Green

I'm aware of my breathing, fast and shallow as I recline on the settee. There's a slight but uncomfortable heat where the back of my bare legs are in contact with the warm leather. My head is tilted to one side, the closeness of my ear to the seat-back allowing every tiny movement of my body to be amplified. I can hear my hair rustling, and think how strange that is. It feels like my senses are both heightened and dulled all at the same time.

With my head like this, all I can see, my entire vision, is on the other side of glass. Summer is approaching fast, and countless shades of green ripple gently as everything strains forward for the Sun's attention. A deep parallax of verdancy, from the cropped grass on the ground, through dirty nettles and tight shrubs, to streamlined conifers and taller trees, with the gaps of sky inbetween sometimes being obscured by even more trees behind.The overhang of the taller trees creates a darkened thicket nearer the ground, and it is this shrouded backdrop that highlights the activity in the air. Hundreds of gnats and other insects can be seen going about their business, reflected brightly in the sunshine. Tiny leaves swing to and fro, caught in long-abandoned cobwebs, and ever-nervous birds survey the goings-on from a bough.

If all of this activity has a soundtrack, I am oblivious to it, hearing only the sound of blood rushing in my head, and still the rustling of my hair.

Rest Stop

The fire escape is old, but has been repainted in dull primer, hiding the rust. She steps out of the window onto the metal platform, dressed for the sudden onset of hot weather in a short denim skirt and brown vest. Work is dispatched first, with an array of humdrum washing being arranged carefully on a drying rack. Then comes the reward; five short minutes spent in the warm sunshine. She sits on a step of the metal stairs, attempting to light a cigarette in the gentle breeze with a rhythmic click click of her failing lighter. Eventually the end glows satisfyingly and she pockets the lighter. With the nicotine comfort coursing through her she relaxes further, and sliding down an extra step her feet are now propped against the lip of the platform. A lovely posture. The cigarette is finished and she dreams she were far away from here. Far away from terraced housing and a weed-strewn garden. She tilts her head back and the sun tickles her throat. She wishes it was soft water from an azure sea. A thoughtful smile brightens her hard-working face for just those last few moments. She stands up suddenly and steps back through the window opening. A soft click of the latch, and she is gone.

Reflections

I'm sitting here, plain T and jeans. Johnny Cash is looking at me in craggy black and white. So is George Harrison, and Kathryn Williams too. A stag party from last year (me included), sits next to a school photo from 20-odd years ago (me included). James Stewart peers at me through binoculars. Dido sits in a taxi wearing a military jacket, whilst Margaret Lockwood, looking cute as a button, enjoys a joke with Alfred Hitchcock. Keith Moon clutches a champagne bottle, and I get to eat beans on toast. With grated cheese.

Celebrity

Condensed from today's Guardian, by Polly Curtis. There's a link to the original piece at the end.

Adults are to blame for a decline in children's happiness because they control a commercial world which "rams celebrity down children's throats", according to the head of an inquiry into primary education.

There is widespread anxiety among adults about a perceived loss of innocence among children, but most children have a more optimistic outlook on their lives, Cambridge university professor of education Robin Alexander told a conference yesterday. Fears about the condition of childhood were being fuelled by adults' own sense of guilt about the social and environmental legacy - as well as the commercial pressures - they had created for their children, he said.

Alexander said people should not be nostalgic for a 1950s idea of childhood and called for less "alarmist talk" about children's lives, which he blamed on the "projection onto children of adult fears and anxieties, not least about the kind of society and world which adults have created". Instead adults should look at their own influence on children's lives, he told the Childhood, Wellbeing and Primary Education conference, hosted by the General Teaching Council.

"It's adults who, via the media and advertising, daily ram celebrity down children's throats; it's adult commercial values which create the junk food which contributes to obesity, and the alcohol ocean which fuels teenage binge drinking; it's adults who vote into power governments whose policies exacerbate rather than reduce inequality; it's adults who take nations into wars in which children are among the most prominent and tragic victims; and I guess - though I've not seen any analysis along these lines - that the carbon footprint of adults is far greater than that of children," he said.

