Bittersweet end of a festival

It’s sad when it comes to the end of a festival. Snoozing on the bus home feeling tired but relaxed and happy. The worries of the world trickle back into my mushy-pea brain as we re-enter the city. 

‘You love this city, and this is your home’, I tell myself, but I can’t help noticing the haggard stressed people who jostle about in the public transport system like flies trapped in a jar. The festival atmosphere was all carefree and fun-loving, wild. 

A woman I didn’t know with a lovely Welsh accent told me over a beer that the end of a festival is bittersweet because she knows it can’t go on forever. ‘Here, everyone’s got glitter on their face and it’s our own little world. When you get back home you see all these people in suits looking serious and you realise God that’s what the real world’s like. Bit of a shock to the system.’

On my way back I see a woman giving grief to a lone TfL worker about delayed trains. ‘It took me over an hour to get here and it was supposed to take 20 minutes. What’s the use of spending millions on this new line if it doesn’t work?’ The staff shakes his head in an ‘I’m not getting into an argument over this’, sort of way and lopes back into the office leaving the woman fuming on the platform. 

I look up at the sign and it reads Next train in 4 mins. At a festival 4 minutes is nothing. You wouldn’t be able to get to the toilet in 4 mins. You might head over to a big tent where the next band you want to hear is playing in about 20 minutes and kill time waiting for their set drinking a beer with your mates. 

Time is wide-open at a festival. 

It took me about 30 hours to accept this fate and embrace it.

Because in the first 30 hours of a festival you have to deal with relieving yourself over a toilet seat suspended over an eco-compost bog, which uses sawdust to cover everyone’s excrement. It stinks. It’s terrifying in the dark when you’re drunk because you worry about falling in or vomiting. I overheard a child in the cubicle next to mine whining to her designated adult, ‘OK. Don’t look down!’ like she was at the precipice of a rollercoaster. 

You soon get used to decanting alcoholic beverages into small plastic bottles which you carry on your persons at all times so that you can have a tipple whenever you want. By the end I was gladly supping shaken-up red wine from a PET bottle because it saved me queuing and spending money at the bar. Although the selection of ales at Green Man were next to none.

You’ve got to get on board with the fact that there’s no bed at the end of the day – only a roll mat in a tent – the thin sides of which shake you awake under fierce winds or make you sweat when the sun comes out because you’re sleeping inside a large waterproof bag. You fetch your own water to brush your teeth in a damp field. Your food staples are bananas and cheese strings. 

All these experiences help set the bar lower than the standard of living I'm used to and as a result made me care less about everything (!) including a lack of phone signal or having any concrete plans. You simply sway to music in the lush green countryside, then scamper over to another bit of a field to watch more musicians banging out their beats, etc. 

Festivals relax you and make you focus on the fun and funny side of things – like, when I was tired and yawning, I woke myself up by falling flat in the mud. Some strangers came over to help me up and said, 'You still look amazing!' which was nice of them. Anyway, I became wide awake in time for the evening entertainment.

Being in Bannau Brycheiniog listening to live music with friends was the best feeling ever. What more could I really want? There was delicious beer on tap and the food was surprisingly good like shakshuka, triple fried chips, Goan fish curries, and so on. 

I spoke to strangers, or they spoke to me. 

In the morning after the torrential rain, I was on the hunt for wellies because I had only bought trainers with me, so went to the festival store to ask the people at the desk. The store worker flashed a quick grimace and shook her head, ‘No I’m afraid we don’t sell them, and I don’t think anywhere in Green Man does, sorry.’ 

A bare-chested bloke standing behind me with blonde hair flecked with mud said, ‘I’ve been doing the rounds all morning looking for a place that sells wellies. This here was my last stop. If there were somewhere that sold boots today, they’d be making a killing.’ 

We trudged back to our own tents accepting our fate of trench foot, but the weather was so much better than yesterday – also the sun had come out –  and today’s line-up was the best one yet, so I wasn’t going to let it hamper my spirits. 

Busy busy end of the year

Even though I had the month of December off it feels like I did more in it than ever before. It was probably due to the lack of routine, which makes every experience feel novel, firing off synapses at a more rapid rate than my dull-wired brain is used to.

Therefore, I have a newfound respect for my nomad comrade friends gallivanting out there in the world, meeting new people and speaking many languages. I raise my glass to you!

