Bus crash

But it's back to Glasgow for me. Busses are my preferred mode of travel, much more so than trains, and for this reason; you travel in proximity with more interesting people. Now some neds traipse on and sit in front of me, drawling wideboys on their way to a party somewhere, I see the shorn backs of their necks, their baseball caps.
Endless bus travel, listening to the dramas of neds or the stories of old ladies, in fact, no choice but to listen. You can feign sleep and envisage a stage, on which the conversations around you are enacted, a grand narrative of the pettiness of their lives. The bus is the most democratic mode of transport, and its passage is like the passage of life. But a peculiarity left over from childhood: Whenever I cross a bridge in a bus I always imagine the bridge collapsing and the bus plummeting into the water. What if the driver suffers a heart attack or a stroke or a fit or is drunk and passes out at the wheel. What if you suddenly veer from the motorway and over the crash barrier down a steep grass verge, strewn with daisies or heather or rocky crags, and the neds in front stop babbling panic for a moment to hear me say one word as I'm tossed and jolted about: "Shit", and your stomach hits your ribs like in a rollercoaster as you plummet down the slope to a road running parallel to the river and then carry on straight into the deep water of the midnight river.
Like the quiet scenic Tay or the dark Clyde. Too many disaster movies, linked to fears and childhood bus migrations. What happens to the bus underwater? Kick the windows or skylight as hard as you can, maybe one survivor will make it to the surface.
Thereafter try n get help. You run onto the nearby road and try to flag down a car, but it's late and the few cars passing ignore you, a drenched, weeping, bruised maniac. One car, full of young guys, slows to a stop but as you approach pulls away and then stops again. This is repeated a few times until it finally accelerates away, its bright yellow tail-lights disappearing over the scrubby back-road, the sound of arrogant, cruel young laughter, strangely mirthless and hard, just audible over the booming music.
So you travel on into the city, getting closer to its commercial centre. It's Friday night and you can see activity outside clubs, people milling drunkenly around. The cops in their luminescent yellow jackets are out in force, there to intervene in drunken conflicts, hostilities between doormen and impulsive punters, maybe even arbitrate the rivalries of screeching girls, spilling out into the vacant, echoing wilderness of the post-club streets and plazas.
I've seen girls rolling about on the floor, on cold concrete floors, girls with hot, flushed faces wretching up the contents of their stomachs, all dignity lost, empty hedonism, binge-drinking, another concern for the Daily Mail writers and conservative politicians, in their obsessive search for moral outrage.
You think of approaching the cops but they all seem uninterested, louche, insolent, swaggering around, armed with their yellow jackets and huge walkie-talkies worn like badges of honour. They stand and crack jokes at streetcorners for all the world like common schoolboys. This is a busy time for them, and they are the kings of this godless nocturnal terrain, seen coldly on CCTV footage. A mere glance at them reveals their ruthless, opportunistic cynicism.
In a far-off lamp-lit street you see a female cop push a drunk in a sweaty shirt against a wall. A wide, wind-swept, empty street. She's searching him or handcuffing him, forcing his hands behind him, but in a grim, official way, preoccupied and businesslike. And, dripping wet, scared and scarred, looking for help, you think: She looks like a girl I know.

No Doubt Part 2

I find in myself a flame,
A flame of persistent light,
That steadily burns in your name,
And never is quenched outright;
And I do not know, and I do not care,
Whether sacred or profane
Is the source of this passion rare,
Whose flickerings never wane.
But that it will burn on endlessly,
And that it will never go out,
In this world and the world to come,
Of that I have no doubt.

Barbary Macaques

Fallen Angel Seen in the Cemetery

Swan Preening, 25th of July

A Screen of Trees, April

Urban Exploration

Urban Exploration

Armed with a water pistol, I go hunting for an old friend. We go to the abandoned estate, dismal now where the student flats were.

Set down in a low part of the city, squeezed between industrial estates, lies a student building purposely built for accomodation, sixties style, brutalist grey architecture, corridors and landings.

The flats themselves are odd. Maximum use is made of limited space, the rooms are strangely vertical in orientation. Descending the steep staircases one comes on the right to a long livingroom, grey curtains concealing the grass and low bushes outside, somewhat with the atmosphere of a hospital or other institution. In here is a telly and beer cans. 

