if only everything was the cinema

Othello at the Buryat-
-Mongolian Театра,
Ulan Ude. Gambo
Tsidenjapov as Othello,
Maria Stepanova as Desdemona.
Nine-
-teen Thirty-Eight.

Smoked Fish

So there I was, surrounded by stiff tissues and trying to get to grips with the similarities between 'Scarborough Fair' and 'Girl From the North Country' when my head was flung around by the sound of a long reverberating squeak at the window. Dressed in only a white towel at the waist I gripped it tighter and faced the window cleaner who was 3/4 profiling his face and now focusing on only the dirty pane his length of rubber was strigiling. Had he turned as I did? Which of the two lyrics below is the most pleasing? I decided to leave the room for a glass of orange from concentrate and smoked mackerel, perhaps with some of the fruit loaf I knew I had left. I closed the window on the west-facing wall to help the cleaner, to give him a bit of resistance, and to hide from his ears the lines:

Remember me to one who lives there.
She once was a true love of mine.

Remember me from one who lives there,
For she/he once was a true love of mine.

A'wonder how many stories window cleaners; and gas men, telephone-line installationists, paper-boys, septic tank-diviners - what sort of stories they tell each other. A'wonder how many variations on the teenager wanking, the au-pair fucking, the cleaner sucking, the dog shitting, the husband throttling they come across and tell their friends in the work. A'wonder if they decide that the stories are boring and start to discuss the changing tastes in wallpaper and dado rails. A'wonder if they have physician-style tradesmen's oathes, or a butler's discretion, never to see and certainly never to tell of.

I'd finished the mackerel and washed down the oil with orange juice when the window cleaners knocked, they wanted paying. What I really needed was an audio recording of 'Scarborough Fair' and 'Girl From the North Country' and a working-class upbringing.

Your Electric Light

When we need it, your electric light is there to find feet in the tangled night-time woods, traipsed recklessly. Whisky vision is good enough to reason with a small cliff-face, to spot a foothold, best yet to be delighted by it. The woods feel wilder than the ones I grew up with, and there’s no doubting I know them not a bit. Whisky only makes the heart grow unremittant, more fevered, lots of other things, more forgetful without losing reaction to it all. I forgot to navigate. A trickled stream makes itself known visually, almost catches your ankle, and a vague notion is swigged by my far too wandering mind delightful; streams run down, to the river, to the path, but we smiled relentless away from it, losing little. It feels like what it looks like, any time, from setting out to long before the dawn and there is no timepiece comes to eye, and it pleases me. I could die out here; I could live out here; brambles tear at legs and you, like me, keep walking. It is a universal truth, particularly applicable in the midst of flowing whisky, that there are no wrong turns when travelling blind. Very easy, and surprising to tree-trained eyes, a clearing strolls for seven yards ahead and the moon is visible only just. We sit or collapse, though not exhausted, and the still-flowered very early autumn stretch of woodland grass is not big enough to be a destination. We decide anyway, with almost nominal scepticism from some quarters, that the next leg of the journey is return. And that’s much quicker.

Your electric light proved as useful on the way back as it did on the outward clamber, maybe more so. We made it, as you know, to the safety of our harbour. The night’s sleep, though grizzled by whisky, was restful from adventure; morning, just lately, feels longer ago.

Next time, or the same time because the past has not kept grip sufficient, if I have my way, there will be no return journey, no thought of batteries. Your electric light will come from eyes and, converging with my eyes, and her eyes, and his eyes, will be light enough to grow the universe, make a clearing home; the roof dangling from clouds, the trees already walls, the sea nearer this time, and that patch in sunlight there looks to be a field of corn to me. Guitar alright with the smoke from fire come night-time, significant soon to birds, there is moonshine aplenty, but really we’re drunk from that and from actual shining of the moon, from crispest air, from your electric light, but mostly we’re drunk from that moonshine whisky and it tastes so very good.

Allium cepa

It can be assumed safely that the onion has contributed greatly to human diets for many a long year; indeed, there is strong evidence that, in the Egypt of antiquity, it was a sacred root, on a par with cats in religious significance. Unlike the cat, however, it was probably eaten. It wasn’t until 1493, though, that the great Christopher Columbus introduced Allium cepa to the Americas, specifically Haiti. Since then, the onion has grown to be one of the continent’s more widely used vegetables. Although onion syrup is undoubtedly a useful remedy for coughs and colds, and reduces the risk of contracting various cancers, it is doubtful that Pig Gantry had this in mind when he decided on the course of action upon which he decided, that of bringing eighty sacks if there’s any of onions aboard this three-masted schooner, a sensitive and above all fragile lady of an ocean going vessel.

Playing With Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs were never a great passion of mine; I never quite fit that archetype. I didn’t, don’t and never will dislike them by any means, far from it, I’ve always had a real fondness for the things. There was the red tyrannosaurus rex that wouldn’t fill with water because his throat was sealed. The dinosaurs at the museum were skeletons, which was great. The tyrannosaurus made for an imposing figure, all teeth and tail and what have you; you had to respect the tyrannosaurus, you’d be a fool not to. This was before I knew he was a scavenger; I can empathise far more readily now. He was never my favourite, though. The stegosaurus is to this day a role-model of sorts, and the pterodactyl is a far out lizard-bird. Excellent skeletons too; the pterodactyl was suspended from the ceiling. I’ll always love skeletons. I liked the diplodocus’s neck, still do sometimes, but dinosaurs were never a great passion of mine. I always preferred to play in the woods. They were much bigger in those days, and darker.

Of course, it wasn’t playing; it was, dare I say it, adventure. Disbelief wasn’t a concept I was familiar with, and I’m not a great fan of it now. There was never much doubt that we’d find gold eventually, or the ghost train in the old abandoned tunnel. Our camps were bona fide settlements; there was some serious improvised engineering a little later on, and I’d be proud of it now. Prouder, maybe, and less capable. I was secretly rather excited at the thought of the gypsy girl who lured little boys off to an unspecified fate out there in the woods. Never did encounter her, though, more’s the pity.

Is it true that all such things, the dinosaurs, the woods, are part of what makes an adult, that’s to say, a fully grown human, to whatever degree of development, and that that’s their principal purpose? That the inquisitiveness, the naked wonder and the joy of children are functions of the formative years? I think someone told me something like that somewhere, sometime. I’m thinking about that red tyrannosaurus now (I called him The Tyrannosaurus). I don’t want my throat to be sealed.