Plutarch’s blog, Now's The Time, yesterday mentioned nettles, and evoked a memory.
In 1954, my parents moved from their tiny cottage with an outside loo, at the Horsefair in Malmesbury, to a shiny council house with a gas copper in the shed, half a mile away at Hobbes Close. My father borrowed the undertaker’s handcart to move our possessions.
I was not yet five and had grown so far in the company of girls … mostly. So I was genuinely shocked when the smaller boy from next door approached me with an evil grin and silently punched me in the stomach; the only time I’d experienced comparable pain had been when my sister had sunk her teeth into my hand because she wanted the tennis ball I was holding.
Within a few days, I’d been absorbed in to the gang of kids that lived in our street, and soon I was going with them every week to see the Saturday afternoon picture shows at the Athelstan Cinema.
The unprovoked attacks continued sporadically and I had no inkling how to resist until one Saturday, after the film, when an older boy pointed out that I could do what John Wayne always had, and use my own fists. He explained in two sentences what was necessary, how to clench the fist and which part of the knuckle should lead, and then the two of us were set-up for a fight, surrounded by a small circle of taller boys. I must have just turned five years-old.
The boy next door approached as usual with a grin and clenched fists. I waited as instructed, until a split second before the expected punch, then viciously drove my tiny fist into his tiny nose. We were standing at the top of a bank where tall nettles grew, and he flew backwards down the slope, emerging both bloodied and extensively stung. He ran home weeping and howling.
His mum was very cross but his dad seemed to see the “funny side” of it.
Some weeks later in that same summer, we dug a small pit in the same bank and filled it with sand left over from someone’s path making. A jumping competition developed and I was persuaded to see if I could leap across the pit, a distance probably no more than four feet. I had never made a running leap before, and was surprised to find myself sailing, shirtless, far beyond the pit and rolling down that same slope among those same nettles.
I ran home weeping and howling.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
the train now departing ...
calling in for a quick pee and a glimpse of something hot and smokey on 28th february 2006, i took a little picture of a forlorn tanker engine standing in the car park at sheffield park station, the southern terminus and loco shed of the bluebell line.
today i arrived at the same spot, for the same reason, and found the same engine about to depart for the national rail museum at york.
she looks a bit smarter nowadays, and i was amused to notice that she'd been built in nine elms, which is where i start my working day each morning
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Carmina Figurate by Charles Sandison
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In a tall room to the left of the entrance to the V&A, high above the stimulating exhibition of and about books made by artists, which is rarther pretentiously named Blood On Paper, (pretentious if only because it displays mostly comfortable art by comfortable artists who were not in immediate danger of being murdered for what they made) … high above all this, words of projected light fly slowly around the walls, thousands of glowing words which seem to move in random orbits, and if you focus on just one word, and follow it’s trajectory for a while, then, as it flies past another word and another, so your mind will distil tiny transiently random phrases … and if the words that drift past occasionally have a deeper significance, so much the better to prod your sleeping subconscious … some say that it isn’t an entirely original work, but I say that it is beautiful, or at least it is elegant, and it fulfils its purpose.
they have their instructions ...
... they must go in to the forest and they are not to come back until they have gathered several wagonloads of firewood, hunted down the largest wild boar, and then roasted it for my tea
Saturday, May 17, 2008
re-iterating the russell blog ... and the value of scrapbooks
after georgeyboy commented on the russell "ten commandments" i dug in to some boxes of ancient scrapbooks ... not being a trained historian, i didn't retain the marginalia and am unable to say when and where these images came from, but it was probably the sunday times in the early seventies, perhaps the photographer was snowdon, i wish someone would tell me
as for scrapbooks, if your memory was as woolly and moth-eaten as mine ...
Friday, May 16, 2008
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
myself, when young
some first impressionsa) mystification at the shapes of the letters we were asked to copy with chalk onto a framed piece of slate
b) an inability of the infant mind to process the changed perspective of the world when i first travelled on top of a bus ... the flat fields appeared to spin, each turning in its turn
c) the distinct multiple echoes of footsteps crossing the square, especially of the coalman's hobnails, and of the hacks and hunters being taken to the vet
walk this way ... at alpha ba lgw
although i always carry a black marker pen, it was impossible to decide on what to do with this head ... should i have inked-in the aerosmith bouffant or the run dmc homburg ?
Monday, May 12, 2008
Crime And Punishment
In last night's ultimate dream sequence I was back in Malmesbury, although you wouldn't have recognized it because it was more like the Appalachians in the nineteen-fifties.
I was trying to scratch a living as a local news photographer and had been told by my editor that the young Michelle Vater ( pictured ) had just got a job in the local police force and was busy arresting every villain in town, most of whom she had been on first name terms with since infancy.
But every time that I dashed to the scene of a crime, I was too late because she'd already subdued and handcuffed them, completed the paperwork, and sent them off to Devizes Prison, pending trial at the Assizes. There was no question of bail, and no possibility of an action photo.
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