I suppose, but hope never to know personally, a paradigm shift in human activity. I mean the sort of drastic change an IED or high velocity weapon might make to a fighter in one of silly wars now going on. Two legs to no legs say, just now wheels and levers and springs can restore some things, but you will not unlike some physically simple lizard, or see the like of that leg again. Not really.
I might have been unlikely to shear off a limb in my previous profession, lecturing, unless in the trowel trades, was physically very safe “most” of “us” aren’t usually expecting to die going to and from the 9 to 5.
Nowadays “it”, progressive decline in physical capacities and capabilities, is likely to creep on us slow, and we may not notice until we have to begin to make compromises.
Today, if I wanted to walk up the road that I live on and get a quarter of a mile up a suburban hill to the doctors’ surgery at the other end, I reckon that I’d have to stop briefly twenty times or so to rest, standing, propping myself against garden fences, pillars, bark peeling urban plane trees and other miscellaneous bits of street furniture. In May 2010 I could manage this modest promenade unaided, by September I would be nearly out of breath every time that I stopped. I would fear falling if I tried to push myself on even a few more paces before stopping.
It is now also tough for me to get back up to standing if I fall. I can roll over onto one side, get onto hands and knees but, without support to pull myself upright I’ m liable to stay down there amongst all them crawlers as if I had somehow unevolved.
Perhaps unevolution is what is happening, instead of sudden dramatic changes to some sort of human supremacy, a slow tide of blubber inexorably rises up the food chain and down again bringing an assorted flotsam of disease and unease with it.
Don’t mean to knock blubber though, it does suit several cetaceans fine and I’m sure lights and heats well planned fat festivals in the far far north.
There have also been artistic hymns or projects devoted to the benefice of that fat. I know of how to German artist Joseph Bueys portrayed and used the lard and felt that saved him after a plane crash in a Russian war.
Fat is fine as fuel, and how much resources of fuel to carry us is always a judgement call and many hikers and cyclists always carry a bit of food and drink just in case of bonk, injury, exhaustion or the weather closing down on the open moor. However only insane persons hike cairngorms carrying whole dead cows on their backs, they might experience a moment of warmth as the huge lump of dead cattle collapsed on top of them as their knees gave. And then be smothered to maggots’ meat under crows’ beaks.
If we’re carrying more fat that we can mobilise and use then we lose, but it’s tough if you don’t carry enough.
This slogan is for sale to passing lard makers.
TRAINSPOTTING IS OUT
Hospitalisation can reduce you to bus-spotting
This is not a hobby that I have followed since before my puberty
Then to demarcate my burgeoning character
Perhaps to establish myself as slightly, but “warmly” eccentric,
(Although not actually insane)
I refrained from spotting trains.
There were steamers in them days
Roaring out of London to Brighton on special occasions
Down the cutting out of Clapham Junction
Fire on the footplates and sparks in the sky
This was the dawning of the end of age of Cuneo,
You know that oil painter producer bloke
Who used to make depictions of such things as
“The Royal Constitution hauling a Pullman out of Victoria”
And he’d paint a little mouse sitting in
One corner of his vast throbbing steam engine porn canvas
Even then I knew
That It was much better to watch the
Ordered proletarian movement of buses
Than such Tory farrago
Mind you this predated the RMT’s
(Which Red Ken and new-fangled modernists depict as the traditional London bus),
Thinner knife like RTL's sliced down London roads
And a last herd of hissing clanging electric trams
Hung on in in the Finsbury park tundra
Like a herd of mammoths calling out subsonically to extinct kin
Whilst none existed nearer than Blackpool
Everything always reeked of nicotine
All parts of public transport
Were like moving human kipper factories
No wonder fifty years later
That my longs are shot
I used to travel around on that lot
And filled my tubes
On smoke filled tubes too
So now this is what I am reduced to
Bus spotting through a hospital window.
UNDERGROUND DISASTERS
Two disasters always come to my mind as I leave the surface grid behind and descend into the Tube. I feel that I should feel safe down the tube like most Londoners do. It’s our transport system; it was almost a womb where deep shelterers returned to sleep out fascist bombardments.
That’s a decade before my birth, of course and there have never been bombs since in quite the same way; the acts of attempted terror that there have been, have been almost random, aimed at symbolic impact and apparently directed by an ignoramus as though a surgeon was using a blowlamp to mend the circulation of a snowman.
No consolation of course if you or yours were one of the poor people next to the rucksack bombs, but there doesn’t, (thank god/s), seem to be any satanic will intent on exterminating us all forever. The tube is generally safe. Unsavoury but safe, yet two incidents stand out for me.
They are the Moorgate crash and the Kings Cross fire.
Nobody really knows what happened in the former
On 28 February 1975 a southbound Northern line tube train smashed into buffers at Moorgate station, in the tunnel end beyond the platform. The cars sandwiched, killing 46 people with 74 seriously injured. Some are still saying driver suicide, some argue for tiredness causing an industrial accident and there may be other explanations.
In the case of Kings Cross some would name the culprit as the ignited end of a cigarette or a match, but it could have been a burning pipe dottle or cigar butt. And whoever dropped the burning item is unlikely to have been responsible for accumulating several decades worth of grease, lint, shreds of paper and skin detritus that were left to marinade together under a wooden escalator a major railway terminus and interchange. In summary The King's Cross fire broke out on 18 November 1987, and killed 31 people. The fire started in an escalator shaft serving the Piccadilly Line, which was burnt out along with the top level of the deep-level tube station.
So why harp on about these two instances of terrible incompetence? why do I remember them? perhaps that it’s hard to like voluntarily going down a hole in the ground when the sun is shining up above? (or even when it isn’t?)
Or maybe that on the night of Kings Cross, a cyclist got rained off the road in a downpour and wished he had had the sense to leave his Dawes Super galaxy in the garage and also had parked himself on a warm dry train. That is he wished that until he stumbled sodden into a pub lounge and saw the news on the Lounge bar telly.
Wounds heal, but some Londoners probably still remember these meanings of Moorgate and Kings Cross. Another sky rises for survivors, who make whatever compromises that they can. Leaves grow again on trees, trees grow again in woods and some song birds sing some songs. Only in the case of London it was sometime around the 1970’s and ‘80’s that house sparrows vanished or began vanishing.
Being a really crap amateur ornithologist, much too fond of descending into tube tunnels in search of money and re-emerging dead drunk; the author can form no clear recollection of when he realised that house sparrows had gone. He penned a mawkish ode to this avian absence at some point in the 1990’s, but looking, back, realises that the little birds could have been on the way out long before that.
