Reading of The Panto Horse End

Part one:
A deadly fart causes an accident that changes the course of Marions' life...

An honest portrait

Forget all those, 'oo, wait while I just check my hair's okay,' moments, this, caught in a moment of silliness (happening more frequently...) is probably the most true picture of me I've seen for a long time. Nicely snapped Ezra.
I'll keep messing about between the blog/Twitter/Instagram/website etc and see if it surfaces on Google....

                           

Building No 65

Spotted on our Allowed Out walk this morning.

Could it's clinical concrete exterior be a cover for something wild and at-the-present forbidden? The gate could give a small hint to the right observers. Tea dance? Exclusive private party featuring a stranded in France stadium rock band? Drug-laced rave?
. . . Probably not. I'd guess at beige or pale grey walls, white leather three piece suite, grey floor tiles, a clipped Yorkshire terrier, shiny red kitchen units, cinema screen TV, brass uplighters, huge white bathroom tiles with a scattering of gold and silver mosaics, palette knife black and red paintings, and a cream Renault Captur in the garage.


 

Following on from last post...

... another walk we discovered within our allotted kilometre walk this morning.

I must have driven up the road that leads to a favourite walk about thirty times and most times have wondered where a small path on the right goes. As we were on foot this time it was easier to think - 'okay, let's find out.'
And we did, until Gala the sometimes deranged greyhound ran off... but the bit of walk we managed was beautiful - a hillside full of scented gorse and thyme, a river cascading in the valley below and new-to-us views of the town.



                                                             Gala with her innocent eyes.... 

                              



             

As an appreciator of small abandoned dwellings and cabanes, I was happy to find an excellent specimen, complete with tiny fireplace, old chairs and long disused kitchenalia (not sure if this a word, but I like it).
I thought the shack and its ghostly owner wouldn't mind if I took a souvenir - an old and much cracked coffee bowl, which will now house a basil plant on the terrace.

                         

In contrast to the wilderness and peacefulness, I recorded a few urban sites on the way home.

                  
                                                 
                                                a favourite view near the river

                       

                                                   Charming bit of 80s architecture



                                              Weathered lockdown ad hoarding - Ha, Macdo!

If I was living back in London I would no doubt do what John Rogers (urban flaneur par excellence) does and record in detail everything around me, and look into geography and settlements of the past.
Below a recent video in which John uses the allotted 'lockdown' hour to investigate his patch of London.

Human re-setting

Many changes with come from our current crisis, one of the positive ones being, hopefully, a decline in the amount of unnecessary voyaging and an appreciation of what we can find in our immediate surroundings.
Nick Papadimitriou, a London observer and walker invented the phrase: Deep Topography for this sort of studying of one's 'patch'. In his case, London is a massive stamping ground but I imagine even during lockdown he will still be using his allowed out time to explore in ever more depth.

I've been reading a rather intake-of-breath book recently by Aurélien Barrau, a mind-numbingly intelligent French physicist and philosopher, in which he lays down the facts - verified by his numerous scientist friends - about where we are heading on this particular capitalist trajectory. Doom, basically. And as you read, you know it to all be true, (despite what certain maniacs in power spout) - the rapid decline in all species, the melting ice, every type of pollution, and on and on...
I started reading before the Covid emergency and had put the book to one side, it all being too bleak to contemplate. Now I'm reading it again with rather different eyes. Our current situation feels ever more like a warning from the planet.
He compares at one point a plane journey to get to a destination to experience life, and then compares it to life within a square meter of an average fairly healthy bit of meadow, in all its minute complexity. I'm not suggesting we should turn our daily existences into a kind of conceptual art and only move within a meter, but we could start to explore own own 'patches' more profoundly.



Not yer average astrophysicist... Monsieur Barrau.

The day before yesterday, the lad and dogs and I went on a walk to discover a bit of the town's surroundings we had never been to. Difficult, one might imagine after living in the same place for eighteen years or so. But, no. There it was, a small grassy lane leading up a hillside, which didn't in fact go as far as we would have liked but we saw beautiful blossom, an interesting shack, bright orange insects and a new view of the town.
We did it again yesterday, on foot from the house and up a road which we normally take in the car to get to an interesting vantage point and favourite walk. This time, as we were on foot and were noticing things in detail, we took a previously overlooked small road to the left, followed a track up a hill and were suddenly in a beautiful area of moss, lichen, gorse, dappled sunlight and huge old pine trees. The path continued, and conveniently ended up making a good twenty minute loop back to the main road.
Today, Mark and I took a more familiar walk past the currently shut station, past the currently shut restaurant de la Gare, and on through a twenties and thirties housing estate - a great place for observing French front garden style - and then into Limoux centre via the river walk. No one out anywhere except a few people sitting well-spaced in the square looking mournfully at the closed cafés - usually constantly open, even on Christmas Day. Weird. Although, oddly, rather wonderful too. The sky is occupied only by birds, wild flowers and grasses remain on all verges, and a car passing is a rare thing...

