The storm is gathering

I cycle home at dusk and watch the trace of a moon grow a little each day in the sky. I rummage in my backpack and pull out jumpers and scarves like intestines. I am feeling for an old camera, I found it buried  in a corner of our rickety house not long ago, halfway through a film. It's almost time to develop it.

I take a photo of the sky. Three more skies to go.

I found a couple of other cameras too, one belonging to someone lost. A treasure. I cross my fingers and hope for a photo of them on the film. I know there won't be any -no one else understood how to operate that clunky contraption so they were always the photographer, rarely the subject- but i'm excited. I'm impatient. I want to see the scenes that were snapped and forgotten -a glimpse of what their eyes saw and wanted to remember. But there is trepidation too. I put the camera aside, I don't want to rush it.

Adam Hurst - Unseen

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.

Flying in the train yard

Bikes and dereliction. Two of my favourite things.

I wish I could ride like this guy. 

We bombed it down the hills

Here are some misty views from my bike last week

Today sitting in the sun, I entered the world of Gormenghast. "This tower.. arose like a mutilated finger".  His sentences taste delicious so far.  I want to tear off the pages and pin them in my hair.

I also ate a duck egg.  I was apprehensive.  It was big.  I had to slam it hard to crack it open.  If you hold it up to the sunlight it becomes semi-transparent and etheral, like an opal.  And inside the yolk is a deep, dirty orange like 1970s wallpaper and those seat covers you get on the Bakerloo line. 

I'm beginning to like hills. Pedal pedal wheeze creak wheeze.

Then freewheeeeeeelin