radio on

Another morning, another borderline-psychotic dash to work in my car. In the past ten days, since the train line stopped functioning after flooding damaged a bridge, this journey has taken anything between 23 minutes and 3 hours 15.

You never know.

I have a tiny silver cake decoration blu-tacked to my dashboard by the radio: GOOD LUCK it says, with a tiny shiny flourish.

The fragility of these transport systems. They kind of work but only through a high speed stop-start lurch along the very lip of breakdown. The infrastructure permanently strained to overload. It only takes one bit of grit in the mechanism - roadworks, an accident, a storm, an anomalous micro-second of behaviour - for the circuits and flows of mobility to grind down to inertia and gridlock. Even in its working, abundant stress fractures of different kinds are all too apparent.

Today, with the sky bright and clear, the usual array of fleeting encounters, little frictions, glimpses of events or the traces in their wake. All so utterly predictable in the unpredictable blur of it all. Small acts of kindness, or of lunacy, or violence. The radio on throughout: a mildly irritating companion, like a slightly tiresome relative who's just occasionally surprising or hilarious in amongst the whittering banter. Channel hopping in search of a song to sing, a small musical dream to slide into for a moment. A kind of ephemeral cinematic anaesthesia.

The sudden jaunty appearance of a little white car emblazoned with LETSBREASTFEED.COM ('You supply the milk, I supply the advice' on its back window). I make space to let the car switch lanes, and the driver flicks her side lights in thanks.

Past a couple of huge texts that have become landmarks. The graffiti on the railway bridge, big rough white painted letters, like a kid's writing, always makes me smile. The letters S O U R. Then the Chubb building, with its new sign several metres to the right of the old one, now faded but still only half erased: so it says CH CHUBB, like an uncertain, stuttering locksmith.

The spray of white paint on the road surface, as though a barrel of Dulux has fallen off a truck at high speed. Or Ralph Steadman has been run over, leaving a characteristic splash with a constellation of tiny spots at its outer edge.

A few minutes later, a dawning realisation that the other side of the motorway is deserted, nothing there, just bare tarmac - there's a road closure in the other direction, and all three lanes are blocked by emergency services and police vehicles. An arhythmic burst of flashing lights, then a crumpled yellow vehicle, its bonnet completely crushed like a fag packet; its front end comes to a halt at the bottom end of the windscreen, which is still intact. A team of people in high-visibility jackets in attendance around it as two of them try to free the front seat passenger. Oh god. A huge wave of traffic is building up in its wake, those at the front looking as though they are well positioned on the grid for the start of the race, but increasingly resigned to its indefinite postponement.

One minute chugging along on auto-pilot listening to the radio, dang-a-lang-a-ding-dong, the next all hell breaks loose, a sudden eruption, weirdly slo-moed by the adrenalin rush. The metal and glass rendings of accidentnoise, then silence.

Good luck.

A few miles further, a break-down truck carrying a car has somehow taken out some traffic signs - they have been mown down and snapped off, or are teetering at oddly comic angles as though they've been installed by a drunk. The driver sits in his cab on the hard shoulder looking forlorn, while the policewoman walks away from him back to her car, which is blocking the lane behind him. For reasons that remain a mystery, she's carrying a big yellow torch. More flashing lights twinkling in the rear-view mirror, then gone.

And the radio sings, "You're innocent / You think everything is possible / And nothing's gonna get you baby / Everything is touchable / Nothing's gonna beat you in this life / It's alright ..."

Three guys in a black BMW, like cartoon big city hoods. All shaved heads, black suits, no necks. The front-seat passenger is wearing shades and talking into a mobile. Serious dude with don't-fuck-with-me written all over him. He glances at me as they pass, and for a split second I see a little blue car like a dinky toy travel across his reflector lenses. Then he's gone.

The planes queuing for landing at Heathrow in the sky. The arced choreography of other planes banking over Surrey after take-off. A v-formation of geese fly above the road, then branch off towards the lakes. A blue-yellow-white train along the water's edge, heading back into London; it looks like another toy in the landscape. Then the gear shift of the M25 for a few miles: a lane-changing frenzy, stuff coming at you from all angles. I turn down the radio to concentrate. A loud click as a motorcyclist zips past and brushes my wing mirror, but it pops straight back into position.

A quick stop at the petrol station to get fuel, a paper, and a coffee. As I walk back to my car, glancing at a front-page picture of a miserable Steven Gerrard trudging off the pitch after yet another disappointing game, the pick-up truck lurches off the road and on to the forecourt towards me. I stand back and give him plenty of space. You never know.