Father had a big semi-detached in the then posh end of Fulham, near Putney Bridge, Hurlingham, he annoyingly insisted in calling it. Before I left to train as a psuedo-marxist at Portsmouth Polytechnic in 1970, I can remember every late spring and summer, going round the side and back passages of the house shovelling up dead sparrow fledglings, broken eggs and nest fragments that had fallen from the eaves above. I repainted the whole house in about 1981 and can’t remember evicting sparrows then, but the annoying tory stock broker, who lived next door, had a nest of House Martins up in his gables. They left piles of excrement in his front garden as a practical per-cursor of eco-socialism. but I don’take this cheap political point merely in fishing around for some kind of link between House Sparrow disappearance and the unburying of Chilean miners in October 2010.
Ah, I know human caused climate change! There it is
Except that what I might have here is some sort of poetic analogy about re-emergence from underground into a different world and/or wandering about in a state of pissed self-obsession for a couple of decades, getting old whilst global eco-political tides don’t sleep.
There area gaps in this and possibly small colonies of house sparrows still around in London live in them. I can think of a couple of places where I can regularly expect to find them which don’t seem markedly different to most of the places where I don’t, unless I am being subjected to systematic deception by very similar Tree sparrows that are unassociated with the Chilean mine disaster of 2010, which, as a piece of conceptual art was something else.
Most of the TV footage was actually of a winch-wheel revolving on top of a steel tripod again a background of barren Atacama mountainside.
I have a really short attention span as far as really conceptual art is concerned. Say: “this is a Pipe”, or “this is an Oak tree” and can undefinitely respond immediately “Yes/no, On/off” just like a cat in a box.
If someone had made a video installation of the Chilean mine rescue and stuck it in a corner of the Tate Modern or somewhere, I doubt if I’d have managed even to pay three minutes attention to it. I’d rather look out of the window at the barges on the river Thames, and think about shit.
Having observed and conceptually considered these vessels I could then compare and contrast them with the events which fascinated me when I watched the Chilean mine rescue on TV.
In both cases I can see containers, carefully made and designed to be strong, secure and not to break, fracture or leak; being transported with the aim of keeping the contacts in tact to a place where the way in which these contents exist, physically and socially, can be changed.
The cargoes of those Thames barges that being towed seawards is literally being rubbished, that decision was probably made for most of it when Londoners threw it away before it even got to the barges, but somewhere up the estuary, east of Canary Wharf the barge cargoes may get uploaded and sorted, some of them end up in the holds of freighters with opening bottoms, built especially so that Londoners can take a collective dump somewhere out in the North sea.
In hospital waiting rooms, pubs and cafes along the Edgware Road (the old Roman Watling street, a major artery of London), I watch the Chilean wheel turning, slowly. Had a Goldsmith’s artrepreneur devised this as artwork, there might not have a continuing long stream of not quite inconsequential verbiage about such things as mining in Chile and South America in general, who was President of Chile, who was President of Bolivia etc, etc. Then there was a change and what the winch was hauling up came up out of the Shaft. A long thin metal cylinder, which was, (according to the commentators, or an interviewed expert), just wide enough to take a man inside. An external diameter of just 54 cms (21 inches) according to the Telegraph on line , a factoid that made me, a fat man up on the surface fearful.
Maybe on the first couple of ascents, the TV did not show actual rescued miners emerging, but once it seemed clear that the the winch was going to bring the men out alive, then they were shown.
Their journey and destination was the opposite of the Thames barges. They were being de-rubbished. They had been buried in the ground, were found and were now being resurrected. It was not just upward physical, but social, mobility as well. They went down the pit as ordinary miners who no-one particularly knew of or attended to and emerged as celebrities who might never have to work again.
Sadly a piece of conceptual art is a bit of a one-trick pony, (as opposed to conceptual art as a whole, probably initiated by Magritte and/or Duchamp and then repeated by ignoramuses uneducated at Goldsmiths in the early 2oth century). The idea of burying chambers full of people under the Tate Modern for a month and then winching them up one by one to be the focus of some sort of ceremony would be a winch winder and maybe a money spinner. Participants could perhaps be awarded something for not striking by Margaret Thatcher or more likely by Jordan.
Wednesday, November 03, 2010
ZIMINICHE
Some human societies seem to create bureaucracies in a similar way to that in which ants, termites wasps and bees make their swarm cities. Human bureaucracies can correspond with physical locations, but as Max Weber, who originally analysed them, pointed out, they are maps of social positions.
In their physical and pyscho-social forms they always entail niches, cul-de-sacs, temporarily blocked off short cuts, footbridges over railway Branch lines and back passage connections that are often too narrow for any passing police car to chase down.
Sometimes such locations are made to facilitate resistance to control. Accounts of Victorian London Slum rookeries tell of ceiling, loft and cellar walls knocked through between adjoining houses to create rat-runs for thieves.
But many of these odd bits of topology are not always so sinisterly and subversively made. Things can exist because of almost unintended consequences, because we always cut through the allotments here, or we put in another space, shed or street because there was some spare room here which could not be let left waste when money or some kind of accommodation could be made.
I’m sitting writing in the corner of a ward of a big London suburban hospital where I am an inpatient. I think that I know the name of the hospital or at least the name that most people round the area call it, if, say, they want to get a bus there.
However, you can never be too sure since at various stages of growth and/or contraction, bureaucracies may graft bits of themselves onto or into each other, like mistletoe onto oaks. So you could think that you’d been sitting in the General Ward of Central Teddington Hospital and you could be, but the chair and workstation that you use could be part of the Community Outreach Unit of South East Essex trust, or something.
You can never be quite sure where you are, what you are going to do, or what you are supposed to do, let alone why.
Further layers of medicinal and /or psychotropic confusion may be added then disorientation can easily result, I’m sitting writing in the corner of a ward of a big London suburban hospital where I am an inpatient. I think, and when I came out of sleep it took me quite along while to figure out that this was so. The walls are grey and featureless, the room is sectioned off into areas partitioned from each other by greyish pale plastic curtains which are probably washable and carry some sort of pink repeated design.
Each section contains an expensive mechanically adjustable bed with some chairs and tables placed closely by, so it is a holding institution of some kind, maybe? Most of the room’s occupants are male, but a woman enters wheeling a metal tripod trolley that carries electronic devices. She wheels it between curtains into one of the alcoves to stand over a supine male who is lying on one of the beds. One of her machines makes a loud metallic click.
“Three point seven.” She calls out.
“That’s low.” Someone else replies.
You can wake to dawns and wonder where you are.
“You” may be spark out, but your body monitor can be ticking over and maintaining your position, jerking your head back every time that it has slumped forwards. Practise this skill well enough and you could be able to sleep on your feet. Maybe if you swam like a whale you could sleep in the sea, (drifting off the Azores between squid hunts); but you ain't, so you can’t.
And then again holding the orientation of a semi-conscious body is about positioning a physically real object in physically real space and time; but we all also use mind-maps, dredging up the flimsiest associations between strange places where we are now and strange places where we might once have been.
You can wake believing that you are on a wide stone terrace, with beds laid out on interspersed stone buttresses, and creepers growing up and around the masonry. Everything is oriented to face the same way, which is contrary to some “badness” and for some “good” facing in the opposite direction.
