Needles

I walk back from the Marina. Sun and dust and the air is pale. I walk near those streets I once knew, pick up bits of ghosts, lost transmissions - rather - stuck transmissions; Joe on a bench here writing a poem, Craig on a skateboard that was falling apart, walking on the pebbles of the beach, alone in the pitch black evenings of a December when I was 29.
Time passes, and it passes by us with a touch like knives. Delicate brush of impossibly hard needles. Events are scars. Form their own landscape.
The sea is endless.
I pass by the Pier, the buildings down the seafront.
It doesn't feel like I live here any more.

Daydream of a Dark Kitchen

I daydream of a dark kitchen on a lost Sunday afternoon. On the outside looking in. A young man stands at a sink washing dishes, his face drawn and like sleep in the gray blue light. There is a door to the left of him - a ragged door, scarred with neglect, leading perhaps to a back garden, a yard forgotten in the rain, tiny and secret and passed over for the whole of winter, most of autumn, most of spring.
I don't know where this day dream comes from.

June the 28th Forever

Shallow streets under street lamp reflected skies. Deep shadows down a road lined with bins and Elm tree trunks. Windows stacked on windows. An electricity sub station. A camper van made from a converted bus, looking abandoned. Shadows pass me. Pubs. Voices. Distance.
There are spiders loose in here. You've got spiders loose in here. Slip through sleep, like snakes through the silver of old water. I remember calling autumn the silver season once. Thinking that not last decade but the decade before on a train to Birmingham. Passing by a canal, watching workmen gathered by a brazier.
The bowl is tilted and smashed and upset, but it's not - wasn't - empty. Apple juice and pear juice - orchard blood - stain the floor - bright and accusing rills swell and pulse and seep through sleep. The curves of the smashed bowl look like fragments of a moon made from a tree.
It feels like it has been June the 28th forever.

The Hill was made of Clockwork

The hill was made of clockwork, and as far from the sea as you could get. An infinity of ever descending mechanisms lay beneath the paving stones, the houses, the cramped obscurity of off-licenses and pubs and the Chinese takeaway on the corner. An intricacy of cogs, and tiny ticking hearts, like footsteps - or insects. Tubes and gears, pipework. Ventilation-shaft dreams.
The hill is made of clockwork, but I don't know whose time it tells any more.

It was rare I spent any time in the bathroom on the first floor (or second if you counted the basement level) aside from to use the toilet - and only because it was the closest to my room. The bath remained unused. The shower remained dry. I remember on certain kinds of rainy days, I would open the sash windows a few inches. Watch the water puddle down the road opposite the house - Wylds Lane? Victoria Road? I can't remember it's name. The clockwork would reach up to me here, through the house, entwined with floor boards, find me on these dead Sundays watching rain fall from flat white skies when I had no money or inclination to go out.

The hill remains with me - that slow ascent up through those places I see most in those half-memories and daydreams that flux through these days. I think of the Chinese takeaway on the corner - just up the road from the house - and I remember it with a feeling of odd serenity - the girl who worked there with her perfect, unreadable eyes. Vegetable Chow-Mein. The television in the corner, and outside the night gathering and rising.
Above a mountain of stars, the air ice-cold and tasting of silver.
I was 25.
I looked away for a second, turned back, and I'm 40.

That clockwork is a mirror, a tide, an undertow.
Something pulling the days down under the hill.

I breathe a different summer, taste the ghosts of sunlight behind the sky.
If I concentrate I can hear the sea.

