WATERBOUND

The politician-show flickers unreal on the old yellow television set. We, qualified, educated and unemployed talk about the state of the nation. Why don’t we take to the road? Or escape to Asia like so many before us. It is tempting. But we are water bound on the island, and no flights or boats are leaving. They say the trains are no longer running. We at least have our bicycles.

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Disappearances




“…May your last recital / Embody this growing proximity to tomorrow / may you lose your voice in song at this darkening border.”
-          David Coates, House Sparrow


I’d taken the first opportunity to flee the city for a brief time. Enjoy some sunshine down on the coast, show my non-British friends something other than angry motorists, fried chicken boxes and Olympic diversions. I sit in my mother’s back garden, the heat pressing hard against my rapidly reddening skin, relishing the lack of engine growls and beeping horns. This isn’t nature, but there is a hell of a lot of life here. Something I’m trying to cultivate back in Hackney, little successes, here and there, but not like this.

Gulls, black headed and herring, wheel overhead, emitting piercing cries as they perch on chimneys and red tile. Buddleia shifts slightly in hot breeze, butterflies and bees crawling over the purple flowers, doing what they do, what they have always done.

A large flock of house sparrows ripples through the bushes, suddenly corkscrewing as one through the sunshine before alighting on the tasteful middle-class pine decking my mother had put down three years ago. Now, it shows signs of mildew. They’re going for the seed of course, the seed I put down a few minutes ago, nagged by my mother into doing so. The others are inside, showering, gulping down that last bit of coffee, brushing cigarette stained teeth, deodorising. I sit. I watch the sparrows.

You just don’t see them in the city, not in London, any more. Only last week I had been added to some round-robin email led by some woman from the RSPB, imploring residents of my postcode to note down any sightings of the bird. Why not, worth a shot.

As the years had trickled by I’d allowed the world to become ordinary and taken the sparrows for granted. A fixture in the anthropomorphised literature of my childhood, roosting in the lofts and attics of Redwall, was disappearing for reasons unclear and disconcerting. Maybe they had just lost interest.

‘Remember when you were young, the buddleia would be crawling with butterflies’ says my mother, stepping out into the garden, sipping milky tea. I do remember. Despite the abundance of wildflowers at the back of the garden, they too are diminished. We all know that if the bees and butterflies go, so do we. My answer is to make passing references, nod my head portentously, look at the problem out of the corner of my eye, do nothing but notice.

Out back, in the patch of overgrown foliage, a debatable wasteland, new houses are sprouting, apparently flaunting various pieces of planning restrictions. The development took out a nature corridor and now my mother no longer sees bats on summer evenings but people need a place to live, I suppose. My brother and I would play out in that useless bit of space before its potential was realised. 

I ask the question ‘Didn’t that used to be?….’ a lot these days.

My life is full of holes and naked disappearances. Events and experiences pass through me, water through a colander. My chest tightens as I put down feed for the sparrows in the shadow of these new buildings. Here, out of the city they are still in abundance, flitting from branch to branch, throwing up dirt into the air as they roll in dust-baths, picking furtively at the seed left for them.  I wonder what my friends who emigrated to Australia are doing, what birds they see in their gardens, in their parks and on their phone lines. In these pockets of sunlit non-reality, I can dream of getting away from all this and learn to disappear.

The other night, I idly flicked through absent friends’ photographs in the digital albums of the new world. They were sunny and far away. Clicking back through my own timeline, pixels of ex-girlfriends hugged tight, a mate’s boozy wedding, younger punk rockers with familiar faces in sweaty embraces, nights in that venue on the Holloway road that turned into a fucking Costa Coffee, pictures of times spent in building’s that didn’t just change but were demolished. The act of remembrance comes hard, a deep dredging, pulling teeth, exposing those dead white things to the harsh sunlight.

I try and join the dots and put together how I ended up here, on this day, watching the dying sparrows, sipping this awful tea, wishing I could disappear.

