Let's move to Cumbria! (An ode to Annina)

‘The sea has to remain a mystery.’ She said then evaporated.

I’m flummoxed. They’re married. You tell me now as if I wouldn’t have wanted to marry her and make her a happy wife.

We could have had a country life….

With a cat who catches mice and two lolloping hounds.

Taken long walks against strong winds and seek’n shelter in the carved out hollows of sunken ships, on low-lying beach.

So that we might hide from the world and then burst out in Spring!

Pass’d Winter nights swooning over the fading moon through our slice of window pane, wrapped-up in thick blankets the weight of hay stacks.

Tea at different times of day and different kinds too.

Loose-leafed, ginseng,

nettle, fennel,

Tetley’s. You'd sing.

Think of it - you in the drawing room reading. Me in the living room pleading to be paid attention to and writing.

No babies.

We could have had it all. Moved away from here. And I could've carried you over the threshold with some help from a stranger. It would've been poverty-stricken bliss

(I'd hide the bills.)

But alas, you found her and I found him and we’ll be better off with them.

Warming thoughts for coming Winter

Cat scrambles up tree chasing after squirrel. 

Her tails whips around the trunk

Squirrel’s tail twitches furiously round and round

The chase becomes a mad scramble. 

Does she catch him? 

Claws and fur.

Leaves.

I have been inundated with books. It’s no bad thing but I need to make time to read them all. No examination coming up. But lethargy is a killer and I always moan that I want to be learning something so I should bloody well open up my brain to all the words. 

It’s autumn now and winter tomorrow. The outside weather makes us all want to stay inside. This happens every year and still it’s unpredictable for me, difficult to commit my heart to. The reason is because it’s unwanted, when it’s getting sunnier and warmer it’s easy to expect it in fact you can’t wait for it. 

I love summer. Friends invite more people out in the summer. We all went swimming in a pond once, no twice. The muddy cold fresh water of Hampstead Heath, leaves stuck to the hair and algae skin. A tiny pool more like a contemporary puddle in the midst of skyscrapers and the new Google outfit, we shared the water with ducks and ran screaming in to a sauna that looked like a barrel.

You can think fondly of those things because it’s life affirming. Exhilarating. But now. Now it’s wet and cold and a political shitstorm so, why would we choose to get out of bed. 

Hole up and read for the winter and eat warm nuts and soup. That’s the life.

Childhood memories of transport links

I have always lived near transport links. My earliest memory is of the kalang kalang of a railway barrier, slowly but surely reclining its black and yellow arms to come down across the road so that the people on bicycles and feet would stop. Trains tore passed – kalang kalang whoosh judder kalang ROAR.

I think I thought, in my tiny confused state that we were on the move. Or about to move. I mean to be fair, we did move quite a lot. 13 times in my lifetime so far, and I think I stopped counting at 16.

But as a baby on my bed I could hear the trains on the tracks. That faraway kalang kalang was like birdsong to me but more regular and constant, like a woodpecker maybe. I liked hearing it in the distance burgeoning as I got closer (this is when I had grown older and larger) taking it as given that I could walk to the shops alone, head thrust skyward.

Strolling.

Stations I feel comfortable in are in the middle of nowhere. Like that two-storey flat we lived in overlooking a dank railway bridge made of muddy coloured brick with all the vines and weeds sprouting from the top of it. Placed between deep countryside and a Green Belt that station was a lone platform. Tickets £2 in to town, return.

In the autumnal red and golden brown, I’d cross the bridge with keys jangling in frost-bitten hands to fumble with the lock. Sunset. Bedroom under heaped-on covers I could feel the tremors from the cargo trains as they passed under through the dead of night. I liked vampires back then so maybe there were bats under there or a gothic station master waiting for the red signal that never came.

Screeching.

Imagination never stopped with train stations and all that waiting. The trains went past with regularity and that gave me hope because I knew people were travelling places and I could sit still and be there to listen. Is that strange? I never felt tempted to board one or to escape because that noise of transience made me feel at home.

Amazing stillness, forethought and possibility at stations when everyone else is moving rushing on ahead. I think I’ll wait for the next train. There’ll probably be another one.

Soon.

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!

The old man in the second-hand bookshop

The man in the bookshop waits for me. I assume he does, a little bit in his heart every day.