Bowl

A bowl that once held fruit balanced precariously on the edge of a table. The bowl reflects the grey light of nowhere days. The edge of the table is sharp and unnerving, and as you try to daydream, the point of it all -both literal and metaphoric- seems to drill, or wishes to, a bore into your skull.
My torso holds something akin to a tropical fever, a mild jungle delerium that disquiets my internal organs. Makes them restless and agitated. I breathe air that tastes of bad clouds. I drink water and orange juice to clear it, but neither do. I look out at the sea, the sky, the workers on the closed off road below.
Farewell to places I'll never see again. I speak to Dad on the phone in the last couple of days of them living there in Perranporth, as they're moving on Friday. No more cliff top path walk, no more St Piran's Cross at Christmas Eve. Ghosts of Bracken and Misty and rock pools and I'll probably never see Cornwall again.
Long day at work. Ten hours.
I forgot to buy milk.
I've got to go out into that evening, balanced precariously as that fictional fruit bowl, balanced on a made-up table, feel it's point bore into me, like a song I cannot forget, a name I can't recall.

Crawlspace Spinney

Not really a wood, but an irregular triangle of trees, an accidental region bordered by forgotten back garden fences, obscure stone walls, the high and smooth-scarred surface of a factory wall.
The trees here are clustered in thick and close. Pine trees of a sort. The ground is littered with needles and cones.
It is impossible to work out quite how large this wooded area - this cramped triangle of trees is - as the air is so crammed full of branches and wood and bark and brown it is not possible to see from one edge - one border - to another.
It is no larger than a small back garden though, and I only know this for I have measured the borders of this region in dreams and daydreamy afternoons. Hours of drizzle and staring out of windows that look like school windows.
It is often night here, and lying on the ground of the wood, the sky is mostly obscured.
Rumours of stars or a shard of street lamp orange.
A nostalgia, little more.
A breeze almost constantly.
It is tempting at first to liken it to breathing, but this would not be accurate. It has more in common with some kind of irregular tide. An up-and-down swell that tastes of attics and old paperback books and childhood night-times with the window open and staring across fields at a sway of distant poplars, god-like on horizons.
So close I could touch it, but this arrhythmic wood, this crawlspace spinney, has never existed, and because it has never existed, is far, far more real than anywhere that ever has.

Cut

The gap in the curtains.
Lying there in bed, in that unreal light of grey summer dawns. A quivering light, strangely violet and uncertain of itself.
Slipped back into sleep again.
Wake up later and go to the bathroom. I managed to cut my finger on a knife last night when we got back from the pub. Thinking about this I look down and the cut has opened itself again.
A shallow cut, but there seems to be a lot of blood.
The colour is exactly the opposite of the grey dawn outside.

Afternoon Quiet

The Mews is still. The air has that odd quality of timelessness, accentuated somehow by the sound of an aircraft. The sound of the plane is the sound of the distance.
Sat on the sofa in the flat. A white day outside, grey sky and the air cool and chalky. Silence settles about the flat, about the softened shadows falling between the gap in the curtains.
I worked with someone once who was fascinated by the concepts of afternoons, about their identity as a time, as a place we pass through everyday. I am ambivalent about afternoons. Where do they belong? To work or wandering about towns, of this afternoon, more likely, to sleep.

Prising apart Clockwork

On the air, the night, the dark-blue of imagined shadows, a voice, the absence of a song just left, an echo of a footstep just faded, a lacing of something cool in the summer, a serpent winding with autumn leaves for eyes, and we might all be falling here.

Sound of Wolves and the Ten'o'clock News

Watching the angles of sun on the sea, diagonal autumn planes. Looks more like a field by a river than the English channel. Watch the street lamp sway in the breeze. A grey drama without excitement. I wait for the lamp to fall but it never does. A piece fell off a building in Queen Street last night though. Closed the road. Hurricane echo. We all remember an autumn back in 1987. Dark now. I watch the blank frames of the night in the window frame. Listen to that wind. The sound of wolves and the ten'o'clock news.

