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seven final spring dances

by Simon Aulman

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1.
the lecturer 02:52
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2.
the publication 03:10
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3.
the stamp 02:46
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4.
the street 03:58
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5.
the room 02:54
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6.
the blue 05:58
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7.
the free far calling hills 02:32
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about

this morning I walked on over to my greatest friend and we drove to the motor museum car park at Beaulieu where the parking is free and quite easy and from there we walked into Beaulieu itself and along the gravel footpath to Bucklers Hard. I've never much liked this walk for the last fifty years because it is so popular and I am a nonpopulist snob. But before then I did love this walk, with my favourite grandparents, when we were the only people who had discovered the New Forest and you could park anywhere, absolutely anywhere.

Today was the warmest so far this year and much sunnier than predicted, at least down there, and everyone we passed was friendly and at Bucklers Hard we went to the Master Builders bugger I do hate all these gastro pseudo crap places except that everyone is also incredibly nice and we sat outside and ate some sort of beef jerky burger with a baked potato in foil - out there, in the sunshine, on the rise, above the wide yacht-covered river, I felt mad and intoxicated and in love and I really really really felt like I was in Cornwall aged about ten when they were my favourite holidays, the way you want To The Lighthouse to be as good in real life as it is in your imagination before you first read it.

The whole path between the two villages is gravel and even in this winter there is very little mud - really only one puddle, with a wobbly board across it, just on the edge of Beaulieu - and you could do the whole two miles in slippers quite easily. In my childhood it was all like the Everglades - easy to get lost too. Today it is impossible to get lost - you cannot stray outside the two-mile-long stretches of barbed wire that guide you all the way either side of you, your friends.

I remember how squalid Southampton zoo was - tiny and dirty and crammed - the people crammed as much as the animals. Thank god it is gone. Thank god all the more awful zoos have gone - though when I walk alongside/outside London Zoo it doesn't look or sound so great. I loved today, but when I am with great friends and their idea of the countryside I do see the new zoos we are building. The National Parks are the new zoos, and everywhere else will be built on and killed, and the parks will be behind the barbed wire - we can still go in them, so long as we stay within the barbed wire - "nature" will be kept like a pale potted plant just beyond the barbed wire, it will not be able to breathe, we will watch it die as we walk on the hard safe paths and read all the explanatory notices with a picture of a random butterfly and bird and plant and stay within the 9 to 5 and knowing the right words to use and the right thoughts and how to look like we agree with the new 1930s men in their unsmiling moustaches, all they created, all they'll force us to build and live in and how their Sobibors have become wild forest and now we are enclosured.

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recorded early this morning and this evening, photo today in Beaulieu

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released April 6, 2024

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Simon Aulman Southampton, UK

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