The interior of the flat is somewhat reminiscent of the design of the lower decks of a ship, in terms of utilisation of space. The bedrooms are no more than bunks, narrow rooms almost like cupboards, just room enough for a bed and a narrow desk. 

They are going to knock this edifice down. And with it all the memories therein. Invading old bedrooms, where old friends lived, looking for a girl in abandoned places who doesn't live there anymore... In industrial estates, concrete plazas, past concrete bollards, overwhelmed with dirt and decay, with every kind of rust and debris and mess. The chaos that you always thought you wanted to see is actually repellent, and you find yourself instead wanting to fix the place up... 

But we are going over the wall and into the deep places, and into the creeping dirt. 

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

I thought suddenly of an old college I once used to attend, and had a sudden sharp memory of the outside of it, the north face of this old sixties building, dating from around 1966 when hopes were fresher and more poignant. This architecture then was called modernist. The students moved in, the lecturers too, with their black-rimmed glasses and practical jackets... 

I thought for no reason of the exterior of the building, it's north wall, studded by grey windows and looking out onto its carpark bordered by an ordinary suburban road. Up in the top room when I was an art student and doing life drawing at the easel I would look out and see friends come in late. Ambling casually toward the entrance. 

I thought too of that long room where we did the life drawing with its cold floor and the great dusty drawing boards in a shelf off to the side. Everything functional and well-designed. My memories dwelt not so much on the people as on the structure of the room, the shelves and the floors and the grey windows that let in the light. The setting appealed to me, perhaps only for banal reasons such as that I was younger then and more naive. 

After pondering this for a long time I thought I would look at the actual building again, that actual north face which I thought teasingly somehow no longer existed. Somehow I thought it impossible for it to still exist. 

I went to Google Streetview and traced the path as I walked it all those mornings up the hill and past the garage and the McDonald's and to a forgotten roundabout, past suburban gardens and council houses decorated with satellite dishes... By an arms factory, underneath a familiar railway bridge adorned with ragged weeds....

Of course when I got to the place where the college had been I remembered that they had knocked it down years ago, and put up a row of sullen soulless flats in its place. The windows of these awfully "modern" flats looked down, mocking me for my naivety, instilling in me the strange idea that the college had never existed, that I had dreamed the whole thing. 

That exterior, that north face, does not even seem to exist in photographs as it was too ugly to capture, or too inconsequential. And I don't feel sad even slightly, or even surprised, on the contrary, it's as if everything is too expected and routine, but I do feel a peculiar loss, a loss which is almost entirely in me and related to me, and hardly at all in the exterior world or related to it. That strange loss, of a thing you didn't care about, weren't interested in, and would disappoint you if you still had it.... That inevitable loss of a functional unglamorous thing which nevertheless strikes you as meaningful and poignant. The kind of loss you find viewing old photographs of insignificant possessions, the sun shining in a certain spot, a fleeting look on a face now changed. 

And the odd thing was that I knew all along that the building was no longer there, with one part of my brain, but I went looking for it anyway.

A Screen of Trees, February

A Screen of Trees, November

How the Internet Works (Technical)

This is going to get technical but please stick with me.

The "Internet" is the net that is formed when all computers and phones worldwide are linked up by special beams of light. These light beams are invisible beams of energy which are able to penetrate walls and other surfaces, depending on their density. 

These beams travel through the air instantaneously all over the earth. They exist in the ether, but their use has recently been discovered and their power harnessed by man. The beams shine like a laser into your home, straight through walls, furniture, and people, without their being in the least aware of it, and quite harmlessly, much like the radio signals which can be picked up by your radio receiver.

Inside your home there is a special apparatus called a router. Attached to the router is a cable which carries to the machine a special gas called "broadband". This "broadband" (so called because the vats in which it is stored by the Internet companies are surrounded by broad bands of steel) is a natural gas which is mined on the ocean floor, bubbling up from the core of the Earth. When the router is touched by one of the invisible beams of internet force, it transmits an invisible gas called broadband which disperses itself throughout the atmosphere of your home. Inside your computer or pocket telephone is a special, tiny machine which is super-sensitive to the particles of broadband gas which hang heavy in the atmosphere, and is able to convert the particles of gas into displays of colour on your computer or phone screen. The broadband gas is able, by its wonderful properties, to encourage tiny liquid crystals behind the screen to form itself into whatever patterns it is instructed to by the tiny machine located deep within your computer, or the even tinier one in your phone.

