By The Minute

I went to the higher education facility to watch four women dance in salt. It was in the next town over. It was about rituals and saturation. I left work at lunch and on the top deck of the first bus I ate a meal deal and all its packaging and the bag it came in and the change from the fiver. The next town over had been straightened and polished since my last visit and I could see my face in the pavement. I spent one pound seventy nine on two books and went to catch the second bus. It drove with its door open, and when it turned to face the way it came I began to suspect I'd assumed too much about my ability to follow basic instructions. I told the driver all about my problems, using small words that fit through the holes in the perspex. I'd meant to catch the fifteen but ended up on the five. I was now late for the thing I'd set off two hours early to be early for. He cackled and burbled and said he hadn't been this amused since he found out his energy provider was the French government and he'd been giving them four or five pints' worth of his sterling every month for the honour of electrifying his hard-working British hovel. He said he couldn't help optimistically remembering that this didn't used to happen when we lived in the past like total idiots who knew nothing about how things were going to have to be in the realistic future. He naively syringed his memories of the public ownership of essential services into my astonished ear canals, then immediately realised he'd have to bury the bus with himself in it under the nearest rugby pitch to atone for this heretical sharing of fact. By this time I was disgracefully late, so I told him I couldn't stick around to help but that I hoped I'd never see him or his opinions again. The third bus took me to the higher education facility, where I crept obnoxiously into the theatre in time to see four women kneeling on a bed of salt scooping air into their mouths.

Quite Some Rush

I am ferociously excited to announce a big new thing:

A 16-page book and 7" record package, being a three-voiced written, illustrated, soundtracked-and-jackanoried seasonal story, entitled Tinselsnakes and featuring the vocals of B. Dolan, the music of Buddy Peace, and the illustrations of Sarah Inkymole Coleman.

Right now the audio's a free download, and as soon as someone punches the big green button in the pressing plant, the whole package'll be available, for yourself and your friends and your children's children's children, etc.

The website is here. It has details.

The people if y'didn't know:

B.Dolan did this about houses and this about names.

Buddy Peace did this about Tom Waits and this about pudding.

Sarah did this about To Kill A Mockingbird and this about Copper Gone.

I've admired all these people for years and it's amazing to hear and see what they did with the words.

As soon as the whole thing's available I'll crash a foghorn into your life. Until then enjoy the audio and thanks and thanks again for your time.

Manual Handling

Would you mind, I said, at all, if I have a listen to your conversation so if it's any good I can reproduce it when I sit down later and try to think of something interesting to write about, which is certainly not the best way to proceed, I know, if proceeding's what you want to do, in that particular realm, but bad habits do drown thrashing, as they say, don't they, or something, almost, or I've failed once again to seize clarity by the arse, and to turn this lack to my advantage, which, I'm led to believe, is a trick I ought to be able to dazzle myself with, regularly, by now, much like I dazzle myself whenever I discover I've left the house in clothing appropriate to the season, and carrying all the items I might want or be required to produce, to boot, which is about sixty percent of the time, I'd say, if pressed, under oath, or exactly one hundred percent, if asked by an online form to list the behaviours and preferences that might help my application, for the position of vacillating supplicant, to the virile and delicious institution of whoever's offering me a bit more money or sanity, they don't half corkscrew deep these days, these application forms, you know, it's no longer enough just to say you own an alarm clock and your carpal tunnels are peachy keen, they want to know what kind of thoughts you're trying to avoid and how successful you've been in doing that, though I don't spose you need to hear that from me.

Well and Good

With music on and the windows open it sounds like the playground directly outside one of my windows is full of revellers losing their minds to my impeccable playlists. Or with no music on and I'm reading a book it's like they're whooping every page turn. Tonight someone was shouting let me out, let me out, let me out, and I kept turning the pages and thinking either he should accept what the moment has brought him and think about what he can learn from it, or someone should let him out, though I can't imagine what he might be stuck in, there being no cages in that particular playground, last time I checked. And I haven't checked the others but I assume the same is also true for them. After three more pages he'd stopped, and I took a break from The Golden Ass's ancient ultra-violent whimsy and went for a walk.
Between the playground gate and my front door there was an upturned shopping trolley. I thought about getting under it, to see if being under it might cause me to want to not be under it any more. The playground was empty of screams and people. But I remembered I was a pillar of the community, with a gleaming history, having so far had the sense to not get caught committing any of my many despicable crimes, and mustn't ever be seen doing something not immediately explicable, or they'd take away my squash licence and interrogate my chauffeurs. I carried on to the Polish shop, and took a milkshake to the cemetery.