When you come up from London to Edinburgh you notice how nice life could be. When it’s sunny it’s even more striking. Better dogs, more frequent snatches of conversation and shared nods and alrights. And here in Edinburgh you get called ‘pal’ in tempered tones of aggression always, and it feels nice. Manageable. Friendly without overdoing it. Not wanky.

I passed Greyfriar’s Bobby with his metallic snub nose, all naked and shiny from being over-rubbed. I got crisps with my sandwich instead of salad, because eating out means not having to be healthy and enjoying life. I pass a charity shop every five hundred meters filled with cardigans and desks (and one cat in the window) and it makes me happy. Edinburgh has to be one of the most pleasant cities to live in. But likely if I said that to someone in passing they’d condescend the comment like a Londoner with ‘If you can afford it’ but then again maybe they’re all just capitalising and hitching up the prices threefold whilst the Festival’s on. I would. Because the southerners coming up here with their selfie-sticks and lack of self-awareness think coffee is worth £4.50 so serve it to them for that.

There is one second-hand bookshop with its shelves immaculately ordered in to categories: modern drama, crime, classical drama, poetry, fiction, non-fiction, American literature, history, ancient history and gardening. Everything really. I asked the white-haired man in the light-blue short-sleeved shirt, ‘Do you have any books by Jonathan Coe?’ because I had finished one of his stranger novels on the train ride up and I was totally intrigued.

The bookshop owner had in fact approached me whilst I was in the fiction section looking up authors’ surnames, I was in section C already and he had just caught me in the nick of time to lend me a helping hand right when I needed it. Good intervention. He seemed glad I knew what I was looking for; so he could actually be helpful I predict because you must get nonsensical requests working in a book store, as we all remember from Notting Hill and Dylan Moran’s acting part.

‘You're in the right place,’ he said with a smile that said I’m proud of you for knowing your alphabet and index systems ‘let me have a look for you.’ He bends down and searches the spines with his index finger.

‘Anything will do’ I say trying to be helpful, but of course I do want that specific author so not anything.

‘Nothing on the shelf.’ He says with not a slump in mood but a wistfulness.

‘Sorry. Coe comes in a lot but we don’t seem to have him in stock.’ He seems amused by it, like he should know where the author was hiding in the book store but has lost all recollection of where he saw him last.

‘That’s absolutely fine.’ I say.

I’m more pleased to have met the old man than to have found this book. I won’t tell him that because that’s too much feeling from a customer I presume. It’s sunny outside and I will keep welling up with feeling whilst my romance with this city lasts (two more days at the most).

The next day and the next day, and the next few days after that, I pass his second-hand bookshop and I see it every time but daren’t go in.

Not out of fear or awkwardness as such, I am not sure why, maybe because I like the illusion of the story I am playing in my head every time I walk past and see in the shop window display not one but two Jonathan Coe books staring at me from behind the glass. I don’t even pause infront of the window incase he sees me and waves at me to come in, or points at the two books with his friendly face and warm heart.

I should just go in.

It would probably make his day.

But what if I did.

And he didn’t remember who I was.

What if he went to all that trouble.

To find those books and put them out.

But what if they’d been out in the window all along.

And he had forgot.

What if they are meaningless.

And the books don’t mean a thing.

That's why I’ll leave it.

Yes much nicer to leave it.

Because I like the story better.

Than ever finding out the truth.

  

 

Yayoi and Georgiana

Took myself on an art day today. Woke myself up early for a Saturday, the earliest in a long while. Made myself a milky instant coffee with a sturdy helping of sugar and then out the door in to a murky grey morn, it’s supposed to be summer.

I woke up fully on the train. Saturday morning carriage still surprisingly filled with hipsters holding caffeinated drinks in flimsy white cups.

The queue when I get there is massive, it’s about an hour and half wait until the front and it’s only just gone 10:00. What a sensationalist exhibition, or populist because it’s free but I don't mind because I have been wanting to see this. Yayoi Kusama that Japanese New Yorker internationally famous pointillist feminist artist, the one I saw one of the best retrospectives of at the Tate a few year’s back is back in London, with some of her walk-in pieces. I had never been to the Victoria Miro gallery and I had wanted to ever since I lived on the boat. What’s an hour and a half on a Saturday morning when there’s nothing else to do but wait? 

The grey clouds had broken apart and turned into moving wisps. Seagulls dipped round and round about a tall skyscraper. 