I travelled to Manchester to see my friend’s play A Christmas Carol, which was a total festive treat. I was fending off a cold at the time, so I think spending a day in the cavernous cold space of the Manchester City Library with its grand oculus finished me off. I had a fever for two days and lost about two-weeks in a fug.

The best thing about this time of year is that friends who live abroad or far away come back through town. I got to host many a Christmas meal; some more successful than others. All I can say is if you intend to cook a Korean feast but omit all the chillies (due to a spice intolerance in some of the guests) then what you get is a very very salty meal. Yet we popped open about five bottles of champagne to celebrate various things I can’t remember clearly anymore.

Me and the dog went on a day trip to West London: what a charming world! My writer friend Eloise took us to a pub with a roaring open fire. When we entered there was a man reading a real newspaper with a brown speckled Dalmatian sitting calmly at his heels. I ordered a mulled wine which came to £9.50! The Fox & Pheasant could never become my local, but we can all dream.

I tagged along to a friend’s family walking tour of London. It had been organised by Una who was visiting her UK family with her American husband. The tour guide, Terry, didn’t know how to pitch his material as the majority of the walkers were familiar with London and this country’s archaic/feudal system of property/land ownership. 

I learned a lot, like how Westminster Abbey is a called a Royal Peculiar because it doesn’t belong to any parish thanks to the way the old kingdoms were sliced up in Britain. My favourite factoid was why the Australians call the English poms. It’s an abbreviation of Prisoners of Millbank (POM) as many convicts were transported to Australia in the 19th Century from this Thames riverside prison, which no longer exists.

After seeing friends and recovering from flu, I set out on an epic journey to Orkney. My family up in the beautiful remote isles hosted Christmas, and me and the dog trundled up there by train to Edinburgh > train to Aberdeen > ferry to Kirkwall. An overall journey time of 18 hours, however, the strikes and the storms did not get in the way! A Christmas miracle. 

It was a quiet time spent with books and going for walks – weather permitting. On Boxing Day as the heavy clouds rumbled across our island, I took the dog for a walk, but when we reached the crest of a hill it started to hail. The hailstones were as big as salt crystals, so I ran to a stone house and sheltered against its wall. ROLO jumped head first into a bush. I peeked at her from under my pulled down hood as we got pelleted by ice. Her small gingery tail, shivering poking out from a hedge. 

A Christmas seal sighting

  

Being good tired

June has happened without much deliberation. The onset of summer is heady, and I get filled with the prospect of late summer evenings drinking beers on rooftops and in open fields. Wedding after wedding have filled weekends, a panoply of love. Friends have flown in and stayed at our house enjoying the cosy offerings of the “Japanese Pub”. 

ROLO has acclimatised to new people arriving and has slept on the floor beside them, snuggling into their sleeping bag and pretending they are their own pack, away from civilisation. One guest awakes saying that I tap away at my keyboard ‘just like a drummer’ with intent and in short bursts.

We’ve gained a beautiful bouquet of flowers from friends who stayed here – but didn’t get to set eyes on because we were at different weddings. They left lilies and carnations in a vase, alongside a nice bottle of gin, classy. A new shiny soap dish that’s like a thin polished piece of wood has appeared on my bathroom sink to help out my formless disintegrating soap. 

As they sleep upstairs on the futon, I’m downstairs tap tap tapping away furiously. I’ve met old friends I haven’t seen in years and made new ones who happen to be in London. It feels good for once to be tired because I’ve been spending my time trying to fit it all in. I’ve learnt a new word too: orchidaceous.

Mad sad happy

I rode the train to to see my two friends in a park and that was liberating. If you curtail a person’s freedom, then the smallest acts take on the weight of something meaningful. Of course, it’s illegal to travel unnecessarily, but I needed to see my friends to discuss mainly death, otherwise I would have gone mad.

A friend calls my mobile phone and I let it ring out. Then I pick up a pen and paper and write her a letter. Postage First Class, so she’ll get it in the next couple days. It’s better than a wearisome week-old unanswered message. 

Tap tap tap; delete delete.

Screen time and online communication is a chore. I have to do it every day for work and speak every night with my mother. I give over so many waking hours to the Internet. I wish longingly for the dial-up modem tones of the past to fill the silence of my future. 

I check in the fridge. Scraps of lettuce and olives with pits. I have more time these days, so I can deal with pits in my fruit. 

I make egg mayonnaise for a party of ten – to discover no body likes egg mayonnaise and I labour through it over three consecutive days. I made egg mayo to use up the watercress I’m suddenly growing on my windowsill. I planted it on one of those days where I had endless time to kill, never expecting them to sprout with such gusto, I wish they’d calm down.