You awake in the last echoes of a cry or chant that you feel that “nearly everyone else” (of who?) has been singing, as they were despatched somewhere, to ‘fight the good fight’. I in fact, you have no idea who “they” were or “where” they went or why. You only know that it was Very Good; they set off gleaming and courageous.
They may have been the “Few” and it could be that you have just missed “Our Finest Hour” and that this omission caps a career that has been devoted devotedly to inept and precisely timed inadequacy.
You can’t quite believe in yourself, you feel that you could have been preparing for this moment for all of your life. You ask someone who is standing there where you are.
“Where am I? I am totally disoriented.” You say.
“I am the sister in charge of the Intensive Care Ward of South Twyford Hospital. You are a patient on the ward, you were admitted yesterday.” She replies.
It all shrinks back, the creepers, the bastions, the battlements, the Mission have all gone. You are in an untidy ground floor grey formica building with plastic curtains with faint pink stripes on them.
Memories of last night return, you spent a sleepless night on a ward bed between two noisy old men who both repeatedly spoke words in languages unknown, (not phrases or sentences, just words and pairs of words). They bubbled their breath through the saliva that they are expectorating so that it accumulates in the curves of transparent plastic tubes, sometimes sounding as loud as boiling metal porridge pots.
You are a number in a med shed and you hope that you have a lot of waiting to do before you start singing the song of the sputum stew.
The Song Of The Sputum Stew.
Alone with two companions,
I must make
The passage that I can and must
Through small grey hours
Sat in a hospital ward
Next to an empty car park.
Under a red metallic sky
That echoes back miles of urban light,
Like an upturned frying pan
And there’s no sound to break the still of the night
Other than
The bubbling sound of human breath
Being percolated through the spittle
Collecting in the bottom of a curve
In the plastic tube
Doing and old man’s breathing
Through a breathing machine.
Detained by illness and poverty
I sit too
With Robert Burns and William Blake
Contained in slim volumes
Who now assist
me to make a fist
of coping with this long, long occasion.
“Mind forg’d manacles” William reminds
Are the strongest kind and the ones that keep me here.
But he doesn’t bring his Tyger
To melt the Hospital linoleum and
Warm my cold cracked feet.
Which do mean fear now
For into the carpark, I won’t go
To lie like a beast with nest overturned
By plough blade
I could be homeless
And lie shivering
Not sleeping like a policeman
Waiting to be taken in the warm at A&E.
Unless a zealous consultant came by
With his not quite chorus
Of not quite totally eager medical students
To whom he could expound
A homily on the virtues of thinness
over my lardy body
Proclaiming “yaY!”
“yaY, People “yaY!”
“Get Barry,
Get Barry
Get Barry
Atric today!
If you don’t do this
Then you will be as I portray
And get as obese as this
Fat bastard here
Who just sat on his couch
And digested himself
To cubby heaven or hell
Whilst we the thin live on
To fly like camels through needles’ eyes
Until we become
Tightly clenched hairs
Round a thin saviour’s bum.”
5 Flocks: Pigeons, Seagulls, Finches, Parakeets, Mallards
As Phillip Zimbardo, showed when he ran his famed simulated Prison experiment in California; it doesn’t take much in the way of social labelling and reinforcement to drive people stir crazy with instutionalisation.
I've seen five flocks over the wasteland and car park outside my ward window since, by seventh day in the general ward of this hospital and I’m starting to get the creeping Zimbardos.
One indication of this is the ornithological notes that I have written and append below.
Others are that I feel that I am detained here, under slightly false pretences and by slightly disingenuous means, (although I believe that I might be able to discharge myself against medical advice if push came to shove).One reason that I tell myself that I am staying is that some of my personal valuables are, apparently, irrevocably in the Hospital safe for the duration of this weekend, which makes it just too much hassle to do a runner and come back, especially if it could, as some events detailed below suggest, involve entanglement in the bureaucratic barbed wire trap of discharging and re-admitting myself.
I’m beginning to show analogies to zoo cage pacing bear behaviour and obsess about gowns and masculinity.
I go over to the lavatory to get some tissues in order to go back there and throw them away again; I repeatedly don and divest myself of my fleece jacket and waistcoat, moving different objects between different pockets so that I can lose them after I’ve found them.
And then there are the gowns. I am a fat man wearing two hospital gowns because one isn’t big enough for me. They hang loose from my gut down to half way up my ankles. At least the ones that I currently, wear, unlike a previous pair that I have some got onto my house, do not have the word ‘Hospital property’ emblazoned all over them, in a small blue font repetitively. They are merely spotted all over with a tiny repeated logo which makes the provenance of the garments very obvious.
According to currently dress conventions and parameters set by physical possibility, trousers can be super imposed over gowns or sub imposed under them. Or gowns can be worn without trousers or trousers without gowns.
Gowns may have been macho and a high social status in cold flag-floored Tudor palaces, to indicate to FatKing HenryWales which prelate or divine to decapitate next; but as Phil Zim grasped, they are now suitable twentieth or twenty-first century signifiers of masculinity for wear in suburban London Supermarkets.
When Zimbardo wished to dress the simulated prisoners in his experiment in a way which might speed the undermining of their pre imprisonment senses of themselves, he dressed men in gowns. When he wished to experiment with enhancing the macho authoritarian aspects of the guard role that he allocated to some in his experiment, he dressed his ‘guards’ in black and gave them shades to hide behind.
When it comes to the way in which humane, human rights respecting rules of a twenty-first century British general hospital are enabled and enacted by guards, who could have been coutured by Zimbardo himself, may attempt to prevent a patient trying to hide his gowns, (and the symbolic undermining of the feeble bastions of his masculinity), beneath his trousers; from shopping in a local Supermarket.
The whole exercise was justified by some spurious urban myth about drug dealers rushing to whack cannula wearing patients straight the veins via the cannulas taped and plugged into their hands and forearms instead of spending more than £40 worth of vouchers in the aisles.
So fulminating about the privatisation of public space and a tendency for, Supermarkets to impose crass and petty censorship of political expression in the verges and car parks that they now claimed to control it is possible to stare at birds through ward windows.
And see five flocks
1) The pigeons, (or to be pedantically accurate the feral rock doves), seemed to form a loose and shifting coalitions numbering maybe fifteen birds maximum. The mainly walk pigeononically, with sudden and frequent bouts of head-nodding and bobbing down to peck at something on the carpark tarmac. What can his be? Is someone leaving grain out for them in just the top north east quadrant of the car park? That’s where they mostly are and that’s where the mostly seem to head toward and walk towards. There’s no fence or organised pigeonherders around them, and they can move at will, (or to human eyes, seemingly at random), but this is their predominant pattern of movement. Sometimes there are only a few in the car park, maybe a half-dozen or so: others may fly over and then land to join them. perhaps due to a deep political flock fissure, a smaller sub flock can sometimes split off and fly away, but the flock as a whole seems to comprise a pecking coalition, always moving along the ground, always pecking pecking pecking, never reneging on the eventual triumph of international urban pigeondom.
