St James the Less stands dark, slightly foreboding, set back from Vauxhall Bridge Rd, between an estate pub and a building site. Litter and leaves catch in eddies in the expanse of paving stones between the grimy main road and grimy church. I walk past once in the week but it isn't open and the only notice is the times of the services on Sunday.
So I go again on the Sunday. I aim to get there for 10.30 and have a look round before the service starts at 11am. I am taking the boys for lunch at my mum and dads with fireworks afterwards, so exexdh is to have them briefly, before we set out. But I am late. I hear 11 strike on Big Ben as I walk down Vauxhall Bridge Rd, a bit flustered, very slightly hungover, having thought I was being clever and taking a short cut but having gone the wrong way - though surprised to have done so, for I live here and know my way really well. Surprised too to hear the clock so clearly from this distance. I am starting to have to travel a bit further to visit churches but I can still hear Big Ben. I get as far as the porch under the tall four storey tower, with it's patterned brick arches, and intricately carved doorway and the wooden door open to a glass one where I can see a man standing just the other side, with a hymn book ready to hand out. I can make out people in pews and a large lit over head screen, and an unexpected richness of mosaic, and brickwork. But I can't sit through the service without being really late for my mum and dad's so I have to turn round and leave. But it feels unsatisfactory, I could see there was something fine to the detail of the church
My youngest son, (which seems as scripted as U'OL coming back on the scene), has started to demand to pray. He is five. He has been to church possibly, twice in his life, goes to a predominantly muslim school with no obvious religious worship, though they did a nativity the first year Gordon Brown's son was in reception ( the year before my youngest attended, and the year after the eldest started ), and beyond slipping out to visit churches twice I have barely mentioned my church visiting project at home. He started asking about two weeks ago, but I couldn't face mentioning it, it just seemed too much like an invented plot. Though years ago he had a dream he had stigmata. Of course he didn't know the word, but he described it exactly. Which scared the hell out of me. Anyhow we have started doing the Lord's Prayer each night. The old words incredibly soothing to speak out loud. And the youngest kneels and closes his eyes, beautiful in his pyjamas. The eldest initially sarcastic, has since asked for a prayer of trust. I find a prayer by Ignatius Loyola 1491-1556.
Saying the words, I wish I could believe something. I can see it would be good for us.
But in the back of the car, through the stop starting of traffic lights at the outskirts of London with a wildly inappropriate CD that we all adore - Leadbelly, Buddy Holly, The Damned, White Stripes, The Clash - the youngest sings 'I want to be a Christian, I want to go to Church' to the tune of I'm so bored of the USA. I wince at the combination. Though I promise I will take him.
Later, I look up St James the Less, to find out it is a celebrated Gothic Victorian Church. There is only a little bit of history - it was built by three sisters in memory of their father the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol between 1856 - 61 in one of the poorest areas. But there is an immense amount of architectural information - designed by G.E Street, a victorian gothic architect of note, he employed the best craftsmen for this, his first church in London- Thomas Earp for stone carving and Clayton and Bell for stained glass and the famous Victorian artist GF Wyatt painted the mural above the chancel, called the The Doom, later replaced by a mosaic he designed. I feel a bit of a fraud because I haven't really seen the interior. Also I discover, John Betjeman, a big fan of Gothic Victorian Churches, helped save it, writing letters to defend the church from demolition, which is amazing symmetry because I have just been reading 'On Churches' by JB, and how he saved loads of churches, writing many letters. Then I find a painting of St James the Less by John Piper in his book English Churches with an introduction by John Betjeman which includes:
'The more you look at churches the more you appreciate their varying atmospheres – whether the vicar is high or low or breezy or lazy or crazy. You notice too oddities of furnishing, hymn boards, oil lamps, electric lighting, pipes, wires and heating stoves.'
And I thought yes. Yes. Exactly.
But then I want to actually see the church, and it seems to suggest on a Victorian architecture history site that it is often open at lunchtimes. So I go back again. From a distance I can see the gate to the porch is chained shut, and I nearly just cycle away. But a man is walking up to the church so I follow him and see him ring the bell of a side door and disappear inside. I have to go and park up the Boris Bike and then come back. Another man rings the bell and disappears inside. I press the bell. The door buzzes and lets me in. Above the bell I suddenly notice two AAs in a triangle. Oh, I think, for after all I did look up all the local AA meetings for exexdh in the area when he first stopped drinking, I just didn't remember it here. Anyhow, I am in a hallway at the bottom of some stairs, with an empty dark kitchen with toddler toys stacked and no one and no noise. I see a sign for the office but when I open the door it is dark and closed. I move further into the building, I just want to ask someone if it is ok just to have a look around. I open another door, pushing it open into a bright lit empty room with chairs around a table. Only then do I really realise I could accidentally walk into the AA meeting and it would be hard to get the words out quick enough to explain the mistake.
