time – BLANK CANVAS

Travelling

Time disappears as you move around, nothing really going on except for the exercise of travelling. Sat on a train that traverses the country, from bottom to top and back again. You aren’t really doing anything except for being stationary whilst an element of transport moves you around. It can be possible to read or catch up on work. Stare out of the window marvelling at the grey skies shrouding any kind of view, which veers from countryside to outskirts of towns, ugly regions designed cheaply and ineffectively. Blue covered seats, thick and padded, still retaining the stench of fag smoke, from a previous era. Compartments where you peered in, slid back the door and met you new companions. Time to watch the world streak by. To watch and engage with people too. On the train you get occasional moments of excitement as you pull into cities you have never visited, places resonating with history and stature. Glimpses caught of dramatic buildings, bridges over rivers, people waiting on the platform, eager to find a forward-facing seat, building up adrenalin as they prepare for the scramble onboard. Sometimes you might be keen to talk, a new neighbour arriving with their own history to tell. Other times the needs of work or your own for solitude mean that you will other passengers to take alternative seats, squashing together like equally smelly sardines in a tin. Driving takes your mind into an alternative state. One of concentration but extreme familiarity, manoeuvring a vehicle through windy roads and wide-open motorways. Talking to your partner, listening to the latest news, sport or music, whiling away the hours as you move from one place to another. Time lost. Although it is an opportunity for Zen like behaviour, turn everything off and let the mind wander and focus. Ideas or concepts floating around and seeping into the brain. A time to think, connect the rushing lines, plan the future whilst remembering the past. You should be able to reclaim those hours spent travelling. Static but in motion. Complete a claim form to send off to the ministry. I would love to be cycling rather than driving, being active, fit, healthy and alive. Still able to pontificate but out on the path, moving from city centre, urban sprawl, the sound of the suburbs, the air gradually lightening and freshening. You can breathe more deeply now. In through the nose, out of the mouth. Travelling with a purpose rather than just existing to get somewhere else. It does get you to where you need to be, meeting with family and friends, attending a conference, going on holiday. So much time spent travelling whilst on holiday. Moving from place to place. Just stay still and enjoy the moments. Have days where you exist in your locale. The covid pandemic provided this life, a time where you weren’t allowed to travel. You had to exist in your own space, which would be a nightmare except for the privileged who had the room to feel comfortable. Finishing a journey after driving for hours can feel mesmeric, as though time didn’t move. Time apparently lost but possibly invaluable. Exhaustion gradually taking over. Arriving home but without true knowledge of the journey that got you there. I should stop flying. The planet really needs us all to do this if we are serious about attempting to reverse climate change. But we aren’t. Not until it is slap bang in front of our face, peeling away, melting, burning, flooding, collapsing. Driving an electric car whilst it would be better just to stay in your own locale. A boring world where we don’t move around but the world survives, cools down, quietens itself and lets nature come back to life. Back to reality.

Bristol to Bath cycle track

Weekends

I always get excited from a Thursday late afternoon onwards. The rhythm of the week drawing towards the excitement of the weekend. The end of the week. The finale. Why are we so drawn towards endings, not present in the moment but reaching out for the future. I am like that through the seasons. Desperately holding on through the everlasting dark of winter, looking for the first signs of spring, a new beginning, waiting for the end and a new start. Fridays are exciting, because it is soon going to be time for leisure. To relax. Unwind. But are weekends in reality like that? When you have children this is the time to fight your way to clubs, watch boring cartoons, worry about how to keep them occupied, stop them being bored. As an ageing adult I still love the approach of the weekend, but maybe it is this moment which is the most exciting part. The anticipation rather than the reality. We are constantly waiting. For that lottery win. For one of my tracks to be played on the radio. For that perfect job to arrive. For the post. For an email. For guests. For partners. For your football team to win. If they lose then this can ruin some weekends. How crazy is that. You wait in excitement and then are just bitterly disappointed yet again. Today, though, it is 6.30am on a beautiful late April Saturday morning in Devon. The golden sun is rising, starting to spread through our bungalow, glowing, rich, golden. All is quiet except for the occasional sound of rising birds. The beautiful dawn chorus interrupted by horrific seagull squalls. Two beautiful days spread out in front of us. The chance to chill. Mm possibly. Well actually my mother is arriving in a couple of hours and this place is a bit of a mess, so cleaning, scrubbing, tidying, shopping, cooking needs to happen. Daily chores that wait until the weekend. Surely the week is better then, when all you have to worry about is the day job. And that’s quite fun. Meeting friends, hanging out at the beach, sharing dinner, walking along the coastal path, swimming, exercising, browsing shops. All this is good. Saturday is activity day. Get all those chores and things out the way. Sunday. The only day of the week where I allow myself a lie in. Papers, books, articles, music. Through the week I mainly listen to talking on the radio but Sunday changes things. Sunday is music day. Exit from the real world and dream. Read articles on holidays. Plan your life. Allow a hangover to gently flow through your body, taking away an over active mind so that you exist in a semi dream state. Awake but chilled. Sundays can allow you to go with the natural flow, let the weather take you. Drift around. A holiday. A chance to potter in the garden. Hang out with friends. Take them back to the station after Sunday lunch. That great ritual. Lamb, chicken, pork, nut roast, gravy, too many potatoes. Sticky toffee pudding. Custard. Local beers. Snooze. Walk it off. Snack. Spend ages trying to find a film that might be good on the overly numerous streaming channels. One that you will both like. Possibly. The film comes to an unsatisfactory conclusion leading some debate on its merits. Then it is time. Time to think of the week ahead. At this moment the weekend ends. Abruptly. Getting ready for the week ahead. Meetings, emails to send, places to be, projects to rescue, people to support, money to be made. The dynamism of the week ahead racing through your mind, looking ahead to the next weekend.

