightings of the devil are not things to be described in writing flippantly or frequently or in the “other interests” sections of a c.v. sent out cold to allegedly potential employers.

Pedro thought this last activity futile, since even employers who were recruiting during a recession, were unlikely to want to take on disabled men in their late fifties. Mention of encounters with symbolic manifestations of evil were unlikely to change this.

He could put them in one of his quasi political blogs, but the superstition would not be welcomed, even if the paranoia was, assuming anyone read it that is, but he ploughed on anyway

Chronologically the first devil sighting was aquatic. One summer off the tip of the Isle of Bute, in Scotland, Pedro saw an iron orca, which was a unsubmerged submarine, sliding up the Clyde silently. In the sunlight with the clear air and the bright water, it could have been a beautiful streamlined marine beast. It could have been beautiful unless one thought, as Pedro did, of what it could have been carrying. It might have been carrying nuclear missiles; sailing around a world that it could end.

Chronologically Pedro’s second sighting was on land, England’s green and peasant one, somewhere between the southern end of the Malvern Hills and Tewkesbury. In the another summer, in an early morning when Pedro was riding a touring bicycle through the back lanes. He turned a corner onto straight stretch of road with flat fields on either side, and about half a mile on, a farmhouse on the right. Pedro cycled on towards this building and saw what he thought was a big black dog sitting upright, mid road.

Pedro had feared dogs ever since a black tongued chow barked in his face when he was a toddler. Whatever deep seated fears might be involved, dogs running out of houses by country roads were a menace to cyclists. They might knock you off your bike or make you suddenly swerve out to avoid them. Pedro sometimes kept a heavy pump or D lock to hand. He kept meaning to get a pot of ground pepper or one of them ultrasonic things to keep in his handlebar bag. However he never deployed or used any of these deterrents.

When dogs came at him barking and snarling, he barked back, shouting and swearing at them or even, if they got close enough, kicking out. The last imperilled a cyclist’s stability and Pedro felt a right twat cycling along shouting, swearing and attempting to kick dogs.

That morning he just wasn’t in the mood for it, the sun was burning mist off the fields but the air was still cold enough to be refreshing. He was not resenting cars yet, since he had yet to see any that day and has blood sugar levels had not yet fallen enough to make him stroppy.

He stopped short of the farm, hoping that someone would come out of it and/or call the dog in. The dog sat immobile. It was black , featureless a silhouette. Pedro it was facing him and looking at him to he was too far off to descry its eyes.

Noises came from behind the farm and a large green tractor drove out onto the road from behind the farm. The dog ran off to the left across the fields, away from the building.

Pedro watched it run, its motion was not like a dog’s, more fluid, less rigid, As the beast ran it was possible to see its tail, which was as long as its body. The beast held its tail in a long curve behind it with the lowest point just above the furrows of the field but with the tip raised and pointing up in a sort of C or J shape.

At the time Pedro thought no more of it than that the dog had gone and that he could cycle on.

It was only about a week later that he replayed what he had seen in his memory and he could see the dog running in the clear air across the field away from the farmhouse, away from the building that any true dog would wish to guard. The long tails behind it with the tip curved up was an appendage that did not belong on any dog’s arse. The shug seen in the clear air was no true dog. Pedro concluded that a big black wild strange cat had crossed his trail.

Chronologically the third sighting was high in the sky. It came almost two decades later than the first. Pedro cycled no more. Arthritis had eaten the tendons inside his knees and no known number of Glucosamine tablets could put them back. Nostalgia and wishful thinking made him keep two bikes in his garage, where he also kept garden tools, a portable combined saw horse and vice, half a sawn up tricycle , four tarpaulins, a wooden dining table tripod, paints, rags and about thirty assorted chunks of timber and stone. Therefore the garage was cluttered. It was also dark and murky because of its corrugated asbestos roof. To let light on or to go out into the garden himself, Pedro had to pen a back door and to do that, he had to wheel out on of his bikes, usually the green painted Dawes Galaxy, and prop it up against the garden fence.

