Much At All

On a blustery corner outside a pub, ludicrous to try writing in this wind but let’s. An atmosphere might find its way onto the page for once. It's flinging the top of my San Miguel into the street. The pub is called the Dolphin Inn, the dolphin on the sign looks a lot like a dragon, green skin and a red tongue and it’s flying. I think I detected some disappointment at the bar when I didn’t order the local lager, but I’ve had it before and it tastes like fire extinguisher, the cloudy powdery variety, and is not a refreshing experience. Giedra Radvilaviciute is with me, in book form, wind-bashed, and she’s fun. I’m reading it very slowly so it doesn’t run out, and in case there’s no or very little more of her in English. I’m going to wake up at 6.15 tomorrow and think it’s time for work and spring out of bed and realise it isn’t and spring straight back in to bed. Across the road there’s a building that calls itself a Meadery, but it isn’t open yet. I’ve walked too far today and my feet feel like prime minister’s question time. All this wind is taking the edge off the sun, I don’t mind it. When I arrived last night there was rain congealed in the air and you had to cut through it eyebrow-first and the future seemed grim and familiar. The receptionist had an everything-will-be-fine voice and said tomorrow it might not rain.
I began to mind the wind. Now I'm in the Turks Head garden (no apostrophe), for historical reasons, and a seagull keeps offering to carry my bag home. There’s a sign up discouraging bad language. A man at one of the other tables just said chefs, don’t talk to me about chefs, and started talking about chefs. Mariah Carey’s getting involved. She doesn’t sound happy. Never has. A woman at another table just wants coleslaw for dinner. Come on, you have to have more than that, okay maybe some skin-on chips. They talk about dolphins while I read this in Giedra: I read that a woman in Israel married a dolphin. She kissed him, said I love you, and then dived into the water with her clothes on.
This abundance of dolphinry is encouraging and makes me believe I’m on holiday. I wonder if there’ll be a real one to look at, talk to or provide administrative support for, soon, and do they have tongues in real life or only when they’re on pub signage? Coleslaw woman’s voice doesn’t match her appearance, somehow. Her husband or, who knows, accountant, was talking earlier about the fluctuating price of cherry tomatoes, and why having a regular veg box delivered to your house becomes uneconomical if you always throw away the swedes and turnips. She was listening to this and making one-syllable answers. Now she’s on about something in a sing-song tone that sounds as if it’s building up to a difficult truth, and it’s his turn with the one-syllable answers, but the wind is obscuring the details, except this: you don’t get a haircut before you go to the barber's, do you? And he’s made no response.

Four Supremes

I’m in Cornwall. (Not now. I’m copying out what I wrote in a notebook and then changing it). Seaweed skulks and mooches and flops in the bay. (It doesn't, it just sits in water and on rocks, doesn't it, yes, there's no need to pretend it has motives). The sun squints behind clouds. (Maybe this is accurate). In Mousehole there are two headlines either side of the swinging local headline display unit: Mousehole Man Recalls Role In Car Prank. £20M Of Cocaine Found On Yacht. (Sometimes it's hard to know when exactly fun turns into crime). 

I’ve come on holiday on purpose, I’m going to experience a thing or two. I’m sposed to be starting the finishing of the first draft of a book, but two weeks ago when I gently placed my laptop back in its position something inside the screen exploded and the only images it now displays are meaningless. And how can I start the finishing of the first draft of a book on paper when the rest of it’s trapped in a useless beloved machine, I dunno. When the Greatest Hits of Motown is the only thing that’s playing on the café terrace, there’s no way of knowing whether or not it’s stuck on repeat. (It’s been stuck on repeat your whole life, this is just one more moment in which to be unsure whether or not Diana Ross is still alive, and what she might be up to, either way, right now.)