My entire world is my dog, my kitchen, my bathtub. I roll between the three, happy as Larry, until it gets too much. Then I cry. Then I finish and pick up where I left off. 

*

Today the sun shone on my face and I felt its warmth bloom in my body. 

The kitchen is the place where I make things happen and consume. Consumption used to be something I did on the fly, like on the way to work reading an advert, or at a theatre watching a show. I used to enjoy trying new things, like going to a different food stall for lunch on a Friday; or an altered walk cutting through Covent Garden to Leicester Square. Meeting friends for a drink in a place I’d walked past a dozen times but hadn’t been into. Chance encounters with ex-colleagues in a scrabbly pub in Soho. Beer gardens on the canal-side with a pale ale in a chunky glass. The kitchen is where I foster new experiences now, over a saucepan, or watching a fish grill in the oven. Cutting into a freshly baked loaf with a sharp knife and being excited to see air-bubbles small and consistent, or disappointed to find them deflated and flabby.

The bath tub is where I do my lounging. Luxuriating. Stopping thinking time. I sit there in the near dark with my wrinkly fingers, absorbed in the warmth and the not-doing-anything of it all. The bath is indifferent to the timetables of outside, even when life was at its most hectic, I stewed in bath tubs. All through my younger years until here I am again, gaining solace from being closed off from the world, truly private. Re-charging like a monster in the depths of her cave.

The dog gives me delight and spontaneity. The kind of thing that might happen when you’re closing down for work and a mate messages you to see if you wanna come to a gig because they’ve got a spare ticket. You scoff a Sainsbury's meal deal and get to the venue, queue, buy expensive beers in plastic cups and listen to a warm-up band and shout over them to chat to your friends. The small dog barks up at the sky when she sees an aeroplane. She farts when I’m trying to concentrate on an excel spreadsheet. She licks my face when I’m clouded in gloom and makes me laugh.

Stars over Porlock // Bold Types 2020 Finalist // Glasgow Women's Library

An essay inspired by a holiday with friends was shortlisted for the Bold Types 2020 competition held by the Glasgow Women's Library. It is called Stars over Porlock and you can read it here, or in full below:

Stars over Porlock

The night sky in Porlock was one of the best skies I have ever seen. I can’t tell you what constellations we were under, except for the Plough, with its axial handle jutting out across many light-years. Everybody was in good spirits, some were sat on the lawn with their coats spread beneath them, others were standing barefoot on the soft green grass. We were all looking up, my mouth was hanging open and I held my boyfriend’s arm wrapped around my waist. A bleat from a sheep travelled across swathes of farmland to us. 

    Perhaps this was the happiest holiday of my life. We were all about thirty years old, escaping to the country from grimy city life. It took three days for my snot to not be grey or flecked with pollution. My pores sang in the water! The water in Porlock was delicious and my first cup of tea there was like a beatification. I thought, how can this tea be so delicious (it’s unbranded?) then I found out it couldn’t – but the water could. Coming straight off the granite rocks; clear and mellow like drinking crystal liquid and my hair became softer and fuller too, like a well-groomed poodle’s.

    The stars were phenomenal. It was dark in Porlock and our house was cut deep into the valleys of Somerset. You could hear the distant roar of the sea rolling back and forth over the shingle beaches. In daylight, you could gaze across the garden down to the agricultural lands and then to the salt marshes, then onwards to sea. A flutter of sparrows rose into the air chattering in a frenzy. On the lawn we played Mölkky, a leisurely game where you throw a stick at a clump of other sticks (the Finn’s know how to have fun); Genny made us a tray of gin and tonics and towards the end of the holiday, a jug of sangria to ingeniously use up the surplus saccharine wine.

    The house held up very well. Full at the seams from the beginning with food, booze and friends spilling over into bedrooms assigned for couples, we eased into it, like a cat stretching out after a yawn. We gave each other pet-names like “Grandma Georgia” and the “Chaos Queen”. People took up their well-beloved roles, like Aidan who became the group’s map-bearer on our long country walks. Gee was the charming one, with all the quick-wit and haughtiness of a lifelong tenured butler. Everybody played a part and yet, we were not pigeon-holed. Caring, stubborn, excitable, cynical – all mad – highly entertaining and filled with a mutual respect for one another. How we managed this I’m not quite sure, but Georgia said to me at the end of the holiday aghast, ‘I thought at least someone would have a barney!’ No one particularly talked about work or politics and when they did someone would be good enough to shuffle the conversation along, to avoid any sparks turning into forest fires. Or maybe because there was a pandemic going on, there was less scrutiny or assurance given to such matters, they just didn’t seem important enough. We all felt grateful to be able to go away together with “more than friends” but “less complicated than family”.

