Imageless Images

Sadly, due to computing issues, we have no pictures this week.

As an anitdote to a rash of paved over drives and solar lamps, at the end of last summer, I planted a blackcurrant bush, picked up cheap at B&Q.  It is now beginning to burst its buds: green and yellow leaves unfurling from the pink buds like indoor fireworks, or the newspaper palms we had to make at this time of year, every year, for Palm Sunday.

1980: Already, the golden vegetable and fruit age of the suburb was dying, but I didn't see it.

I have started considering the world of Folk Suburban window sited ceramics, blasting & blessing as I go.  This week I wish very much to blast! a display of off-the-shelf vases I have seen in a window round the corner.  Alternating are Superdrug-pink and white vases, in strictly equal number.  I am imagining these have been bought, all at once, and for a 'look', with no real care whatsoever.  No piece or assembly is important, and will be gone again in a year when the colours 'go out'.  They stand opposite the remains of an ancient orchard, marked now only by a wall.
I beg leave to bless!, however, a nearby china robin on a ceramic mound of rubble, painted green on the top part and with Happy Christmas picked out in gold and white on the lower.  The robin's breast is too red, and its wings too brown, but this robin, sitting in a windowsill as it does all year round, I only presume was given with care, and is thus proudly displayed.

News reaches the Folk Suburb of the final landing of the space shuttle.  A metal model of this lives in our house somewhere.
I was drawn to remember the evening of the first landing - it was a summer's evening, I am sure, where the sun shone low, pale yellow gone to white through a slightly misty haze of tired heat; stuffed with gnats.  We were playing a game, I remember it well, of attempting to chip-land a football on the rows of haysweet cut grass in the park.  It was already turning grey, from lying there so late in the day.
The sky, I remember, was clear pure blue; maybe with a 'plane streak in it, I'm not sure.  I'm sure my mum, washing up in the shade of the kitchen, would have warned of chopped up dog shit being in the clippings.

Lateish - and people are disappearing inside to watch the shuttle come in to land. The light rushes silently out from the old lanes.  We stayed in the park, with the gnats, chipping the football.

Folk Suburb #5

In the moment you are tired, dog-tired, but near no bed; when one world oscillates with another, and another one can be magicked, accessed through the tired sight of one object, the smell of one some thing, the temperature of something, that is when the folk suburb reveals itself: in the right circumstances, like catching the fairy ring occupied.

They asked him to go a-hunting.  A bottle of Diet Sparkling Florida Orange is opened at the desk opposite.  I am dog-tired, coming in and out.  Suddenly, the deep orange colour, and the smell of synthetic oranges, sends, like Orwell's King Zog poster, back - to a particular glass bottle of Corona Orange.
There is parched grass.  Here is a park, deliberately laid out (unlike our 'playing fields'), and it is reached by a lane, this lane, joining our world to that - a steep lane, bordered by high hedges and brambles.  The hedges screen the sound of the suburb, on this hot afternoon: the scraped plates, the sawn wood, the snatch of conversation carried suddenly by the heat; and, in early autumn, they will be filled with fat blackberries.

But it is now.  We emerge, come out, opposite the park, more or less, in shorts probably.  There are Edwardian pictures that exist of boys in black shorts & high collars (it must be Sunday) prodding at paper boats with sticks in a pond (long gone), but it retains an aviary and a putting green.

We are heading there now, excited.  And these bold and wicked villains, took his life away.  None of them are there now - the birds, mostly budgies and canaries - are all dead, and the putting green is returned to grass.  Someone's job they left for, every morning in the summer, was to sit in the temporary hut handing out clubs and balls and scoring cards, printed on warm, blotting paper-like paper.  They are gone now.
There is one hole that resembles one of those Jamboree biscuits and the humps have dried out and are grassless, in the hot weather.  We lie out on them.
In the autumn, the metal flags will be packed away again, and the green willl be just a hedged off rectangle , bumped like an iron age fort; all but empty of all but its history.  We watch the flags being put away again.