He did this one spring a few days after a volcano had erupted in Iceland. The ash from this volcano had drifted in a huge high invisible cloud over Britain. Fear of the ash cloud and the crashes that it might cause, made all airlines cancel their flights. Millions of profits were lost and as the skies emptied, the radio waves filled with the whingeing of airline entrepreneurs.

The day that Pedro wheeled the bike out was just when some authority had just judged the swifts’ road safe again. So after he had propped up the bike, he looked, to see if he could see the vapour trails again. There were a few beginning to weave a blue and white tartan across London skies again.

And above them all, crossing the sky diagonally, white doughnuts on a rope, a vapour trails higher than and unlike all the others, one that Pedro had only read about in obscure magazines devoted to obscure subjects like sightings of things that could be the evidence of secret aeroplanes. The main part of the strange thing that Pedro saw was a line in the sky like other vapour trails, but along it , at seemingly regular intervals were circular white clouds and in threaded through the middles of them. It was superficially pretty, looking like a child's necklace across the sky and maybe round the world. but what Pedro suspected about it made it seem less cute than it looked. He suspected , and his computer later confirmed this, as far as he was concerned, that it could be the trail of a pulse jet. This powered a plane, his computer told him the most powerful nation in the world could use to show it things which its space satellites were unable to detect. So why was it Flying over London? Was it only flying there today, or was it only visible today because there were fewer airliners than usual making vapour trails below it. Pedro shivered as his brain bathed him in paranoia.

However Pedro might have seen angel once in the form of wild European lynx beside a motorway near Gothenburg when he woke from sleep on the hard bed of that road’s hard shoulder.

INVIGILATOR

INVIGILATOR

Enter an empty room,
put out all the papers
on the desks arranged in rows
write words on a whiteboard
and invite the exam candidates in
cheerily greet them by saying,
“Put your bags at the back,
And turn off your mobile phones.”
Start the exam
And stare And stare And stare
For three hours
I am the eye of authority
For a pittance
I have hired my gaze out
To enforce exam regulations
Exercising petty power
As bureaucratically stipulated
Only allowing one person at a time
To go to the lavatory
After they have put their hand
to request this privilege first
Thus bladders are subjected
To principles of academic freedom
And proper rigour.
And part of this important authority
Is the power to end the exam
Which I do promptly
And collect the papers,
Wipe the whiteboard
and leave the room
Empty again.

Mary the Mare and Billy the Beaver

Mary the Mare lived in a cottage with flowers round the door,
Or she did, until she ate all the flowers.
She asked her friend Billy the Beaver round for tea,
but she had no tea to give him.
So he ate the door
All the way from the ceiling to the floor.
Well he would wouldn’t he?
Because it was wood wasn’t it?
“I hope there’s not too much varnish.” Mary said.
“Nah” (chomp,chomp), said Billy
Then he spat out the hinges and the handles,
And went off leaving a trail of sawdust turds behind him,
Ready to be made into MDF kitchen units.
Mary stared at the world through the empty space where the door had been,
She didn’t even have half a door left to look over,
Thanks to that greedy beaver,
So she felt all unstable,
Suffered from a sudden loss of confidence
And fell over.

The moral of this story is
That we must all pull together and use good British commonsense
Because that’s all we’ll have left soon
Apart from sawdust turds.

someARTWORK2011

A salad day of Fatty Rentamob

Life was like a salad now; once it had been meat and two veg, meat and two veg, meat and two veg, meat and two veg, fish on Fridays and roast on Sundays. A stodgy but nutritious routine of working 40 + hrs a week, 5 out of 7.

Reconsidering this gastronomic analogy, he thought his working years could be compared to the career of a farmed goose in south-western France. Initially he had felt relatively unconstrained. He had had quite a convincing illusion of freedom. He had been able to eat well and they even gave him holidays; but slowly the price that he paid in his labour and freedom for the sums of money regularly going into his bank account increased.