2) Seagulls, probably urbanised herring gulls are the most beautiful flyers here. Some glide over from the south east maintaining a height of about fifteen feet, inclining aerodynamic bodies and knife-like wing tips and beaks so that individuals each pick up new and differing air currents that t sometimes turn back in the direction that the flock is coming from. This means that the flock interweaves round on itself quartering and re-scanning ground it has passed over, scouring for food. Nothing today, so no unseeingly screaming white fathered vortex forms pecking over the remains of a discarded take away. The flock silently flies on.
3) Finch flocking, (as I now nominate it), is strangest of all. I had no bins (binoculars), so could not see, what all the little birds might be, in their rapidly changing crowds moving like breeze-blown smoke. Probably a mixed bunch of seed eaters: long tailed tits, great tits, blue tits, coal tits, green finches, gold finches; whizzing at speed across suburban gardens, road verges and along canal edges. This time of year (late autumn, early winter) fifty finches in a flock can descend on berry bushes, feed quickly and move on, leaving stones skins and shit stains and uneaten fruit and no stragglers for any hawk to hunt. It may be an anthropometric explanation, but these guys aren’t top of any food chain; round here it’s gulls and crows fighting to be top flying dogs of overlapping food niches. And I wouldn’t say that finches live in fear but they don’t stop around long enough to fight or pray to be a hawk’s breakfast by day or an owl’s supper at night.
Their flocks whirl like smoke against pink London sunset and suddenly change direction like a sheet or a sail wrapped around a pole by a blast of high wind. Almost all of the finch flock seem to cotton on and follow instantly or maybe they all simultaneously all forge the same lead at once. In a new direction they can all swoop down to be birdstream inches above the rubbled surface of wasteland before rising high up again as though a living sail had been whistled to another boat and was hoisting itself up a new mast.
A man with a throwing net and some cages to sell songbirds in might cope, if he was fast and made some lucky throws. But any avian predator round here would be onto a bum steer. The chances of catching an individual finch from the rapidly twisting flock are zero minus. The whole flock would probably easily twist and turn away and the hawk, that wasn’t here any way, would survive unfed.
4: Parakeets: About twenty flew across the cat park from North West to southeast, straight line in a flock which could have been splitting with a wing of twelve leading I line and a bunch of twelve following, fast, straight and low, maybe to roosts in big tress in the parklands along the Thames valley.
5: Mallards: The fifth flock, about fifteen mallards making an s –shaped tracked flight about fifty feet above the car park from north west to the east, maybe broadly following the canal along towards Little Venice basin.
In their physical and pyscho-social forms they always entail niches, cul-de-sacs, temporarily blocked off short cuts, footbridges over railway Branch lines and back passage connections that are often too narrow for any passing police car to chase down.
Sometimes such locations are made to facilitate resistance to control. Accounts of Victorian London Slum rookeries tell of ceiling, loft and cellar walls knocked through between adjoining houses to create rat-runs for thieves.
But many of these odd bits of topology are not always so sinisterly and subversively made. Things can exist because of almost unintended consequences, because we always cut through the allotments here, or we put in another space, shed or street because there was some spare room here which could not be let left waste when money or some kind of accommodation could be made.
I’m sitting writing in the corner of a ward of a big London suburban hospital where I am an inpatient. I think that I know the name of the hospital or at least the name that most people round the area call it, if, say, they want to get a bus there.
However, you can never be too sure since at various stages of growth and/or contraction, bureaucracies may graft bits of themselves onto or into each other, like mistletoe onto oaks. So you could think that you’d been sitting in the General Ward of Central Teddington Hospital and you could be, but the chair and workstation that you use could be part of the Community Outreach Unit of South East Essex trust, or something.
You can never be quite sure where you are, what you are going to do, or what you are supposed to do, let alone why.
Further layers of medicinal and /or psychotropic confusion may be added then disorientation can easily result, I’m sitting writing in the corner of a ward of a big London suburban hospital where I am an inpatient. I think, and when I came out of sleep it took me quite along while to figure out that this was so. The walls are grey and featureless, the room is sectioned off into areas partitioned from each other by greyish pale plastic curtains which are probably washable and carry some sort of pink repeated design.
Each section contains an expensive mechanically adjustable bed with some chairs and tables placed closely by, so it is a holding institution of some kind, maybe? Most of the room’s occupants are male, but a woman enters wheeling a metal tripod trolley that carries electronic devices. She wheels it between curtains into one of the alcoves to stand over a supine male who is lying on one of the beds. One of her machines makes a loud metallic click.
“Three point seven.” She calls out.
“That’s low.” Someone else replies.
You can wake to dawns and wonder where you are.
“You” may be spark out, but your body monitor can be ticking over and maintaining your position, jerking your head back every time that it has slumped forwards. Practise this skill well enough and you could be able to sleep on your feet. Maybe if you swam like a whale you could sleep in the sea, (drifting off the Azores between squid hunts); but you ain't, so you can’t.
And then again holding the orientation of a semi-conscious body is about positioning a physically real object in physically real space and time; but we all also use mind-maps, dredging up the flimsiest associations between strange places where we are now and strange places where we might once have been.
You can wake believing that you are on a wide stone terrace, with beds laid out on interspersed stone buttresses, and creepers growing up and around the masonry. Everything is oriented to face the same way, which is contrary to some “badness” and for some “good” facing in the opposite direction.
You awake in the last echoes of a cry or chant that you feel that “nearly everyone else” (of who?) has been singing, as they were despatched somewhere, to ‘fight the good fight’. I in fact, you have no idea who “they” were or “where” they went or why. You only know that it was Very Good; they set off gleaming and courageous.
They may have been the “Few” and it could be that you have just missed “Our Finest Hour” and that this omission caps a career that has been devoted devotedly to inept and precisely timed inadequacy.
You can’t quite believe in yourself, you feel that you could have been preparing for this moment for all of your life. You ask someone who is standing there where you are.
“Where am I? I am totally disoriented.” You say.
“I am the sister in charge of the Intensive Care Ward of South Twyford Hospital. You are a patient on the ward, you were admitted yesterday.” She replies.
It all shrinks back, the creepers, the bastions, the battlements, the Mission have all gone. You are in an untidy ground floor grey formica building with plastic curtains with faint pink stripes on them.
Memories of last night return, you spent a sleepless night on a ward bed between two noisy old men who both repeatedly spoke words in languages unknown, (not phrases or sentences, just words and pairs of words). They bubbled their breath through the saliva that they are expectorating so that it accumulates in the curves of transparent plastic tubes, sometimes sounding as loud as boiling metal porridge pots.
You are a number in a med shed and you hope that you have a lot of waiting to do before you start singing the song of the sputum stew.
The Song Of The Sputum Stew.
Alone with two companions,
I must make
The passage that I can and must
Through small grey hours
Sat in a hospital ward
Next to an empty car park.