Windy for a While

It was windy for a while but it seems to have calmed down now. Walking back from work, watching the trees in the churchyard by Tesco's, wild and ripping and not-still. Grey skies behind. Rain and not rain. That churchyard always reminds me of ghost stories and summer days like this, disquieted and fascinating.
Autumn hanging in the air. Autumn - all seasons - are side effects of space as much as time. Autumns in the petrol station. Stranoge angles of wet-rain afternoons, damp light and the shadows of the Old Shoreham Road softening the shelves and the tins of food no-one bought; Green Giant Sweetcorn, some kind of treacle pudding, possible some kind of strawberry flavour, peas, new potatoes. Overpriced baked beans.
Em lies on the sofa behind me, I hear Andy in his room. Indistinct music trickling through those sharp curves of the landing. Some documentary on the television about policemen in Swansea. Burglars, street lamps, suspects afraid of their mothers, being arrested on zebra crossings.

The Nights start Drawing in now

I can never quite remember when midsummers day is, due to its habit of skipping around days when I think it should always be on the 21st. According to the internet it is today - or rather tonight. Does that mean that today is the longest day and tonight the shortest night? Or is that yesterday? The nights start drawing in now. That slow-quick creep to autumn, then winter, then spring. That endless circle - or rather spiral. Days creeping backward and forward like tides. The sun is shining out there, and for once it does feel like midsummer. There's always something more other midsummer than winter, something a bit more unsettling about it all - the height of the surreal lengthening of light, particularly when you go outside an hour or so after night - 10:30pm say, and still see a vague trace of light in the sky.

Midsummer Stillness

Walking back from Em's last night. That hour before midnight, and everything is still, laced through with some midsummer strangeness. There is a watchfulness in the dark alleys that lead to the dead-end cluster of back gardens, and the groups of garages, set back from the road in their own country, display their empty forecourts with an aggressive equanimity. Breathe in and taste the odd serenity, the sky with lat traces of the day - stars in the velvet blue, and I think, in Scotland now, it would be far lighter yet. I take a right angle of a road I have not taken before, the light cast from lamps is darker here, more trees, and the rubbish bins frequently present obstacles. As I descend into this strange road of angled-shadows, it begins to adopt all the textures of a dream, of something being strange, when nothing actually is. The tipping point of oddness. The road cuts sharp to my right, and I recognise a familiar road and the curve that takes me back home.

Autumnal Time

I'd like to find a period of autumnal coolness, a room in an old house I have not previously known - except perhaps in dreams or half dreams or day dreams. I can almost see the house - two or three storeys - a large building; sloping roofs, missing tiles, tall narrow windows. Empires of chimneys and the ground floor windows hidden by clusters of ivy and the shadows of trees that grow too close to the building. Though the house is large, there is no sense of grandeur about it - or rather, ostentiousness - the house is far too anonymous for that. It is a hidden place, slipping sideways into those places between the everydays we live through. The house is set alone in a wood, surrounded by tall, spindly trees. The ground of the wood is covered with leaves; orange, red, gold, and all the tones of the autumnal fevers. Is the house abandoned? Is the house deserted? I don't know - there is certainly the sense of the house slumbering - or dreaming - or falling. The state of the house is uncertain, a Schrodinger's Cat house. A place both steeped in the essence of autumn (warm and balmy September gold, laced with something cool, lake-blue October, fragments of a bleached bone moon) and in the essence of something outside of time - oir at least the passing of time.

I don't know how I will - or would - come to be here, though I imagine it may be in connection to some kind of work connected with the house. The work of an antiquarian (though I am not an antiquarian) or maybe some uncomplicated gardening task (sweeping leaves or apple picking perhaps, - though I am no gardener either). I would be given access to the house - perhaps even a set of keys - but my tenancy there would be transient. I may occupy some kind of temporary caretaking position, but my duties would be light and would not be taxing.

In the house there would be a room - or series of rooms, possibly on the ground floor - and part of my duties would allow me access to these rooms - perhaps as part of the antiquarian project I may be involved with (sorting through old papers from a vanished tenant) or as some kind of storeroom (boxes of old newspapers, broken gardening trowels, melancholy dusty watering cans).

