Your name, lying just where you left it

A sky as white as clay stretches ahead for miles. The trees have been razored to the ground. A film of floodwater lies smooth and undisturbed, a sheet of mirror to the creeping, clay-white sky.

Pick up your name. Brush off the grime. Hold it in your fist and take great gliding strides. Make for the horizon.

 

Bersarin Quartett - Mehr Als Alles Andere

Dear wasp

It looks like we’re going to have to sleep in the same room tonight. Please don’t be too noisy. Tomorrow's a big day for me. And don’t do that thing where you sneak into my bed and I roll onto you and you sting me again. That wasn’t too nice. I’m still kinda upset about that. I don’t know if that was you, it might have been your cousin Jeffrey or whoever. It was dark, I never got a good look. I don’t wanna dig that whole deal up again, just don’t do it and we’ll be cool. Don’t crawl on my face either.

When the quiet deepens

Hold on.

 Javier Navarrete - Lullaby, from Pan's Labyrinth

This makes me smile

Space cartoons, handclaps and desperate lyrics.
Hailing from 1980, meet Italian duo La Bionda and cartoonist Guido Manuli.

Dirt Bike Kid

When your week takes a wobbly nosedive and you wake up feeling tender and more reclusive than usual, when you write off the day and shelve your plans, when you fill up a hot water bottle and an oversized mug of coffee and settle down to finish an escapist book, when you contemplate going out to choose another book but decide it looks chilly out and you'd have to make the effort of finding some less-hobo clothes and comb the tangles out of your hair, which you'd much rather not have to do.. not just yet.

When you want to hide in a cocoon just a little while longer.

If any of this applies, I recommend a dose of 1980s kid films. They cure many ills.

I love the dirt bike kid.  He is awesome. Truly.

Walk quietly by

Goodbye Bert Jansch, thank you for the music, it's wonderful.

"The birds fly out behind the sun
And with them I’ll be leaving"
  - Robin Williamson, October song, covered below by Bert.

 

 

I never can be sure

If we're as free as they say.

Sandy Denny - Fotheringay

Company for the insomniac

Worry needles into your sleep until you snap awake, restless.

You peep behind heavy, psychedelic curtains to guess at the time from the shade of the sky.  The air is a quiet, icy chill, tickled by the skitter of an eight-legged critter that skids across glass brushed with the dappled stain of past dirty rains.

A spindly silhouette.

It dances, it dances just for you.

Listen, listen,  from dream to daylight