A few pictures from yesterday's and today's local wanderings.






                                   

                                                        New hillside vantage-point



Magnificent palm tree and newly painted balcony



Deserted back streets (apart from us and two dogs) 


                   

                             the rather lovely fire station petrol pump















 

My new Youtube channel: Tales from the vestry.

On watching an eagle

It was warm - very warm for late-ish March and I was lying on our terrace watching the clouds. What for a brief moment I thought was a plane, was in fact an eagle, riding the thermals and perhaps eyeing the Earth's surface with a little more clarity than a normal Saturday afternoon's atmosphere might have allowed.
I am not for a moment ignoring the terrible plight around our globe that the virus is causing, and we are in a privileged position in that we have space, a garden, family members that aren't (so far) plotting each other's demise, and we are allowed out. BUT, there is a strange feeling of slowness, a tangible noticing of the small and often overlooked stuff. And this seems too be increasing on social media - forgotten recipes being tried out, a certain make do with what you have, knitting, foraging, taking up of instruments, garden activities, reading...

                    
                                               Foraged salad last night.

I'm sure there's also an astronomical increase in the amount of Netflix, media platforms, etc being used too but hopefully people might be looking elsewhere for inspiration. I do have a reoccurring image of the remote server buildings - whatever and wherever they actually are - as bulging and creaking sheds, smoke issuing forth. Well, they say loading up an image to Instagram is the equililant of boiling a kettle . . . Actually, to add to the problem, I'm going to ask Uncle Google about this.
(Blogger opens up new window). Nope can't find anything. Maybe I dreamt it. Anyway, a nice general statistic - the internet uses 10% of the world's electricity. Yep, that sounds possible.

So. Life in our compound. I jokingly call our house and garden the compound, but it has become just that. We are allowed out with the right paperwork, to buy food, exercise for up to an hour and within a kilometre of the house, or to see a doctor. The town is utterly dead apart from a queue (a meter between folk) at the post office when they choose to open, a small supermarket, our favourite bio shop with its new very reduced hours, and, interestingly, the wine shop...



                                                            very quiet town square

Our son is back from art college - classes closed possibly for the rest of the year, Mark off from work and me doing what I usually do - writing, organising house, garden, etc, but with added frequent phoning and texting to check all friends and family are okay.
It's a strange time, like a very elongated Christmas day without the overeating, crap TV and presents; a very personal family time of work and getting together to cook, eat, play board games, watch films and walk the dogs. Not much else. And so far, none of us have missed anything from the busier life at all.
Of course there are questions and simmering anxieties: we are in the middle of selling the house, but can't go to look at other properties. What will everything be like in two months? a month, a week, even a day? Will the entire world economy built on nothing very real, crash? Everything is changing so rapidly. Unprecedented . . . everything.
About two months ago I was having dinner with some friends and I asked our host, who lives part year here and part year in New York, where he would choose to be if there were suddenly no flights - the sort of notion that often flits around my mind . . . he looked at me as if I were slightly deranged (possible) and said something along the lines of, 'Well, that's not going to happen, is it?' I pressed him further, and he still insisted it wasn't worth thinking about. I said, 'No, go on, really, tell me' or something similar and eventually he said, 'Okay, here, then.' Unfortunately they took a flight back to New York a couple of weeks later, so the choice was made. How odd now looking back at that point and now knowing that so many of the world's planes are now sitting about on tarmac - in fact, stored as much as possible in deserts to reduce corrosion.
I try not to think too much about the domino effects caused by this micro bug; it's all a bit too huge and scary, rather like thinking about what's beyond our universe. But for sure, the world is going to change drastically, and hopefully not necessarily in a negative way. Time to consider how we can move forward; address all the climate problems that were and still are to there to be addressed. Maybe we can no longer nip off to Iceland for a mini-break, or take a cruise, or believe our governments. Maybe it's the moment for re-scaling - scaling down, teleological descent, smaller communities, shared farming projects. Maybe we've reached a summit that we shouldn't have reached and peered into a dark and frightening future chasm. Maybe, we should quietly tip-toe back a few years or even decades and rethink our role on this planet.

A quote I like by Paul Kingsnorth, author of the Wake.

‘We like to think that the fate of the Earth and the fate of human worlds are the same thing, but we’re not as important as that’.