Despite the fact that my residency there would be transient there would be little rush to define this transiency. This would be some paradoxical effect of the house, and its equally undefined surrounding regions, of being both steeped in autumnal time and free from the effects of the flow of time. Time would pool and swell here, become deep like the back water of some forgotten river running through the unmapped geographies of the edges of sleep. Half remembered childhood woods, half glimpsed shadows in the garden on an October day.

In these ground floor rooms, it would mostly be late afternoon. Warm sunlight would fall through dusty windows, broken by branches and leaves moving in a pre-twilight breeze whose strength would vary from a morning-whisper to a small-hours roar. There would be a chair here - perhaps by a fire that would not have been used for years - decades - even never - for in this house it is always autumn, and fires are only ever lit in winter - here anyway - and it will never be any other season here but autumn. The sunlight over the floor - the dash and flicker of shadows - the night-flutter, would have all the uncertainty and fascination of light reflected from water, an old-harbour dance, an interior dockland.
Then there would be the weight the house around me, all those empty rooms, and unknown hallways, rumours of lost stairways. Attic-echoes- cellar songs.
Despite the emptiness, the J.Alfred Prufrock completion of desertion (or abandonment), there would be nothing sinister about it, but more a deep and resonant mystery. I don't really need to accentuate that, point do I? Everything at Bridge 39 depends on mystery, about that knowledge in the not knowing, about the qustion mark behind a door only a few inches ajar, showing a glimpse, a beguiling fragment of the corridor beyond.

This is what I crave fot anywhere, here at the beginning of summer, with the seagull song, and the wood-pigeon nostalgia calls, and the long evenings stretching impossibly late in this midsummer week.

11:39am

Sunday morning.
Andy, Em, tea.
Horses on the TV.

Weather report:
Grey skies, might be blue.
People in the Mews.

Car door shuts.
Em looks out the window,
'still a bit windy'.

8:56pm

Wind is up.
Restless evening.
Twilight loosening everything.

Could sleep for days.
Could walk for hours.
Could be lost forever.

Boats drift apart.
Cold water.
Grey skies.

Unfelled Elms

The cold water of an imagined afternoon, watching planks of wood drift on loch-deep waters. My reflection, the sky.
I have never been here.

I remember the wind of a walk in the woods last year; deep shadows through the trees, dusty melancholy down lonely paths, fields too yellow and stretching out to places I may once have slept in.

I pause as I cross a certain road. Elm tree lined shade, deep, deep, deep, like night. Like the luxury of night. Poor elms. Every year there's less and less of them. I would say it may be another farewell to the shade, but there's no sun to cast a shadow.

Lunchtime Undertow

Maybe it's the air conditioning at work, or the heavy, stuffy weather, but whatever it is, I am exhausted. My limbs feel like they're made of concrete, and there seems to be an unstoppable attraction between my eyelids and the notion of closing. My level of concentration slips away, and I start to think of headache-y days when I was a kid, staring out of the window at the rain during sickly maths lessons.

After my alarm went off this morning at 7:00am, it took quarter of an hour to drag myself out of bed. Industrial-air, thick as treacle, and the imagined atmospheres of desert factories. Sat on the sofa in the living room, half closed curtains, watched by the half closed eyes of a grey day. Men down in the Mews, opening up their workshops. I suppose once there may have been blacksmiths down there, horse-shoe makers; iron, fire, metal. It's all joiners now. Bespoke furniture, wood and the sound of drills and saws. The more things change, the more they stay the same, except there are no horses now.

Lunchtime passes and the sky has gloomed over. It felt like summer walking in this morning and now it feels like weather in Limbo

While

Sometimes I should like to slip through a gap in the mundaness of the everyday - not to find anything more fantastic, but to find myself somewhere more slowed down - and mostly empty of people. I'd like to walk, for a short while - or a long while (just a while really, a 'while' that would refer to place rather than time) a country of narrow winding lanes cutting through tangled woods. Spinnies on distant fields of overgrown wheat. Blue skies like that turn during September into autumn. Just walk this countryside, without rush or haste. lost in a maze of stiles, a labyrinth of ruins, an architecture of meadows. As I get older I find my need for solitude increases. A craving to be free of voices and footsteps and conversations. Tired even of my own voice, I only want to converse this afternoon with silence.