He became more and more discontented, but he had previously worked in shops, factories and on building sites, so he knew that relative to workers in those places, his conditions were good. Sometimes he could just about make himself believe, that as he taught Economics, or Psychology, or Politics: he could be contributing to a counter culture or even, if really deluded, that he was fostering some sort of revolutionary consciousness amongst his students,

When he taught word-processing or some of the gimcrack pro-capitalist garbage that went under the banner of “business studies”, or “world of work” or some other such bullshit name; it was then he knew that he was a wage slave in the wage slave training industry. Over the twenty years that he worked in the College, it was the latter type of work that grew whilst, the former shrank. So to return to the analogy of the French goose, he was still being stuffed with salary stodge, but he had now noticed the funnel down his throat and the fact that his feet were nailed to a board.

Like a force fed goose, he got ill, but unlike that of mature geese, mature human liver was not yet a saleable delicacy so he got ill health retirement instead of being pateed, preserved and tinned.

Since then he had ceased to have a routine. Sometimes bits and pieces of casual employment, or the need to travel, could induce him to pitchfork himself of bed early, even before dawn in the summer if need be. Sometimes electronic bleeping that he had programmed, or more often and urgent need to piss could get him up. He usually wished that he could resume the conversation that he had been having with a great crested grebe in the urinals of Buckingham Palace. Sometimes if the bleeper reached him whilst he has elvisly enthroned asleep on his not tropical hardwood toilet seat, he would open his eyes and his entire flat would seem to move through forty five degrees when realised that he was looking down at his feet which were not sticking out of the end of his bed.

Seizing the time and a tube of athlete’s foot cream from the window sill, he would anoint himself between the toes with this white fungicide. An operation which usually reminded him that human toes were a useless evolutionary dead-end, like the vestigial legs of slow worms. He wrestled with  and swore at bits of attire as he donned them but seldom as much as he did when he took them off again in the evenings.

He seldom went anywhere without a bag ever, but recently his brand new ones had wheels on since his arthritic knees meant that he had to use the shopping trolley that he dragged behind him as a sort of walking stick. He packed this contraption with whatever he thought he might need that day, sometimes if hurried screaming “ Get in the fucking bag!” at recalcitrant objects.

He limped and lumped, down the stairs, the downloaded essential junk out the front door, over the step, down the cracked concrete drive past an urban foxturd. Out the front door turn left, turn right along uneven pavements to the bus stop. Sometimes he returned and made the journey again, if he remembered that he’d forgotten something, like the memorised memory stick that he’d once forgotten that he hadn’t got.

If it was early morning, cold or raining or all three, the people at the stop would often be morose, some almost asleep on their feet and /or conversing softly it languages that he could not understand. On anyone one of seven weekdays, the bus was likely to be full. London had a voracious and continuing appetite for servants to consumers, it sucked in waiters, house painters, cooks, shop assistants, security guards, clerks and all their line managers, like crabs, flatfish and strands of kelp into the blades of a tidal turbine.

Usually he only went has far as the maw of the nearest tube station, he might buy an unhealthy breakfast of biscuits and canned drink, to digest: he also was digested by a metal travelling worm to be cast back onto the surface into a demo, a meeting, a computer room, a library or some other assignation.

On a political day he might end up holding a placard or banner outside some ministry or multinational HQ, or even the Prime Minister’s official residence, often fenced in, by the police portable sections of metal fencing into a sort of political pig-pen. But the political activity he most enjoyed was the start of a big march.

Here he could behave like an extra in a sickening sentimental musical based on a sickening sentimental novel by Charles Dickens.

“Placards! Placards! PLACARDS!” he would shout.

“Git yore Placards, ‘ere! Green party Placards! No demonstration is complete wivaut a PLACARD! Heverey political hactivist needs a PLACARD!”

