A short story without a home

I was writing earlier and didn't know quite what to do with this gloomy specimen, but as it's pretty short and also more or less a true story (to the extent that I ever remember anything correctly) I decided it may as well darken my blog...

SOMETHING HAPPENED

I once met a man with a hole in his head. We all have holes in our heads, of course, to let air in and feelings out, but this was an actual hole in his actual skull - in the ordinary run of things it shouldn't have been there.

He told me that he'd come for a meeting. I told him that he was a month early.

"But I've come all the way from Norwich!" he said, as if expecting that this would somehow collapse time.

It didn't; time was lamentably robust at that reception desk. By way of consolation I offered him a cup of tea to refresh him before he retraced his mistake.

On his return from the toilet the tea was ready; I passed him a mug, and perhaps assuming some kind of exchange was necessary, he gave me his life story. I politely tried to give it back, but he was insistent - I suppose when you've come all the way from Norwich you want to do something more than drink tea.

Happily, I forget the exact events of it now - it wasn't a terribly happy story. All I can remember today is that it included an accident and a year of painful, lonely treatments and recuperation in a specialist ward at Addenbrooke's Hospital, in Cambridge; a year that left him still not quite right, but much healthier and with a hole in his head. He pointed it out to me, or I'd have never known it was there - it wasn't even big enough to be shocking. But it was still hard not to show revulsion - the state of his scalp was terrible: great flakes of rice-papery dandruff... you could almost smell the hair just by looking at it. Maybe when you have a hole in your head, though, washing your hair is far more trouble than it's worth?

Finishing his story - the tea was long gone - he got up, sighed, and returned to Norwich. I took the mug, washed it up, and returned to my book. I was 23, and wished I didn't identify quite so strongly with the central character, a middle-aged man who is slowly coming to the realisation that he is an unwilling stranger in his own life, too tired to even wholly despair, barely even able to feel, drearily trapped inside his own head - something must have happened to cause it, he thinks, but he has no idea what. It's like a part of him is missing.

It's a good book, though, Something Happened - once you get used to the repetition. And I'm quite OK these days.

A few days later it snowed., overnight and unexpectedly. No buses ran; I could have stayed home; but I set out for work anyway, on foot. Mile upon mile of gleaming white, almost wholly untouched; the world transformed, shining, deserted - a clean slate in negative? I wasn't even sure of the way to go - but how could I not?

UPDATE: Well, with the benefit of a day's distance and some helpful comments, it's finally back to the original ending, I think - many thanks for the free editing :) I might even leave the damn thing alone now.

Oh, and if you highlight the apparently blank space above, the alternative ending's still there.

Saturday in Falmouth

The Moor. Saturday. People with large knitting needles were knitting with shredded carrier bags.

One of the people had knitted a chair.


Someone else had knitted a woman.


Whether she really wanted to be unravelled, or to hear the complete works of Bob Dylan being played by a succession of tag-teaming buskers behind her, I'm not sure.

She didn't say anything.

Or move.

Here are the knitters, making single bags out of many bags (I thought it probably better not to point this out).


As I joined the main street (really two streets - Market Street and Church Street) roars could be heard. Also: seagulls, insects, and exotic birds; perhaps an elephant. Being sounds, I was unable to photograph them.

Other corroborating evidence of their existence was also lacking: my fellow shoppers and idle wanderers seemed to be ignoring the unfamiliar soundscape.

First the knitters, now this. Troubling.

Yet pleasingly disorientating. Like being in one place but with the soundtrack to another.

Some say Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon is a perfect alternative soundtrack to The Wizard of Oz. But this wasn't like that. The bricks weren't yellow. And none of the short people were singing.

A few minutes later, I was in the middle of sending a text message when a pink Cadillac drove past, down the non-yellow brick road. It contained three people in 50s regalia, and for a brief few moments Rock 'n' Roll could be heard mingling with the seagulls, the lions and the elephants, and the silence of short people.

The car was gone before I could photograph it.

By now I was at The Poly. An exhibition by the Wooden Hand Collective looked interesting. I decided to wander in.

In a kitchen, hiding from the Box Office people who wanted a cut of everything sold, I bought a card. It was Mandrake 5 by Tarkus Blackmore - he has no net presence so I can't link to it. You'll just have to take my word that this happened.

It occurs to me now that I don't really remember there being a kitchen in that gallery before... But never mind. There probably isn't. It was probably just some room with lots of kitcheny things in. This of course would also be quite an accurate description of a kitchen.

Again, never mind.

Leaving the possibly non-existent kitchen, and then the rather more definitely existent gallery, I was pointed towards an upstairs gallery by a sign proclaiming "Live Art." Had I been looking at dead art? It certainly hadn't moved. Or perhaps if I ventured upstairs I would have the chance to live art? I wasn't sure if I'd done that before (I had definitely drawn things sometimes, and had presumably been alive at the time, but I figured that this probably didn't count as art).

Intrigued, I soon found myself trying to open a locked door.