In the distance, the incessant hum of the city's traffic rolls on. An omnipresent surf-like drone that Virginia Woolf once described as 'churned into one sound, steel blue, circular'. In a more martial and despairing vein, DH Lawrence suggested that it 'booms, like monotonous, far-off guns, in a monotony of crushing something, crushing the earth, crushing out life, crushing everything dead'.

In the end, 28 minutes door to door today.

Good going ...

And the radio sings, 'Do you want the truth, or something beautiful?'












Images by Ralph Steadman: British, and I shot the sheriff

horse milk

for the noo

photos © David Williams
for ... 'unusual' horse & cat milk products, see here

season of glass

Walking down the hill through the middle of Totnes today, I encountered a stalled lorry blocking the road. It had obviously wheezed its way up most of the hill, and expired. The trailer read ASSORTED GLASS. As I passed by, I noticed a stream of milk pouring out of a gap under its rear doors, then trickling into the gutter. Gallons of it. A river of split milk coursing through Totnes. Like a long liquid finger tracing a luminous line through the traffic to the River Dart.


black-and-white
I have a photograph in front of me, taken from the interior of an unknown room in New York.

Through the window, the downtown city skyline is a faded grey blur in the middle distance, afternoon shadows there and not there. Could be a forest. Could be a water stain. Could be a mirage.

On the windowsill inside the room, much more imposing than the fugitive city, a glass of water, half empty or half full: a lens that quietly distorts the spectres in the distance.

Beside it, a pair of glasses balanced on the frame and arms, staring unseeing towards the viewer. The left-hand lens offers a perfectly focused miniature of the window sill’s rim and the skyline beyond, a tiny framed world. The right-hand lens is splashed with a dark liquid, an impenetrable blur like spilt paint. Or blood. An obstacle to seeing. One eye maimed, the left eye.

The photograph, called ‘Season of Glass’, was taken by Yoko Ono. The glasses were worn by John Lennon when he was shot. So. New York. Central Park. The Dakota Building. December 1980.

The memory of glass.
The glass of memory.

Everything is still.
Everything moves.


into sand
As fragile as a dragonfly’s wings, a reflection in water, a promise. As brittle as a web of caramel, a pencil tip, a confidence. As transparent as the blue soup of the sky, as silence. Can be fashioned through fire into any shape and size and colour: a tiny crimson chimera, an imposing gold wave, a shimmering periwinkle veil. Can be used to contain, to frame, to enlighten, to focus, to build, to decorate, to stimulate, to protect, to obstruct, to warn, to pierce, to cut. Can be broken by dropping, throwing, crushing, colliding, the shock of water too hot, water too cold, polishing, touching, the clumsy fingers of forgetting. If left for long enough, will eventually break down into particles of sand.


shatter
once there was a girl called shatter and she lived in a glass house full of glass things and she had learnt to be careful learnt the hard way to watch her step her hands her clothes her every move and she moved like a cat all balance and listening and aware and eyes-all-over and breathing stillness and her rhythms were tight and right and all was shiney and transparent and in its place

everything was glass glass cutlery glass plates glass bed (a hammock of glass fibres suspended between glass posts) glass bath glass doors glass walls glass plants glass books glass dust

there was glass music and glass sighs glass giggles and glass light glass tears and glass dreams

the windows were glass spheres that turned everything outside upside down and made it smaller

the ceilings were lenses that magnified the sky the clouds the stars and made them bigger

the floors were mirrors that reflected the sky

when the sun shone everything glistened and sparked and refracted and hummed and when the night came and the wind and the rain the house chinked and swayed and danced like slow water inside and out and shatter chinked and swayed and danced with it

one day a small crack appeared in the living room ceiling only small but getting bigger and then the sky split in two and then the crack forked and then there were three skies with black rivers separating them and shatter could only watch as they grew and grew and jump over their reflections in the floor

then when the night came and the wind and the rain all three dripped through the cracks and onto the floor until the room was knee-deep in night and wind and rain then chest deep and shatter had to navigate from room to room in her glass bath first paddling with a glass bed post then rigging her hammock as a sail as the storm picked up and the house clanked and staggered and moaned inside and out and shatter clanked and staggered and moaned with it

at dawn the night level dropped and the wind eased and shatter slept and dreamt she was leaking and drowning in her own watery flow dreamt she was dissolving liquefying dispersing disappearing and when she woke up she felt refreshed

sitting up she saw the bath was beached high on a glass cupboard the damp floor a network of dark lines and fissures the walls stained by the water the windows murky and blurred

like a cat she climbed down the shelves
like a cat she walked across the floor and out of the glass door

outside everything was less shiney, slightly larger and the right way up

it would take her a while to get used to it


© David Williams, April 2007