Progression Loops

You look tired, they'll sometimes say, somehow only ever after I've been to bed at a reasonable hour and am feeling like the minister for moderation, with a gleaming stomach and enamel-white eye-whites. They seem to expect instead of surprise a reply something like Yes, I am tired from the lack of rest, the lack of rest from the strain of the constant murky hullabaloo and three minutes' sleep before work. The days I turn up rum-shoed and giddy and say I'm a bit tired they say you don't look it, and well can I dangle out the window by my feet and swivel my head through the drizzle for a couple of hours or do you need me for something?

Guided Distribution

We practised our huffs and laments in the medicine queue. The clocks were no help at all. When the next appointment was due, the name-display thing let loose a biblical alert-shriek which did nothing to soothe the anxious or calm the infants. The leading edge of the cloud of the mutterings of the man behind me slurped the top of my spine. The noticeboard said not to worry, none of these things are new or exceptional or temporary.
When the receptionist handed me my prescription she said here's your dinner, tasty bit of dinner, you're gonna eat it all up, with some water at a table for one, and tell me how it tastes.

Shortcrust Leverage Imbroglio

Blobs of doubtful vitality ought to keep their holes shut, I wanted to overhear someone saying, at the pie shop, two weeks ago, but didn't. The previous night I'd watched Savages bring down a church from the inside, then had some confused but lively sleep and taken my howling ears to work and finished early with an imaginary appointment. You ask to finish early and they say do you have an appointment, and you say if I did have an appointment would I also have to have proof of the appointment, and they say no, and you say well then of course I have an appointment, in fact this interrogation is making me late, and the appointment people take an extremely dim view of lateness, whoever they are.
So the pie shop was subdued but for the kitchen-clatter and my howling ears and the damp rustling pies inside heads make. I was having difficulty overhearing something I could steal and put amongst the fragments of the thing that is now finished but then wasn't. It was research and I was hungry. At the door as I was leaving I heard some lively pie-based dialogue I could use, and went home and put it in the thing, and half an hour later deleted it, and spent the next two weeks moving fifty thousand words around until an order that doesn't look like much of an order emerged.

Fact Is

Scarcely credible at first. Fevered blather, I thought. Dropping from his chops like the spells of a sick wizard. Told me he was all set to sue the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Hyper-Specific Tinnitus and Related Inconvenience.
Can't be done, I said. Flea's swapping cheese with Radiohead now. God knows the power of those two combined. Drive a mournful juggernaut straight up your guts. Never tango in this town again.
But total unconcern.
Ball's been rolling for decades, he said. Calm as a dead dog. And there's a peculiar extra feature.
He waved me towards his head. I leaned in. Round the side he said, ear to ear. Quizzed his muncher and he nodded. So that was it, flap to flap we dallied.
Rum future brewing in the man, I thought. Imagined the swift sink into gathering tics, erratic hours, lengthy corridors. How long before I'd start opting not to visit? Poor tosser. And with little Stanwix on the cusp of the academy... But you know: Wind. Caution.
And he held his breath and put out his hand. I followed suit. And what I then heard fairly scrambled my marrow.
Tinny and gruesome it sailed from his canal to mine: Neh-neh-yer message on the pavement, neh-neh-neh, neh n-neh-neh neh wave meant.
Feather daggers up my spine. I withdrew. Advised the unwiseness of tricks. Law-dodging. Hollow gold. Nodded my finger. But back in he beckoned me.
So I went ear-to-ear again and it hadn't bloody ceased. Neh-neh-n-neh-n-n-neh answers jer-jer-juh jer-juh-belly dancers. Incontrovertible. Obscene.
I stood up. Eel-mouthed. Molten. He laughed his hat off.
You've got them downright spatchcocked, I said. You'll not even need a lawyer. You'll be a bastard made of money.
A stammering set about me. An urge. Shameful, but I have to tell you now as I had to ask him then: How do I get in on this? I must have the method!
He drew his chin to his chest. Waggled his cabbage.
Can't say it's worth it, he said. Worse than the Meatloaf poltergeist. Man of your constitution'd be smashed into paste within the week, lucky I wasn't mangled gormless myself. But Stanwix.
He inhaled deeply.
The injections and the talking cure'll cost us half the settlement at least. I'm not sure why we bothered.