Things I haven’t brought with me to the café or the holiday include a hat, suncream, shorts, flip-flops and the iPod charger, because I left in a hurry, because I always have to manufacture a minor crisis, because I dunno. I did remember to bring some books and my eyes, though, so that’s a relief. (How long after we’ve invaded Mars will it take for someone to put on the Greatest Hits of Motown? What sort of objections might there be? Will it sound fresh, again, finally, over there? Is there a sound art piece that’s every Motown hit being played simultaneously, like there was with all the national anthems a while back?)

While I was walking to Mousehole this morning, to learn about what vehicles they use for pranks and cocaine, I passed a garden full of scarecrows with plates for faces and bottles for arms and bits of old rope for hair and then one of them was a dolphin on a stick. (Half-hour interlude for relocation here because Motown stopped and Simply Red came on, and while I was scattering tables, shattering bowls and sinking boats in my desperation to get out of earshot or die, I was regretting everything I’d just written about Motown and promising, internally, to you and whoever else, that I’d never be ner-ner about a good thing again, because of brain-consequences, like after I wrote about the bird foetus I dreamt someone gave me fifteen budgies, but they lived with their feet planted in little pots of soil, and I said thanks I’ll look after them, and the giver went away, and all of the budgies very quickly one-by-one died quietly gasping, and I shook them all out into a bin bag and held the bin bag to my chest and it started squirming, and I woke up with the feeling I should stop being flippant about gestation.)

Minimum Fuss

A bench by the fountains and the sun for breakfast. A sweating egg in a black leather jacket landed on my right and pointed a camera at the crow on my left. He asked permission for its picture and wondered about its habits. I ate a cheese and chicken sandwich and believed I mustn't move. The egg told the crow it had great feathers. It nearly moonwalked. He compared it to a jackdaw but needed it to know he didn't mean jackdaws were better. It bobbed its head and blurted yeah and flew away. He leaned in and showed me his pictures. I nodded and said decent. He looked at me. I chewed through the silence. He compared the rear of a passing woman to the rear of his girlfriend in the mid-seventies. I got the feeling they were no longer together. I didn't want him to ask me who's removing my trousers these days and he didn't. I chewed.

Bare Minimums

If you're reading this, thanks for reading this.

There is no news except that Sting has a cottage round here and his favourite hobby is to drive round in a small old car pretending not to be Sting. This is a fact so true that people are bored of talking about it. Unlike the cold and miserable future.

If I was to make something up out of slices of things I've made up that didn't make it anywhere it would look like this and be called some sentences taken out of context are a lot better than the things from which they've been removed.

#
The sand was havoc in our foldy bits.
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The sun had arrived and was beginning to claw people's faces off.
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I told her about what I would need to tell her about if I was employed to be doing the job I was pretending to be doing.
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Oxgoctional bumbunctions.
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The sun was throttling people with its nuclear hands.
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I burst into the shop and composed myself.

That Hat

There's a Europe-wide shortage of coaches-with-beds-instead-of-seats. But we're here, and the sun's everywhere and the grass is going mental. Half the kids were ill on the first day, and some of the adults too, and Jackson Pollock had been through the bogs and there was a quarantine-the-infected / sanitise everything situation. It was save yourself for a while and the pale were shunned, along with the coughers and the sneezers and the woozy.
Everyone is a fruitball, a batcake or a sneaky nut. There's plenty of rock to go up. So "things" are "going well". Flip-flops are going on frequently. It's the end of week one and everyone's having a bit of a drink so they can get to know each other and maybe later their faces can get to know each other's faces or the floor. I am on stay-sober-in-case-terrible-things-happen duty due to being late to morning meeting due to massive clock failure due to unnoticed battery outage. The number one rule is don't be late because this is what happens. It's a bit of a shame as I like the occasional twenty drinks. But I have the secret cashew stash and the Belgian chilli tortillas. The results are in and the winner is yourself.
The site is between two rivers and next to an airstrip for all your smuggling needs. If you were going to smuggle something it would be bacon. The doom-cloud has gone, so don't delay. I can send you the co-ordinates, or you could just keep an eye out for a hundred and twenty tents and a lot of exceptional behaviour.