Watching

I look back over my own drawings, a random selection from the last decade, unearthed from my battered portfolio that is nearly twenty years old. I've never noticed before, but so many of the pieces show people looking out of a window, or a door, caught up in whatever landscape is around them. I wonder why this image appeals to me so much, this fascination with the act of watching, the ritual of witnessing. These characters are often faceless - we view them from behind, their faces hidden - reflected - in what they observe. Patterns emerge that are only noticed after the fact - I had really not, well, observed this recurrent theme before. I wonder what I'm looking for in these pictures, of people turned away, wonder what these people in the pictures are looking for. I wonder if there's anyone who might be watching me, who in turn themselves is being watched, and the thought of this sudden infinite regression suddenly and pleasingly unnerves me.

Rain Storms in Malta

It started raining yesterday afternoon and didn't stop until I woke this morning.
I had to walk to Sainsburys last night and got soaked, and after spending all day in the house, needed more of a walk, so headed off towards Portslade. Narrow houses hiding under sumemry trees, and the rain makes the shadows beneath them even deeper, more luxurious.
All darkness in summer is elegant.
I remember writing in a notebook over December of 1996 of how a rain storm reminded me of Malta. This was written deep in the night, during those phases of crushing insomnia that used to plague me during my twenties. I remember lying in bed smoking, the clock inching toward 4:00am, deep winter blackness, craving for sleep that always remained just out oif reach.
It never rained in Malta though. I don't know why that rain reminded me.

Zombies, Dreams, Hitler and No-One at the Door

Two recent dreams...
1.
There had been a zombie apocalypse. Living corpses on every street. I am worried about walking the street with a shotgun in case the police see me and think I am a criminal. Society continues to collapse. Law breaks down. I join a group of survivors holed up in a bunker. The leader of this group is Adolf Hitler. I think to myself that 'this could lead to trouble' but, despite a less than good Historical record, decide that he 'might have changed'. More survivors gather outside the bunker. Hitler is quite cross about this, and refuses to let them in or give them food. Out of the periscope I can see women washing their babies in taps that grow out of the ground. I am shocked by such poverty. We convince Hitler that they need some food. He agrees, and installs a giant flexible tube that will run from the bunker to the other survivors. This will dispense a grey/green tasteless mush that is called 'Grunge containing all the necessary vitamins for survival. 'If they're not happy with their grunge' rages Hitler 'they can go somewhere else!'.
2.
I am at my grandparents old house in Stone, Worcestershire. I am in the living room with Bracken, our old Yorkshire Terrier. The living room is full of shadows. It suddenly strikes me that I might be spending the night here alone. The thought fascinates and terrifies me - the house is haunted after all.

The last dream I had yesterday afternoon when I had got back from work. When I woke, I lay on my bed, thinking about what I would have done if I had to spend any nights alone at my grandparents house (I used to think the house was haunted when I was a kid). I began to day-dream (nearly slipping back into sleep-dream) of spending summer nights in the garden, building a makeshift shed, being afraid to go anywhere near the house at night for fear of glimpsing something. Perhaps, even, during the day, the house might adopt an increasingly malevolent atmosphere...
As I began to get caught up in these waking fantasies of avoiding haunted houses there was a sudden knock. Someone at the door. There is little that is more unnerving than an unexpected knock at the door on a Saturday afternoon. I elected to ignore it. What if there was another knock I thought? Then there was another knock - urget, insistent - I decided to answer it and leapt off my bed, grabbed my keys and looked down the stairs at the frosted glass of the door...
There was no-one standing there.
Whoever it had been had quickly left, and I never found out who it was.