Deep within your computer is an ingenious clockwork device which is specially made by artisans in the mountains of Switzerland. A tiny replica of this device is also present in your pocket telephone, thanks to advances in recent technology which has enabled miniature microscopes to be utilised in their construction. The artisans employed in this work are specially bred to have small hands to aid in this intricate work, and are fiercely proud of their skill in working at such small scales. 

This clockwork device contains a special cog which is fabricated from a unique dark gold mined in Brazil. This rare gold reacts with the Broadband gas to make the minute liquid crystals jump into place, to form the images and words you see on your screen. If you look very closely at your computer or telephone screen, you will see that the images are formed from minute rare crystals of different colours, which the teeth of the special cog forces into alignment mechanically according to input from the keyboard. These crystals are harvested from various deep caves in Borneo. The red colour, however, is made of a special kind of coral which is only found off the coast of Australia. 

The Broadband gas itself is mined deep in ocean trenches in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. From there it is carried in specially reinforced cables to various centralised locations in America and Europe, where it is stored in enormous vats, strengthened by "broad bands" of steel (hence the name). Despite concerns, this broadband gas is quite harmless to human health, though repeated exposure to the raw product, before refinement, may result in minor emotional disturbances and disorientation. 

The Internet force beams, before they get to your home, are first stored in massive metal relaying towers which are able to transmit, receive and store enormous quantities of internet energy before passing it on. These internet relay towers are dotted up and down the countryside and double as nesting places for colonies of migratory birds.

You will have noticed that sometimes your internet mysteriously "goes down", that is, stops working. The reason for this is that a unique sea-dwelling mollusc has adapted itself to feeding off the broadband gas, for which reason they are given the name "broadband worms". These molluscs are really more like a snail or a leach than a worm, but they possess three sharp fangs with which they are able to penetrate the undersea broadband cables and siphon off the gas, which leads them to swell up to a great size, where they can often be seen bobbing in the ocean currents. This is the reason that your internet is sometimes disrupted. 

To tackle this problem, a race of miniature sub-aqueous divers has been specially bred to constantly monitor the underwater cables. This race of small creatures are sometimes derisively called "Internet goblins", but we should not make fun of them as they do a sterling job in maintaining our internet connectivity.  With their tiny hands and keen eyes they are able to patch up the punctures made by the broadband worms in the cables, and ensure a free flow of gas to the router in your home. They have adapted to undersea conditions by means of a secret government program which accelerates evolution, and have developed gills and webbed feet to assist in swimming and breathing underwater. They prefer to be mounted on seahorses, and are armed with special prongs to dissuade the broadband worms from gnawing at the cables, whom, however, they are forbidden to kill in too great quantities, as the species is endangered.

Of course, when you don't pay your internet bill, an employee at the local internet warehouse simply turns a wheel and shuts off the supply of broadband gas to your router. This closes the valve and interrupts the flow of broadband gas.to your home. When your internet is slow, it may be because the cable that carries the broadband gas has become tangled up with other cables, or perhaps because it has become clogged with a residue of that metallic dust which is a byproduct of the gas. If this happens regularly, please call your internet company and ask them if they would please dispatch a special team of trained internet goblins to secure and clean your broadband gas cable, and make sure it is untangled and free of residue. 

The view to the south, 21st of April

Some White On Black

More yours than his own, 2

                    I am closer to you than myself,

                    I am more yours than my own,

                    Yours is my meagre wealth,

                    Yours my unhappy home.

                    Under the stars and planets,

                    Down where we mortals roam,

                    In this unhappy annexe

                    Of unwieldy flesh and bone,

                    I am closer to you than myself,

                    I am more yours than my own.

                    Even the power of death

                    Into the darkness thrown,

                    Shall not divest my breath

                    Of this one word alone;

                    I am closer to you than myself,

                    I am more yours than my own.