Sometimes he made up a little song to the tune of “My Way” as sung by Frank Sinatra. His lyrics were quite simple.

“Placards, Placards- Placards,
Puh luh uh-uh, uhhh uh-uh achards
Placards, Placards- Placards
Puh luh uh-uh, uhhh uh-uh ackards
Placards,Placards
Puh luh uh-uh, uhhh uh-uh ackards
Placards, Placards- Placards
Puh luh uh-uh achards!”

In the course of all this singing and shouting, he handed placards to those passing by who were assembling for the demo occasionally, he attempted to foist them on bemused tourists. Sometimes people wanted to take them, Sometimes they didn’t. It seemed to go in phases and he could feel like a loud-mouthed angler standing on the bank of a fast flowing river, filled with migratory fish that would suddenly, and for no apparent reason, voraciously bite bait.

At some point either the placards or the people would run out and his shouting would cease. If the march was slow enough, (and nowadays it seldom was), he might go on it, but usually he took some kind of short cut to its end. This often turned out to be a paved square or an area of grass trampled into flat mud in a park where there would be speeches and pigeon shit.

Speeches at English political demos in the early twenty first century were, as far as he was concerned, empty rituals, usually as irrelevant as biblical psalms, but never as beautiful. Much as he purported to despise the prevalent media driven sound bite culture, he was incapable of listening attentively to even a two minute speech.

Demos were basically big social events, unless there were counter demos or sometimes unless a shadowy powerful person or committee deemed that some sort of symbolic threat to capitalism was being posed via the smashing of a bank’s plate glass windows or the scratching of expensive cars so that roboid cops in riot gear were deployed and push did come to shove. Usually during the speech, the listeners were rather than continuing to struggle, vowing not to give up the fight or keep marching until something or other, deciding which pub to go to and therefore also which ones not to go to.

If the demo was anywhere near central London, the pub was crowded the drink was expensive, the journey back to suburb or province cramped, so the sword went back to sleep in the shopping trolley, the clouds did not unfold and capitalism stayed to be smashed on another salad day.

Dead Harvestman

“I am Sir Nigel Underwater Pocket-Walloper.” Sean said one midwinter morning.

These were the first words that he said after awakening. He said it because awakening was the nearest he ever got to rebirth. In the time between waking and the time when his regular identity was reconfirmed, usually when he logged on to his computer for the first time of the day, he could briefly be, or pretend to be, someone else. Therefore his first utterance was often a self renaming.

He soon forgot his temporary morning identities. There were many, he did not inaugurate one every morning, but he often took one on.

So it was as Sir Nigel Underwater Pocket-Walloper that Sean went that morning to his bathroom to urinate.

He unleashed his steaming yellow stream, (not literally, you understand, as he seldom tied his foreskin tightly or indeed at all). Once he had done this, he cleaned the pan; then deciding that the lavatory cistern was dusty, he wiped it with a piece of toilet tissue and in doing so, he disturbed a spider that had been sitting it its webs that hung beneath the cistern.

The spider was a harvestman, a species of arachnid unlike others in these parts, but if some sadist had pulled its legs off , it would have resembled Sir Nigel since its body was almost perfectly round. Its legs were long, long, long, and longer.

Sir Nigel Underwater Pocket-Walloper was surprised to find it here, he admired its toughness. It was as enterprising as any of the human refugees who frequented this part of London, Sir Nigel thought. He guessed that it was born and raised back in the old long green grass jungle of the back garden, uncultivated as an insult to suburbia.

Here, in the summer it had presumably thrived, eating whatever thrips and droots were a harvestman’s customary fayre. As it sought its harvestman’s lunch, it had moved through the middle reaches of the high grass stems balancing and manoeuvring on its extremely thin limbs, no wider than a technical draughtsperson’s pen line.

Actually it could have been a harvestwoman, and bearing in mind the propensity for spousemunching in some spider species, female might be the more likely spidergender to survive.