Under a red metallic sky
That echoes back miles of urban light,
Like an upturned frying pan
And there’s no sound to break the still of the night
Other than
The bubbling sound of human breath
Being percolated through the spittle
Collecting in the bottom of a curve
In the plastic tube
Doing and old man’s breathing
Through a breathing machine.
Detained by illness and poverty
I sit too
With Robert Burns and William Blake
Contained in slim volumes
Who now assist
me to make a fist
of coping with this long, long occasion.
“Mind forg’d manacles” William reminds
Are the strongest kind and the ones that keep me here.
But he doesn’t bring his Tyger
To melt the Hospital linoleum and
Warm my cold cracked feet.
Which do mean fear now
For into the carpark, I won’t go
To lie like a beast with nest overturned
By plough blade
I could be homeless
And lie shivering
Not sleeping like a policeman
Waiting to be taken in the warm at A&E.
Unless a zealous consultant came by
With his not quite chorus
Of not quite totally eager medical students
To whom he could expound
A homily on the virtues of thinness
over my lardy body
Proclaiming “yaY!”
“yaY, People “yaY!”
“Get Barry,
Get Barry
Get Barry
Atric today!
If you don’t do this
Then you will be as I portray
And get as obese as this
Fat bastard here
Who just sat on his couch
And digested himself
To cubby heaven or hell
Whilst we the thin live on
To fly like camels through needles’ eyes
Until we become
Tightly clenched hairs
Round a thin saviour’s bum.”
5 Flocks: Pigeons, Seagulls, Finches, Parakeets, Mallards
As Phillip Zimbardo, showed when he ran his famed simulated Prison experiment in California; it doesn’t take much in the way of social labelling and reinforcement to drive people stir crazy with instutionalisation.
I've seen five flocks over the wasteland and car park outside my ward window since, by seventh day in the general ward of this hospital and I’m starting to get the creeping Zimbardos.
One indication of this is the ornithological notes that I have written and append below.
Others are that I feel that I am detained here, under slightly false pretences and by slightly disingenuous means, (although I believe that I might be able to discharge myself against medical advice if push came to shove).One reason that I tell myself that I am staying is that some of my personal valuables are, apparently, irrevocably in the Hospital safe for the duration of this weekend, which makes it just too much hassle to do a runner and come back, especially if it could, as some events detailed below suggest, involve entanglement in the bureaucratic barbed wire trap of discharging and re-admitting myself.
I’m beginning to show analogies to zoo cage pacing bear behaviour and obsess about gowns and masculinity.
I go over to the lavatory to get some tissues in order to go back there and throw them away again; I repeatedly don and divest myself of my fleece jacket and waistcoat, moving different objects between different pockets so that I can lose them after I’ve found them.
And then there are the gowns. I am a fat man wearing two hospital gowns because one isn’t big enough for me. They hang loose from my gut down to half way up my ankles. At least the ones that I currently, wear, unlike a previous pair that I have some got onto my house, do not have the word ‘Hospital property’ emblazoned all over them, in a small blue font repetitively. They are merely spotted all over with a tiny repeated logo which makes the provenance of the garments very obvious.
According to currently dress conventions and parameters set by physical possibility, trousers can be super imposed over gowns or sub imposed under them. Or gowns can be worn without trousers or trousers without gowns.
Gowns may have been macho and a high social status in cold flag-floored Tudor palaces, to indicate to FatKing HenryWales which prelate or divine to decapitate next; but as Phil Zim grasped, they are now suitable twentieth or twenty-first century signifiers of masculinity for wear in suburban London Supermarkets.
When Zimbardo wished to dress the simulated prisoners in his experiment in a way which might speed the undermining of their pre imprisonment senses of themselves, he dressed men in gowns. When he wished to experiment with enhancing the macho authoritarian aspects of the guard role that he allocated to some in his experiment, he dressed his ‘guards’ in black and gave them shades to hide behind.
When it comes to the way in which humane, human rights respecting rules of a twenty-first century British general hospital are enabled and enacted by guards, who could have been coutured by Zimbardo himself, may attempt to prevent a patient trying to hide his gowns, (and the symbolic undermining of the feeble bastions of his masculinity), beneath his trousers; from shopping in a local Supermarket.
The whole exercise was justified by some spurious urban myth about drug dealers rushing to whack cannula wearing patients straight the veins via the cannulas taped and plugged into their hands and forearms instead of spending more than £40 worth of vouchers in the aisles.
So fulminating about the privatisation of public space and a tendency for, Supermarkets to impose crass and petty censorship of political expression in the verges and car parks that they now claimed to control it is possible to stare at birds through ward windows.
And see five flocks
1) The pigeons, (or to be pedantically accurate the feral rock doves), seemed to form a loose and shifting coalitions numbering maybe fifteen birds maximum. The mainly walk pigeononically, with sudden and frequent bouts of head-nodding and bobbing down to peck at something on the carpark tarmac. What can his be? Is someone leaving grain out for them in just the top north east quadrant of the car park? That’s where they mostly are and that’s where the mostly seem to head toward and walk towards. There’s no fence or organised pigeonherders around them, and they can move at will, (or to human eyes, seemingly at random), but this is their predominant pattern of movement. Sometimes there are only a few in the car park, maybe a half-dozen or so: others may fly over and then land to join them. perhaps due to a deep political flock fissure, a smaller sub flock can sometimes split off and fly away, but the flock as a whole seems to comprise a pecking coalition, always moving along the ground, always pecking pecking pecking, never reneging on the eventual triumph of international urban pigeondom.
2) Seagulls, probably urbanised herring gulls are the most beautiful flyers here. Some glide over from the south east maintaining a height of about fifteen feet, inclining aerodynamic bodies and knife-like wing tips and beaks so that individuals each pick up new and differing air currents that t sometimes turn back in the direction that the flock is coming from. This means that the flock interweaves round on itself quartering and re-scanning ground it has passed over, scouring for food. Nothing today, so no unseeingly screaming white fathered vortex forms pecking over the remains of a discarded take away. The flock silently flies on.
3) Finch flocking, (as I now nominate it), is strangest of all. I had no bins (binoculars), so could not see, what all the little birds might be, in their rapidly changing crowds moving like breeze-blown smoke. Probably a mixed bunch of seed eaters: long tailed tits, great tits, blue tits, coal tits, green finches, gold finches; whizzing at speed across suburban gardens, road verges and along canal edges. This time of year (late autumn, early winter) fifty finches in a flock can descend on berry bushes, feed quickly and move on, leaving stones skins and shit stains and uneaten fruit and no stragglers for any hawk to hunt. It may be an anthropometric explanation, but these guys aren’t top of any food chain; round here it’s gulls and crows fighting to be top flying dogs of overlapping food niches. And I wouldn’t say that finches live in fear but they don’t stop around long enough to fight or pray to be a hawk’s breakfast by day or an owl’s supper at night.