Too Long

There seems to be a common trend at the moment of art works spreading out before you like the great expanse of the Gobi Desert, blowing around aimlessly, waiting to get to the point. Sometimes it is necessary to sit in and feel the energy, get sucked into lifestyles, atmospheres, take time to tell the story. Jeez though, some recent films and books have meandered their way. Booker Prize or Oscar nominees. Have the editors been cut from their jobs? Jettisoned like unwanted plankton into the seas of journalistic oblivion. There was I thinking we live in the tick tock world.

The Bee Sting – Irish family troubles taken to the nth degree of narrative, personalities you understand within a few paragraphs drawn out for huge swaths, 100s of pages.

Oppenheimer– the human big bang, lots of men talking, shouting, laughing, plotting, bombing.

Dragons Den – in the end it just repeats its formula infinitum until we throw down the remote control in disgust and go for a walk. Or pick up the latest recommended novel.

The Love Songs of WEB du Bois by Honorée Fannone needed it’s length, the opportunity to exist in current and historical black American worlds. The Bee Sting groaned from under the weight of over bearing descriptions and recap, reinforcing messages which were understood early on. A great 250 page novel turned into War and Peace, love and cars. Likewise, David Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, where the interesting storylines are battered into submission by over explanation. Leave the reader or viewer with some element of involvement. Like a classic French film, leave open endings. Stop halfway through. John Cage’s 4’33” of background noise or random performance, nothingness expanding a short space of time. Minimalism. Less is more. There is no need for yet another series of Schitts Creek, the humour, the stories have all been told. Fawlty Towers for all its racist, homophobic, hegemonic rantings knew when to stop, 12 episodes. Maybe Friends could justify its expanse. The double album never really worked, except for maybe The Clash London Calling or Sandinista. Daydream Nation, Selected Ambient Works. The White Album, taking minimalist Yoko Ono inspired Richard Hamilton artwork and introducing a range of styles that flowed over the whole. Country star Beyonce is yet another to cover Blackbird in the dead of night. New Order’s Blue Monday, only ever available at 12” length is a perfectly formed record. An example of using the medium in a perfect way. Maybe that is the problem with books? There is no limit. A press can just add more parchment. The same with Spotify. Your playlist can expand to ever reaching worlds, keep evolving, never having an end point. Music, music, music. Artists, musicians, producers saturating an already overburdened market with a slew of mid quality flotsam which floats around, no-one really streaming, no impact, just a space where artists can present their work. I mean that is probably a good thing, but the gatekeepers have vanished. The only people saying no are those working for major labels who just churn out material from their top selling artists. Fleetwood Mac, Elton John, Abba, Bob Marley, Taylor Swift x 10, the Beatles of course. Even Billy Joel hasn’t yet moved out. What hope do new artists have to puncture this dichotomy of a world. It’s never been so easy to release music, it’s never been so difficult to get heard. What new music makers should concentrate on is creating the perfect song. Don’t worry about a whole load of material, just write one amazing piece of music and then somehow get this to the ears of radio and record companies. Or create lots of tracks, form a band and get out there on the road battling through Brexit paperwork, sleeping six up in a dodgy freezing old transit van, making enough money for food and a drink the next day. Rock ’n’ Roll. Actually just make a song that is 1’30”. Short, sweet, to the point and doesn’t take up much of anyone’s valuable time. Now where’s that Tolstoy..