Patrician Families

Watching breasts.
Spent all of 2003 watching breasts new breasts firm breasts slack breasts non-existent breasts. I formed bodies from breast components, they were my Archimedean solids, one for the shoulder, elbow, ear-lobe, cheek, nostril and ball of foot. They became breasts and breasts became them. I was an architect, in best modern taste, obsessed with curves. Each container I wished to smooth of burrs and round, mould and encompass in human constant y=sinxes.
The ratio of a river’s length to it’s distance straight (as the crow flies) from source to mouth is defined by π, with modifications based on the hardness of the environment through which it runs. From mouth to vagina via the skin is surely ruled by the same calculations. If you could take a route straight down the esophagus, with a cutting through the gut – no detours, no taking a racing line down the small and large intestines but burning straight through with some burning beak - it would be much quicker.
Π and Sine is what I was after all along. I thought it was the roundness I was looking for, a depression, a dimple a press on skin relates to the amount of vitamin C you have been taking in recently? When, as a smoker, you go to the dentist, hey find it difficult to make you gums bleed - they have to push and scrape the probes vigorously to confirm that you are starving your mouth of oxygen. But it was the intrinsic inhumanness of curves.
Sitting in the conservatory of a pleasant villa in northern Italy - LIE, seaside cottage while the wind howled - LIE, the wind was audible periodically and he was in a suburb of a large post-industrial conurbation - BETTER.

'Neath the Sands of Druridge Bay

Here's a traditional Northumbrian folk song to wish farewell to the November.

I buried my troubles
‘neath the sands of Druridge bay;
Many a Lover has been forgot
‘neath the sands of Druridge bay.

I sunk my tears
To the bottom of Leazes Lake;
There’s many a Love that has been sunk
To the bottom of Leazes Lake.

I forgot what ails ‘z
As I walked down old Kells Lane;
Many a lost soul’s telt the tale
From the top of old Kells Lane.

I drowned my sorrows
Down in Bar 36;
Many a poor man had been drowned
Down in Bar 36.

I’m gonna hide my face
Underneath the Elvet Bridge
Plenty of shame’s been stowed away
Underneath that Elvet Bridge.

As The Moon Glimmered over Worswick - a fragment from the short story: 'Worswick St. #1'

“Undefined Undefined Undefined Underfined.”

Undefined never liked them anyway. She stubbed out her unlit cigarette- she across the way like an epileptic fit. The near-by Punjabi illuminated sporadically the redbrick Street and the flickering window display of ‘As the moon glimmered over Worsick’. She had etc. as it traipsed off into faint traces. Her countenance had suddenly shifted, till She strolled passed the flickering Take-away, smiling at the cocktail of cumin.
The indigestion was gone and she made a beeline for the Bridge. She had already picked out one of the pale white Lampposts to stand under and not smoke another cigarette.

Only Fifty minutes ago she had stared (That Guinea at the Bissau jazz &) at the man she loved in the disused Worsick St. Bus Station, not even an hour ago. He told her he didn't love her anymore but maintained the eyes of a saint.
She was a little proud that she didn’t cry.

I Never Knew the Village Green: A Brief Ramble

I’m not a patriot. England’s the back of some Constable forgery in the bottom right-hand corner as you look at it of a drawer of odds and ends as far as I’m concerned. Any connection I feel is to the land, that’s my land, Northumbria we’ll call it, moors and the sea, and to the better part of humanity, special emphasis on the people I know, short a’s by and large. English is a language, and a fine one at that. People are excellent when they’re excellent, and it’s a global thing, it’s a feel, and I’ve noticed plenty of it up here. Internationalism’s my bag, and I want to fill it with the soul that made Gazza cry and the righteous passion that drove Mosley and his fascists into the Tyne, pissing their bitter little selves. I digress. England’s not a concept (if it’s that) that I can really relate to, frankly. But cricket’s what I really want to talk about.

Why is it I want to see England and Wales’s cricket team perform well while I find a certain bent appeal in seeing England’s football team stutter their way through the upper echelons of mediocrity? It’s not like I take great exception to the personnel involved, with the possible exception of Frank Lampard, whose face I can’t abide. Again, it comes down to feel. It’s the ugliness. I felt very unpleasant scratchings at my synapses having to witness the opportunistic patriotic fervour following the 2005 Ashes win. But that isn’t par for the course, as it were, in the cricketing world. It felt to me like a spillage from the headless-hen bowel of the scattershot, desperate, misplaced and distasteful nationalism that so often accompanies football, into the bloodstream of what the collective consciousness could be if we could get over knee-jerk tribalism. It simply wasn’t cricket. Cricket for me is always about the game itself, and although allegiance is not such an unconscionable thing in itself, if it were blind I would never have seen the look on Kevin Pietersen’s face when England lost to Sri Lanka by two runs. That’s the thing. They’re all top blokes – Freddie, Monty, Paul Nixon, our very own Paul Collingwood – and ultimately, now and when I’m sober, it’s all about people and not three amorphous lions and a crown (don’t get me started on the crown). Lasith Malinga is king of my heart. But Iran's what I really meant to talk about.