She was one of the hill people from over where the lanes end up the steps and in the dark with port town lights on the low horizon.
By Figgy Ormerod’s farm, satellites lead you into a training facility with close-cut grass and roving cameras.
Now Figgy wanders through the lanes, takes clippings and blocks stiles. The tops are secured for miles and miles. The lower ground has plants in every store
ready to pass messages up the chain. Eyes on you in every feed station, ford, lock-up, lay-by and loading bay. Just one of the hill people, you say.
With all that brickwork, a shed ablaze and also, through intersecting lines, the sky at the far horizon, there’s a gift for the burning bush observed through rain-smudged glass, in writings on negotiated walls or in the voices of students on their way to class.
I once overheard you and Iain Sinclair among porticoes on London Road. It was something about the architecture of hospitals. Do places retain a memory of pain? In building anew, what do we remove? Your eyes roam through famous and common land, find what makes a town distinct
on the margins: gasometers, factories, an odd inland gull, people on unique trajectories, made new or strange by weather, politics, light catching off glass by the Oracle offices as though fire radiates across the valley from a business park and cobbled together nature reserve or gesture by Sonning.
Then the pause, the interregnum: thoughts of Liverpool and stations in-between, a life transplanted and re-planted as a now quite utterly unique breed in a Thames Valley influenced by the Far East seen through a lens of past industry with modern trade on credit seen for what it is
and mainstream media interests less significant than the cracks on the road, geese proliferating by Kennetside road ends, salvaging moments against the currents of memory in fleeting cloud glimpses and aphorisms converging in time and halting, as you said, but only for now, in the grounds of abbey ruins.
From the embankment of the Thames by wind-ruffled waters and still Mildmay oaks we’d watch and wait, alert to the newness of the day, for cousins’ single-mindedness and strength in boats
to emerge from a mid morning heat haze from a stream off the Brocas, before a hopeful search through indescribable scents in charity shop doorways for Ben Shermans and deleted Pulp albums
incongruously nestled by Sir Christopher Wren, suit jackets and glasses that looked like Graham Coxon’s. I can still hear you through the dictaphone breathing stories Jarvis could have taken on
and, before Shazam, ‘I think last night…’ was lost in broken fragments, endlessly reconstructed before Steve Lamacq played ‘Your Ghost’ on the evening session and we could piece it all together on Maidenhead Road.
On your dad’s bookshelves, seventies brown and mid-orange framed the bearded head of the ‘forgotten Spurgeon.’ We were doubled up unaccountably, or perhaps because the book was also forgotten
soon to be unforgotten, reforgotten and unreforgotten.
Now we have our sad allotted nights in our own configurations of time and light taking form in the mind’s private dark rooms to imagine you on stage again in Camden,
on the deserted streets around Caledonian Road or after trademark fried chicken in Highbury Fields. Saying prayers on the streets of North London, it was the individual he loved and not the group.
To a zealot’s ‘Community goes deeper than friendship’: ‘So you’re not a great friend, then.’
And he’d take the foolish things to shame the wise as with baffling knowledge of Pokemon tour dates became proxy wars in village halls as Gareth’s base stats and anti-metagame
switched advantage to the weak or despised. And he’d remember the praise, but he’d remember the slights through long Essex days and deep Penzance quiet. Hurt and joy combined in the eyes but for all that wonder, he’d forgive every time.
This darkness charts solo missions each orbit: by Saturn, by Dogger, by rural churchyards in hemispheres of local time. And space travel is what older citizens are veterans of – set their watches by. Only moving in the Milky Way yields stardust at the temples. This darkness is a field of constellations, red shift, grey matter greying in transit liked the neutron turned positive inside the Crab Nebula.
The globe provided a live weather report to boldly interrupt the thoughts of an 8-year-old science lover with news of constant Colorado storms and scattered showers when you zoom into Sonning.
That contraption, with its right proportions, torque and granular mountain relief was the height of technology: didn’t stop speaking.
It collapsed imagination to hotel and seaside idylls projected on a screen and snapshots of eternal sun over low desert lodges.
This world gives us so much but where is its charging cable and can we explore the Free State without bluetooth?
The original world was more of a sketch; great continents fused then left. It was the work of an impressionist, with an extra light that held deep space projected into dots and shapes while you’re dreaming.
That model gave us space, and, as you said, this other world is still plugged in; this other world is lit up from within.
(written inone of the Covid interludes when social distancing was not emphasised as it had been)
After so many days without contact, I can feel its place now – the laying on of hands. Still in the Co-op car park, it looks like a pause for prayer, meditation on the Saturday morning grey-white sky, a moment to bring to mind the things we’ve done or will, but no – on the lady’s back is a baby carrier, a momentarily well-defined existential burden not the weight of guilt for past decisions marring a view of crows around pylons from Bulmershe pavilion.
The hands are of those adjusting straps, attending to the wide-eyed bobbing head, ensuring there’s a cushion for the neck, reassurance for that suspended time around the shoulders, watching from behind their mum benign meandering dogs, families strolling under amorphous cloud forms skirting crows around pylons. The laying on of hands in constant support of a thousand forms and moments: milk or tube yoghurts, more strap adjustments, human thermostats attentive to all the climate’s subtle modulations.
The child is pre-guilt (forget Original Sin on the Sussex Coast) – before transgression. Where is that compelling argument articulated in a sterile conference hall on powerpoint from the pulpit, hopped-up on notes and congregational shrapnel, that children are born and die sinful? The laying on of hands by cousins, aunts and brothers from security to security, with mixed beliefs in higher forms of providence, prop the oblivious in the backpack carrier. Does it really take a wafer, or some symbolic token, to show us sins forgiven?
Wilderspool Causeway 