Well, despite getting my camera all happy and serviced last week I didn’t take it out with me this weekend on my numerous adventures around the cube, stokes croft street fest, the lido, the dancing-round-your-living-room party, leigh woods, more lido and easton.  So here is a picture of some pea soup i made recently – it has the tenuous connection of being the last time I picked wild garlic in the woods which i also did today… and its the kind of thing that people seem to expect from blogs.  Utterly irrelevant.

Trying to sift out all i wrote today and make something sweet and beautiful out of it before my untidy mind and inbuilt nihilism make it feel ragged and tired and less worthwhile.  Lone soul wandering I find myself on a word journey.  Parcels of words seem to flock together in a way while cycling through woodlands that forces me stop and record them every time I come to a patch of sunlight in trees.  Often I smile into the air to myself at thoughts I’m having; little impromptu incarnations of the now, recessed and looked at through the inner kaleidoscope.  The world refracted through me – no-one else will ever know it.

Navel-gazey morning drinking coffee on the sunlit sofa turns into navel-gazey afternoon on two wheels; passing through woods and suburbs, by turns the rankling whiffs of sun-stewed car upholstery and the divine breaths of hot mayflower from the froth-blossomed hawthorn.  I am happier than I was Thurs/Friday:  I have met new people and old faces; bumped into nascent frineds; spent time with good friends who I see little and had unannounced visits from best soul mates.  I need these little pots of interaction to stand me as fuel for the solitary days.  Fill my mind with something to think about, turn over… the trouble is, I love to wallow in melancholia, touch everything with an elegiac mournfulness – and what better day to wallow than a sultry sunday afternoon?  Its definitely some kind of perverse pleasure in life but i need to keep a hold of when to put the brakes on, when to stop my malicious psyche turning these things into sources of self doubt.  I met someone on Friday whose collarbones proclaimed that ‘everything in life is a balloon’.  I love this thought – it has so many uses.  Think i need to internalise this idea as a possibility.  Remember that everything can be filled with air and let go on the breeze and that its all brightly coloured and beautiful; shiny and transient.  (ok, go no further missy, stop envisaging the sad balloons in the corner of the party that are half-deflated and a little baggy around the edges…)

I can’t make sense of my two sides, the creature of such terminally tragic thoughts walks hand in hand with the self-reliant entity wrapped up in my own impenetrable world which no-one sees.  Sometimes I am both all at once.  I wonder if it is the fear that no-one might ever discover what I really think that creates these vacuums of dystopia that I can disappear into for days….

Its all about nature at the moment.  My senses are filled with hawthorn flowers.  I wrote a list of things I like today, including finding slow worms, and an hour later found one curved in a flourish on the path in front of me.  A big beetle hit me in the face as I cycled.  A bumble bee was swept up as I biked into its trajectory.  Kate and I decided that my flat is on the Maybug flight path due to all their unwanted clumsy buzzing traffic through the wide open windows.  I look up from beside the fishing pond at Pill and all I can see are oak leaves in the most intense shades of luminous green and shadow black against a sunlit sky of pale eye-blue. The path along the river is all glaring yellow hedgerow flowers which I try and fail to pick with my left hand as i cycle, blue horizons, thick grasses and hazy rolling flats.

I have had the most fantastic of ear worms today, so good I sing along as I ride my bike too fast for a winding pedestrian sunday path.  Air Algiers by Country Joe, ‘hopped on a plane from oakland new york, oakland new york, new york to marseilles, hopped on a plane oakland new york to marseilles, pigs on my trail, hey I got to make my get away.  I got a one way ticket, I’m flying air algiers; think i’ll go to the Kasbah, cool it for a couple of years’  and Blackbird by the Beatles, ‘blackbird singing in the dead of night, take these broken wings* and learn to fly, you were only waiting for this moment to be free, black bird fly, into the light of a dark black night.’ (* i always wondered if the bird had broken wings already and was being told to go out and fly them anyway or if it was being given broken wings as a present…not sure which is the sadder picture in my head)

Chance and felicity smiled on me yesterday as I went several times to the door of the cube and rang the bell to retrieve my lost phone… i was met each time with the pitch black square letter box of silence until I was rescue by an unscheduled keyholder…would have been quite a different weekend if i had been incommunicado for the whole time. i shudder to think, and shudder to be so dependent on such a little slip of black plastic wizardry.