Eventyr

All is Quiet

In short: Went to the packed out place that was Bognor Rox Festival to see Fun Lovin' Criminals. Discovered the horror that is Bognor Face. Had a jolly good, if obscure, time. Escaped from Bognor. Quietly.

Fate

Your pulse is beating faster now, like a bird flying hard against the wind;
trying to understand all the crazed compulsions that you feel.
And all the little jealousies and betrayals, they echo in the dark;
and somewhere back through it all, the key is still turning in the lock.
Now the ghosts that you have laid, they all come out to greet you;
the knowledge that you've gained - well, none of this protects you.
You've been so very far, still peace will not embrace you,
for all the while the past is close behind.
Like headlights on your tail, headlights on your tail.
-- Headlights by New Model Army

Saw 'em live, and it was good.

Mountain Fireworks

I don't know what's going on
I've got no clue as to what went wrong.
But I don't care.
If there goes another one...

So, for my sins...

I went to see the Mountain Firework Company on Tuesday, who I discovered while doing judging for the Brighton and Hove Virtual Festival.

And, once more, it turns out that one of the people on stage was a member of the glasto crew. The spiegeltent is the place for people I know to perform it seems.

I should've known...

----

On an aside I am currently heartbroken that I cannot see the performance on Rumi due to it having sold out at just the wrong moment.

Back to School

There was a strange feeling of coming home, and yet not being home; of familiar smells and shapes and corridors half-remembered, and yet recognised – like the fading yellow paint on one of the radiators.

Having gone to the school but having chosen to leave for sixth-form I never studied in the sixth form block. But I did once clean it. I had so many memories of pushing a broom up and down the corridors, of turning it ready to push more dust along, that I was lost when the man leading us turned to what had once been a path through to a computer room and started heading up some stairs. Stairs which had not been there before.

I had known that the sixth-form had now a block on top of it, now had two floors where one had previously sufficed, but had not realised that I would be going there. And so I faced it.

The stairs were worn, the banister broken. All I could see marked how much time there was between myself and the people I had come to study, and yet, yet, I could have been one of them I thought.

----

And thus I mark the brief study I did of my secondary school sixth-form; a day where I bumped into friends, am not recognised by teachers, ate food in offices which were once Home Economics rooms, remember maggots and brooms and outside cupboards for secret smoking, and a house with a dog, and realise how far I have come.

And how small the central staircase really is. My dreams lied, it will not swallow the world.

Withdean Hall

Yea, and it spake to me thus mockingly:
"Resist me not, with me there is no strife,
Dids't thou not call upon me, I am come
To be the Guardian Angel of thine home,
To be a light to lighten all thy life
Henceforth we will dwell together, thou and I."

Today I took a brief excursion out from my work at the University to once more go on the cemetery tour.

I learned two important things:

1) Blowing on a dandelion will tell you the exact time time to the minute (3pm it turned out). It was a very accurate clock...

2) In the extra-mural cemetery a man is buried. A man who wrote of vampires and werewolves in Victorian times. A man who "has been described as 'the first Goth' and 'the Quentin Crisp of the 1890s'." A man who used to live in the hall at the bottom of my road. The hall with the inverted pentegrams. At last I have the answer to the question I have idly wondered for so many years...

Back to work now... But with thoughts of mad mad Count Stenbock...

Towards the last the Count was mentally as well as physically ill. At Withdeane Hall he terrified the domestic staff with his persecution complex and his delirium tremens so scared the young Mowatts that they had to be moved to more distant rooms. On his travels he had been escorted, and with him went a dog, a monkey and a life-size doll. He was convinced that the doll was his son and referred to it as 'le Petit comte'. Every day it had to be brought to him, and when it was not there he would ask for news of its health. The Stenbocks believed that a dishonest monk - or perhaps a Jesuit - had extorted large sums of money from him under the pretence of paying for the education of 'le Petit Comte'.

Madness.

Burst of Pink

Today the ground is marked with puddles of pale pink petals, freshly fallen and dense, from the many cherry trees. It is a young girls dream of colour.

The trees have marked time once more and dropped their blossoms in unison. I am happy that the world is turning as it should, with no interaction from me.

So I shall mark this thought, and go see the sky explode with fireworks. Content.

Things are.

Out for the voodoo that you do

So, tonight, I finally get around to braving the horrors of Voodoo Vaudeville.

I must say I think I am quite excited, and hope that it ends up being just as entertaining a performance as the Tiger Lillies last night (and puts those images out of my head).

I love the festival, it gives me so many vital excuses to postpone getting on with my work.

Timbers Are Weak

We sail in a ship and the timbers are weak
Through the storm clouds the rainbows the rainbows we seek

We sail for horizons that one day will end
To sleep with the fishes on that we depend

The storm when it breaks we shiver with fear
In our bowels we do know we'll face no new year

We sail for horizons that one day will end
To sleep with the fishes on that we depend

-- Tiger Lillies - Sleep With The Fishes

Host Ctn

And then it broke, and then it was fixed days later. Such is the way of the hosting company...