Dichotomous Ramification 1

I was thirty. We went to Lisbon, for pastries and balconies and hills. On the balcony you could eat a box of pastries and look up and down the hill. It was a loud urban hill paved with taxis and mosaics, which they swept at night with water, sending the cartons and papers down the gutters in a stream that stopped for the traffic lights and left behind the phrase "glistening cracks", which I disappointingly haven't been able to construct an unforced-sounding sentence around this week, but maybe next, maybe next.
Pessoa has a statue sat getting polished by photography outside a good cafe. There was an empty chair next to it and sometimes there seemed to be a queue for the chair, sometimes there were fifteen art students drawing pictures of the statue and the statue's photographers. I sat next to it and poked it in the eye.
Across town his house is mostly now a tall library, but they still have his room and his books and you can go in and look at the margin notes and lie on the bed and crush the hat.

Monophonic Dreg Embellishment

Weather made sitting on the hill an option and I did it. I couldn't convince anyone else to do it. Sometimes I lie down on the hill. But not if I'm on my own. I fear getting kicked into a shallow grave by liberal toddlers. This time I looked at a book and watched some hot-air balloons and tried to ignore the sentence Eel-haired Roustabouts Lament Death of Pendulum, which was mincing back and forth across my mind behind the sounds of the words in the book I was looking at, because the death of Pendulum was being gang-lamented behind me by a bunch of somebodies. I didn't inspect the haircuts of the lamenters, but applied our location and the tones of their voices and their reaction to the hot-air balloons as they passed and the general subject matter of the conversation afterwards to my prejudices, mood, ego and residual bigotry to build up a picture of what was on top of their scalps that I was too arrogant to turn round and confirm.
On the walk home I sniffed around the local front yards looking for an excellent plank I could add to my bookshelves. People leave a lot of things on the pavements round here, you could find yourself a board game or some boots or the complete works of absolutely everybody. And there's a lot of wood and when it's not the wrong length or width I pick it up and then I have a new shelf to put books on and I take it home and put books on it and watch the books being on the shelf and the shelf being underneath the books, and the dirt on the shelves that I haven't cleaned and the dust on the bricks holding up the shelves, for days, it never gets less exciting than it is.

Shrubs For The Small Formal Border

An old man said you know things used to be different round here, it wasn't like it is now and it isn't like it was then, back then we had an unalterable allowance of things and the differences between these things were very carefully monitored by scrupulous hawks and if the differences became too great we had to dig a big hole and put the differentest things in it until the children stopped crying which is why them hills are so big. Similarities were very rarely mentioned, it was differences we cared about and if there weren't any we'd make some up using a calculator if necessary and let me tell you it's awful the way this country's being handed over to the
It was a dreary monologue that needn't be repeated.

Less of This In Future

Some temporary work in the country near the wet place known as England's most beautiful lake. They say. And they've seen them all. They had a big lake show and everyone put their lakes into carrier bags and went to a stadium and poured them onto a catwalk. This one won because of its versatility, unusual length and agreeable breeze. Some of the other lakes thought they should've been allowed to bring their surrounding scenery, but the chief judge said no, you don't judge the food by the cupboard it's kept in, do you? Do you? And does this look like a fucking cupboard-judging competition? And all the lakes were quiet and dribbled back into their bags and their owners took them home and sloshed them out into their holes.

Protect What You Value

The beach for the weekend. The far away award-winning one. We did good beachtime things and at one point walked to somewhere and arrived somewhere else and came back. There were large ancient things to look at and the sun was very close. My sardines were controversial. An iPod crept out of my pocket and crawled into the sea. The loss makes me wince, a day-long wince broken up by roaring laments.
I went to the job centre. They did not throw me any kind of welcome back party at all. No jelly. No hats. They are full of questions and can no longer afford to dish out plastic envelopes. It's the cuts. Their questions include where have you been, why did you go there, who were you there with, when did you get back, why did you come back, who are you back with, what are their names and dates of birth, what is the relationship between you and them, describe it, how many rooms do you share, how long will it last and what makes you think this, have you ever looked out the window together and said nothing, do you think that other people think the relationship is unlike how you said it is, what are your hopes for the future, do you often go around the house barefoot, do you ever catch yourself staring, was there a time in your life when you considered going into the ice-cream business, do you know any other people, really know them, would they give you a kidney, what have you forgotten.

Precision People

A bike, a hill, I will experience the joy of combining them, and to top it off I will skid gracefully to a stop at the top of the steps at the bottom of the hill, I thought, and there's no need to test the brakes before setting off is there, no, I'll just start the skid early in case they don't work. So I did, but the bike, being European and a girl's and well-maintained, had its front brake on the left hand side, exactly where it's never been on any bike I've ever crashed, and so I was launched off and upside down and somehow both my shoes ejected and I had the luxury of hoping the bike didn't land on my head before it landed kindly on my shoulder and we both clanged togther on the ground, I laughing and it spinning, and I've a bruised ankle and a scratch and nothing more except be careful what you wish for.