    After the trip was over, I was telling my boyfriend’s father about it. He is a good listener, always nodding at the right tempo and reacting to titbits of my story. He has grey hair, a tall frame, and emanates those leadership qualities people long for in boardrooms. Halfway through my retelling of Porlock, something must have clicked in his brain and he began to delve into a memory of a good friend whom he had known since the Seventies. This friend is handsome, intelligent, a delight and on his fortieth birthday he hosted a big bash announcing to the world that this was his wedding day – because he would never marry! Champagne and confetti. The father chuckled, regretting not having more reunions like that when they had had the chance. He told me more about his friend who in the end did get married (a surprise to everyone who was at his birthday party), he had a daughter with his wife, but soon after they divorced… 

    While he told me this I was thinking in the back of my mind, ‘The 1970s is when Tarantino’s film was set; that’s when Patti Smith was getting famous; Joan Didion’s essays are about then.’ It struck me that when the father recounted things from his past, I conjured up a pastiche of different forms of media I had consumed. Famous photographs, movies and music, the nostalgia effect; and in turn, when one day I tell a younger person in the future about my holiday to Porlock, they will be reminded of something they saw once about a pandemic and a referendum; some protests and art.

    I felt then the future was slightly out of reach, my finger’s grasping at floating fresh threads. Everything was becoming and everything was remaining, all at the same time, the world was still and changing. When I am old my memories will be films to the young and their future, relics to someone else after them. I felt the world in a state of continuous flux, like the vivid landscape shimmering and the rolling waves pulsing – but the stars cut into the veil of eternity will outshine us. I let go of my breath and thanked the heavens because it made me feel at peace.

Packing and Moving

I am starting to pack up my room. A lovely, homely room I have lived in for about five years – on and off – I went to Japan for 6 months in between, but the room didn’t mind and welcomed me back. There are books on the shelves I never read on philosophy, sociology and political theory. They’re like standing heroes who oversaw my move in and now my move out.

Top tips for movers

·       Test your appliances, wires and devices. When you’ve been in a place for a while, you accumulate a lot of stuff, namely things that supply power to other things. It’s likely some of this tech has given up the ghost. I don’t need to take this mini-USB charger with me when the world i.e. port-sockets have moved on.

·       Close the lid. Find the lid and close all open containers and bottles you have in your possession.

·       Bags in bags. I’m a huge fan of putting small bags within slightly larger bags, and that within even larger bags. Like a Russian doll of your own stuff. I want to compartmentalise my life, to give it an ordered effect, so that I know things can’t escape and get mixed-up with the wrong things. It’s all nonsense but I want it to make sense. Sometimes it’s just about fittings things together. The end result is that it takes up less space, like this small brown leather pouch with an ipod and a wine-aerator in.

·       Get rid of old cards and vouchers.

·       There will be a lot of dust. Be prepared to sneeze.

·       If you have a massive vine – like my overgrown ivy – then unfurl it from the stand it has become attached to. Wrap itself around itself, so that it looks like a sleeping fox in a nest, then gently place it into a plastic bag for transportation.

·       No pain, no gain. Be prepared to stub your toe, scrape your arm, get splinters, etc.

·       Make sure you understand the importance of some things, in other words, “You don’t miss something until it gets smashed.” If you have a framed print you care about then wrap it in scarves.

·       Coats and bags take up the most room. Literally, they’re padding and baggage.

·       Get everything out of your drawers and pile them high on your bed, or the floor. A space where you may survey it, like a lord over his hobbits. This will allow you take stock of all you have, and give rise to discoveries like, oh I had a wad of facemasks my hygiene conscious aunt gave me in Japan – these are actually really useful in a pandemic. Thanks auntie!

·       Use bags for clothes and cases for books. It works with their shapes and consistencies.

During the move, it honestly helps to have friends cook meals for you, so that you can eat at regular intervals and not fall down with exhaustion.

Once you have arrived, hug your friends even if there are social distancing rules in place, because they are now part of your household.

