last seen

Soft dreams in a city; no hurried steps, just slim streams of me and other people sliding around each other. All faces and feelings are yet unread. Just another day, more food eaten, phones tapped and feet squashing their shoes into the ground. Layers on layers of living unwind themselves and float down onto the earth. Stories are trampled underfoot until all is coated in fine sedimented history.

the wind and its wiles

A knife, a tomato, scissors, Rizla, a red pepper, two novels, one notebook, one address book, a letter, a sprig of broccoli, a pen, a handkerchief, a mobile phone.

And me. I'm lying diagonally across this expanse of bed, my feet nestled comfortably in a thick wedge of feather duvet. The woodburner in the corner is roaring out heat, the delicately scrolled legs a benign camouflage for its angry interior.

I am in lovely home comfort, quiet radio keeping me company in this green caravan. Outside the wind is wild, it presses against the walls of my wood lined retreat and I can feel the structure shifting and bending in the face of these solid fists of air.

The wind turbine emits great swoops of sound, the frantic mechanic whines of a machine approaching maximum exertion. How long until it abandons this attempt to tame the air? Until it gives way to brutal shearing force, wrenching the tiny fan into the sky in a final exuberant tumble.

The electricity cuts out at intervals and suddenly the light outside is intruding into my private space. There is no happy yellow glow emitting from my familiar windows, instead, out there, tree bone silhouettes pop up like black paper scenery.

The light flickers on, the radio resumes and I am back in my cosy homeland; my heaps of woollen blankets and heavy sheepskin, my personal riches of blue velvet curtains and worn wooden floor.

Earlier I watched the sheep outside my window. I watched a ram trotting head down, now with purpose and now benign; stalking a ewe with stiff legged innocent steps until it was close enough to quickly move forward and push its face into the scent between her legs. She moved away, startled.

The wind has infected the horses, they run in short, jerking steps, tossing their heads. There is a moment of blowing; rushing and rising, as if they fly, high and outwards with this quick flick of energy, over trees and fences.

I have just returned from the main trailer, picking my way, candlelit, through the garden. One more thing.

In the main trailer there is a huge apple, the size of my two clenched fists. Picked like a prize pearl from a heap of sliding apples, saved from a mere mundane death, it sits in our kitchen like royalty. Blushing from red to yellow, this dappled prize is pert and perfect. It's a picture of an apple, magnified and made flesh.

I want to write across your skin oh apple. I want to engrave loving words into your flesh. Oh ideal apple, our adored exhibit, I will carve clear curling poetry that will stand fresh at first in a shock of white then fade and brown in your ageing; a slow hymn to your shrinking, your dignified descent into fold and decay.

There is no end to this letter, just a fade to sleep. The wind continues, unremitting. When I go outside it is as if I am caught within and dragged into the air. The wind pushes us and takes all within itself; we are no longer solid, only blown through like pieces of tiny leaf, nameless.

hot stream

This morning I sat for an hour in the grey dawn light, watching the rain laden clouds moving so slowly across the sky that I could barely see them change. I wanted to see the horizon clear and for the sun to rise free of mist and shade.
Eventually, when I had given up, laid down, rested again, yellow light filled my caravan, and I rolled over and said 'hello', then laughed at my welcome to the morning.
I walked outside, shivering naked and anointed the earth with a small cup of my blood.
Then I went tall and fresh into the open morning, my skin contracting all over me, my feet sinking into ice cold mud to a half barrel full of water where I filled a glass milk bottle to wash my feet.
On my walk to the computer I could see 20 miles into the distance, sunlight hitting multicoloured trees on lumps of hills.
Now I can see a clump of sheep, moving like a growth under a microscope, speeded up to where hours are seconds, spreading, colonising a hillside two miles away.

And it's only 9am. Hurray! Now I'm going to have breakfast and maybe cut some grass.

one day hitching

Thank you to the shy man who wouldn't meet my eye. Skip diving for a living, talking your madness out to your dog. I am the balance of your 17 year old Karmic debt.

Thank you smily Shabs for squeezing me into the back of your Toyota Celica with an equally smily child and headscarved wife. I would not have expected you to pick me up.

Thank you to the music producer, international traveller and unselfconsciously rich. I am your many opposites but equally free.

Thank you to the biker couple who halted my mile long trudge on a fast road. There was no need for you to stop for me.

Thank you to the crazy van couple, smoking poppies and talking of robbing people. I don't want any smack thanks but I still like you.

From angels to opiates in the twist of a thumb; all went out of their way for me, equally.

Certain flashes of Cardiff

Stencil mission, late night striding. Watching the streets for paint opportunities and oblivious passers by. Far ahead, too far to notice me, a man whirls around the pavement. Martial moves with a baseball bat, his shirtless skin glows orange in the late lights. I approach, slow, purposeful, not to be deterred or deviated from my path. Once seen he curls into defence and faces me, ready to whip out. I keep his eyes and keep my movement. His gaze is bright from behind his Halloween mask and I see the grinning skull face break into laughter as, when we are about to touch, he spins away and lets me pass. I smile.

