jerk off

I’m lying in my darkened bedroom, grey light creeping in around the curtains.

The air is humming with the pulsating blades of a helicopter, hovering pretty much directly above my home. It sounds like a noisy tractor, chopping away at nothingness instead of a harvest.

The tractorchopper started whining at 7:30am. On a Sunday.

Somewhere in the background – don’t think we don’t hear you, brother – is a bass beat, straining against the sabbath calm and heavy with the anticipation of bigger, better, louder tunes.

The crafted oil drums are out, lying idle under cheap B&Q pergodas, ready to billow and belch out half a ton of jerk chicken. The blades keep on chopping.

It’s Carnival and I’m scared. And tired.

I hear a click of key in lock and the clunk of a chubb bar falling back. The door squeaks open and old uncle Jamaica’s obscenities, muttering murmers and self-banter drift in through my open window. Slippers shuffle along stained concrete towards relief. Any second now, I will hear the trickle of old man’s piss falling pathetically into the gutter, meandering down the red brick wall and dousing the weary drainpipe.

a propos of something

I apologise for my lack of devotion to nfan of late – it’s been a strange few months, very busy, very tiring and very distracting.

There’s been writing, interviewing, thinking, working, drafting, baulking. I have worked harder than I excpected to this summer. And every day my feet itch, and itch and itch. It’s an itch that calamine won’t help and a scratch won’t ease.

I will do my blogging more, I promise.

stone circle

we’re all animals, afterall

Who’d have thought it? Eleven girls – sorry, ladies – one leisure vessel, optimistically named the “Random Harvest” and one very happy skipper, Andy.

A choppy sea, bolshy skies, a bucket full of Pimms. Bouncing pink balloons, jostling along the bow. Random it may have been, but as for harvest? All signs pointed to a guaranteed drought.

Mackerel hunting rods launched and spinners flickered weakly with the prospect of a dunking in the English channel – autumnal on an August day.

Fishing, they say, is a waiting game. A sport of patience, calculated idleness, concordance with mother nature and the grace to know when a day is a day and that an empty net means an empty plate.

Ah, so you thought.

No sooner had the hen whipped up her shirt and flashed her sunkissed baps at the passing fishermen did the harvest come tumbling in. Oh how we feasted that evening.

Nature is, indeed, a bountiful giver.

greenness, soundsystems and love

It’s been a great week for treehouses. I broke a story last week about Nick Weston’s Essex treehouse and every Tom, Dick and Harry from every newsroom in the South East wanted a piece of the Crusoesque action. I had a message full of gratitude from Nick and a promise of a dinner in the woods. Report back I shall. I’m so jealous of his life amongst the elements, surrounded by nature and with nothing but books and a fire for company… Green with envy? I’m glowing like the very incandescent  and oh so un-eco nugget of plutonium Bart Simpson catches as he rides past Burns’ factory.

Happy August! Tis the month of the Carnival. Coincidental etymology of the pleasure-inducing word: carnage + festival = carnival. I read a slightly odd reference to the wondrous NHC in ES mag this weekend. Something along the lines of “get down to Notting Hill for soca beats, shimmying bottoms and buckets of jerk chicken”. The first bit was made up – but “buckets”??? It’s not a KFC hootenanny, love. No, the chicken bursting from the blackened oil drums along Kilburn Road is served on high piles of dry rice and anyone who’s ever balanced a Red Stripe, a wobbly paper plate of jerk and their dwindling sobriety whilst surging through the sweaty, grinding masses knows, really knows that there are no buckets of chicken at Carnival. Prepare to suck bones, drain cans and get messy.

And finally. This is the last month of singledom for my lovely Ro. Only one month today until the knot is tied, double-knotted, triple blessed and left to tighten in the ever-changing rain, sun, snow, drought, storms, deep blue skies and shifting winds…