Custom

It's the bouncing out again of the light that hits my eyes so suddenly so that the paddling pool and the bird cage are no longer relevant but gradually return in time because that is where I stop. It's the white suit, well really a track-suit that radiates an almost ultra-violet glow that is part in itself and part what is made of it out of the sunlight. There's a scattering of dogs and children underfoot as I stop so that the wheels of the two bikes are now at right angles on the path. It's Shakespeare.

The traffic underfoot moves around us readjusting like a stream around a pebble. 70's Soul Music comes from the handlebars where a compact speaker is taped. There are birds within the cages and I begin to be aware of the colour blue and the colour yellow constantlly shifting. The water from the pool is crinkled and blue. No one is paddling.  He has been around the park three times already.


I`m in a shop on the Holloway road buying an umbrella. The woman is tired and keeps losing track of the transaction, repeating parts or leaving other things out. On my way out the alarm goes off. It is a small high pitched siren. I need to empty out all my purchases on to the floor and search through my bag for my pay slips. Meanwhile another woman walks past me and approaching the door the alarm goes off again. She looks behind her, looks at me, shrugs and keeps going. The shop-assistant keeps picking up different items and walking them over the threshold to see if that activates the siren. It isn't actually the umbrella after all but something bought form the household department upstairs which was probably not swiped. One woman apologises on behalf of the shop for causing me this "Humiliation". The words turn the episode inside out for me and I see it for the first time from another angle, from another customer's view across the shop- floor noticing the event unfold. Looking out across the expanse of that shop-floor there are many glass containers upon the surface of clean glass counters all sparkling.
A woman sits in an easy chair made of lightly woven fabric with her face turned up towards the many lights having her eye-brows plucked.

I am entering a market. There is Eloina and she greets me. She is coming out of the market with a blue bag. She wants to show me what she has bought. Amongst other things there is a small glass container that we hear break from within the bag and that she takes out in pieces and puts at the side of the road.
I apologise. There is also a tiny fold-up chair that she now takes out and unfolds. She sits down on it though it is a  long way down to the seat and a long way up again in order to stand. I tell her that ever since the garden went -a fence went up, the key confiscated forever- I try to make a place out of wherever I happen to stop. She says, yes she can take a rest whenever she wants to now with her new chair. I tell her about my Japanese guest coming in two weeks time whom I have just bought towels for and that some people she knows from the garden will be coming to his presentation nearby and why doesn't she? She says, yes she will come and I write down the address on the back of one of the payslips that I tear in half before giving it to her.

The near and the far

I am on the end of a peer looking out to sea. The sea has receded far form the original coast line so that it is shiny mud-flats that absorb more light and take up a picture of some sort of the inverse sky. That is not like the moving sea that bounces straight out again the fractural light, magnifying that beam where it immediately bends back on itself. There are a group of kids to one side. Hindered by their own intelligence and lack of a place to go, they start picking on one another, backtracking on plans for the moment and expectations to come. It's only when one of them gets up to go, that they grip on to one another, hugging, with fists clenched around pulled down sleeves. A man and a woman are lying out to my right trying to judge the distance of boats that are tilting over because the bottom is toucing the mud through water that still only just swirls around them. "Four Metres" says the man. "No, much further than that" says the woman.
I`m leant up against a pole and it's uncomfortable because it's a square metal colummn and my back meets it where one side converts into the next. I need to sit like that to get the right view. Right out across and to the land far away on the other side. Music is coming from the empty bar down at the other end of the peer where a boy served me my drink. There are some Spanish people half way down the peer with sunglasses on, not looking out to sea but facing inwards along the walk-way. They look back at me as I look down that way.
A rumbling can be heard from a crane which is dredging up large quantities of sand and shingle just past the pub in a cordoned off area. Every once in a while, some kind of coversion takes place in the inwards of the pillar I am leant up against. Something between the wind, the crane working and the music in the bar creates a tone that resonates and ciruculates in that limited internal hollow space and all the sequential items laid out here seem to ring together not as given distances on a certain plane but as harmonics that must also be in place for that sound to exist. I hear it now and it summons back up the music, the rumble of the crane and the smell and taste of the salt air. A deep thud that however chimes for an instance even as it cuts out. It is like striking something into existance all over again. I cannot predict when that sound will re-emerge. As I sit there on the cold concrete of the peer, my body still hot from the sun of the day, my ear pressed against the cold metal of the pole to catch the thud when it comes, my back straining to position on the edge of that square pole, still uncomfortale, I hear a hurriedly rattling sound speeding towards me. I stop breathing and my lower abdomen contracts. Then the plastic bag scuttles off the edge of that peer with incredible speed, at odds with everything else so far, and for one instant I nearly follow it. It would be simply for the sake of completing a pattern; resolving a sound with it's evidential movement. And it is so compelling a thing to do. Such an incredible lightlness and ease in doing it. There is no current of wind once it begins to drop past the level of the peer so gradually it descends and I lose sight of it as it goes towards the mud-flats.
I realise then that imperceptively I have adjusted my posture; I am pressing in to the corner of that square bar until it hurts and now when I remember the feeling of that pressure I also see the floating plastic bag which seems to go up momentarily before it goes down. This is not a visual memory. It is a sense I have of my body re-organising. That organsiation is on-going- not a before or after- but a re-application every time the chime comes through. A re-accomodation of the near and the far.