I am about to chicken out, to leave, when I see a heavy wooden door to the side. I lift the latch, surprised it is open and feeling like I am in a fairytale I walk through into the dark, unlit church. The air is so quiet and still and subdued, I feel my lungs fill with the grainy peace. From very far away I can hear voices but no one challenges me and I walk quietly around. I am briefly worried that they will think I have got lost and come and collect me for the meeting and usher me out of the church and onto a chair with a cup of tea and a biscuit and everything to say about alcohol. Then I feel free, just allowed to be here under these high ceilings, in a huge space like finding lung capacity.
In this dull gloaming light, the church is pixellated with the patterns of red, black and cream bricks. There is an extraordinary font of wrought iron with a roof like a nutty hat at ascot. Then sofas crammed in the back. Beautiful stained glass, beautiful tiles, and the overhead screen hung from the high ceiling. The G.F. Watts mosaic is high up on the chancel wall picturing Christ in heaven. Far away, in the corner there looks to be a skeleton glowing out from the dark. Slightly wary, I get near, but it is a large figure of made out of parts of musical instruments, the body a squeezebox, the fingers keys from a piano, the legs saxophones. It is crazy loose-limbed - a strange, crude representation of Christ. I go back to look at the craftsmanship of the iron work, and the pulpit. But mainly I like the fact I shouldn't be here, there is no electric light, there is space and quiet to breathe deeply.
Then today at work on the TV above my head I see the scenes of fire and windows breaking, and demonstrators pouring into Millbank Tower. Just round the corner from us, just round the corner from the school. I watch fascinated, slightly admiring ( though later I think - of what? ) but anxious for my children. Also I know, having been to a children's birthday party at the Pizza Express in the wings of the building that diners, tucking into doughballs and a Veneziana would have surprise ringside seats to the burning of David Cameron and Nick Clegg effigies. Then cower at the back of the restuarant near the toilets (or watch - which would you do?) as windows were broken, youths showed their bottoms and young people overcame the police. I would have taken a photograph of those diners faces but I don't think anyone did.
Later, on my way home from work I think I will just go and see, getting off one stop early. Walking past the peace camp and the increased police presence at the Houses of Parliament, and in a straight line on. I wondered if I will recognise students in the normal crowds of tourists and office workers. But it is surprisingly easy. Young women wear DM's again and young men look earnest.
I get to Lambeth bridge where cars in a tailgated traffic jam are being diverted. It is dark and really cold. A runner flashes past and dips down the steps to the Thames path. There is police tape across the road, with a few coppers alongside but no barrier to the pavement. I think they will say 'Turn back now, lady' or some such. But no one stops me and I keep walking on an almost empty street. Above a helicopter hovers, as if focussing. I am carrying a Gap bag with a new coat for my eldest son, some jogging bottoms and pants for both, using one of those 30% off vouchers and a heavy tesco bag too. Nearing Millbank Tower, police like dark beetles in riot gear arch together herding the few demonstrators left. Apart from the helicopter, it is very quiet. Bystanders and students ( ex protestors?) stand on the pavement in the dark under the trees by the Thames, placards littered. Many are drinking. Cans or whole bottles. Better protest than drink, I think. But I worry about everyone's drinking these days, including my own, for it doesn't seem good for survival. You ain't the fittest if you are drinking and that seems to be how evolution works. Inside the foyer of the lit building I can see police in riot helmets and fluroscent yellow jackets jammed together, like fish in a tin. Too many and too big for the space. On the walls in surprisingly thin and ineffectual pen there is an anarchist A in a circle, 'Tory scum', and a drawing of a prick and a broken glass door with some girls taking photos on their phones, I walk on. It doesn't seem very substantial. Though I think the lib dems will not be trusted for a long time. Do you remember Nick Clegg's sudden credible status through the televised debate? - I think I had forgotten, I just thought he was a twit - but those young people had wanted to believe absolutely - and here they are disappointed. Combined with the gleeful cruelty of the Conservatives, I think people already feel trapped in having got what they didn't want.