Must Be Off

I had this whole big thing in my head about the watchability of Taken 2, it was really going to highlight the something something paradigm something, but when I started to write it I realised it wasn't going to make any sense or be the kind of nonsense that's readable, and I tried to come at it from another angle and it ended up just being about boozing, and not really very whoa hey wow that's raw, so I put it in the pile of things that didn't work and went to a talk about self-publishing, where three people said keep going, champ, in three different ways, and you'll either find a publisher or realise you're not very good, and they asked for questions, and there should be a rule where if someone has asked for questions, and you've put your hand up, and they ask you what your question is, and you just go on about yourself so much that everyone else in the room begins hoping you either already have a terminal disease or contract an extremely meticulous one before dinnertime, and you have to actually be prompted to ask the question you were supposed to ask before you started saxophoning your brilliance, as if your question would be incomprehensible without the entire audience having a solid understanding of your cavernous potential, even though we can all tell your self-improvement will only begin with the removal of your ridiculous hat, and would you like us to remove it for you, with our feet, as part of a blinding assault, I've forgotten how this sentence was supposed to end. One of the questions was what am I doing wrong, and the answer was you haven't stopped doing what you always do.

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.

Chorizo

In the square a white-haired man approached and said can you believe it? They mugged me, in the metro, there were three guys and they take my wallet, passport, cards, it was as easy as a cake, where is the police station?
I didn't know, neither did the woman next to me. The man said never again will I keep things in my trouser pockets. I said but that's where I always keep mine. I was just about to introduce him to my dutch police jacket, which has two inside pockets, a biro holster and cuffs of variable circumference, and suggest maybe he get one himself, they don't ruin your life, but two policemen walked past and he went to get their attention.
It was my first night. The woman turned my way and said crazy times, huh, and I said slightly, and we talked about pockets, it didn't last very long.
There was an alarming lack of sock vendors. I had been down to my last pair for a while and my feet reeked like a cheese factory massacre. I didn't tell the woman this, but after a short silence asked her where you go to buy socks, and she said you wait until morning, is it an emergency?

Barcelona has a lot of buildings with good bits. That's a good bit, I kept saying to myself, I'm glad they built that. I walked. When my feet hurt I took the train. The next night I put on new socks and took them to the bar. To see how they would hold up. Black furniture and yellow walls and the chandeliers were tiny bottles of whiskey, vodka and amaretto. Outside a man in a green jacket was dodging bullets and wrestling bears. The barman played the stool. The best stool playing I have ever heard, loud and insistent.
Next day the modern art museum. I was excited. I paid and entered and went straight to the toilet. It featured two urinals, one cubicle and about ten six year old boys. One had installed himself in the sink, lying down, mouth under the tap, which was running, he was very happy. They all looked at me and one of them said hola and I left.
The ground floor gallery could be heard from miles off, there was a moaning whooshing insects-slowed-down sound installation endurance test scenario situation occurring. Like most good things it made me feel a bit sick. On the walls was a lot of jiggery pokery to look at. Some of it moved. Some of it was by John Cage.
On the second floor was a retrospective of some bloke. He'd produced many tiny things and a few big ones and here they all were in order. Some of the big things were made up of the tiny things, it looked like chinese but up close it was little people.
The third floor was Are You Ready For TV? I went back to the ground floor and the whooshing noise. It was all over the place.
Then Nasty Mondays, oh it's massive, you must, the whole world is there, said a swedish girl, so I did, and it wasn't nasty at all, it was downright fucking pleasant, which was very distressing.
Back at the black and yellow bar. It was playing circus funk. Another swedish girl, wearing a red shawl and her eyebrows went up a lot, she said it's a good town for shoes, and we talked about Stephen King and grandmothers.

Ruoms to Avignon

It took a while to properly leave. I packed incorrectly. Two bags is madness. I dragged them to the first roundabout thinking I don't need to be carrying seven shirts, three blank notebooks, two coats, army boots, two different shower gels...I'd forgotten how to move, six straight months, ish, in one place. I didn't have a tent.
The first car that stopped contained two people I already knew. I got in. They took me to their house and gave me lunch and a tent and asked why I had so much baggage. I didn't know.
-I hate baggage.
-There's a metaphor in there somewhere.
I made a bag of unnecessaries and left it under a table.
I walked from their house to Lablachére, it didn't take long, I was knackered and full to the face with sunshine and lunch.
I accidentally walked onto a campsite and gave a man eight euros for the use of some ground.
Paying for camping is not in the plan. But not planning anything is also in the plan. And his site was in the way of the woods I was planning to camp in. He immediately gave me a bunch of grapes and I felt like I hadn't made a bad choice.
I watched Lablachére. It was quiet, I was looked at. Much happened last week, at the fete, some people were refused service and became ultra-disgruntled and drove a car into the middle of the square everyone was dancing in. On the noticeboard is a letter from the mayor, it says paroxysm, unprecedented, barbarism and disgust.

