another distorted piano ambient thing, trying to be like the better moments of the previous album, not quite succeeding, but never mind, it's all luck, today wasn't so lucky, tomorrow might be even worse, and today's still okay.
(LATER - now that I've actually heard it for a little while it really seems quite good, in a cold austere kind of way - when the right mood strikes you, this is the right music for that mood)
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Well what a day what a dull day well what a day all day all day all dull day what an awful day what a terrible day all day well it was a bit dull but I did enjoy it an awful lot, god knows how or why, it started with me in the post office queuing to post my rock'n'roll parcels, it took me longer to queue than it took to make the albums and the covers, just one person serving all of broken Britain, most of them homeless and queuing up for £20 because the machine had broken in broken Britain oh what a dull day, and then I went to see Napoleon and before it started we waited for a friend's pizza but it came so late because they had no staff either - and Napoleon itself is such a dull film, a battle the same as all the other battles and then some chat the same as any chat over a pizza, I won't see it again.
Yesterday, ah yesterday, what I wouldn't give for yesterday and its tenderness - the first bus to Calshot again, and along the beach again, and this time as I was walking up alongside Southampton Water I got chatting to a bird watcher. I've never been interested in birds. But he told me what he was seeing and where they'd flown from and where they were going, he's in some official job that is marking them and keeping an eye on them and he knowns them all, their markers and habits and the cams on their nests, there is nowhere private today.
I was interested in what he said about the curlew - how they used to breed a lot in the Forest, but now nothing like so much - because the Forest is so much busier, dog walkers let their dogs off the leash and they run around disturbing everything, and the children scream, and the officials build a new path to cut in half some bit of land that was already too small to be of any use to anything and cyclists shout mindlessness on their phones as they cycle mindlessness in the countryside and they might as well be on their home peloton inside sweet mindlessness.
Well we must build the houses for us all and we must all get out there and enjoy the shrinking spaces between the houses - though I was glad that really if you're early then there is no one anywhere around. I later sat in Seashells in Hythe with a friend and she'd just been in the library where they give out free out-of-date food and she passed on some rolls and scones and a cake and I ate them on the ferry back to town. That counts as a good day.
The photo is yesterday, taken from the seat I sat on as I ate a kind of breakfast of runny running annoying cheese and tomatoes and figs and appletiser, totally alone, no one anywhere, if you choose the right places and the right times you can find the places where there is no one at all, no one to serve us, no one to make a good film - though the night before last I did see a good one at the cinema, the Eternal Daughter, it stars Tilda Swinton as both old mother and middle-aged daughter and I normally find Tilda quite annoying, but she was good enough in this fine quiet uneventful odd cheap little film directed by Joanna Hogg, one of those sorts of films, so much better than Napoleon with all the battles and men running around shouting.
I've never understood why they do it - why we men obediently run around battlefields killing each other - because we're told ? because we want to ? because we're more frightened of our bosses than we are of the enemy they have chosen for us ? But whatever it is, we do it, mustn't grumble. Another year almost over, another year when the young have yet again been treated like shit and taken it up the arse like good little citizens, but the person who kills Rishi Sunak wouldn't really change very much, what'd really kill him would be if we all stopped - I don't know quite what, but if we stopped as much as we could, all together, just stopped, then perhaps everything else would stop, and when it started up again it might start up differently, or perhaps we might start to enjoy things being stopped so much that we might not bother starting up again anyway, that's how I want it, just nothing, stopped, forever.
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recorded this evening, photo Ashlett Creek from a breakfast seat yesterday morning
she says this is the last album she'll make like this before she goes off and makes stuff with Lana Del Rey - so just for this moment we have Kathy to ourselves - (yes I love Lana's music too) Simon Aulman
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