Past the Tate and then circling back to home. I hear a young man say 'In the UK there just aren't many of the lower or upper classes' and I think maybe not where you live mate.
Behind the buildings, I look up and see the tower and I think there are still people up there. ghostly white against the dark night sky, with a helicopter coming in, really near as if herding. I imagine that they got in, went as far as they could and don't know what to do now. Though the power of having obtained the roof top, however briefly, must be amazing.
Amen
Showing posts with label Sir John Betjeman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sir John Betjeman. Show all posts
Monday, 8 November 2010
Tuesday, 2 November 2010
St Martins in the Fields. Trafalgar Square
I think it is the tube strike but it isn't. I get the wrong day, the day before, not the actual day. A little bit like weather reports I find it hard to take in such details. Listening to the news I think ok, concentrate it is coming - rain or winter coat? And then I blink, or turn the tap on to wash up, and the report has gone, and yet again I make an ill informed guess, just looking out of the window and we are down the flights of stairs, late for school and standing outside, the children and me under blue skies and sunshine in thin clothes feeling a little bit cold. If we go fast we'll be alright I say.
This day though, I go to Notting Hill on the bus thinking I have been really clever and aren't I lucky because it isn't too packed for a tube strike day. I have an appointment with a counsellor I have started seeing and I didn't want to miss it. For some reason I don't really want to write this. Though perhaps it is just another truth barrier to go through. Angry children. Counselling through a domestic abuse charity.
The day I rang the domestic abuse charity it was well after the worst - after separating, after the drinking stopped. I had been given the leaflet initially by the woman who came after I phoned for help after exdh disappeared drunk driving the children around and held onto it, though I can remember well before that looking at the poster on the wall at a toddler group thinking that is what it feels like. But there was never any physical violence so I was unconfident that it described what it was. But exexdh had shouted and sworn and ranted at me one more time and after soothing the children back to bed, back to sleep I lay on the floor and sobbed and thought I cannot allow this to carry on anymore. This is my home. The next morning shaky and weary I took the children to school and then came back, took the phone into bed, lay under the covers and phoned the number. I told my tale to a kind, warm voiced woman.
I have always felt that I was a powerful person so it is a surprise to be or have to tell this.
She said you need a solicitor. She said yes, you need to talk through what has happened to you for you have been so strong and you have had no support. Yes. You do not have to live in this way.
So on this tube strike day that isn't - I think - I know, I can walk back through the parks afterwards and then onto a church. I can go and have a look at the Anish Kapoor sculptures. What a treat, I think, and the day is beautiful, warm, crisp blue skies and the autumn trees are strutted peacocks, flame coloured in amazing display.
This is beautiful. I am glad of everything that has put me there at exactly that moment. Not knowing it isn't really a tube strike yet.
In a bit of Hyde Park I don't know very well I find the first sculpture. A Rothko dark pink curved disc in a grey pond. Reflected clouds moving across the sheen of metal and swans and geese scudding beneath, like their home just got a satellite disc. Quite nice I think and move to a huge curved rectangular mirror. But the concrete base it is on causes a funny angled reflection and the scrub of mud and worn grass where people have walked round is ugly. Ho, ho, ho I think at the fairground fattening and upside down of behind but mainly I'm just not sure, not convinced as I tack back across the park to the robocop liquid metal of a spire reaching up. OK. It is OK, for I like the heaven reference, the church reference and I am reading John Betjeman 'On Churches.' But I am surprised by my friend's recommendation. Then, walking down to the lake I see the huge disc like a landed moon, clouds made monumental by their framing, energetic, like thick painted brushstrokes. Oh, I think oh. It is beautiful, And then I turn behind to see the red disc now glowing like a red orb. I feel in a constellation between the two. Earth and the sky combined unexpectedly into wonder.
How much art can you take? Passing the Serpentine Gallery I dither about going in, worried I have got to get everything done and I am working 4 days this week not 3 and time is tight and I still have to get into a church. But, I reason as I am here I might as well just whizz in. An exhibition by Klara Liden.
In a dark room a grainy projected film shows a man ( I think ) but it turns out to be a woman, the artist, slipping slowly backwards, feet sliding a moonwalk through night time streets. It is haunting and repetitive, her journey ending back where she started. A loop. A circumference.