Sunny Windy Days

Sunny windy days.
The rain and gloom of earlier in the week has dissipated, replaced by a ceaseless ongoing wind. There was something autumnal about it yesterday morning as I sat in the cosy gloom waiting to leave for work. The sun broke through the rain in the afternoon, and the wind grew wilder. It rattled loudly through the night, leaked its poltergeists into the doors and the walls, and the cassette tape I jammed under the door frame ('Nothingface' by Voivod) didn't stop the door rattling.

Seems calmer out there now - even summery - though if I crane my head to look back at the sea - the water is restless. Not as much as yesterday - or even this morning - when the sea seems dangerous - a fluid and untrustworthy carnivore, eyes of waves, foamy-white with a drowny bloodlust. No boats out there. But it seems to have grown calmer now.

I remember sunny windy weather when I was a kid - they seemed to make wherever I was that much more mysterious - as if the afternoon was about to reveal something secret and glorious and ambiguous. Empty houses and abandoned alleyways, the wood to the north of where I lived, the farmers fields beyond the green fence. It all seemed to promise mysteries that needed to be investigated. It didn't take much for us to start ghost hunting on days like that becaus somebody would say they had 'seen something strange', -often a few days previous- or had heard something 'creepy' in the deeps of a childhood sleep, hovering on the edge of dreams.

Something still persists of that sense of mysterious possibility when such weather comes now - though these days I'm more likely to daydream out of the window, rather than investigate any ghost stories. One of the perils of growing up I suppose. Still, if I were to come across an abandoned house I'd never noticed before, with an open door leading to a darkened hallway full of shifting shadows, it might be a different, and far more interesting, story.

Not today though. No wind now.
Almost looks like it might be summer again.

Menacing Gods and Silence

The outside is restless, keeps trying to get into the house. The interior rattles; door in door frame, the cat-flap in front door, and all round the house the sound of that troubled, restless wind, a ceaseless noise that contradictorily seems to define a certain kind of silence.
Perhaps it is a silence of the day. I hear nothing that indicates the presence of people. There is just the wind, and the light (it changes even the bulb of the table lamp I am writing by) - it all seems infused with those days of very early autumn, those dark, breezy mornings, the afternoons full of menacing gods.
I hear the sound of something now - one of the workshops opening - or the sound of a back door in Drurys Coffee Shop being slid back. I can't tell if its the wind though. I listen carefully.
Nothing but the wind that defines silence again.

Like a Cemetery in the Year 2666

Thick heavy rain. The air conditioning turned up full at work. Like a hospital in the tropics, not that I have been to the tropics, but I have hospitals.
They are always too warm.

I start reading 'The Savage Detectives' by Roberto Bolano again. I read the piece about the author at the back of the book. Rather flick through it; work is busy and breaks are snatched in glimpses during quiet moments. The writer (Biographer? Reviewer?) writes of another novel of his '2666' that it has a sense of 'creeping conspiracy'.

Oh yes. 2666. I remember reading that. That sense of odd undefined wrongness that ran through the book. Not so much the words - or the subject - if '2666' can be described as having a subject, but the tone... the rhythm of the words themselves... set up strange echoes. Oscar Fate, where are you now? - sent to Mexico to cover some boxing match - or matches (too long since I read the book) - lost writers and murders - and reading it was like being followed by the place itself. Insidious.

Reading 2666 would be like reading 'The King in Yellow', a fictional theatre play dreamt up by Robert W Chambers, but 2166 is sprawling and real, and 'The King in Yellow' is in fragments and has never existed.

Rain cleared up.
Sun.
I'm afraid to read 'The Savage Detectives' because 2666 is too perfect.

Nine Words

Clammy.
Drizzle.
Hot.
Wet.
Busy.
In.
Tea.
Out.
Rushed.