"On this basis, adults may well feel not just anxiety about the society and world in which today's children are growing up, but also a degree of guilt about the social and environmental legacy which today's children have no choice but to inherit."

Original article HERE.

Gallery 00001

Just a few photographs taken through 2007. Click on each one for a larger version.

Sounds

I await the sound of your footsteps with jittery excitement. First I hear the faint, reverberating echo of the metal steps being ascended, and then the hollow clack of your flat shoes across my rooftop garden. I then listen for the final soft swoosh of the door opening before your voice bursts my senses. Always.

What a sweet blissful anticipation it is. A skittery feeling that builds up throughout the day, and one that can only be quelled by your embrace. The order of sounds announcing your arrival like a miniature countdown, one which only I am privileged to hear. Always.

Wherever else I might inhabit in the years to come, it will be these sounds I remember. A sequence invoking a Pavlovian response. An inward smile, an outward smile, and then a rush to greet you, to investigate your day. To love you. Always.

Snow

You never lose the childhood wonder of snow. You remember that first morning view from your bedroom window, the landscape transformed, everything draped with the cleanest, purest blanket you ever saw. Sleepiness forgotten as an energy fills your soul, you just can't wait to get out there and do snow things. Any things, and every one of them is fun. Very cold, mostly wet, but always fun.

Even though it is still early evening, it is so very dark. I am a long way from any town, and wet snow swirls unevenly, breathlessly, caught in the conical beam of my headlights as I drive through the hills. Each soggy flake is reflected brightly in a mesmerising onrush before fading rapidly to the unknown darkness beyond. It tingles me, and even if this harsh wet sleet is not quite movie-like perfection, it is still a magical special effect that momentarily transforms my windscreen into that childhood window.

As we get older snow becomes a negative thing. An obstacle to the successful completion of our day. Our lives. We once marveled at its alien purity, now it is just an annoying part of the most annoying season. A hindrance. It is something to be removed either by ourselves, or preferably by someone else whilst we stay warm.

And yet children find no annoyance in snow, even if they are cold and wet they won't leave it alone. We are so much happier when our lives are at their simplest, yet we strive to complicate our lives, every day, by chasing happiness. We should think of revisiting simplicity like this more often, and remember how even if a snowball hurt, it didn't really matter.

Takeaway

What can I say? Simply the most awesome name for a burger van I've ever seen! And I've seen a few...

Height

Just a few short weeks ago this was the view I had. Nearly 3,500 feet above sea level here I stood, gentle tendrils of cloud hanging in the damp air. How tempting was it to stand with my arms outstretched, feet on tiptoe, as if my body had to somehow attempt to outwardly portray the exhilaration I felt within. I settled for a very big grin, wide as the view.

This was Snowdon. It was as if history itself paved the way for me to enjoy this view, or at least 150 extraordinary men did - building a unique railway to the very peak of the mountain - so that I might see an almost identical vista to that which those early passengers did, nearly 110 years ago.

So here I was, presented with an almost unique pairing of different histories. I thought about how those early patrons must have felt, seeing this most amazing sight for the first time, a view which had previously been available only to those very intrepid few who might venture to climb Snowdon the old-fashioned way. And though even to visualise life 110 years ago requires a ragged-edged black and white imagination, I then thought to imagine the larger scale of history that created this incredible landscape. The millions of years of precipitation guiding the contours of rocks on such a massive scale.

A mischievous wind breathed life into the scene, billowing all around and through my clothes. The sound created by this turbulent fluttering became my only soundtrack to this cinematic panorama, as the damp grass rippled in harmonious waves down the hillside, weaving wherever it could find purchase amongst the jutting rocks and shale, all the way down to the green twinkling copper-tinged lake below.