In another room, the same fleshy youth, the artist, beats a bicycle with a stick. It starts out just a knocking, like finding a note, almost a sensual tracing of the form, then increases, but not so much, for the violence is sidelong, casual, a little bit sly, loses momentum and then gathers again. There is no real frenzy to it. Though the bike does topple over, does break into pieces but it never seems inevitable.
These are just observations. I am not sure what I want from them.
I buy some postcards and set off across the park again. It is a long walk and eventually I take a Boris bike from Hyde Park Corner to Trafalgar Square. I feel I am playing hookey on my own life to fit so much beauty into one morning.
I know St Martin's in The Field's has a cafe and has a lot of concerts but I don't know if I will be able to get in, I don't know if the actual church will be open.
But, walking up the steps, admiring the sky and view of Trafalgar Square which is so beautiful, letting light and space come into the heart of London, the doors are open. Though I still peer suspiciously in from the vestibule doors into the church. There are people sat at pews. I see people inside welcoming others. And walk in.
'There is a free concert.' The kind faces say. It starts at one o'clock. I am tempted to stay but think I will decide as I look around.
The church is beautiful. A huge space. Like an American church. I think, and then find out later that it's 1721 design was copied across North America Simple wood pews, a balcony above with more wooden pews, ornate chandeliers, and baroque white plaster ceilings with gold decorations and an amazing modern window at the end that later I find out to be by the Iranian artist Shirazeh Houshiary. It has clear leaded glass that shapes into a patched cross in a hazy, optical illusion. As if there is a shimmer, a movement to it, like a vibration.
The first official reference to a church on the site was in 1222, when The Archbishop of Canterbury decided that William, the Abbot of Westminster had authority of the church over Eustace the Bishop of London. That church was surrounded by fields in an isolated position between the cities of London and Westminster. Imagine! Trafalgar Square! Though excavations in 2006 led to the discovery of a Roman aged grave from about 410. This body, so far outside the limits of Roman London burial has led to ideas that it was an early Christian centre. (possibly reusing the site or building of a pagan temple).
Much later Henry V111 around 1542 built a new church and extended the parish boundaries to keep plague victims being carried through his palace and this was enlarged in 1607 and then pulled down in 1721 to be replaced by the current building. designed by James Gibb. The Vicar of St Martin's Dick Shepherd during the WW1 saw St Martin's as 'the church of the ever open door' following the example of the patron saint St Martin a roman soldier, who became a christian and is remembered for giving half his cloak to a beggar, Dick Shepherd allowed soldiers to rest in the church on the way to France in WW1. And his open door policy led to the work with homeless people, then later the chinese population that arrived in the 1960s and this busy feeling of committed welcome that is apparent this day.
I discover too, on the internet that there is a CD of recordings from WW2 - THE BLITZ Vol 1 (1939-41)
Audiobook 2xCD on CD41 label
ISBN: 978-1-906310-00-4
'An evocative double-disc set, The Blitz (Vol 1) features 145 minutes of rare material recorded 1939 and 1941. Most of the 44 tracks cover the period of night air raids in British cities between September 1940 and May 1941, including the heavy raids on London known as Black Saturday (7 September 1940) and the Second Fire of London (29 December 1940). All the featured recordings are first-hand accounts made at the time, and include civilians, evacuees, ARP and civil defence personnel, RAF pilots, AA gunners and politicians, as well as actuality recordings made during raids and inside shelters.'
With a report from 'CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow from St Martin in the Fields on Trafalgar Square during an air raid alert on 24 August 1940. The crypt of this famous church was used as a public shelter. On this night German aircraft bound for Rochester and Thameshaven instead dropped bombs over Central London, causing the first damage from enemy bombs since 1918.'
I am fascinated that I might be able to just choose to play tracks of this. That I can buy it like a greatest hits. Though I will.
Reluctantly I think I really don't have time to stay for the concert but I follow an open door down some steps to explore what there is. In the basement, in this space where people sheltered night after night from bombs, the cafe is packed under vaulted bricks. It is lunchtime. I move on to a huge modern underground expanse of space where there is a shop and a brass rubbing centre, then a sprial staircase that goes back up to the street. I have seen a mention of the Dick Shepherd chapel available for private prayer at any time and follow the arrows to find it. At the back, down some stairs, very quiet, behind glass is a modern simple chapel, two candles either end of a table and some chairs. I look through the glass, to a space cutaway in the earth under the pavement of busy feet, a very very peaceful room. Even walking home tonight from work, thinking oh, oh I am behind writing this, how will I finish it, and then I just remember the peace of that room deep within the building.