Restless Sort of Day

Sun and wind, sat on the sofa and back to the window. A restless sort of day. About to head out with Em to some place outside of Newhaven, a possible geography of rivers and marshland. A saver for the bus, and that bus-ride through town, drowsy at the window, staring at the streets below.
Last night at dusk in my room. Watching the shadows grow and everything soften and become fluid. This could all be made into a tarot card image - a foreground of gardens, in the distance hills, beyond that moutnains. Beyond even the mountains, an unreal vivid red sunset. This was the image that summed up what I felt during last nights twilight. I don't know why. It bears no resemblance to what I can see out of my window.
The door rattles in the door frame. I had to get up during the night to stuff a cassette tape under the door(I think it was 'Nothingface' by Voivod). It sounds like someone knicking, someone wanting to come in - or go out.
A restless day, like I said.

Bunting

The bunting is still strewn across the Mews. I eye them with suspicion (metaphorically, from where I sit I can only see two of the triangular flags, one coloured red, the other a Union Jack) as it only takes the slightest of breezes for them to wake from their silent slumber. Trying to watch the film of 'The Krays' last night (all muted colours, red brick back streets and 40 watt bulb lit rooms) the noise of the flags were quite incredible, sounding ridiculously loud, and like a number of different things; a rain storm, waves, and, more alarmingly of all, the sound of something collapsing. I quite liked the sound - it gave the living room an ambience of being deep in winter, deep in the small hours. There was an urgent to it all, as if the bunting had something it desperately wanted to say. There was no-one to hear but me though - and I could not translate the language of those breezy flags.

The Shadows you Rest in

A creaky day.
The light in my room has that muted post-rain quality, a daydreamy feel that makes me think of tree-lined roadside verges, narrow strips of squat and thick-leafed English trees that never seem to have a name. The day feels like resting in these shadows, watching the white sky through the branches, and the shadows you rest in full of sleep and last night's half remembered dreams.
Venturing to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, the noise of the bunting that is strung across the Mews startles me. The triangular shaped flags - the Union jack plastic - flutters like wings. A sudden memory - dating back to Malta - of a butterfly caught in melting tarmac, trying to escape. The desperate flutter of too fragile wings. The wind does not seem that strong, but the fluttering bunting has a maddened quality to it.
The day has a pleasing, abandoned quality to it, an old-fashioned country where everything is closed, like Sundays in the 1980s.

The Jubilee Siege ends

It rained.
Everyone went away.

Notes from the Jubilee Siege -3:28pm

1) If I am out at the front of the flat, I can hear loud 'pop' music of a nefarious quality. This began about fifteen minutes ago, when Em had left to go to work.
2) There is the happy laughter of teenagers. A laughter that seems slightly old fashioned, as if it is a Jubilee celebration of 1977 not 2012.
3) Through the frosted glass of the front door I can see figures moving about the Mews.
4) Em, before she left, noted that she saw 'trestle tables' being organised. I was too afraid to come to the window to look in case I was espied and had to 'join in'. Em also noted that she could see no 'cakes' yet. Her tone indicated disappointment.

And so the Jubilee Siege begins

In the quiet of my room. 8:59am.
The bunting is strung up across the Mews, hung from lantern wire and pipe. There is a party due to start there at 4:00 this afternoon. We have been invited, of course, which is the trouble, as I must now spend the entire evcening avoiding the party. It is very nice we are invited of course, but, really, the thought of a party - any kind of party - usually fills me with a sense of cold horror. It is all that 'joining in', all that enforced jollity and party games. We live in a world where 'joining in' is seen as something noble and heroic and mandatory. 'Bring your own food!' the woman said from next door when inviting us 'and if you can do any entertaining then even better - bring your talents too...'
Upon hearing this news I considered the option of maybe spending the night in the woods somewhere. Now I am considering just hiding in my room when the celebrations start... but I have to go down and let Em in when she finishes work... I have to make sure I have all necessary food and supplies, as I don't really want to make my way through the jolly fascism (Celebrate or die!) of the Mews party once it starts.
This seems to be turning into a siege situation.
I didn't even like the Jubilee celebrations back in 1977. I broke my plastic union jack flag.