I sit in the hot summer sun, a blessed relief after weeks of torrential rain. With time to idle, I conduct internet research on how to encourage wild bird populations in my Hackney garden. I get the feeling any nature writer worth their salt would not admit to using the internet. They would not live in London.

I was not given the gift of inherited lands and friends who owned tracts of woodland. No one offers me a place to crash in their rural retreat, no coastal cottage nor sylvan shelter.
I am a squatter in a haunted ruin, taking temporary shelter in a world of disappearances. The sparrows, butterflies, friends, family, warped streets, the buildings that now only stand in memory. The past is neatly diced and packaged.

*

I walk up the shabby Deal pier, passing dangling fishing lines, trays of squid-bait, beer-bellied fishermen with accents more London than London. I arrive at a modern café, incongruous, a few diners and black coffee-drinkers who pay ludicrous prices considering the setting. Thin plastic Union Jack bunting flaps in salt breeze. Off in the distance, the White Cliffs are visible, the ferries crossing over to France. What became of the Cinque Ports?

*

On Margate sands I can connect everything with everything. Every grain of sand on the beach is an undiscovered world, a fantastic metropolis of fresh futures waiting their turn. I muse, like the rest, on who constructed the shell grotto as I lick emulsion white ice-cream with visiting companions, looking out at the sweep of the coastline, the shabby charm of the tidal pool (pictured in Whitstable galleries) ,the Turner Contemporary daubed with Olympiad-pink,  standing as a final full stop to our story.

A small hut crouches by the gallery. 

SIINEMA AMNESIA – THE WASTELAND

As squatters in Britain’s history, we make use of the things once forgotten, unloved and neglected. Told we’re not wanted, nuisances, a fly in the ointment of progress. Those who claim ownership to this history, those who hold the superior firepower in the memory war, they want their property back. 

The niches we found, breathing space and a place to simply be, uninterrupted, are being filled in and plastered over. 

*

The sparrows decline as I decline. I scatter seed into the flower beds and the birds come, along with collared doves, chaffinch and dunnock. It’s a form of regeneration.

*

The high street of Deal is an amnesiac’s wasteland. The story we look for is in the wood of the pier, below the shingle, in the sigh of the sea. Herring and black-headed gulls are in abundance here, feeding on greasy dropped chips and scraps of battered cod. They mill around beetroot-red families who rest on benches, mobiles clutched hard. Their child familiars lap at lollies. The sun shines, at times.

At a dappled church out near Hythe, rain-pitted carvings of the Green Man peer out of religious architecture. Strange, I think, for a pagan being of bud and briar to be carved in stone. John Barleycorn and I are becoming better and better friends.

*

The town of Sandwich is wealthy, an English idyll, forgetful of its days by the sea, all silted up and cut off now. A Cinque Port, landlocked, liberated from purpose. That’s how you become truly free.

‘Didn’t that used to be…?’

           




Life During Wartime





A pair of jays in the trees, seen through the dirty glass of a tube train delayed near Golders Green. Behind them, Hebrew signage.

Goldfinches flit on metal fencing that grows out of the rubble where Colindale Park meets the humming train line. A crushed Fanta can in the dirt. Commuters, harried looks, rushing by, ignorant of the incandescent avians.

Beery conversations, angry shouts over Holocaust memory, the gender of trees, men talking over women. The theoretical abyss of feminist males.

Anarchy daubed in white emulsion on old redbrick.

Discussions of American interpretations of street punk and Oi! An alternative anglophilia. I warm to them as people, Americans that are better than their country deserves. We laugh over Judge Judy played at half-speed, at how they can’t interpret a Yorkshire accent with any degree of accuracy.

A vegetarian BBQ within sight of Suicide Bridge, talking performance art, failed relationships, skinheads and drunk punks in Blackpool, literature and vegan sausages. Heavy dub on the stereo. 