But soon the orangeade is Diet Sparkling again - a bottle.  All those people are gone.  And in the ditch there is no water, only brush and briar grew.  They could not hide the blood of slaughter, so in the lane his body threw.

Folk Suburb #4

In the moment you are tired, dog-tired, but near no bed; when one world oscillates with another, and another one can be magicked, accessed through the tired sight of one object, the smell of one some thing, the temperature of something, that is when the folk suburb reveals itself: in the right circumstances, like catching the fairy ring occupied.

In the evening after dark, the blackleg miner creeps to work, with his moleskin trousers and dirty shirt, there goes the blackleg miner!  As I was walking home from work, wagtails were wandering the pavement, the striped hands of crocus leaves heading for the light of dusk, and the blackbird sang its song the same colour as the branches it was on.  When out of one house came a smell of meat and gravy - just like that; there was something about the gravy, or the meat, or the gravy and the meat, that was transportingly of Brain's faggots, and gravied chips, out of the chip shop, in a past similar end of dusk, when the very clouds smelt of drizzle.  Walking home from a school cross country.
Away across the school field where I had shivered in a yellow vest waiting to start the race, was this falling Camelot into disrepair.  I see it now, as I ignored them then, these many, these tucked away, small, condensation wet and drizzly forgotten things of small industry in small farmer's fields.
When young, we played around the bricks and stones as sure in our own minds that these were castles, not mines, like on the public information films before Grandstand; a cross in the country of magick and safety.
Don't go near that mine: across the way they've stretched a line to catch the blackleg miner. To catch the throat and break the spine, of that dirty blackleg miner.

Then, the walking has taken me away from the smell and drizzle, and the image is holdable no longer.

(In passing, I understand this particular mine engine house has been tidied up, and now stars in a bit of landscape in the development mentioned in Folk Suburb #3.)

8: Odd Corners

In an attempt to avoid the closing in of a dank Sunday, we took a walk in the suburb - and here are two odd corners we found.

The first is this wyrd almost circular hollow on the top of a hill -

which put me kind of in mind of an Arthur Machen story.  The hill is, reputedly, where Mary, Queen of Scots, stood to watch some battle en route to Fotheringay.  The circular hollow is not mentioned on the sign board and, in its middle, is this strange tree -

A suitable sized item pushed into the hole at the top comes out of the hole at the bottom. 

The second 'odd corner' is slightly more man made, but affecting nonetheless as the kind of place of which Suburb Folk Memory is made.  The quiet of this square of garages is what you notice, compared even with the none-too-noisiness of the suburban streets you step off to reach it.  It, too, is Machen-like.  Rabbits live in it.

Folk Suburb #3

In the moment you are tired, dog-tired, but near no bed; when one world oscillates with another, and another one can be magicked, accessed through the tired sight of one object, the smell of one some thing, the temperature of something, that is when the folk suburb reveals itself: in the right circumstances, like catching the fairy ring occupied.

Rather than a trigger from far away, this was brought by an actual revisit, though the air smelled much the same.  The stone stile, like two gravestones wrenched out from the nearby churchyard and put one on top the other, leads into a lane of about 1/4 mile, where it ends in another stile much the same.  At the other end was, and is, pretty much opposite, a 16th century farmhouse set facing a tussocky and brackeny common.  Listening recently to Alasdair Roberts' version of Long Lankin it was this house I saw.

At this end of the lane, though, there is no farmhouse; and what was once the end of the city, as I remember it, now has added on a small 'development' - a part of which I have glued, slightly out of its true place, but not much, to the side.  These are cream cubes, rather than Orwell's red. 
The lane itself, though, with its bare bramble stems, is still a passage out of all time, strangely silent on a wintery afternoon, leading to the manor and the false nurse.  Let the doors be all bolted and the windows all pinned, and leave not a hole for a mouse to creep in.  Oh, the doors were all bolted and the windows all pinned, save one little window where Long Lankin crept in. 

