Symbolic Forest

Keyword noise: July 7th.

Two random people on the tube, a boy and a girl.

She is tickling him fiercely, and enjoying it. He is curled up, unable to move, shrieking and giggling loudly. The other passengers are moving away slightly.

“You scream like a GIRL!” she says, as he gets back upright.

“Bitch!” he says, affectionately, looking in her eyes.

“Tosser.” And they kiss, gently, on the lips.

I can’t tell how long they’re going to be together. A day? A week? Who knows? They certainly don’t know themselves. But I hope they stay friends afterwards, because there’s definitely a spark between them. Sometimes all you can do is enjoy the moment while it lasts.

* This was written whilst I was still in London, and was always going to be the final post in this block. There are still lots of photos I haven’t shown you, and lots I haven’t written about – the band Montoya, for one thing, or the Kandinsky exhibition, or some excellent cups of coffee. I wanted to be able to get on to other things, though, so this is being posted now, and tomorrow we’ll return to the normal non-specific rambling.

Keyword noise: holiday, holiday romance, London.

I walked around London a lot last week. Wednesday, for example.

I started in Islington, along the canal, and wandered downwards. Past the remains of City Road underground station, through Clerkenwell and Farringdon to Smithfield, along Charterhouse Street and Grand Avenue. I walked under the restored Temple Bar to St Pauls. Then across the Millennium Bridge.

Some sort of film shoot was going on on the Millennium Bridge. A Bollywood movie, maybe, or a dance video. I lurked about with my camera, trying to work out what was going on.

Keyword noise: canal, cathedral, City Road, disused, Grand Avenue, Islington, London, London Underground, Northern Line, Millennium Bridge, Regent's Canal, Smithfield, St Pauls, St Pauls Cathedral, station, Tate Modern, Temple Bar, underground.

More photos from last week, because I’m too lazy to write something. Hope none of the people in them mind.

Keyword noise: holiday, London, photography, beer garden.

Number two argument why I need to buy a digital camera: scanning photos really is the most boring job in the world.

I intended to post sooner about last Sunday’s Shimura Curves gig, but ended up writing all sorts of random nonsense which has since been deleted instead. I should really have written about the band too, because they really were rather good. They’re rather hard to categorise, though: laptop electronica, dronerock guitar, but above it all some lovely polished girl-group harmonies. The chap who came on before them, singing along to the best 1980s Casio rhythms, wasn’t so great,^* but we found ways to amuse ourselves during his set by standing in front of the ventilation fans and pretending we were on the Baywatch credits instead.

I tried to take photos of the band, but the lighting was truly awful. A complex mauve backdrop was projected over the whole stage and the band with it, turning natural-light photos into an abstract mass of blurred shapes. Still, here are the best I came out with. The order of the band photos reflects their on-stage positions. I hope none of them mind how bad the photos are; and I like the way K Shimura seems to have a halo.

* a couple of days later I was chatting to Anna Shimura in a pub, and I mentioned that I’d been at the gig. “Oh, yes,” she said, “I remember standing in front of you during the first act, and listening to you slagging him off.”

Keyword noise: gig, harmony, live music, London, music, photography, Shimura Curves.

Another new month, and I’m back home with sunburnt arms from wandering around London. Time to start scanning all the photos in, I suppose; there’s a few more London scenes that I want to write about too yet. I mean, I haven’t even described any of the gigs I went to, first the Shimura Curves, then Montoya; or the art exhibitions, or the random tourists, or the people on the tube.

I met up with Kathryn, an old school friend a young friend from school, whilst I was down there. “When are you moving to London, then,” was one of the first things she said.^* I wondered what made her say it; and it made me wonder why I haven’t already, given that I’ve been idly mumbling that idea to people for the last year at least.

* Well apart from “where the hell have you been? I’ve been to the pub and left again already!”

Keyword noise: holiday, London, Montoya, music, Shimura Curves, sunburn.

I’ve gone back to university.

No, not like that, I’ve not suddenly gone all intellectual again. This week, though, I’m staying in one.

When I was planning this trip down to London, an internet acquaintance contacted me and said: “why don’t you stay at a university? It’ll be cheaper than a hotel.” So, I went and booked a room at Shoreditch University’s Ripper Hall,^* to relive my university days.

Of course, I never actually stayed in a hall at university, so I’m not really reliving anything. There’s something common to all university accomodation, though. The cheap, cheerful decor, designed to be easily replaced or cleaned at the end of the year. The slightly broken fittings. The dubious stains on the carpet. All very familiar from my university days. There’s a couple of slight concessions to tourism: free soap and shampoo in the bathroom,^** and coffee-making equipment: a small tray with a built-in kettle, a single cup, and little sachets of instant coffee and sugar. If you have any visitors, they have to be signed in and out at the front desk – full name and address on the form, please – and definitely have to be out by 11pm at the latest. It’s not bad, as accomodation goes, but it does feel a little blank and soulless compared to most hotels I’ve visited. And given the level of hotel I usually stay in, but that’s saying something.