I think the city and I are done, too many broken promises and disappointments on both sides, but then it pulls me back. I fall in love every day.

Traveller boys play football with the Muslim kids on Stoke Newington Common well into gloaming evenings. Hasid families look on from the playground. We smoke, drink and mutter about multi-cultural Britain. Plan what intoxicants we’ll be purchasing later.

Mixing with an older literati up in the leafy hill-burbs of Highgate. Trying to get a foot on a ladder. Perhaps a slight guilt building, but also a coalescing of what I want to do, want to be. What I am. 

Conversations with Yiddisher Hackney boys from the anarcho-punk days help solidify the ideas that I don’t have to play anyone else’s game. I won’t forget who my parents were. I do not want to be middle-class, though fear I may be. A time will come where a line may have to be drawn.

Standing in a field, deep in Flanders in a Belgium now ungoverned. Everything seems to be working fine. A festival of near exclusive US punk and hardcore. A glut of straightedgers, no drugs to be found. The queue for the half litre beers is tiny, only full of the English desperate to approximate a pint. The Europeans and Yanks are all happy with their little beers, and they queue for the privilege. In that moment, we feel uncomfortably bound to our country. I see a back-patched Leftover Crack fan sip from a plastic flute of cava. We witness genuine legends. 

I think punk rock and I are done, too many broken promises and disappointments on both sides, but then it pulls me back. I fall in love every day.

The background noise is this: anomalous monarchs celebrate their longevity, and idiots applaud, celebrating their own oppression. The mass media shows its true poisonous effect – all consuming coverage and yet…a million may cram the banks of the ancient river, yet they are the minority. We, the people, enjoy the time off, sleep off hangovers, do whatever it is that we want to do. We are the majority, the republican and the indifferent. Shame on the BBC. 

The Olympic flame, we discover, will head on down the road on which we live.
Hackney as filtered through Jay Z is on the telly. We sigh and shout at the box over our dinners. 

This is life during wartime. Slowly the network is expanding, though, a few people who think and feel the same coming together. Leafing through urban texts, post-psychogeographical tomes, in a derelict dentist’s on the Chatsworth Road. Friendships get formed or strengthened. We all know each other through someone else, the pool is small but it is growing. It gives hope during wartime. You reclaim a sense of self and realise you never wanted to be an individual, not really, but part of something. Something that you create in collaboration with others like you. You realise you can’t buy your way out of a problem. 

People, physical people in a digital world, may be the answer.

            I fall in love every day.


Blue Tits, Great Tits, Robins




Green status.

The storms of early summer were abating, slowly. The constant damp, endless days of moisture, punctuated regularly with bright bursts of hot sun. As a result, the garden of our ramshackle house had burst into life. We’d decided to allow the bluebells that had bloomed. Uninvited but welcome guests.

            Dodging the rains when I could, I’d been out in garden, digging, fighting my doomed fight against the weeds. I found it hard to muster up venom toward them, they were survivors, like the foxes and squirrels that would visit us. Their flowers helped the insect life, and I couldn’t hate them, these outlaw plants.

Using a fork bent out of shape last summer, a new trowel bought (I was ashamed to admit) from Homebase, I cut into the earth, disturbing centipedes, woodlice, ubiquitous worms that were duly thrown into the compost bin to help with the mulching. A pair of robins had watched me silently. I dug out pits to fill with rich compost, bought from a local garden centre and dragged like a dead body home. For reasons we never understood, the landlord had left a near endless supply of red brick lying uselessly round the garden. These formed the raised barricades separating the bedding grounds from the inert sea of earth that was failing to grow what we wanted. What we needed.

            My desk was awash with nature writing, Richard Mabey’s Nature Cure, Richard Adams’ novels The Plague Dogs and Watership Down, Kathleen Jamie’s wonderfully acute essays in Findings and Sightlines, a collection of poetry celebrating British birdlife fittingly entitled Birdbook. Our beautiful set of the Readers Digest Nature Lovers Library, rescued in pristine condition from a second-hand for the price of a few beers. The possible idea was growing, suggested to me by George McKay’s Radical Gardening, that we could reclaim this piece of land out back. Grow our own veg, but do it the way we wanted, DIY, autonomous. Encourage the wildlife. Do whatever we wanted, get muddy.