Carefully unwrap the paintings, dust the floors, put the vine back on a pedestal, take a nap and then unpack.

London Wildlife

I went walking with a friend after Lockdown lifted, ever so slightly.

We met in Clapham because of the promise of a fresh gelato ice-cream. Yes. A double dark chocolate dream, but when we arrived at the front of the queue in the gelato place, it turned out my friend had eaten the last scoop the night before. So, I made do with a raspberry sorbet – still delicious and not something I could make at home, or crucially, get delivered to my door. It still counted as a pure #Lockdown experience.  

I walked with Georgia across Clapham Common where everyone was meeting again for the first time after Coronavirus hit the shores of the UK. We both stood in amazement at the park-scape. People enjoying themselves in groups, real people – not lagging behind tech, actually affecting the space surrounding one another. It was amazing.

‘This is so much better than television.’ Georgia said staring, eating her ice-cream.

‘Yeah. SO much more interesting.’

We were starved of human interaction and frozen stiff from too much screen-time. It took us a while to defrost.

The sun was bright and the common was green. It looked like paradise.

We walked through scrubby woodland in the middle of Clapham Common. There were little dens made of folded down twigs and so many wet wipes strewn across the branches. Then we ambled around to the lake to see the ducks and some geezers fishing. Rows of wildflowers had been planted on the Common, but it was mainly dandelions and they’re sort of weeds, aren’t they?

The finale was the urban heron.

A bunch of pigeons were pecking at a pile of chicken pasta salad somebody had thrown over the grass. A stealthy, very lean heron was approaching it, looking pretty awesome in an outfit David Bowie could have worn on stage. Feathery tassels, azure patterns down its razor thin neck.

A brown cocker spaniel bounded onto the scene – scattering the pigeons – screaming infants ran in the opposite direction – the heron swung its legs into the air, like when you get off a bar stool and retreated to a pond.

There were joggers, cyclists, runners, fitness pros live streaming workouts, skaters, cars, shirtless picnics, hampers: London wildlife.

Greek Roadtrip

Driving around Crete with two friends

Saeko's Tadpole Story

Her father said, ‘She was an odd one.’ The child of his that most changed his perspective on the world; before her he was hard, unbending in his ways, brittle, even. Actions took place according to rules, and to defy them was to do it wrong. Saeko changed all that. She was his eldest daughter out of four.

‘I was the first girl!’ Saeko claims, opening and shutting her wide eyes, like two clam shells out of the sea. Her father says she behaved like an odd-ball, always speaking out of turn, living in make-belief and not playing with any toys, or other children. An un-favourite of the teachers, she would get picked on at school and get in the way at home - because of all this - Saeko would take herself off to the woods and play games on her own. Her family still live in the mountains, at the foothills of Mount Fuji, surrounded by tea farms and forests.

One time, Tetsurō her father, came across a glass tank made for insects filled with pond water and silvery fish in the middle of his corridor. These were fish you could fry and serve up as bar snacks, and he wondered about them, as he carried them into the kitchen for his wife to deal with. He then went and found Saeko and asked her where she had got all the silvery fish from. She replied she had caught them in the river, but Tetsurō was doubtful, ‘Surely not - they swim very fast. It would be difficult to catch one. How did you do it?’

She had gone down to the riverside with a butterfly net and some bonito flakes from the cupboard. She had placed a stone in the net and let it sink to the bottom of the riverbed, while holding onto the handle, then sprinkled some flakes into the net. When enough silvery fish had come to feast, she very slowly, incrementally, pulled the net upwards until all the fish were caught inside and couldn’t escape. Then she emptied them out into her tank of water, and repeated the steps again, and again.

That night her father ate the fried fish snacks with his cold beer, salty and crunchy, while reading a magazine in the lamp light. Many moths fluttered into the lampshade, sounding like the occasional ping of a rubber-band. Saeko slept soundly upstairs in her futon, in the room nearest to the rafters, where her family used to keep the silkworms.

At school Saeko kept herself to herself, to avoid being bullied by her classmates, or being called up in lessons to be made an example of, although she never studied hard, she was still coming top of her class. She thought big thoughts and roamed around freely. Her father was bothered about her attention span and wondered whether all girls were so weird, her mother didn’t mind so much, at least she seemed happy. When Saeko’s class went on an excursion to the river mouth, the teachers gave every child a bucket and spade and organised a competition. Who could catch the most tadpoles?