* No, it’s not really called that.

** “Complimentary toiletries are not replaced during your stay”, the visitor instructions warn.

Keyword noise: accomodation, halls of residence, hostel, hotel, London, holiday, travel, university.

…was the headline on the Evening Standard billboards when I was wandering around Islington this morning looking for a bus. It’s not a headline you hear every day. It turns out that the manic in question was a ‘heavy plant operator’, which at least might explain how he knew how to get hold of a JCB at 7 in the morning, never mind how to drive one.

I’m still in London – well, to be honest, if you read the start of this post, that should be rather obvious. Last night involved an all-you-can-eat Indian vegetarian restaurant, its walls plastered with pro-vegetarian propaganda all over. The food was good, but the propaganda left me wanting to rebel, and sneak off for a quick greasy burger somewhere. And, to be honest, it wasn’t a patch on the greasy-spoon fry-up breakfast I had in Archway on Monday morning. There’s nothing like a greasy-spoon fry-up when you’re feeling slightly hungover and slightly dirty too.

The photos from Sunday’s gig have arrived, but are slightly disappointing: the whole stage was projected with a big purple picture which makes it very hard to see anything at all of the band. The photos of us sitting around in the pub beforehand are, frankly, much better. You’ll have to wait for me to scan them, of course – it really is time I went out and bought a digital camera.

Keyword noise: Archway, food, fry up, greasy spoon, holiday, Indian, JCB, London, photography, travel.

I said yesterday that politics hasn’t been interesting me lately. It’s not so much that I’m feeling a lack of interest, but I’m trying to block out just how authoritarian this government is becoming. As was shown by yesterday’s prime-ministerial speech on Justice: “Justice should mean summary justice” was one of its messages. The other was: “I want to lock up anyone I don’t like, but those nasty judges won’t let me.”

The one thing I fear, more than anything, from all of the politicians in power or likely to get into power, is that they all have a love of power more than anything else. They are addicted to legislation, swingeing, unenforcable legislation, to try to pacify whichever newspaper editor has been loudest recently. They let themselves be pushed into draconian laws by whatever cause will sell papers, purely because they think it will help them stay in their beloved offices. They have a grand, noble cause: the grand, noble cause of self-interest.

Anyway, I’m off on holiday now. I’m going to sit back, relax, and try to stay away from the latest news updates; and blog about random passers-by in the street.

Keyword noise: authoritarianism, civil liberties, government, holiday, justice, liberty, media, power, travel.

It’s not only Friday again, but it’s my last day in the office until July. Hurrah! Come Sunday, I’m off down to London for a week, to mooch around museums, go to a Shimura Curves gig, do some geek-shopping, and generally get up to nefarious stuff. I’ve already arranged to meet a few intimidating internet people, who, I suspect, are not to be trifled with; but if anyone else would like to stalk meet me, get in touch.

Fertility Newsflash: there are now two regular readers of this place who are expecting babies around Christmastime. Congratulations to Archel and Matt, the latest to announce their pregnancy.^* Clearly, this is a good thing: regular Symbolic Forest readers are bound to be far more intelligent than the average, so if you have children, they will be smarter too. I’ll shut up now before I turn into Robert K Graham.

Big Dave is away too at the moment, having gone off camping in the Lake District. As he’s never been camping before, and I have, he asked me what advice I had.

“The top piece of advice?”

“Yup.”

“It’ll piss down. No, really. You’ll go off, set up camp, and it’ll piss down the whole week. Take plenty of books.”

I hope his tent isn’t leaking.

Oh, the other pregnant reader is still a secret, by the way. But as she never leaves comments on the site anyway, and doesn’t hang around any of the bits of the internet that most of you readers come from, there’s no point me telling you who she is.

I seem to have lost interest in anything political at the moment. I’m back at my default state of “meh, they’re all awful,” which means I really don’t care to blog about any of it. Which is a shame, because there are so many terrible things about the state of politics in this country. Both parties are but a shiny layer of media gloss covering an authoritarian heart of darkness; Tony Blair’s shiny paint has pretty much worn off now, but Cameron’s is still fresh and tacky. There is so much I could be doing, too; so much campaigning you can do from your own home. I need to pull my finger out a bit.

Blogging will start off on paper, next week, sitting in a café with a cup of coffee and a notebook. Very civilised. I’ll try to get online regularly and keep updating, though. A week of sitting in cafés, with coffee, cake, and … well, all the other stuff you get in cafés, will do me the world of good.

* Well, Archel’s pregnancy, at least. It’s not like you can take turns to incubate it for a week.

Keyword noise: Big Dave, campaigning, camping, congratulations, gig, holiday, London, music, rain, Shimura Curves, travel, weather.