But now, just finishing, I hear something creaking and moving in the kitchen. I am not sure what it could be. I listen intently. I feel slightly frightened that unexpectedly a mouse or rat or just something could somehow, not sure, have mangaged to get up here. Then there is a muffled flat bang. It is a balloon bursting within a paper mache mask we were making for halloween and didn't finish, it is such a peculiar sound, such a strange tectonic movement in our flat, that I laugh.
Amen
This day though, I go to Notting Hill on the bus thinking I have been really clever and aren't I lucky because it isn't too packed for a tube strike day. I have an appointment with a counsellor I have started seeing and I didn't want to miss it. For some reason I don't really want to write this. Though perhaps it is just another truth barrier to go through. Angry children. Counselling through a domestic abuse charity.
The day I rang the domestic abuse charity it was well after the worst - after separating, after the drinking stopped. I had been given the leaflet initially by the woman who came after I phoned for help after exdh disappeared drunk driving the children around and held onto it, though I can remember well before that looking at the poster on the wall at a toddler group thinking that is what it feels like. But there was never any physical violence so I was unconfident that it described what it was. But exexdh had shouted and sworn and ranted at me one more time and after soothing the children back to bed, back to sleep I lay on the floor and sobbed and thought I cannot allow this to carry on anymore. This is my home. The next morning shaky and weary I took the children to school and then came back, took the phone into bed, lay under the covers and phoned the number. I told my tale to a kind, warm voiced woman.
I have always felt that I was a powerful person so it is a surprise to be or have to tell this.
She said you need a solicitor. She said yes, you need to talk through what has happened to you for you have been so strong and you have had no support. Yes. You do not have to live in this way.
So on this tube strike day that isn't - I think - I know, I can walk back through the parks afterwards and then onto a church. I can go and have a look at the Anish Kapoor sculptures. What a treat, I think, and the day is beautiful, warm, crisp blue skies and the autumn trees are strutted peacocks, flame coloured in amazing display.
This is beautiful. I am glad of everything that has put me there at exactly that moment. Not knowing it isn't really a tube strike yet.
In a bit of Hyde Park I don't know very well I find the first sculpture. A Rothko dark pink curved disc in a grey pond. Reflected clouds moving across the sheen of metal and swans and geese scudding beneath, like their home just got a satellite disc. Quite nice I think and move to a huge curved rectangular mirror. But the concrete base it is on causes a funny angled reflection and the scrub of mud and worn grass where people have walked round is ugly. Ho, ho, ho I think at the fairground fattening and upside down of behind but mainly I'm just not sure, not convinced as I tack back across the park to the robocop liquid metal of a spire reaching up. OK. It is OK, for I like the heaven reference, the church reference and I am reading John Betjeman 'On Churches.' But I am surprised by my friend's recommendation. Then, walking down to the lake I see the huge disc like a landed moon, clouds made monumental by their framing, energetic, like thick painted brushstrokes. Oh, I think oh. It is beautiful, And then I turn behind to see the red disc now glowing like a red orb. I feel in a constellation between the two. Earth and the sky combined unexpectedly into wonder.
How much art can you take? Passing the Serpentine Gallery I dither about going in, worried I have got to get everything done and I am working 4 days this week not 3 and time is tight and I still have to get into a church. But, I reason as I am here I might as well just whizz in. An exhibition by Klara Liden.
In a dark room a grainy projected film shows a man ( I think ) but it turns out to be a woman, the artist, slipping slowly backwards, feet sliding a moonwalk through night time streets. It is haunting and repetitive, her journey ending back where she started. A loop. A circumference.
In another room, the same fleshy youth, the artist, beats a bicycle with a stick. It starts out just a knocking, like finding a note, almost a sensual tracing of the form, then increases, but not so much, for the violence is sidelong, casual, a little bit sly, loses momentum and then gathers again. There is no real frenzy to it. Though the bike does topple over, does break into pieces but it never seems inevitable.
These are just observations. I am not sure what I want from them.
I buy some postcards and set off across the park again. It is a long walk and eventually I take a Boris bike from Hyde Park Corner to Trafalgar Square. I feel I am playing hookey on my own life to fit so much beauty into one morning.