Echoes

It always seems so very strange to me how the acoustics of a room are changed so dramatically by removing even the smallest items. A cabinet, a table, sometimes even a poster will do it. I find that the change in the effects of sound within a room genuinely affects me on a personal level. It fills me with a tiny melancholy, mixing up the excitement and unknowingness of impending change in my life with the mournful sadness of an empty room. Of course, any room starts off bare, but as you slowly fill a room with things - with LIFE, you don't notice the echoes leaving. It's only when you deconstruct and remove items that you notice the change as the ghosts return.

I'm leaving the building I've worked in for so many years. Today is the very last day. Slowly the ghosts have surrounded me as everything has been removed until all I have left is a desk and this computer. In ten minutes time even the internet is being switched off, and I will be locking the door for the last time on a place I have laughed and lived and spent so much of my time.

Sunrise

Sunrise, sunrise.
My whole being jiggles imperceptibly in a lovely shuffle, tuned to the rays of light peeping around the curtain's edges - warm tendrils caressing me awake.
I look at you in this light. Sometimes I find you asleep, lids closed and breathing so softly, but mostly you look right back, an inescapable smile tentatively peeping around the corners of your mouth. We might be like this forever, floating gently as if suspended in amber, each rapt in the other's gaze. There's nowhere else we want to be.
The most tender part of the day. Eyes accustoming themselves to the light, heartbeat increasing oh so slightly at the brush of movement alongside me.
The day ahead has the unknown in store for us. There will be all sorts of unforeseen activities ahead for both of us at work or for friends - but this shared morning light is ours alone to treasure and to think about when we are apart.
Sunrise, sunrise.
It lasts for such a short precious time. The alarm always intrudes. Most people's alarm clocks wake them up, but ours is a last minute warning of impending reality, and that magical feeling fades slowly away - as it does each day - soundtracked by the morning soundtrack of buses and cars drifting through the open window. Inevitably, the day intrudes - it always does.

Green space

What you see above is what I see each morning (click the picture for a lovely big version). This (sadly) isn't my garden, but I live opposite this lovely park and enjoy it every day. Occasionally, I might choose a long detoured route home just so I can walk through this beautiful green space. A busy road is shrouded directly behind that line of trees but you would hardly know it, with birdsong being the only soundtrack to this peaceful place. Giant green sentinels shutting out the noisy reality of 2007, exchanging a thousand exhaust pipes for a gentle stereo rustle as the breeze meanders through this leafy panorama.
Just like my countryside post of a while back, being in this place allows room for the mind to truly breathe. Away from the stifling world of endless decisions, thoughts made here can meander from one connection to another without intrusion from the pressed-for-time world behind those trees.
You can wonder at the enjoyment which this simple space brings to so many people. Later in the evening a kids football session will take place here, literally with jumpers for goalposts as if to prove the timelessness of this space. But for now it's just me under a damp grey sky, planning nothing in particular and enjoying every precious second.

Blood

Another "guest post" ahhh. Nice oblique lyric from Editors, soon to release a new album. This song 'Blood', taken from their debut 'The Back Room' shows off a nice descriptive minimalism. Join the road.

---------------------------------------------------

This wicked city just drags you down
You're with the red lights, your side of town

Don't say it's easy to follow a process
There's nothing harder than keeping a promise

Blood runs through your veins, that's where our similarity ends
Blood runs through our veins

There's nothing believable in being honest
So cover your lies up with another promise

Blood runs through your veins, that's where our similarity ends
Blood runs through our veins

If there's hope in your heart
It would flow to every part
If there's hope in your heart