Sir Nigel thought that it must somehow have flown to reach the underside of the lavatory cistern in his second floor flat in midwinter. Perhaps fierce autumn gales had picked it up as it clung on for an involuntary hanglide beneath a websail of made its own silk. This flight had, Sir Nigel presumed, taken the harvestman to the ventilation fan in the small shitroom window whence some of the acrid odours of his excretions were wafted and diffused into the suburban atmosphere of this part of North London.

The sight of the live spider under the cistern in midwinter aroused almost contradictory emotions of jealousy and admiration.

He was jealous of the spider, because he wished that he could make a web of strong adhesive silk, but he did not have the necessary glands or metabolism. Had he been able to do so, he might have exuded a vast parachute that could have carried him to the Algarve to drink gallons of gin by the sea in warm weather.

Sir Nigel also surmised that, if he had had an inbuilt web-producing facility, he might have been able to avoid shopping trips. He could, theoretically, have hung a vast web from his kitchen window to the forty foot tall poplar tree that grew at the end of his back garden. However that might have meant subsisting on a diet of pigeons, crows, magpies and the occasional passing seagull. Further more extracting such birds from the web would surely end up being as labour intensive as dragging a shopping trolley to a supermarket.

He guessed that the harvestman ate the small black flies which hovered around his lavatory. When his reflexes were sharp, and a flies reflexes were blunt, Sir Nigel sometimes pulverised one of these insects against the boghouse wall with a swift blow of a toilet roll. He now felt guilty about doing this as it deprived the brave harvestman of a meal.

Why did he anthropomorphically attribute the quality of bravery to the spider? He wondered; it had just blown in and survived a bit, like most other living things round here. Rewarding the spider for the bravery that he accorded to it was, in any case, beyond his scope; after all, pinning a medal to its “chest”, would most likely, be fatal to it; and anyway he had no medal.

He enjoyed such stupid rumination, but it was futile, he had something else to do, he had to log on to his computer and check his emails. This involved consciously taking on the “real” identity of Sean which was the name on his birth certificate, driving license, cheque card, library card, Party membership card etc, etc. As soon as Sean thought of himself as Sean, before he even touched the computer’s keyboard, Sir Nigel Underwater Pocket-Walloper ceased to exist. Sean became Sean and Sir Nigel was erased and totally forgotten.

In future Sean remembered the spider and he knew of his early morning habit of temporarily assuming personas who had silly names, but he could not remember what the names had been. So, as far as Sean was concerned, it could have been that Sir Nigel Underwater Pocket-Walloper was Leornad Spinggy-Pitshanger.

Two weeks later, when the days were imperceptibly longer but perceptibly colder, the Archmandrite Merlot von Liquitab found the harvestman dead, hanging legs up from the tattered web remains beneath the lavatory cistern.

Merlot felt a grief twinge, as he regarded the tiny shrivelled body. He hoped that out there in the ex-lawn beneath a six-inch snow carpet, more spiderlings or eggs survived, perhaps buried or attached to the underside of a leaf or stem. He had no idea how harvestmen overwintered.

Then in May when the grass grew tall, new harvestmen could foray out again to feast in suburban jungle.

A phone rang and the Archmandrite vanished.

Jet necklace

Why did I deserve to see
All the towns and cities and major roads of Italy
Stretched out miles and miles beneath me
Sparkling like the jewellery of a goddess
Against a black velvet night?

And could a poor wage slave scholar
Have ever crossed the mountains and seas
To add pictures to his albums and memories
Of the sun rising from the sea at Skyros
The gardens of Granada,
the Oracle at Delphi,
or the elephants of Sri Lanka.

It has been done once,
But it shouldn’t be done again
To jet a fat fool in an aeroplane
From here to there and back
If the cost of spending a Christmas in Spain
Is drowning and deserts and dying

So fly on fartbags, full of gas
Or travel by sitting on your arse
On the whizzing worm of a high speed train
So walk if you can
And bike if you like
But never fly on a jet again.