Their flocks whirl like smoke against pink London sunset and suddenly change direction like a sheet or a sail wrapped around a pole by a blast of high wind. Almost all of the finch flock seem to cotton on and follow instantly or maybe they all simultaneously all forge the same lead at once. In a new direction they can all swoop down to be birdstream inches above the rubbled surface of wasteland before rising high up again as though a living sail had been whistled to another boat and was hoisting itself up a new mast.
A man with a throwing net and some cages to sell songbirds in might cope, if he was fast and made some lucky throws. But any avian predator round here would be onto a bum steer. The chances of catching an individual finch from the rapidly twisting flock are zero minus. The whole flock would probably easily twist and turn away and the hawk, that wasn’t here any way, would survive unfed.
4: Parakeets: About twenty flew across the cat park from North West to southeast, straight line in a flock which could have been splitting with a wing of twelve leading I line and a bunch of twelve following, fast, straight and low, maybe to roosts in big tress in the parklands along the Thames valley.
5: Mallards: The fifth flock, about fifteen mallards making an s –shaped tracked flight about fifty feet above the car park from north west to the east, maybe broadly following the canal along towards Little Venice basin.
Tuesday, November 02, 2010
HUTCHED
The airport workers are hutched in rows around the outskirts of Gatwick in southern England and some of these rows are arranged round big spiritual sheds, built large enough to house small airliners.
Weddings can be launched to heaven from these buildings. Up into lower middle horizons; complete with sunsets, palm trees, parakeets, sandy strands and fluttering, cherubically winged, cherubic babies, (usually allocated at a rate of 2.5 per (usually heterosexual) couple).
It was a wet day throughout, initially, the strangely suited man could not find the correct shed for the marital lift off that he had been invited to attend, even with satellite assisted assistance from a local taxi driver.
He shuffled around across the rear lawns of the spiritual sheds attracting rain drops to his person from recently planted orange and red leaved ornamental trees. He crept into the latecomers’ area at the back of the congregation who were just rendering “Amazing Grace” anaemic, having realised that they mostly lacked the conviction to sing it and did not know the words anyway.
British Methodism and Low Church Anglicanism, have honourable, once vigorous traditions of hymn singing. The strangely suited straggler could remember his aunts and uncles belting it out, their very souls vibrating with religious fervour, their personal pieties melding into One Lord’s brass section, which did not need electronic amplification or borrowed traditions.
The unsuited suited one did not find a jigsaw slot in the congregation to fit him, as he was neither Methodist nor Anglican (at any level), but rather an anarcho-syndicalist eco-socialist with several other silly principles as well and a big hollow mistake in the middle of his life that had coincided with the 1970’s. Then he had youthfully and enthusiastically charged as part of a quasi-generational peace jihad against what some then took to be the sex and drug taboos of the then ‘developed’ world.
The unsuited suited witnessed the marital unity of his Methodist cousin with someone else's Anglican cousin, and thought he saw all around him , the suited ones’ attempt to reknit their community that actually worshipped ornamental garden plants and politeness more reverently than any force of creation.
He never had anything against a decent whistle and flute himself though, but Oxfam had been one of the few tailors that he could ever have afforded.
Those who had hired and those who had had their clothes especially made for them on this occasion sliced, glued tied and bound the bride and groom together by means of ritual, psalm, unguent prayer and apparent attention to sermons.
The “youngsters”, (contemporaries of the splicereeroons), had formed themselves quite a nice tight little soul/gospel combo, (bass, drums, organ and keyboards, lead and rhythm and two young female soprano singers neither of whom had one sixteenth the lung power of Aretha Franklin) which sang the suited out onto wet autumn municipal lawns.
And taxi flotillas and lifts from cousins and two single decker hired buses came and took guests to receptions.
Unsuited suited was left regretting his life at a bus stop as the summer came and cried because it had just died. Indeed he might have regretted it more had he not learnt in the course of casual conversation with passers-by that he was on the wrong side of the road, for the bus to the station for the train to the Smoke.
And the when he had got himself sorted out, (gottonabus, gottoffabus), finding that his Old Age Pensioner’s bus pass worked out here where the airport workers are hutched with their hatchbacks. His breath was then so short in that decade of his life that he then could barely walk ten yards on the level and he entered the suburban station via a sloping series of wheelchair ramps and having scaled this low grade pyramid was, he was accosted at its almost apex by a local junky lady cradling a balding leopard skin print bag.
“Err I know this is a long shot..” She essayed, perhaps it she being new to the role of the medically mendicant and it being a middle class suburb.
“It is. No. I’m not giving you any money!” He snapped back projecting the fire pain of his diabetic feet at her.
And thus having established his petty bourgeois credentials he commuted back to London from his cousin’s wedding, unbothered, since he slept as the train pulled into Victoria station terminus, which was then terminally busy with the coincidence of tourists, day time town shoppers returning and people coming in for a night on the town.
A slow moving pensioner in this was a bit like an alien species dropped into a swarming confluence of army ant columns by sadistic small boy. Though he moved slowly and deliberately a nature cameraperson would have sought him out for focus and described him with commentary:
“Here is the diabetic pensioner slowest denizen of this swarming confluence of persons and traders, paraders, travellers and tourists. These massing, crossing tides of human fish, these clouds of commuting plankton swirl over around and through each other like twisting mackerel driven to shoal upwards in tighter and tighter gyres by the pointy jaws and unrelenting maws of the marlin that herd them from beneath. The pensioner plods on through this maddening moil, frequently stopping to lean stop and rest, like a timeless tortoise, an interminable termite, a five-legged tarantula or a barely mobile spatula, he grogs on regardless supporting and supported by his shopping trolley seeking out the concrete promontory long laid out in his traditional DNA by his traditional genes. That grey sacred seeming pillar that has long been the halt of the number two omnibus en route to Stockwell. Here like crabs, claw waving in tidal froth would- be travellers cling, amass and congregate and as each bus arrives the clump off to surge on to its decks, using elbow, knee and even gut-barge to secure travelling niches.”
The rain has now set in as a steady wet black background to everything that night. The air is almost water and the water is almost air. And when a slow moving pensioner gets off the number two in Stockwell he almost gets underwater there.
Wet blobs spread on parts of his unsuitable suit seeping round the edges of, or even straight through the seams of an inadequate waterproof. So with strides almost as small as to be monopodal like his night speed buggy pal, the slug, he crawls along sodden pavings and over sodden concrete north off the big back doors of Stockwell bus garage. He plods and pauses, plods and pauses, along iron railings, over two side roads and under dripping pane trees to the ‘garden’ of the Union Arms where subversive nicotine addicts are huddled under umbrellas, resolutely refusing to get married and conversing about anarcho-syndicalisms eco-socialisms as a northern hemisphere year could be beginning to end badly for them.
