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.

"But I hate Busy Trains..."

A boy holds his mother's hand on the platform at King's Cross. He's about five and his big, dark, beautiful eyes are filled with sadness as the train approaches. It's quite full.

"But I hate busy trains," he says, bottom lip quivering.

"It's okay," his mother says as the doors open and people file off.

There are seats and they sit down. He's still not pleased and gazes up at the map. His mother strokes his chestnut hair, which falls just above his eyebrows and takes his hand. She reassures him that it's not far to Camden Town, from where they will change.

He doesn't want to change but after some persuasion, he says, "okay."

His eyes move to the advert next to the map, "Mum, look, it says 'donate yourself', why does it say that?"

And just as she's about to explain he says, "I know what donate yourself means, it means give yourself to somebody else."

And then we're at Camden Town. They walk away. He doesn't look sad anymore.

The Pope's Visit

Groups of pilgrims stand in Victoria Station. African nuns wear yellow 'Papal visit 2010' bags. They look so happy. Two priests walk past me. A gold cross shines light into my eye from the breast of one, a reminder to me of the wealth of the Catholic church before I cite its symbolic meaning.

Underground, a father is explaining to his young children that it's busy because the Pope is in London today.
'But daddy,' one proclaims, 'the Pope's old.'

I smile as I board the tube to travel away from the epicentre.

Defining PC Games and Media of Old.

I've always been interested in the paranormal. God, ghosts, lake monsters, yetis, time portals, telekinesis and everything else 'unexplained' fascinated me from the minute I was aware of them as concepts (if a toddler can grasp the concept of God, which I suppose is not necessarily plausible).

This evening I was talking to @oye_billy on Twitter and I brought up a PC game I loved as a kid. I had to look it up. It was based on Sam & Max, comic book characters created by Steve Purcell in the late 80s (I'm an 80s kid). The game was called Sam & Max Hit the Road and I loved it because they went across America solving mysteries in weird places. Like at the giant ball of yarn.

Another game I played, again on the PC, was 'WeiRd.' In this game you went through various levels solving puzzles and reading about things like the woman with asthma, which for some reason caused her breasts to glow blue. The game was a place of different dimensions that were fantastically designed, from holes that descended miles underground with stories to unearth as you went down, to labs and misty mazes. It was magnificent.

I even enjoyed the Goosebumps PC game, One Day At Horrorland which was neither cool nor magnificent.

On TV, The X-Files was a seven-year-old revelation. From the first episode I found my mother watching in our living room (Mulder running a tooth through a supermarket check-out and alien code screwing the system) to the the hole in the smoking man's windpipe near the end.

And with a backdrop of Fortean Times Magazine from the age of eleven, all these things were absorbed with a lot of love. Yet somehow I still don't think I've turned out as a geek. Not really.

No One's Infallible

So... Yesterday I bet everything (I'm not sure entirely what I bet) that I'd be okay commuting to London and using the tube on the day the staff went on strike.

To be fair, I was acting under the advice of older, wiser people than myself.

The train from Bristol to Paddington was fine, emptier than usual but on time.

@Biltawulf had tweeted me, 'go for it. It's fun!' which gave, I think, a slightly false sense of hope. But he'd somehow managed to get into work earlier than he had in years so it was coming from a good place.

I arrived. I walked past this queue on my way to the tube.
And then I was told there was no tube from Paddington. The tube trains may have been running but if they weren't running from where I was it was no use.
I asked for help. A friendly Transport-helper-person (I've no official name to hand) told me to get the 205 bus from outside. Lovely, I thought as I bounded to the bus stop full of hope.
I was greeted by this at the bus stop:
So the upshot was, over an hour and only two simultaneously-arriving-and-quickly-filled 205 buses later, I turned around and went back into Paddington. I was too late to meet the person I was meant to.

But it was alright... at least I wasn't a doctor or other important integral cog in London's Big Ben... or something.