Rain in June Mood

It rains. What could have been the wind through trees is not. There's no movement and leaves droop with the weight of water. An oversized mac and impractical shoes, leaking onto semi-socks trudge. Trudge, trudge, trudge. Underground with wet knees and toes, umbrellas folded pass. Drips fall from lips and noses. Sit. Each person after falls heavily into empty space and sighs. Rain in June again. Wet through again.

Building

I'm a bubble. Held in the air in a place with no atmosphere, spinning on an axis, tripping on the stars, occasionally I fall, and rest on rivers, borrowing more than a cliche. I'm an instrument. I feel like a projector. An aged projector which pulls up the wrong images in a presentation which has taken many hours to put together. I'm a flutter. I'm the wings of a moth beating and beating and beating. Coated in camomile, hair done up and I'm bent around my words. I'm a thesaurus not alphabetised. I'm a forcefield. Shattering metaphorical glasses with my fingertips. I'm a pianist with a keyboard instead of a piano. Making letters not notes. Building with them. Putting letters into words, tap, tap, tap. Sliding words into sentences, tap, tap tap. I float on paragraphs on seas of pages, a solid hull to safe-glide through the emptiness. An oil lamp in my hand. A blanket of belief around my shoulders, soft.

Top Deck N31

The bus stop crowd sighs as an empty 31 rattles past on the Camden High Road. When the next arrives, the people-mass is twice as large as it would've otherwise been. I wait for everyone to board before eying up the top deck and taking my own chances. At the last minute upstairs a seat up-front becomes available. I sit down. How privileged I am to get this view of the throng of red car lights illuminated against the black night. To see the the people outside the clubs having a good time from this height.

Then the guy across from me pipes up. A big, bald Jamaican guy with a leather jacket and fingerless biker gloves.

"Artificial intelligence. All of you young people with your internet and your mobile phones. You're not human, you're artificial intelligence," he repeats over and over again to the window in front of him.

The man beside him widens his eyes and shrinks against the window.

The bus slowly progresses to the end of the High Road, at which point our biker says, "come out, come out, wherever you are. Who stole my youth? Who stole my youth? Be it on tube, bus, plane or train, come out, come out." He repeats this line over and over before a few more choruses about artificial intelligence.

The shrunken man catches my eye in the window reflection. He looks a bit scared. I shoot him a sympathetic glance.

At last we pull into a bus stop and with the entire top deck now watching, the biker stands up and, as he turns to leave, mutters, "Fucking two-legged wankers."

The Waiting Game

Boring 2010

I'm fragile today. Boring 2010 can't have been Boring. An excellent day and a happy after-pub. I won't bang on about it but will quickly mention @mount_st_nobody and @thesouthpole. Their talks were sublime. And @iamjamesward, thank you - best London thing I've done in London yet.

Some photos can be found on my Flickr account

I Thought of You

I thought of you at Piccadilly
and while sitting next to an old man
turning pages of The Secret Life of France
on the Jubilee

(opposite a man
who read Lenin's biography)

I thought of you as I left
the station
and with each footfall to my door

And I cursed you
for making me write
a poem

I hate desperate poems

Her Van and Mine

I've taken the most precious of my books with me to London. One is my friend Emily Mackie's And This is True. I picked it up this evening and opened it again.

And I read the bit that describes the van that Nevis and his father lived in. In detail. And I thought of my own van. The third-hand van my dysfunctional family and I drove around in when my parents were still together.

A white Mitsubishi. The interior beige. Different shades of beige. The front had three seats covered in broken and cracked pleather, all a pale beige. The oil was underneath the driver's seat. The radio had dials. We always had it set to Atlantic Long-Wave 252 to listen to the same limited playlist over and over - the most memorable song Sunshine After The Rain. The back had two MDF benches which faced each other. There was enough space for three people on each bench. There were three dark-beige dirty cushions on each. If you lifted them there was a thumb-sized hole you could lift the top of the bench with, to access the storage space beneath.

In the boot was a large rectangle of the same MDF the benches were made of. It had two further bits of MDF which meant you could make the rectangle into a table, elevated in between the benches, or lie it flat to create a double bed.

The windows in the front wound down by means of a rotating beige handle. The back windows had thumb holes in, as the benches did, so you could slide them open.

The van broke down all the time and cost loads to run - but it was lying on the cushions in the back looking up at the double-lights permeating the black night above the motorway in the summer, with the breeze on my face as the others slept, which forms my earliest memory of a journey and is the reason I keep moving. I loved it.