Time to go

Sorry, Harry, you've been a long time with us but another house move? No, think it's time.

I think I've blogged about this picture before . . . or maybe not. Anyway, this album featuring the great Harry Secombe and his look of assured reliability that if he did indeed rule the world he would have excellent ideas about fairness and equality - unlike certain humans who should not be in charge of putting the bin out let alone being given the freedom to rule/decimate/f**k up an entire country, and possible the whole planet - more than it already is - represents a memory of a certain point in time. That was a long sentence but my brain is part frozen ( v cold day here) and I can't currently think of how to shorten it.

Winding back time to about ten years ago in the South of France where we used to live, Ezra and I had gone on a walk into the hills above our town. We had followed a previously un-noticed track and had discovered a strange sort of encampment with lots of dismembered bikes, rusting non-moving vehicles and collapsing sheds. It seems as if all of it had been long abandoned, including a stack of ancient vinyl records. I felt I couldn't leave Harry and his desire to rule the world to get any more rain damaged so took him home and discovered the record inside the sleeve was actually a scratched example of Belgian brass band music. That being thrown, I kept the cover which graced our 70s loo/gallery space, and then upped rank into a framed picture with added Goons photo.

While trying to scale down our collection of stuff for this next house move - see previous posts - I felt the frame could go back to Emmaus and the much faded album cover could finally go, but it will live on on this blog, and in the printed book version so I can forever, if I want to, recall that hillside walk and our discovery of such an odd, hidden place.

Hidden places

While trying to find an abandoned mine up on a hillside recently - as you do - me and the boy took a wrong turning and ended up on a gravelly overgrown track, the sides of which were lined with dismantled bicycles. It had to be worth further investigation, even with the risk of slavering dogs, or a slavering owner.
At the end of the track we came across a semi-derelict windmill and a huge rotting lorry, its inside full of everything from crockery, pans, hoses, sinks, to records, books, bedding, toys, furniture, dead plants, and more bike parts.



How had they got such a massive vehicle up there? And what had happened to the owners of the place? It was possible to see inside the windmill (I assume it was an ex-windmill) and there was a slight Mary Celeste scenario - plates and cups on the table, a stove with pans on it . . .
Feeling uneasy about trespassing, despite the place looking long-forgotten, I took a few photos, the weirdest being a picture of a decrepit Harry Secombe record in a wire basket along with many other long-forgotten English vinyls.



I often think about that place now as I drive along the main road and look up into the hills, wondering if all the stuff is still gradually decaying away up there, or perhaps someone has returned for the summer and is re-fitting the windmill with a shiny new Ikea kitchen - probably not.