Infinitely Distracting

Highs and lows. High points and low points. The road, always the road, twists and turns. The lie of the land, varied and infinitely distracting.

We have angels up there, looking over us, sometimes guarding us from danger.

Without a song, where would we be? Where would we be without a song? Recording new songs in an old school bus, in Ladbroke Grove.

The crooked house on the corner of Marlborough Avenue is slowly sinking into the ground, swallowed up by the marsh. But we are light on our feet, nimble and quick, and permanence does not appear on our list of bare essentials. (Song: "Room at the inn" from the album "Room at the inn" (2007) by Peter Loveday and featuring Andy Gemmell, Sarah Davison and Naomi Wedman.

Spurred on by my own lethargy and lack of achievement, I rise in the morning bewildered but determined, determined to leap into action. Song: "Cloud song" from the album "The Faraway Near" - Peter Loveday.

Rocking oneself to sleep in a hammock, rocking all the way down into the valley of dreams.

Once you start, you cannot stop. This rewinding and peering into the past, overcome with backroom reverie and non-specific yearning. The story returns, briefly, to where it began. (Containing quotes from "2666" by Roberto Bolaño) (Song: "Pretty black rose" from the album "For everything a place, 2025") #robertobolaño #foreverythingaplace

Long nights stretched out between briefly glimpsed days. Songwriting and a debut in London. The story goes on. (Music: Birds of Tin, "High road, low road".)

this infernal reaching out… blindly… for something

Autumn quickly plummets into winter. Sometimes sleet, sometimes snow, often rain, or constant drizzle. Shoes are full of rain, and from salt on the road, … shoes stain. Feet soaked, toes wrinkling up like raisins. Socks are better … off. Hang them by the gas fire and watch the steam rise.

I lose myself at night and then come back again in the morning when I wake. How can that be. Where do I go. What exactly do I do there, that it is so hard to recall as soon as I wake. Do I leave my body entirely to float, to wander in the ether of dreams. Is this biology, chemistry, electrical engineering or metaphysics.

I am sent to the records department of the Law Society in Chancery Lane. Imagine my dismay to discover that they are not the kind of records I envisage.

Sometimes, things fall into place, mysteriously or methodically. Some believe it to be the work of stars, others put it down to numbers and maths, or even genetic design and disposition. There are those who feel the hand of some powerful being pulling strings, as if we were mere puppets, perhaps we are… (London skyline illustration by the author: EP cover design - Tiny Town, No Place Like Rome)

Small wonders win the day.

Faced with an empty pocket I am forced to leave aside, for a moment at least, my artistic endeavour in search of income and gainful employment, inevitably implying interruption of dreaming and a slap to the face from reality. (Music: Post-Birds of Tin. Image: Vigeland sculpture, Oslo.)

Immersed in distraction, one day leads effortlessly into the next.

We were not looking where we were going, running on intuition, hunches and illusion, or … delusion. There, in that dark sprawling city, spilling with life, on the troubled and brooding River Thames, writhing with history and with the shifting waters of now, I find a place to live, though under constant threat of eviction.

It’s a stage, I suppose, where it all plays out, the unfurling of boundless energy and blind yearning of youth. Is it theatre, or is it simply a dream.

On Sunday morning, we go to visit Diana, whose address still faintly appears on the inside of Pedro’s wrist where she wrote it back in chapter 132.

I sincerely hope that a plot is not forming here. What could be worse than that. (Image illustration by the author; some twisted handmade nails.)

The Fat Boys are apparently distracted by the slow deliberate plucking of my fingers on the strings. I ponder this scene wondering about just what it could mean,

Infinite attention. What could that be about. The opposite perhaps of infinite distraction. What would that look like. A good cop, bad cop dichotomy. Attention good, distraction bad, ... or not.

Everybody wants to try, at some time. Everybody wants to try and jump off something that’s higher than what they can handle,

Jacques Lusseyran, French author and political activist, blind from the age of seven, suggested that one might prepare for one’s central mission in life by doing things that may seem entirely unrelated, and how necessary this may be.

Time marches on in the Wilting Thistle, apparently waits for no one.