Hanging In A Jar

Coming home is like drifting off through a film or living through a coma punctuated by an intermittent consciousness. What you see is familiar but things are slightly out of place. Some characters are gone, others reaching the end of their arc. Every so often you fall back asleep. Your life continues. It feels like nothing's changed, though your own lives have been many and your face and manner would confuse those who encounter you too.  The doorbell rings and there's Brenda, hair set and ruddy cheeked, with a wrapped box of After Eights and a bottle of gin. Shall we have some now, together? Frank next door is in his garden working on his model railway. His wife Viv is whispering the village gossip to mum over the top of the garden fence, her white hair and glasses just about visible if you stand on your tiptoes.  The settings change: in the movie, the school gym is no longer festooned with streamers but now empty and abandoned, light streaming through a broken window. In life...

Venice: Nights of Madonna blue, the tail end of a shawl moving away into the darkness, a certain nothing. I think of the water's edge - how the dense fog felt like the end of time but was the beginning: the caigo an embrace.   I will miss the witches' brooms, the metallic clunk of the binmen, the warm glow melting like honey from morning shop windows onto the dark, cold Autumn calli. The old man who sings as he pedals through San Tomà, the alsatian in his 5pm booties, Giorgio on the steps of the church at San Lio: a plastic bucket on his head. The incredulity of the 7am ombre, the vampiric kiss of the cocal, the tiny skeletons running through Halloween darkness of Campo Santa Margherita, whooping with joy. "Singing" the songs of Curva Sud as if dubbed by a toddler, but Ascolani only have olives. Remembering a shroud of fog concealing delinquents on the water. The swifts darting and dancing against the bright blue sky, the cormorants crucified as the sun sets over the ...

My lockdown apartment faced no neighbours. Opposite me was a former monastery, dark and unused, the gates bolted shut.  Most days I lay on the kitchen table with my feet poking out of the window, watched only by the sun. ⠀ As time went on, I grew accustomed to the distant clatter of neighbours' cutlery against their dinner bowls, of the dog walkers surreptitiously meeting on the street below my window, of the scratching beaks of the tiny birds poking through the seeds that lay in the gutters. But my constant companions were the trees of the monastery. The trees were the beacons that brought in life. They were maypoles for the bats that spiralled round in the dusk, impervious to my desperate lens, playfully looping in a manner I couldn't quite fathom. The heat brought lightning, illuminating the sky and rendering them actors on a grand stage: a performance just for me! These trees were companions to the life that flourished from their gifts, unnoticed before, but always there. I...

Many years ago, in Napoli, I caused a traffic accident. My head was in the clouds - daydreaming about an antique silverfish with an emerald eye - when I stepped out onto a one way road. But it wasn't one way. The motorcyclist braked. His body lurched forward and scraped along the asphalt in slow motion as I stood, rooted to the spot, watching him die. Everything else stopped, but the screams of the drivers behind me. And then somehow, he arose. He trembled as he looked at the palms of his hands. They were embedded with grit, but no blood. In the end, he comforted me, I don't know why, and I still feel such guilt for killing a man, even if he didn't die. I always wanted to live in Napoli, and maybe one day I will. But for now, I'm here. I feel so at ease in this city. At night the bricks are soft to the touch, but I daren't. And there are no roads. Today, I bought a tiny, antique, silver fish. ⠀

A 5 hour driving lesson in the blazing sun. The day after, I walked from Upnor to Hoo and back to Borstal. You can follow the shore at low tide and collect oyster shells and broken bottles along the way; warm milk happiness decoding the glass remnants, learning the story of some old bottlemaker, somewhere down the coast. This time it was Powell and Ricketts from Bristol, and the drink was done with in 1880 something*.  Across from Upnor is St Mary's Island. The island is well-developed now, but in the 1500s it was a minor defensive post. A chain ran from Upnor Castle, across the River Medway to St Mary's; they'd simply raise it up in the case of threat from a Spanish fleet. Elizabeth I had a fort built opposite, at Hoo - Cockham Wood Fort - with bricks after the colour of her hair. St Mary's later became the burial ground for the Napoleonic POWs imprisoned on the local prison hulks. Rumours have it that some of the more badly behaved prisoners were tied to stakes and ...