half of me wishes this was much more extreme and half wishes it was almost nothing at all - because I naturally like music that stays in the same "zone" throughout its whole length it means I go without climaxes and lulls, which is fine if life feels like one big climax or one big lull and that's what you want, but today I wanted a bit of both and I'm not sure what I've ended up with. One thing is for sure - this is best treated as an attempt to be a climax and therefore is best played very loud - if you play it quietly and try to treat it like something delicate in the background it just goes very wan and very skinny and withers and dies - really this is one of those things I stupidly do from time to time to remind myself that things are better when you stop trying so hard.
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Yesterday a friend and I set off in her car with no idea where to go and we ended up on the south coast of Hayling Island - and I'm not that embarrassed to admit that I'd never been to H Island before. People like us - we don't go that way - east, it's just such an impossible direction - I've been to Portsmouth about eight times in my life, I've never even been to the eastern side of Southampton much, never driven across the Itchen Bridge, walked across it a few times, been to Woolston about 6 times, Weston Shore about 5 times.
But further away eastwards, yes I've been that way lots - I've probably been to Dungeness more times than I've been to Portsmouth, I know Petersfield/Chichester/Arundel/etc better than I know Bitterne or Bursledon, I've never been to Fareham (though have been thru it) blah blah blah.
We parked in a car park at the southern end of the "Billy Line" - a disused railway line. The car park was free. It already felt such a world away from Southampton. There were lots of people about and everyone was friendly for all of the 10km of walking up and down the line to the road bridge and back. So that was another way it felt so different from town. We had our own lunch, plus we bought another lunch at the burger van that you pass on the way up, and we had another lunch there too on the way back down.
The tide was out and it looked like you could walk across the mud all the way to Portsmouth. My friend is a birdwatcher/photographer but she knows that I am bored of being taught/told anything so I was spared any lectures about where things were flying and why they had stopped to stand on some mud by a burger van on Hayling Island and they're looking at me and now I've got a reason and they're staring all night and they're staring all day.
I think this is why I might be going through a bit of a tricky phase right now - my lack of interest in anything has served me well up till now, but now I've reached the age when if you're not interested in anything then there really isn't much else to do or think about - so I'm at a bit of a loose end. I'm not really interested in doing anything - it's not like I want to start going on cruises or anything - I've done a bit of sleeping-rough in a van and it was fine but it's now so middle-class and boring and I really don't want to go through that phase, I would love to go back to drinking heavily forevermore but I'm too old for the highs to be at all enjoyable, and the lows are awful now. I still can't bear TV. The books that grip me get rarer and rarer.
Music-making is a pot-shot in the dark - one day I'm lucky and I feel like a genius, the next day I'm unlucky and it's a weight off my mind to know that it makes no difference, the only thing I seem to enjoy doing is going through the 70000000000000000000000000000000000 things (music) I've downloaded over the past few years and instantly getting bored of them and deleting them, that feeling of getting less and less, it is what I live for - and walking - and yesterday we walked for about 3 hours, very slowly, ate too much, spoke to a thousand people, everyone friendly, yet again I can see why I and others just want nothing and to walk out unencumbered and meet the beautiful world head-on, because it was beautiful, a scruffy old mess that I love hitting-on at random.
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recorded this morning, photo looking at Portsmouth from Hayling Island yesterday
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
The new EP from Scottish songwriter Alec Bowman_Clarke goes deep, setting vulnerable lyrics to gentle melodies & stripped-back arrangements. Bandcamp New & Notable Oct 30, 2021
Soft and soothing acoustic compositions from this Italian guitarist with melodies that flutter like leaves on a breeze. Bandcamp New & Notable Mar 1, 2021