A well-to-do family joined the queue behind me, they were fine apart from the son who must be at whatever parents call ‘a difficult age’ because he couldn't see the point of waiting for something (anything I assume) nor did he like art. As the line progressed I saw taxi cabs pull up and drop well-coiffed males with expensive sunglasses who looked perplexed at the idea of waiting. And aghast tanned belles who strutted up and down the queue surveying it whilst on FaceTime whilst taking a selfie. 

Once inside it was over in a flash. Upstairs there’s a walk-in box room with mirrored surfaces that contain some of the light-up pumpkin installations. They are not beautiful but striking and have that hallucinogenic appearance about them especially when seen close-up from inside a dark reflective box, but as I say, it was over in a flash - 20 seconds to be exact - because of crowd management. Apparently someone had fallen backward and smashed one of the pumpkins during a busy time (insert joke about the band here) whilst taking a selfie, amazing, so the staff had to limit numbers and duration inside the walk-in box. 

But there was more. The all-mirrored and slightly larger walk-in box downstairs which held a revolving flashing chandelier was more alluring. The infinite depth of reflections, you know that trick of facing a mirror to a mirror and getting an optical illusion happened, so the artwork called Chandelier of Grief sort of felt like that. Eternally spinning and superficial aka. ennui. 

In the outdoor garden a pond displayed an older installation by Yayoi, hundreds of silver orbs floating on the surface of the water called Narcissus Garden. It was all very her and I admired the space. Victoria Miro blows Damien Hirst’s new gallery out the water for sure. It’s the elegant use of light and form, concrete doesn’t have to always look like slabs. There’s this long narrow staircase wide enough for two slender maidens to ascend up like waifs, to hit a window pane. Even mortal me can walk up the stairs as through a tunnel to a bright surface. Then sky.

I headed on the 243 towards central London, the red buses completely inadequate for the heat. Sure you can open a window here and there but the seat covers are made of what looks like industrial velvet and you feel suffocated just looking at them. 

Dogs die in hot cars, is a thought. 

Ding Ding! off the bus at Somerset House which holds the Courtauld Gallery. Another space I’d never been to for no good reason at all. I’d been hankering to see the artworks of this Victorian spirit medium called Georgiana Houghton, because frankly they looked weird as hell. 

Ironically she drew most of her paintings about God: the father, son and the holy spirit mainly. White feathery veils were the spirit and the tiny dots something else holy, I remember reading, on the back of one her horrifically detailed paintings. These looked like the product of someone who was not only mad but concentrating really hard on being mad - but she wasn’t remember - because she was a Victorian who conversed with ghosts.

Spindly incessant lines evolving in to swirls

that erupt in to bloom.

Brash irrational colours 

all sensing impending doom.

No salvation

The artist said her hands were controlled by dead spirits like that of Titian’s or St. Luke the Apostle’s, it wasn’t her painting but these dead people and God using her body as a vessel. And you know what, the exactitude of her fine lines and fastidiousness of her scribbles do look like they were made in a trance state. Sure, these even reminded me of heinously close-up variations of Aboriginal DreamTime paintings which were often produced in ritual trance sessions. Yet Georgiana’s paintings were gory and fragile. Precious and atrocious. A bit sick to be honest.

But if you see one of her drawings you’ll think it’s a lot more modern than it is, even the curator when he got shown one of Georgiana’s paintings at first thought it was from the psychedelic period in art i.e. the 60’s. The cool thing is spirit medium or not, this Victorian woman artist managed to preempt the Abstract movement in art by about 40 years, Georgiana’s stuff in the Victorian time looked a bit like a completely-bat-shit Miro before Surrealism had even been invented. So how does that happen? 

That’s what I was interested by, anyway. This glitch in time in something so boringly linear as art history.

Nothing like it had been seen in the sitting rooms of Victorian houses or imaginations before. Yes, even at a time when seances, ouija boards, magicians like Houdini, and Arthur Conan Doyle type stories were prevalent. Even at a time when machines seemed to be superseding the human race à la Industrial Revolution with steam power and the light bulb. Even when Charles Dickens’ most popular Christmas tale conflated Pagan spirits with Yuletide morals in a Christmas Carol, did the people of Victorian England have the capacity yet to cope with the avant garde. It was way too early, far too avant.

Her downfall?

She puts on an exhibition of all her best work at a prestigious and probably pretentious art gallery in Bond Street in the 1870’s and it was a successful spectacle but ruined her financially. After that she didn’t get another chance and was forgotten about until now when post-modern art critics are looking at Victorian Georgiana’s spiritualist pieces with newfound admiration.