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Candle burning in the window of an empty house. I sit, no fear of being seen, on a bare mattress. My room is cosy but if I open the door, hollow darkness looms beyond; only orange streetlight flashes lighting odd corners of corridors. I am on the edge of loneliness until I am conforted by a text from a friend. Even solo I am not alone.

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Bike riding, cool cruising. On a BMX that gets headturns from kids and skagheads. I go all over the city, through street after street that looks the same. Only the people are different. I pass effortlessly through their many bubbles, a multitude of existences, many languages spring into my ears. Pedal pushing, no effort, eating celery in hot sun on my way past the prison. Beer in a park then find Gaz and we go to his allotment. More beer by the river, dirt on my hands and I'm floating on concrete in the afternoon air. Sunset clouds stretch ahead like a peacock feather quilt.

afternoons in the garden

Recent drops of soft rain are shining on leaves and all the plants around me are drinking from the earth. A shabby gate, old black boards slowly greening from the bottom upwards. I can see through the slats to three hens and their cockerel, picking and packing round their stony enclosure to discover what changed during their overnight confinement. Small, squat little birds zigzag from the trees, snatching grain. I turn up the radio and walk away; our defence against foxes is a quiet burble of Radio 4, talking to no-one but keeping alive a small human presence in a corner of the landscape. Discontertingly at first, until recognised, the sound drifts through the garden. Deep conversational voices, in their recognisable rhythym, soon recede into a low background murmur. A constant in light and darkness, the steady cadence of the radio, and I think the patient earth, is there, whenever you turn to listen to it.

Single lives like spent matches, their presence a flame.

Guano streaks down the rock face as birds drip off the sheer cliff and wind round the air in black and white semicircles. This is an image of a valley, a vista. In the centre of a rolling sweep of rounded mountains, two chunks of granite jerk, slab sided, out of the flat valley floor. The prehistoric shapes of cormorants fly above me, heading down for their fish supper. But first they must traverse, over road and river. Drifting like the clouds over sugarlump caravans and broccoli trees they swoop out to the sea, 5 miles hence. Waves crash no longer against this granite nest, it faces only the ripples of a sea of wheat. The water left 8000 years ago; the valley now drained and settled, only the seabirds remain.

another world, just a car park away

So here I sit in the Port of Dover, toes poking out of multiple holes in my socks and a proper fruity stink on. A fat Chinese man is snoring; he's laid out in a strange position on the always uncomfortable seats and his round little son has just gently slapped him awake. There's something intrinsically Oriental about the slapping gesture, I'm not sure what parts of my brain are firing to tell me that. A couple are conversing quietly in an Eastern European language. They have the wan pallour and faded, forest coloured clothes of the sensibly middle aged.

I can't stop thinking about the 3 boys I met in Calais. Arriving at the ferry port in the centre of a clamour of delayed ferries, striking fishermen and cars bulging with distressed Brits and the many many possessions they needed for a 2 week continental holiday was too much. I left my suitcase and walked, determinedly in a straight line towards the edge of the sand dunes. The 8 or 10 figures on the edges of the clumps of brambles melted away as I approached and I had to wait a while, even wave once before 3 giggling men came towards me, pushing and nudging each other. They were boys not men, no more than 19. I expected them to be from Morocco or the African continent but they weren't. They were from Afghanistan and suddenly their faces jumped in front of me and reassembled into the wild eyes and wind rounded faces that I've only ever seen in shiny magazines.

I gave them food and tobacco and my wind up torch. One of the boys put the cigarette in his mouth the wrong way round, fortunately, when I unthinkingly reached out and corrected it, he smiled at me with his mistake. I showed them my wind up torch and when I lit it and flicked it round to point at them, an inch from cigarette boy's belly he jumped and put his hands up in shock. What did he think it was?

They answered my stupid, frustratingly functional questions - where are you from? How did you get here? I had no way to connect enough with them to be able to ask why. Why do you want to come to England so badly? What's it like where you come from? Do you know that most English people don't want you in their country? Why do you still say England is good when we do so much wrong in the world? Who are you? Why are you smiling?

I walked away, across the car park and back into the queues of uptight people in badly fitting clothing, complaining because they'd been waiting 4 hours and hadn't had any free sandwiches and they're sure those French counter ladies are lying to them about the wait and isn't it a disgrace that this is happening to them. Their whole holidays are ruined. Fucking, fucking, fucking, fucking IDIOTS.

I am left frustrated and unfulfilled by my brief encounter and I've been trying to understand why. I think it's because all the things I actually wanted to give them were intangible - my British passport, my ability to go anywhere in the world and speak my own language, the help that is just a phonecall away, my freedom.

This morning I woke up in a wood in the south of France, near Bordeaux. I didn't have a tent so I found a fallen tree and crawled beneath the drooping branches. I felt very open to the earth and thankful. I awoke to a beautiful sunrise, steam rising from a nearby lake and a light frost on the ground.

Now I'm sitting in a ferry terminal under florescent light. There's a plastic plant next to me with a label in it that says "Asset Verification 2007". I just touched the pebbles at the base of the plant. They're glued down.