1st october 2003
October Day

from Kilvert's Diary, 1st October 1874
This morning I went to Bristol . . . we projected a visit to St Mary Redcliffe on the way to the Station. Kathleen, Ella and I ascended the spiral staircase to the Muniments Room and saw the old wormeaten remains of the chests in which Chatterton averred that he had discovered the poems of Rowley the monk.
And there in the great windy dusty room as we looked out through the mullions of the glassless windows over the murky smoky misty city there came a sweet reminiscence of the sunny hillside of Chanctonbury Ring on the afternoon of the Findon wedding day.

Alas, my own reminiscence of Chanctonbury Ring is cold rather than sweet. We camped there one early summer night, wondering exactly what would happen to us (there are stories of hauntings, UFO sightings, any old rubbish you care to make up - plus legend has it that the trees there cannot be counted, even though they were only planted in the 1760s). Personally I would have welcomed alien abduction when I started to freeze to death at about 2am, not having brought a sleeping mat. I tried to insulate myself from the ground by lying on a hand towel, with limited success. A fried breakfast at the Little Chef never tasted so good.

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6th october 2003
heft

Gottfried Rosenbaum said somewhere of certain sculptures that dey madt him feel goodt ven he lookedt at dem.
At the weekend, picking sloes and blackberries on a warm and sunny riverbank, I was wondering why it was so fun. The future pleasures of handling and preparing the fruit seemed dubious and more like work, and the eating of the end products impossibly far distant*. But the sorting of the objects from the vast messy matrix of the world and the piling of them together into a container was very good, and then there was the weight of the full basket at the end of my arm, so that I could say that dey madt me feel goodt ven I carriedt dem.

*sloe gin takes several years to mature.

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9th october 2003
from another net


*** You are logged in as Guest. ***
>Look
You are in a bosky grove. The gilded car of Day is driv'n to Occident; the glow of Hesperus lies faint on leaves.
Sabrina the Nymph is here.
Sabrina the Nymph has left.
Comus has arrived.
You say, "hi there"
Comus bows.
You say, "where do i find the help files?"
Comus says, "Among the perplext paths of these drear brakes."
You say, "are you a newbie here too?"
Comus says, "I know each lane and alley green, Each bushy dell of this wilde Wood."
You say, "kewl, can you point me in the direction of the Main Square or something?"
Comus says, "And if your stray attendance be yet lodg'd, Or shroud within these limits, I shall know ere morrow wake."
You say, "you must be like, admin, right?"
Comus says, "I can conduct you to a low but loyal cottage, Where you may be entertained til further quest."
You say, "I'm not really in that kind of mood just now, sorry"
Sabrina the Nymph has arrived.
You page Sabrina the Nymph, "i been asking Comus stuff but I can't get any sense outa him"
Sabrina the Nymph pages you, "Ay, that dam'd wisard hid in sly disguise, That foul inchanter with his banefull cup, Whose poison unmakes all that drink it up."
>QUIT
<Your 'TELNET' connection has terminated>



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10th october 2003
british summertime ends

leaf.jpg

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13th october 2003
Gubernator Curtius - mortuus est

Regarding the Thames estuary, Conrad's narrator Marlow points out in Heart of Darkness that it has 'has been one of the dark places of the earth', and goes on to expound on the thoughts of Romans in the early days of their occupation of Britain.
What a movie it would make, eh? The rogue governor, Curtius, upriver somewhere around Henley or Oxford, the newly arrived agent in early Londinium chartering a boat to take him into unknown marshlands and tributaries harboring hostile tribesmen; Curtius doing all the Celtic nasty stuff like wicker men, human sacrifice and stagshorn dances.
I'd do the dialogue in Latin, with subtitles, like Derek Jarman did in Sebastiane.

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14th october 2003
attic

The air in London today was so clean and bright everyone seemed extra large and healthful: even the dealers at Centrepoint had skintone a notch above their usual Morgue. The building itself looked so splendidly textural that you wanted to pick it up and scrub yourself with it, like a loofah.

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16th october 2003
watersplash

I read on a noticeboard by a lock on the Thames (is the information thereon reliable? I suppose about as reliable as on that interweb) that Oxford means not as I had previously thought a place where oxen forded the river, but a place where only oxen could ford, the water being deep there. Hence Shifford (where sheep can cross) Swinford (pigs) and Duxford (ducks), although this latter raises the question of whether ducks need a ford at all. Possibly at Duxford the river is too deep for anything but ducks to cross.

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27th october 2003
halva revisited

This time it was the Indian version rather than the Lebanese, at Diwali in Southall. Giant neon chilis overhung the street, but there was no savoury food to be taken away: all must be sweets, and we started off with a mixed box of carrot and pistachio halva.
Later in backstreet traffic gridlock we got the opportunity to see local firework usage in closeup: the accepted mode of rocket launch seemed to be from the hand, at the end of an extended arm.
All the western horizon of the city rumbled that evening: Hounslow, Southall, Harrow, Wembley; the light from the explosions giving Rama and Sita safe passage homeward from the Slough hinterland.

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