Symbolic Forest

Following Monday’s post about a burst water main: I should probably point out that someone did turn up, the following day. A whole team of contractors turned up, and dug a rather large, and deep, hole across the road. They pumped out gallons and gallons of dirty water, filled the gutters with silt, and then the water stopped flowing. Presumably, they fixed it.

What they didn’t do was: fill the hole in again. So now, outside the house, there’s a big spoil heap and a rather deep hole. Dark red sand overlying browner silts, with plenty of non-imbricated gravel in it, based on the quick glance I took down the hole this morning. Fortunately, not so close to the house or the front door that we risk teetering on the brink of the abyss every time we step outside, but close enough. Presumably they’re waiting to borrow a road-roller, or something along those lines, before they can try filling it back up again.

Keyword noise: Bristol, hole, leaking, roadworks, strata, water.

The weather has turned warmer, but it hasn’t done the water pipes any good.

The roads round here are mostly tarmac, but tarmac on top of cobbles. The tar doesn’t extend right to the edge of the road – the gutters are still cobbled. It’s a common arrangement around here, but I’ve never seen it anywhere else.

Anyway, we got up yesterday and went out of the house, only to notice the gutter full of water. Walking uphill a little, we found that it was pouring into the gutter rapidly – from underneath the tarmac road surface. At the edge of the gutter, a stream was gushing out from a small crack between the tarmac and the cobbles underneath.

I’ve reported it to the water board. A chap drove up a few hours later, and painted a big blue arrow on the road, pointing at it. Hopefully, it will get fixed, before our foundations start to get washed away.

Keyword noise: Bristol, leaking, roads, water, weather.

Sickness is a strange thing. So psychological, that you can almost think yourself sick. I’m wondering if it’s going to happen to me – and, of course, wondering about it makes it more and more likely.

Everyone we know, pretty much, has been horribly ill over the past month or two, in bed for a few days, aching, throwing up, incapacitated. I can’t think of a single person, in fact, who says they haven’t had it.

Except, that is, us. We’ve both felt awful, we’ve both been tired and aching, too exhausted to do very much, but we’ve both stayed out of bed. Neither of us has given up and retired to bed for a few days waiting for it to blow over. But the exhaustion and the achiness has gone on for much longer, longer than it would have if we’d actually been ill in the first place.

Now, thinking about it, I keep wondering why we’ve managed to not get too sick when everyone else we know says it’s sent them to bed at some point. Which in turn means: is it our turn? Is it going to come around.

In the real world, I really don’t think epidemiology works that way; but I don’t know about my head. So this morning when I had a sudden attack of dizziness, I felt: is this the winter flu? Is that what’s coming on? The way things are going, I’ll convince myself to fall ill, and fall ill, when otherwise I’d stay fine and healthy.

Keyword noise: flu, psychological, psychosomatic, sickness.

Wednesday night was New Year’s Eve; and, for once, we went out. Counting on my fingers, I worked out, it must be about seven or eight years since I last went out to an event on New Year’s Eve, rather than just pop round to a graveyard or a friend’s house. Last year, I remember very clearly where I was at midnight: in bed, ill, groaning and wishing the bloody fireworks and cheering would shut up.

This year, though, as I said, we decided we’d go out. Find somewhere which sounded like Our Sort Of Thing, something new to try, and enjoy ourselves. And, indeed we did.

We ended up at the Cube Microplex, the independent cinema off Stokes Croft, for a night called Fascinating Virtue; and fascinating it was, with a stream of small folk-ish, indie-ish bands taking to the stage. One performer, Rachael Dadd,^* had flown in from Japan that day, and flung a boxful of Japanese confectionary into the audience for us all to try. One landed right in my lap. We kept the wrapper:

Other performers included alt-folk storyteller Jetfly, quiet harmonium-equipped duo love.stop.repeat, storyteller Hannah Godfrey telling a tall and beautiful tale in-between, and complex local five-piece Boxcar Aldous Huxley. The latter sounded like a cross between the Everything Is Illuminated soundtrack and the Decemberists,^** had not only a harmonium but also a saw, clarinet^*** and euphonium, and sang lively songs about such things as the Hellfire Club and how debauchery isn’t as good as you might hope; or the difficulties of being an astronaut in the 19th century. The stage acts finished with Men Diamler, self-proclaimed drunkest act of the evening, who went on to DJ by the bar for a couple more hours. We danced, energetically; skilfully in K’s case, not so much in mine.

K pointed out that often, when you go out on New Year’s Eve, it can be a bit of a compromise: you go out to something that you wouldn’t normally go to, just because you feel you should be going out somewhere. Fascinating Virtue was an event we’d be excited to go to any day of the year.

* I was tempted to ask her if she was related to the famous mentally-ill Victorian artist Richard Dadd, but I didn’t get chance. Which is probably a good thing, because I’d forgotten his first name.

** It was me who thought they sounded like the Decemberists, and K who thought they sounded like the soundtrack. K rather likes klezmer.

*** Any band with a clarinet in has to be a good thing. Except possibly for Supertramp.

Keyword noise: Boxcar Aldous Huxley, Bristol, The Cube, dancing, Fascinating Virtue, folk, Hannah Godfrey, indie, japanese, Jetfly, Kingsdown, love.stop.repeat, Men Diamler, music, New Years Eve, Hogmanay, Rachael Dadd, Stokes Croft, storytelling.

Overheard in a group of smokers outside a pub, as we entered it:

Woman: … I was shagging my dad’s best mate …

Keyword noise: overheard.

So, what are my resolutions for this year?

Well, really, they’re all project-based. This is going to be the year of getting things done – not Getting Things Done^TM, but the general, non-trademarked sort of getting things done.

This year, I will: for a start, redesign this website. It’s not been changed since it was first written, and it could do with being freshened up a little. Then there’s the other website project that K and I have been working on, that’s almost ready to go live, but not quite just yet – that one needs finishing off. And then, there’s everything else we’ve got planned. Everything else that we’ve thought about doing, and said: we really should do that one day. We really should do that. Everything from publishing our own zine, to getting some photos saleable, to writing a movie and a novel, to cataloguing all our CDs and DVDs. I’m going to have a stab at all of them.

Keyword noise: completion, new year, optimism, plans, resolutions.

My second memory of the year is the more important. It’s not so much a memory of a specific event, as of a feeling. The feeling I had when we had moved in to our new flat together, the friend who had helped us move had left, and we were alone in our own place for the first time. A feeling of immense love and unbounded opportunity.

Keyword noise: happiness, memories, moving house.

In past years, I’ve usually posted my stand-out memories of the year so far, around this time. Last year there were four; the year before five.

There aren’t so many big, stand-out memories on my mind this year. That’s not because the year’s been dull or empty. Rather, the opposite: there have been so many happy memories that I can’t single many out from the crowd.

This one, though, is from my birthday. It’s getting dark, and I’m looking out of a plane window, at lamplit streets and tower blocks, watching the ground get closer and closer and trying to make out landmarks I recognise from the map. If you know me, you’ll know I don’t fly very often; in fact, at this point, I’ve been up since about 4am, I’m on the second plane ride of my birthday, and also the fourth of my life. I’m scared, not because of the flight or the impending landing, but because I’ve never been to a foreign country quite so foreign before, but I’m also rather excited. We might still be in the EU, but this is definitely more exotic than France or Germany. Latvia at night, as I turn 30.

Keyword noise: birthday, flying, Latvia, memories, Riga, travel.