There was no mystery; I simply had the wrong room. In the correct room, the walls were adorned with sheets of A4 paper printed with people's memories of cars beneath different shades of car paint. I decided the work lacked balance. Where were the cars' memories of people? Maybe the printer cartridge ran out.

In a corner, was a monitor. It was showing someone's feet.

Next to it, on a windowsill were scattered what appeared to be progammes of events. Indeed, this was exactly what they proved to resemble - perhaps representational art was not dead, after all? Further observation revealed the evident trouble someone had gone to: programme dates and times had been made to match with this exact weekend, and like a mirror held up to a mirror, reflecting on into infinity, this work itself even listed the exhibits I was stood amongst at that very moment.

Someone had dreamed up countless other events for it to list too.

I had to have one!

Possibly disturbing the artfully random arrangement, I quickly slipped one into my bag and left. No-one noticed.

No-one else was there.

Supposing that perhaps other events listed might exist too, I followed a helpfully included map and soon found myself watching two girls in overalls feeding each other jelly and ice cream with long spoons. A cassette player tried in vain to convince me that I was at a children's party, rather than in a white room amongst mostly non-children, mostly looking serious.


Once the girls had stopped, the serious looking people began to applaud. I wasn't quite sure why. Hadn't the girls failed in their task? Look how much food was still uneaten:


And the ice cream had melted.

I suppose it was kind of a hot day, though.

Downstairs another monitor was showing feet.

I went back upstairs. In an empty room a bicycle orchestra had failed to turn up. In another empty room a woman told me that there was nothing to see there. I didn't point out the empty room to her. Or that she was in it. In still another room someone was making fruit cocktails - they weren't for me. I tried another door.

In the dark, on a projector screen, some kind of meat construction was squirting milk and roaring in slow motion. Hoping it wouldn't do this for too long, I sat down and watched.

After this, feet were shown. They looked cold. This time they were in the rain.

In a series of fixed camera shots: a toddler could be seen doing undignified things to a cat, a small dog patiently and lengthily standing on two legs was ignored by people watching Eastenders, and two cats fought while another five ignored them. Eventually, a dog knocked the camera over.

Another fixed camera shot showed us a post-smoking ban game of drive-in Bingo. In Ireland, in smoke-filled cars unsociable people sat listening to numbers. A horn sounded. Someone had won. I wasn't sure who.

Next, we saw an artist showing his father his work (stick around until 00:34, or fast forward to it if you're squeamish).

Last, the feet again. And two hands pretending to be feet. I left.

Atop feet; smallish but real.

Apparently, feet are inescapable. Especially your own. No matter how fast you run. There's probably a message in that somewhere...

Either that, or an elaborate defence for foot fetishists.


[Something resembling an explanation. Oh, and the sounds of the Serengeti were being played from speakers in the windows of flats above the shops].

He turns the page, and...

Yay, it's April! Well, OK, in my room it's April...

I probably shouldn't have bought a Dali calendar.


OK, fine - I only just turned it over from March.

Seriously, I don't 'get' calendars. I mean, the pictures do really brighten up the place - of course they do - except... then there all those ugly numbers hanging off the end of them. Which, I suppose, would be fine, if I'd ever been able to find much use for them.


Should probably just buy more posters...

Testing Times (A Sign Thereof)

Just wanted to confirm that, assessments and such at uni having ended for a few months, the near relentless stream of semi-regular drivel that is this blog has now resumed. Until my next bout of chronic laziness and time mismanagement, probably. But still.

As for the photo, a number of these went up around Falmouth about a month ago. No idea exactly what they're being tested for. But I think it's fairly safe to say of this one that, yep, it definitely is a sign*. I'm almost certain of it.


*To be fair, though, I think they figured that out eventually themselves**, seeing as the testing seems to have stopped now.

**Whoever was testing them, not the signs. This isn't LA Story. Believe me. I stood there for nearly an hour*** and it didn't once give me cryptic romantic advice.

***If you round up to the nearest fifty minutes.

Ha ha! Made you look!


Sorry. Couldn't resist.

My typically in-depth analysis of the French election results

Sarkozy.

Does anyone else immediately think of some kind of knitted cover for sarcastic comments?

(the pic is linky)

No?

Oh well.

Err, OK, it seems you've just highlighted an empty line...

Hi, I suppose.

Strange empty-line-highlighting type person.

Er, wait, bugger - I can't say that now, can I? Now I've added that invisiblogging tag, empty-line-highlighting probably isn't such a strange thing to do. Well, not unless you hadn't figured out what that meant, of course. In which case, I reiterate: Weirdo.

Erm, anyway, there were other meanderings here earlier. Now there aren't. Although, I suppose, relative to the previous meanderings, these could also be called "other meanderings". But that would just be confusing. And irrelevant, because the other other meanderings don't exist anymore. Which is probably best for all of us. They only complicated things. Not like these meanderings at all.

So, yes, this invisiblogging thing. Basically, I just figure it could be fun. Less so if no-one notices, though; hence the tag, the existence of which rendered those other other meanderings confusing. Hence their removal. And their replacement with these clearly far less confusing meanderings.

Er, right, anyhow:

Watch this space :)

And all the other ones...