Evening Rain Part 2

I guess after my rainy post of a few weeks ago, this one seemed impossible to not write about. There I was mesmerised by the visuals of rain without the physical effect. Snug indoors.
Here I was, 3am in Dublin city centre, and it was raining. Rain like I hadn't seen in the UK In years - a thick vertical forest of water reflecting the light from a million pubs as it splashed downwards on its journey to the pavement. There was no time for musing on the beauty of concentric circles when the pursuit of a warm taxi was a far more urgent consideration.
I was told that after taxis were deregulated in Dublin a few years ago, their numbers swelled from 2000 to something like 13,000. This fact didn't help much as it seemed nothing was going to stop for us that night. They were already full or going somewhere else. And it carried on raining - even heavier I thought, or maybe that was just part of my rapidly developing persecution complex.
So we walked home. Clothes and shoes and jackets soon became one sodden squelchy mass as we danced around puddles and precarious pavestones. At the half-way point I started smiling. There was this sudden moment of realising that I could do one of two things. I could be a miserable, conceited and very selfish bastard and bemoan the unfairness of it all in a "why me?" way, or I could enjoy this experience. I enjoyed the rain pouring through my hair and somehow being funneled down the back of my collar. I enjoyed the crazy laughter we all had at this shared misfortune. It felt like freedom, childhood memories of tasting raindrops, and mostly I just enjoyed the sensory rush of being reminded how ace it is to be alive. Or at least, knowing what it is to get thoroughly pissed on in Dublin. It all seems so simple.

Comment posting

It was only a matter of time. With apologies to those friends and readers who do occasionally post a response here, I am being forced to change the comment posting procedure to enable me to check comments. This is due to my being plagued by a particular sad Russian spammer in the last couple of weeks, who it turned was also spamming the boards of disabled children in a particularly insensitive manner.
I love to hear any and all responses to anything I write (yeah, I know I don't write enough), and I would like to stress that I am not doing this for reasons of censorship.

Charliex

Evening rain

As long as I am nice and snug indoors, the rain is my favourite kind of weather. Just ordinary rain, the kind where you can't quite see it, it's presence revealed only by the infinite concentric circles each drop forms in puddles. It's nearly silent too. There's none of the drumming or thrumming or pitter patter or any other description of sound evident other than the swoosh of cars driving through it, leaving tiny bow waves of tread pattern on the road that melt away as swiftly as they appeared.
When it's constant and steady, as it has been here for a few hours, those circles seem to become a repeating loop that could last forever. If you watch them long enough you feel you might discern the point at which the patterns begins, as you're otherwise mesmerised as each expanding circumference is swallowed up by another. Sometimes it feels so metronomic that you imagine it might never end.

The Real Deal

Britain has a new talent. And I'm talking about a genuine talent here, not just a person with a vague ability to not bore you on television, which seems to be the only requirement for celebrity these days. No. I'm talking about a person blessed with a true gift that we can admire. A gift to inspire us to be better in ourselves and reassess our own goals.

I'm talking about Kiran Matharu. She's 18, a girl of Indian heritage, and she plays golf like you would not believe. Basically, she's Britain's ass-kicking answer to Asian-American wunderkind Michelle Wie, but without the attitude. In an interview for this month's Golfpunk magazine, she chats about her iPod playlists, her myspace site and her favourite TV shows. Oh, and the fact that she can consistently shoot 70, 71, 69... At the moment Kiran is the best-kept secret in British sport, being more famous in India than over here, but that can only change. She's at the beginning of her career, but how amazing would it be for her to realise her potential? You're not telling me that British Asian kids aren't crying out for a mainstream hero/heroine to call their own, being stuck year after year with the increasingly nihilistic corporate banality of hip-hop culture or TV celebs. Talking of which, here's a wonderful fly-in-amber snapshot of Kiran's London visit for the Golfpunk article - which seemed to me a real Join The Road moment:

"She's been looking forward to this, but rolling in the studio straight off the train from Leeds, dragging her Puma travel bag behind her and with her mum and dad in tow, she betrays not the merest hint of excitement. Vernon Kay walks past, flanked by the sort of people who would be screaming 'Out of the way! 'A' list British celebrity coming through!' if they weren't trying so hard to be cool. It's a moment - the toothsome ex-model who reads autocue for a living striding purposefully past one of the most naturally gifted young sports people in Britain. Oblivious to it all, Kiran shows us her new pink grips..."


I should link to Golfpunk because I've shamelessly stolen their copy, and it's brilliant. Also, here's Kiran's site. Oh, and a great BBC article about her here.