Folk Suburb #2

In the moment you are tired, dog-tired, but near no bed; when one world oscillates with another, and another one can be magicked, accessed through the tired sight of one object, the smell of one some thing, the temperature of something, that is when the folk suburb reveals itself: in the right circumstances, like catching the fairy ring occupied.

Beyond tired, I buy a packet of Tooti Frootis from the newsagents, to get change for something.  I bite a purple one and immediately I see a corner, clearly.  On my right side quiet, semi-detached houses, their small leaded panes reflecting unevenly the whitish light in the silence.  And a privet, in an unfelt breeze.  I know someone who lives in one.
But then opposite rises this giant suburb-megalith.  They came to the high castle where my lord he was sitting at meat.  "If you did but know what news I brought not one more mouthful would you eat,"  "What news have you brought?  Is my castle burning down?"  "Oh, no, your true love is very very ill and she'll die before ever you can come."  But then opposite rises this suburb-megalith, giant stone wall, grey, broken by a coach arch and a single doorway.  Like a castle wall.  Above this door, is a look out window, or a lantern window: its glass, in the aspect facing me, red; a red film or paint, peeling.
"Saddle me my milk-white horse, and bridle him so neat.  That I may kiss of her lily lips that are to me so sweet."
What callers found themselves watched from that window?  The place is occupied now by a mysterious Oz-like doctor, who, if he practises at all, practises a Victorian medicine, with Victorian instruments.  But the window is already now disused.  All kinds of spirits jostle.  Carts, and horses and bicycles pass; beneath it.  Before the suburb arrived, surrounding it with privets and ornamental cherries.  The last bone-shaking rider has passed, out of the village.
They saddled him his milk-white steed at twelve o'clock at night.  He rode, he rode till he met six young men with a corpse all dressed in white.  The roof is not visible, nor any building behind the wall.  A cloud passes another shadow across the wall and a woman in a pac-a-mac walks out of the arch.
Then the sweet is finished, and the wall; and with it passes the street, and the wall disintegrates
once more.

Postscript: I passed the original of this at the weekend and was astonished at its smallness - I remember it as high; featureless.  It is now hemmed by 90s houses.  It does retain the two X ceiling supports (I suppose they are) which I had forgotten in the earlier picture, but were definitely there. 

Folk Suburb #1

In the moment when you are tired, dog tired, but near no bed; when one world oscillates with another, and another one can be magicked, accessed through but the tired sight of one object, the smell of one some thing, the temperature of something: that is when the folk suburb reveals itself: in the right circumstances, like catching the fairy ring occupied.
I wish, I wish, but it's all in vain, I wish I were a maid again; but a maid again I never shall be till apples grow on an orange tree.  Swaying looking at a stand of trees so that the noise of the robin is as if they were on your shoulder, I saw, quite clearly, a broken asphalt path, broken by roots passing beneath it.
I wish my baby it was born, and smiling on its papa's knee, and I to be in yon churchyard, with long green grass growing over me.
It was blue coloured, in the shadow, the asphalt path, and rose into a stand of trees.  I don't recall the type of trees and cannot see them, but they were there.  And then, away to the right through the trees, a blue - it is definitely blue - blue wooden door in a high wall appears.  There is a flinty stone arch, like arrowheads, above the door.  Leaving the path in the stand of trees, opposite the door, I walk through the tussocky, ankle high grass where the park keeper's mower hardly ever goes, but twice a year, June and August, and enter by the blue door.

Suburb magick.  When my apron strings hung low, he followed me through frost and snow, but now my apron's to my chin, he passes by and says nothing.  Across a gravel border path a lawn, clipped and striped, and white metal tables laid for tea, outside the black 'french' windows spaces, hung with fluttery white curtains, of a 3 or 4 storey Regency house - actually a hotel but who would stay?
I myself took a dish of ice cream here once, when I was very small, one hot afternoon.
But already it is getting late, each flat in the Regency building has a light on against the bluing day, each tile fronted house hemming it in with TVs.  The grass is gone, car parked.
Oh grief, oh grief, I'll tell you why - that girl has more gold than I; more gold than I and beauty and fame, but she will come like me again.