He has a drink or two, cracks a joke or two, learns a thing or two and maybe; but cannot settle. He can still see the rain , feel the rain, taste the rain, drink it in, spit it out and hear it fall again, (and again). There’s no way out but the crippled pensioner’s walk to the bus stop.
Later it transpires that there was another way out, to a dry party, which in this context meant a party where alcoholic drink was served on weather-proof premises. However he did not know that then and did that wet walk back again. The bus back to town, when it came, was more like the inside of a fisherman’s bait can for maggots crawling the wrong way in the rain, than a conveyance forming part of a twenty first century transport system, BUT it got you there unsuitable suit and all. It also got you to two more places where you had to wait in the rain for another bus again.
And by the time the bus was lurching up to the final stop, unsuitable suit wanted a spiritually alcoholic edge to cut through the last damp hour of the damp day and its mildewing memories. So when he could have ridden on one more stop, he got off where there was a 24 hour supermarket open. He walked in, got his wire basket and let its five to twelve hammerhead sharks take him for twelve quid for a litre of orange juice, a hunk of cheese a loaf of Polish sliced bread and a half-bottle of good old English vodka.
One more two stop bus ride, one more furlong up hill on his suburban road in the still unceased rain, resting every ten yards, leaning palm on damp slightly abrasive concrete pillar, on wooden fence post releasing a slight odour of wood preservative in the incessant dam damp.
And at last, after fumbling with house keys on neck ribbons under an undry fleece. Through two doors to privacy assured, up the wooden hill that he had bought and paid for to sit at the computer that he had brought and paid for, subscribing to the internet service that he had brought and paid for by watching repeats of TV programs that he wouldn’t have watched if he hadn’t been able to do so for free.
And it was not that he wanted a drink as such, he had a couple of cans of cider in, if it had just been that. He wanted his whole day back, or life back come to that and the vodka from the 24-hr rip off store seemed like a clean sharp blade that could cut him out a chunk back.
He was not attending a religious ceremony that he sympathised with, but did not wholly agree with. He was not making journeys around to places and through mad crowds that he might not otherwise have made. He was still wearing some clothes that he would not otherwise have worn, but at least he wasn’t getting wet any more.
British Vodka doesn’t taste of much, except, in the instance of the particular half-bottle, its orange mixer and though, (if he thought back in perspective, which he didn’t just then), he was a selfish bastard who usually sorted himself out in petty regards, so what that drink tasted of was self-control, like an action being done by a doer who does wanted to do it. Dah do Ron-ron-ron.
But, but, but; it all bit back. He drank the vodka probably until about 5 am and then he slept or perhaps passed out. The liquids worked their way around his body; and then maybe an hour or so later, sort of woke him up perhaps.
And perhaps this gets retrospective here; parts have to be reconstructed from local logic and a bit of domestic archaeology.
For instance, it seems sensible to suppose that to have fallen down, probably slipping and/or tripping and descending in a rapid involuntary knee-slicing kneel that made a one inch deep gash across left leg just below the knee cap, that the person who inflicted this on themselves dunnit from a standing or walking position. They done this by coming downhard without possibility of volition or control.
Who knows? He did not see, but what cut the cut, but the cut was done. Blood vermillion from warfarin and vodka splatter a square yard of suburban flooring and growing. Subcutaneous fat was visible round the edges of the cut and in the middle of the blood mess on the floor, an intact empty vodka half bottle lay mocking the newly wounded man.
He ignored its taunts, he knew what to do. Cloth clamped across the wound, (an Arab head cloth was first to hand), phone an ambulance, come as soon as you can, I’ll be sitting in the street on the doorstep wearing a Harris tweed jacket, wrapped in an old blue blanket waving feebly and bleeding copiously.
Wounded, get down the stairs to the street by crawling on this arse like an upended weevil to be inspected by the dawn of a relatively dry late autumn day. Light rising over suburban rooves, sure he could hear a first bird song, one note, surely not a house sparrow, they’d all long gone from London.
He had long enough to sit there and watch the light rising. Long enough not to watch his blood puddle spreading down the front garden path reach the edge of a flower bed. Long enough to wonder when to make a second emergency call, but a yellow and green motorised watermelon, a London Ambulance Service Ambulance rolled down the road.
The crew took him up and took him in; cradle to grave, accident and emergency.
Weddings can be launched to heaven from these buildings. Up into lower middle horizons; complete with sunsets, palm trees, parakeets, sandy strands and fluttering, cherubically winged, cherubic babies, (usually allocated at a rate of 2.5 per (usually heterosexual) couple).
It was a wet day throughout, initially, the strangely suited man could not find the correct shed for the marital lift off that he had been invited to attend, even with satellite assisted assistance from a local taxi driver.
He shuffled around across the rear lawns of the spiritual sheds attracting rain drops to his person from recently planted orange and red leaved ornamental trees. He crept into the latecomers’ area at the back of the congregation who were just rendering “Amazing Grace” anaemic, having realised that they mostly lacked the conviction to sing it and did not know the words anyway.
British Methodism and Low Church Anglicanism, have honourable, once vigorous traditions of hymn singing. The strangely suited straggler could remember his aunts and uncles belting it out, their very souls vibrating with religious fervour, their personal pieties melding into One Lord’s brass section, which did not need electronic amplification or borrowed traditions.
The unsuited suited one did not find a jigsaw slot in the congregation to fit him, as he was neither Methodist nor Anglican (at any level), but rather an anarcho-syndicalist eco-socialist with several other silly principles as well and a big hollow mistake in the middle of his life that had coincided with the 1970’s. Then he had youthfully and enthusiastically charged as part of a quasi-generational peace jihad against what some then took to be the sex and drug taboos of the then ‘developed’ world.
The unsuited suited witnessed the marital unity of his Methodist cousin with someone else's Anglican cousin, and thought he saw all around him , the suited ones’ attempt to reknit their community that actually worshipped ornamental garden plants and politeness more reverently than any force of creation.
He never had anything against a decent whistle and flute himself though, but Oxfam had been one of the few tailors that he could ever have afforded.
Those who had hired and those who had had their clothes especially made for them on this occasion sliced, glued tied and bound the bride and groom together by means of ritual, psalm, unguent prayer and apparent attention to sermons.
The “youngsters”, (contemporaries of the splicereeroons), had formed themselves quite a nice tight little soul/gospel combo, (bass, drums, organ and keyboards, lead and rhythm and two young female soprano singers neither of whom had one sixteenth the lung power of Aretha Franklin) which sang the suited out onto wet autumn municipal lawns.
And taxi flotillas and lifts from cousins and two single decker hired buses came and took guests to receptions.
Unsuited suited was left regretting his life at a bus stop as the summer came and cried because it had just died. Indeed he might have regretted it more had he not learnt in the course of casual conversation with passers-by that he was on the wrong side of the road, for the bus to the station for the train to the Smoke.