            I wanted the birds back. I knew that London supported more birdlife than most people realised. I had seen green woodpeckers, tufted ducks and sparrowhawks in Clissold Park. Buntings by the Lea. 

            Once, returning home through Millfields Park, close to the noisy lea Bridge Road, I had heard the machine gun fire of a great spotted woodpecker, looked up amazed to see it in full view, here in Hackney. I stood there, watching the black, white and red bird (surely an anarchist), for a few minutes, before three young men on bikes rode past me, one of them shouting:

            ‘Oi, mate, it’s a tree!’.

            They had laughed. I was tempted to shout back ‘I was looking at a woodpecker’, but wisely decided against it.

            Grey herons, Canada geese and cormorants were plentiful down on the Lea Navigation, and I had been informed that, somewhere, bittern were to be found.

            London could, in its margins and forgotten space, harbour life. We were now attempting a tiny act of reclamation in our back garden in Stoke Newington. 

            There was space. Space, in the carnivorous city, was at a premium. We had a chance to get mud on our knees, an opportunity for nettles to sting our bare arms, sore shoulders, cat shit stuck in the grooves of our boots. Suddenly this seemed revolutionary, an undeserved gift, the chance to use green space when only those who could afford to get on the property ladder were worthy of such privileges. What about allotments? my partner had suggested. I liked the idea, but you’d sit on a waiting list for years. The Olympics had destroyed many of the local ones anyway. 

            I would finger the green man pendant, bought off Scandinavians at the Viking Festival in York, and flick through a book on organic gardening bought in a remaindered bookstore near my mother’s home in Whitstable, and learn about composting, worm tea, threats from aphids and whitefly, the tyranny of chemical pesticides. I would listen to certain songs as I did this, ‘Free the Land’ by Inner Terrestrials, ‘Foundations’ by Autonomads, ‘Terra-ist’ by Oi Polloi. I was beginning to write fiction based around the environmental road protests of the nineties, when I was turning from child into teenager, Twyford Down and Solsbury Hill. 

            We bought a compost bin. Next time, I thought, I’ll make one. 

            I dug the beds, far more soil and earth than I expected shifted and redistributed across the garden. In the turmoil, an exposed earthworm was plucked, wriggling, by a darting robin. 

            The robin is, according to the RSPB, Britain’s favourite bird.

            The beds were dug, filled with compost, every spare pot also filled, and we started seeding, purple broccoli, potatoes, baby carrots, cherry tomatoes, lettuce, beetroot, courgettes. Pots of mint, sage, coriander, parsley, like balustrades to keep us safe from the mundane world’s predations.

            My mother, in an act of helpful eccentricity, had donated twenty fatballs, a greasy compound of suet, fat and seed designed to attract birds and give them an energy boost in the colder months.

            These went out along with the peanut-stuffed bird feeder, metal now, the previous one having been destroyed by a seemingly vindictive grey squirrel.

            In the early mornings, my housemates asleep or already departed for work, I sit on the step overlooking the back garden, and I watch the birds that I’ve attracted, with my fatballs and peanuts. Handsome blue tits, the aggressive great tits, the pair of robins. I try and chase away the squirrels when I see them, though they pay me little heed. Bastards.

            I drink coffee and I watch these birds feeding, such a common sight still across England, yet endlessly new. My flesh feels more solid, my presence more certifiably real when I am in the presence of these tiny avians, no other humans around to disrupt the peace.
*
            Today, the beetroot sprouted. I’m running low on birdfood. The robins come every day, as do the blue and great tits. Today I saw the first swifts and house martins of the year, back from Africa. It was good to see them.