Outside the campsite in the morning was a donkey in the back of a transit van. It was munching a newspaper. Across the road were more, chained up. The market was on. I squeezed through it on my way out of town. Then I squeezed back into it and bought a baguette and sardines and sausages. I started walking towards the sun. There were hills and valleys and trees and something smelled nice.
After however many miles twelve kilometres is I crossed the Chassesac. I sat down on a rock, ate some sausage and some biscuit. Half the trees were almost yellow. Finger-sized fish pointed upstream while brown leaves floated down past them.
A Heron was out, practising Heronry, taking off, landing and being massive.
I got in the river, then out, then in, then out, then sat with just my feet in. The Heron did the same, I'd like to say, but it was out of the way, I couldn't tell.
The river sounded like it was chewing. The shade slid around. I slept.

I walked into Les Vans when I woke up. I had a beer at a table. The Harley Davidson woohoo club were rumbling around town. A small boy was practising crossing the road, on rollerskates. After a few minutes his mother looked up from her drink and saw him, and the queue of vehicles on either side of him, and went over to smash his face off. He stopped where he was and covered his head with his arms. She dragged him to the kerb and put the skates next to a bin. He went back across the road and pondered. She went back to her drink.
I walked out of town the way I came in, to four stone walls surrounding some thorny overgrowth. A path went through a doorway in the back wall. It led to some trees. The ground was brown crunchy leaves. To the right was another doorway to another four roofless walls and some more thorny growth. To the left was the wall of someone's garden. I put my mat down under a tree and used my tent as a pillow. A dog wouldn't shut up. The tree dropped an apple on my shin. The leaves waved in front of the stars. I went to sleep.

After breakfast I walked up a hill overlooking the town and put my thumb out, at the correct angle, and after two minutes a 4x4 stopped.
A grey man opened the door and moved his luggage off the back seat.
-I'd like to go to Montpellier. Or Alés. Or Nimes. Or south.
-Ah. I'm going to Orange.
-Ruoms?
-Orange.
-Is that south?
-It is the same latitude.
-Okay. Good. I'll go.
His name was Patrice and he was going to work the wine near Orange. His family run a bed and breakfast on a mountain. It's called Stevenson, after RL, he might've stayed there when he wrote his donkey travels, or near there, I couldn't be sure, but I was enthused.
-It's a good book!
-Yes.
-I regarded it recently!
-Good!
The hills and the grapes and the sunflowers flew past for an hour and he dropped me at a roundabout next to a train track.
-Many journeys here. Good luck!
I was still enthused.
Two minutes later a white car stopped. A blonde woman was at the wheel saying something about documents.
Her name was Pascale and she was going to Avignon so so was I. She was from Algeria and America and France. She was enthused because I said I was from Manchester. Twenty years ago she spent some time there, it's better than London, the bus system is good, and the theatres, the music...
-Yeah it's a great place.
-You live there still?
-Nah I moved out eight years ago
-Why?
-I didn't like it.
She overtook everyone else.
-We are there in twenty minutes or I am late.
-This is good.
She told me the names of many beautiful places on the south coast. I didn't take any notes. I could feel my brain forgetting.
-You have a guidebook for your journey?
-No
-You should have one, I think.
-I hate guidebooks.
-Why?
-They tell you where to go.
-They only suggest.
-I don't like their tone.
She said the names of some good guidebooks and dropped me in the centre of Avignon.

Unbelievable Sir

It's only minus nine so keep your moaning silent, ninnypants, and get on with what you've got to be getting on with. Alaskans wear t-shirts in this weather and start thinking about what flip-flops to buy when it reaches zero. And it keeps your thoughts fresh and stops your mind stinking. Makes it slower maybe, but weren't you tired of it clattering around up there all morning while you were trying to get some work done?

Removal

While I wake up there's a voice in my head speaking a language I don't understand. Every morning so far this year it has said the same thing. It wants me to learn what it is saying and say it. It knows my life would be pineapples and thunder if I could say this thing. Then I wake up fully and it goes away.

On the news today underneath a picture of a grey-haired man feeding a dog were the words EXAM CHEATING.

Not Military In The Slightest

Leicester looks slightly cleaner and a lot more the same as everywhere else. The big shops've moved in. Black and white and dark grey and silver. The holy retail grails. A fuss was made.
The wedding went well, without distraction or bad weather, relaxed except for just before and during the bestmanspeech. Vertigo faced with a hundred and sixty ears. Dessert followed.
Manchester vomits a hotel in my skull. Nextdoor they knocked the Spar down and now the Travelodge must be built. Concrete cacophony versus wednesday hangover. Prune mouth. Webbed eyes. Brain needs wiping.
Switzerland on Friday. A month's work and some mountains.