And the when he had got himself sorted out, (gottonabus, gottoffabus), finding that his Old Age Pensioner’s bus pass worked out here where the airport workers are hutched with their hatchbacks. His breath was then so short in that decade of his life that he then could barely walk ten yards on the level and he entered the suburban station via a sloping series of wheelchair ramps and having scaled this low grade pyramid was, he was accosted at its almost apex by a local junky lady cradling a balding leopard skin print bag.
“Err I know this is a long shot..” She essayed, perhaps it she being new to the role of the medically mendicant and it being a middle class suburb.
“It is. No. I’m not giving you any money!” He snapped back projecting the fire pain of his diabetic feet at her.
And thus having established his petty bourgeois credentials he commuted back to London from his cousin’s wedding, unbothered, since he slept as the train pulled into Victoria station terminus, which was then terminally busy with the coincidence of tourists, day time town shoppers returning and people coming in for a night on the town.
A slow moving pensioner in this was a bit like an alien species dropped into a swarming confluence of army ant columns by sadistic small boy. Though he moved slowly and deliberately a nature cameraperson would have sought him out for focus and described him with commentary:
“Here is the diabetic pensioner slowest denizen of this swarming confluence of persons and traders, paraders, travellers and tourists. These massing, crossing tides of human fish, these clouds of commuting plankton swirl over around and through each other like twisting mackerel driven to shoal upwards in tighter and tighter gyres by the pointy jaws and unrelenting maws of the marlin that herd them from beneath. The pensioner plods on through this maddening moil, frequently stopping to lean stop and rest, like a timeless tortoise, an interminable termite, a five-legged tarantula or a barely mobile spatula, he grogs on regardless supporting and supported by his shopping trolley seeking out the concrete promontory long laid out in his traditional DNA by his traditional genes. That grey sacred seeming pillar that has long been the halt of the number two omnibus en route to Stockwell. Here like crabs, claw waving in tidal froth would- be travellers cling, amass and congregate and as each bus arrives the clump off to surge on to its decks, using elbow, knee and even gut-barge to secure travelling niches.”
The rain has now set in as a steady wet black background to everything that night. The air is almost water and the water is almost air. And when a slow moving pensioner gets off the number two in Stockwell he almost gets underwater there.
Wet blobs spread on parts of his unsuitable suit seeping round the edges of, or even straight through the seams of an inadequate waterproof. So with strides almost as small as to be monopodal like his night speed buggy pal, the slug, he crawls along sodden pavings and over sodden concrete north off the big back doors of Stockwell bus garage. He plods and pauses, plods and pauses, along iron railings, over two side roads and under dripping pane trees to the ‘garden’ of the Union Arms where subversive nicotine addicts are huddled under umbrellas, resolutely refusing to get married and conversing about anarcho-syndicalisms eco-socialisms as a northern hemisphere year could be beginning to end badly for them.
He has a drink or two, cracks a joke or two, learns a thing or two and maybe; but cannot settle. He can still see the rain , feel the rain, taste the rain, drink it in, spit it out and hear it fall again, (and again). There’s no way out but the crippled pensioner’s walk to the bus stop.
Later it transpires that there was another way out, to a dry party, which in this context meant a party where alcoholic drink was served on weather-proof premises. However he did not know that then and did that wet walk back again. The bus back to town, when it came, was more like the inside of a fisherman’s bait can for maggots crawling the wrong way in the rain, than a conveyance forming part of a twenty first century transport system, BUT it got you there unsuitable suit and all. It also got you to two more places where you had to wait in the rain for another bus again.
And by the time the bus was lurching up to the final stop, unsuitable suit wanted a spiritually alcoholic edge to cut through the last damp hour of the damp day and its mildewing memories. So when he could have ridden on one more stop, he got off where there was a 24 hour supermarket open. He walked in, got his wire basket and let its five to twelve hammerhead sharks take him for twelve quid for a litre of orange juice, a hunk of cheese a loaf of Polish sliced bread and a half-bottle of good old English vodka.
One more two stop bus ride, one more furlong up hill on his suburban road in the still unceased rain, resting every ten yards, leaning palm on damp slightly abrasive concrete pillar, on wooden fence post releasing a slight odour of wood preservative in the incessant dam damp.
And at last, after fumbling with house keys on neck ribbons under an undry fleece. Through two doors to privacy assured, up the wooden hill that he had bought and paid for to sit at the computer that he had brought and paid for, subscribing to the internet service that he had brought and paid for by watching repeats of TV programs that he wouldn’t have watched if he hadn’t been able to do so for free.
And it was not that he wanted a drink as such, he had a couple of cans of cider in, if it had just been that. He wanted his whole day back, or life back come to that and the vodka from the 24-hr rip off store seemed like a clean sharp blade that could cut him out a chunk back.
He was not attending a religious ceremony that he sympathised with, but did not wholly agree with. He was not making journeys around to places and through mad crowds that he might not otherwise have made. He was still wearing some clothes that he would not otherwise have worn, but at least he wasn’t getting wet any more.
British Vodka doesn’t taste of much, except, in the instance of the particular half-bottle, its orange mixer and though, (if he thought back in perspective, which he didn’t just then), he was a selfish bastard who usually sorted himself out in petty regards, so what that drink tasted of was self-control, like an action being done by a doer who does wanted to do it. Dah do Ron-ron-ron.
But, but, but; it all bit back. He drank the vodka probably until about 5 am and then he slept or perhaps passed out. The liquids worked their way around his body; and then maybe an hour or so later, sort of woke him up perhaps.
And perhaps this gets retrospective here; parts have to be reconstructed from local logic and a bit of domestic archaeology.
For instance, it seems sensible to suppose that to have fallen down, probably slipping and/or tripping and descending in a rapid involuntary knee-slicing kneel that made a one inch deep gash across left leg just below the knee cap, that the person who inflicted this on themselves dunnit from a standing or walking position. They done this by coming downhard without possibility of volition or control.
Who knows? He did not see, but what cut the cut, but the cut was done. Blood vermillion from warfarin and vodka splatter a square yard of suburban flooring and growing. Subcutaneous fat was visible round the edges of the cut and in the middle of the blood mess on the floor, an intact empty vodka half bottle lay mocking the newly wounded man.
He ignored its taunts, he knew what to do. Cloth clamped across the wound, (an Arab head cloth was first to hand), phone an ambulance, come as soon as you can, I’ll be sitting in the street on the doorstep wearing a Harris tweed jacket, wrapped in an old blue blanket waving feebly and bleeding copiously.
Wounded, get down the stairs to the street by crawling on this arse like an upended weevil to be inspected by the dawn of a relatively dry late autumn day. Light rising over suburban rooves, sure he could hear a first bird song, one note, surely not a house sparrow, they’d all long gone from London.
He had long enough to sit there and watch the light rising. Long enough not to watch his blood puddle spreading down the front garden path reach the edge of a flower bed. Long enough to wonder when to make a second emergency call, but a yellow and green motorised watermelon, a London Ambulance Service Ambulance rolled down the road.
The crew took him up and took him in; cradle to grave, accident and emergency.
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