Children ran off in all directions, being told to stay near the shallows, which is where all the tadpoles were swimming anyway. Tetsurō recounted this story with a sense of held-back pride and a wide grin. The other children collected three or four, maybe, even six tadpoles. Saeko caught thirty-nine! The teachers and the other children crowded around Saeko’s teeming bucket to see how she did it. She cupped her hands under the surface of the water and waited, until one tadpole swam into her palms and she lifted it up. Everyone watched her calmly pick up tadpole, after tadpole, to place into her bucket. After the competition was over, everyone clapped as she released her colony into the waters, like nothing had ever happened.

‘I don’t know why they chased them. If you wait, they come.’

Friends at the centre of the universe

It was the hay fever. The pollen count was exponential and my eyes itched and I couldn’t breathe. I had to speak with an open dry palate, every - breath - effort. As your brain snapped in to gear it would stop intermittently with sneezing fits turning it in to sludge. 

I arrived at the bar and burst in to tears. A gin and tonic ordered straight away and they listened, carefully like teachers and molly coddled me like a newborn puppy. I cried the world was too much! My job, the work, the state of it. I couldn’t breathe! I blew my nose and had a nose bleed and drank my gin and felt better. The pair of them. Dressed in dungarees, a mustard yellow baggy sweater, crop top, bright socks, hair messed up, scrunched atop their pretty heads like bird’s nests. I loved them. And they told me tales of theatre.

Imprisoned indoors because of the grass I was sad and spoke to Susan. She listened and offered to wash my towels because of my conjunctivitis. I bought hair perming solution. Susan positioned a seat in front of the bathroom mirror, twizzling my hair, making me feel better. Her delicate fingertips massaged my head and pushed me adrift on to a swimming pool, where I lay dozing on an inflatable alligator. Not a single strand left loose, she’s a pro. I clumsily rinsed my hair out twice and woke up with curls. 

Brixton Market on the hunt for a shopfront with ‘a blue hue’. It rained the night before so the air has clarity. I feel almost human again. Sunglasses acting as protective shields, vaseline smeared across nostrils to stop particles. She lets me tell my sorry tale. Encourages, coaxes, gives me fuel.

I have a sty in my eye but it doesn’t matter, I believe. Bounding my way across London to a pub at The Centre of the Universe, where all my Friends shall meet. Four friends who’s paths rarely cross between London, New York and Berlin but it happens. Get a round-in, pork scratchings and pints, gin and tonics for me (because wine and beer contain histamines). Spilling over the pavement then filling our booth. It looks like a cabin from a timeless fleet, with portholes of stained-glass windows peering out on to the street. How much time has elapsed. None at all. Ten years. We end with pizza at Pollo’s and a bottle of red to wash it down.

Now I lie on my bed. The final night. Peripeteia complete. Annina lies by my side with her asthma inhaler, I with a bloodied tissue pressed against my nose. She tells me to tilt my head back and I can’t because I’m lying on my back. ‘Do you know the story? Of the man who is standing in the middle of the square. Looking upwards. In to the sky so people start to wonder, what is he doing? One stranger stands next to him and looks up too. Then another joins the pair and begins to stare upwards. Soon whole crowds are joining the men, all wondering what can he see? Then the first man stops and looks down. The second man asks him with awe-inspired breath, ‘What did you see? What could you see?’ And he replies, ‘Nothing. I had a nosebleed.’

I smile and believe that my friends have saved me.

Halloween horror spoof

I shot this horror spoof called Halloween at Bromfelde Rd (Part 1). Featuring the haunted housemates who are Georgia Margaret from the dead Murphy, Jesse All hell break loose Lamb, Neil Spade, Louise Demonic Son and it's by me Rimi Solloway on Vimeo. Original score by Jesse Allam and Lou Dickinson. Boo!

5 Days in Japan

I wrote up my extensive 5 day trip to Japan, co-authored with Aidan Cifford, which is published here.

Enjoy Japan travellers and friends!

Primavera Sound Porto (playlist)

Listen via Soundcloud to my Primavera Sound Porto playlist

With my arm bound in poly-thaaine (Withnail fans bow in adoration) I am aware I have not yet done my packing nor got any Euros out or checked my train journeys to the airport. Again I loll about in a lull of time listening to tracks that flicker because of our super-slow broadband connection and the light outside my window only exists because of pollution. Off to a beach town. Off to a port. My arm is wrapped in cling film because I burnt it on the frying pan flipping courgettes. I wonder what will happen when I wake up.