Wide eyed and helpless

My finger hung poised over the sunroof button the second I sat in the car, the rays bursting in as the motor whirred the roof backwards, always too slowly, the mechanical creaking evidence of its wintry inertia. That single button press sets in motion a whir of wholesome activity - a season's worth of fun and breathlessness bundled into a single day. A tangle-haired barefoot run in the park transformed us into 2K7 hippies. Daisies were picked and stored carefully for a necklace probably never to be made - we'll just pick more next time, when they're long enough to be tied. It's a learning process! That doesn't matter because there was a slide to climbed again and again and, oh why not, again. Ice-cream vans were chased after and caught (with a special ice-cream van catching net ha!) and oh so difficult choices were made as to which one mummy would like and which one would I like and which one would be the best one of all for Amelia to have. We nibble at twirly coloured ice-pop until brainfreeze sets in and our tongues have turned green, and we rock to and fro on the big swing bench. One of us can touch the ground with our feet. One can't yet. Both of us giggle.

Cars were soaped and rinsed and the high powered mist of the jet-wash made beautiful shimmering miniature rainbows in the sunshine, before making our shoes sopping wet. We practiced our alphabet too, but had trouble with the letters 'm', 'n' and 'o', so we just shouted 'mellow mellow' instead which just summed things up nicely and it seemed the perfectly formed philosophy of any 4 year old.
The Sunday tiredness descended like a blanket, school in the morning, and ice-cold milk was drunk straight from the fridge before lids began to sag too much. The sunroof stayed open for coolness, Norah Jones for lazy smiles and a Wurlitzer tinged soundtrack for the homeward journey of a little day worth being alive for.

Jagged shards of electric guitar

It is never my intention that Join the Road become a series of gig reviews, but what can I do about these things as they happen? Music is an all-consuming passion for me. It shapes the way I think, it chooses my path in life. For better or for worse, and I never complain.
Wilko Johnson is a bona-fide guitar hero. Four decades into his career, beginning with 'seminal' (for once a use of that word with real resonance) Canvey Island R&B crew Dr. Feelgood, and still up there stronger than ever. And there I was too, been there before, knowing, needing another jolt of what Wilko provides. What only he provides.

No electronic tricks, no pedals or Pro-Tools, Wilko's guitar spits venom. His eyes piercing the gloom of the grimy room and, clad as ever in black, he sprays forth an unending stream of angular chopping stabs and sawed-off shards of notes pouring from the blackest of all Telecasters. Truly guitar as weapon. Sheer musical invective, addictive to behold. It's a purifying, almost binary noise. From hands to strings to pick-up to amp to your ears. You can feel the ching like you're playing it yourself, and you can smell the metal of the strings.

Heroes begat heroes, and Wilko's is Mick Green. The 1960s pioneer of a style where a single guitarist in a band is forced to fill the shoes of both the rhythm and lead playing. Rhythm is the rock solid basis, the lead part is the manifest excitement. Precision timing is required, all at 100mph. Couple this philosophy with Wilko's angular stage strut, once famously described as like a clockwork mouse fixed on a rail, and you have a stage performance to truly behold.

Wilko always did leave in his wake a sea of disbelief and shaking heads as people try in vain to comprehend the man's playing style. Unique and almost impossible to replicate (believe me I'm constantly trying). Your eyes seem to witness the calm rhythmic motion of a hand moving across the strings that does not, surely cannot, correspond with the sputtering, stuttering staccato aural fireworks to which you are listening.

Summer this way comes

It's definitely coming. I can feel it. I sense the spring in people's step. Perhaps that's just the effect of winter wrappings finally being banished to the back of the wardrobe for another year, but I can definitely sense something. There's a new tingle to be found in stepping out on the newly bright mornings and feeling a crisp warmth from the sunshine. A renewed excitement in another year finally getting interesting.

I say all this as a springtime justification for changing the site layout and taking the chance to add a new picture header. (Sharp eyed fans will recognise the title font!) Very professional, if I do say so myself. I've just moved to the new Blogger, and it makes all of these things so very easy to do now without scurrying through pages of html code.