I know St Martin's in The Field's has a cafe and has a lot of concerts but I don't know if I will be able to get in, I don't know if the actual church will be open.
But, walking up the steps, admiring the sky and view of Trafalgar Square which is so beautiful, letting light and space come into the heart of London, the doors are open. Though I still peer suspiciously in from the vestibule doors into the church. There are people sat at pews. I see people inside welcoming others. And walk in.
'There is a free concert.' The kind faces say. It starts at one o'clock. I am tempted to stay but think I will decide as I look around.
The church is beautiful. A huge space. Like an American church. I think, and then find out later that it's 1721 design was copied across North America Simple wood pews, a balcony above with more wooden pews, ornate chandeliers, and baroque white plaster ceilings with gold decorations and an amazing modern window at the end that later I find out to be by the Iranian artist Shirazeh Houshiary. It has clear leaded glass that shapes into a patched cross in a hazy, optical illusion. As if there is a shimmer, a movement to it, like a vibration.
The first official reference to a church on the site was in 1222, when The Archbishop of Canterbury decided that William, the Abbot of Westminster had authority of the church over Eustace the Bishop of London. That church was surrounded by fields in an isolated position between the cities of London and Westminster. Imagine! Trafalgar Square! Though excavations in 2006 led to the discovery of a Roman aged grave from about 410. This body, so far outside the limits of Roman London burial has led to ideas that it was an early Christian centre. (possibly reusing the site or building of a pagan temple).
Much later Henry V111 around 1542 built a new church and extended the parish boundaries to keep plague victims being carried through his palace and this was enlarged in 1607 and then pulled down in 1721 to be replaced by the current building. designed by James Gibb. The Vicar of St Martin's Dick Shepherd during the WW1 saw St Martin's as 'the church of the ever open door' following the example of the patron saint St Martin a roman soldier, who became a christian and is remembered for giving half his cloak to a beggar, Dick Shepherd allowed soldiers to rest in the church on the way to France in WW1. And his open door policy led to the work with homeless people, then later the chinese population that arrived in the 1960s and this busy feeling of committed welcome that is apparent this day.
I discover too, on the internet that there is a CD of recordings from WW2 - THE BLITZ Vol 1 (1939-41)
Audiobook 2xCD on CD41 label
ISBN: 978-1-906310-00-4
'An evocative double-disc set, The Blitz (Vol 1) features 145 minutes of rare material recorded 1939 and 1941. Most of the 44 tracks cover the period of night air raids in British cities between September 1940 and May 1941, including the heavy raids on London known as Black Saturday (7 September 1940) and the Second Fire of London (29 December 1940). All the featured recordings are first-hand accounts made at the time, and include civilians, evacuees, ARP and civil defence personnel, RAF pilots, AA gunners and politicians, as well as actuality recordings made during raids and inside shelters.'
With a report from 'CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow from St Martin in the Fields on Trafalgar Square during an air raid alert on 24 August 1940. The crypt of this famous church was used as a public shelter. On this night German aircraft bound for Rochester and Thameshaven instead dropped bombs over Central London, causing the first damage from enemy bombs since 1918.'
I am fascinated that I might be able to just choose to play tracks of this. That I can buy it like a greatest hits. Though I will.
Reluctantly I think I really don't have time to stay for the concert but I follow an open door down some steps to explore what there is. In the basement, in this space where people sheltered night after night from bombs, the cafe is packed under vaulted bricks. It is lunchtime. I move on to a huge modern underground expanse of space where there is a shop and a brass rubbing centre, then a sprial staircase that goes back up to the street. I have seen a mention of the Dick Shepherd chapel available for private prayer at any time and follow the arrows to find it. At the back, down some stairs, very quiet, behind glass is a modern simple chapel, two candles either end of a table and some chairs. I look through the glass, to a space cutaway in the earth under the pavement of busy feet, a very very peaceful room. Even walking home tonight from work, thinking oh, oh I am behind writing this, how will I finish it, and then I just remember the peace of that room deep within the building.
But now, just finishing, I hear something creaking and moving in the kitchen. I am not sure what it could be. I listen intently. I feel slightly frightened that unexpectedly a mouse or rat or just something could somehow, not sure, have mangaged to get up here. Then there is a muffled flat bang. It is a balloon bursting within a paper mache mask we were making for halloween and didn't finish, it is such a peculiar sound, such a strange tectonic movement in our flat, that I laugh.
Amen
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)