Flâneur on the Solent

I do wonder about some people. I usually wear a pentacle although you generally can't see it. One hot summer though I was on the tube in London and wearing a black tee shirt and it was on view. As I was going up the escalator at Kensington, a woman coming down suddenly leaned over face to face with me as she passed and hissed 'HELL'!!! And I said, 'And which direction are you going in now?'

I'm stuffed with a cold. Not swine flu but 'man' flu so I'm having a whinge! Nobody in the house at the moment to whinge to so you lot are copping it instead.

It's a bloody weird thing but I was expecting it as I've had a cold on the same week for the past few years. Sure enough, it kicked in last night. Does the human system have a memory that resurrects viruses like an alarm clock set to go off? Mmmm... Dunno.

Today I'm going to hang the first show at the gallery viewing space of my new art dealership. Back in the art dealing world and self employed again! The dawn of a new age. Who cares about having a cold anyway. I don't...

Cable now seems to have only five main themes.

'Most shocking video clips', 'fat reducing surgery' TV, 'American syndicates' (eg CSI, Without a Trace etc), people who catch snakes (wow, isn't there a lot of snakes!), and 'ghost watches' (eg Ghost Hunters, Most Haunted etc, and wow isn't there a lot of ghosts too!).

On the subject of ghost hunting see the clip of one of my FB friends, comedian Glen Maney, tackling the subject in one of his sketches...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUMJQKOJtSM

Thank God for people like Glen and clever complex and metaphorical drama shows like True Blood and Generation Kill.

And I've just realised that Countryfile is now Sunday evening viewing. How on earth did I miss this tumultuous event? Now I know that terrestrial television is dead for sure.

BTW does everybody else hate that bloody Go Compare advert with the opera singer that seems to be on every five minutes because the credit crunch and the internet have killed off television advertising?)

Hey!! I've just plugged them!!! I should get a fee for that...

'Go Compare, go compare... la dee dah'

In the midst of the unattractive scenario of the goverment sacking experts they have hired because they disagree with the goverments own findings, I offer the following observations on drugs versus alcohol.

1) ALCOHOL. I had a friend who got so drunk one night that he not only called a friend in Sweden from the UK for two whole hours and couldn't remember the conversation the next day, but he also thought that it would be a good idea to eat an Orange. Nothing wrong there except he decided in his stupor that it would be best served microwaved and the ensuing explosion took two days of scrubbing to get the microwave vaguely normal.

2) DRUGS. A guy who used to drink in a pub I played music in regularly was a prolific dope head. He was so stoned one morning that he walked into the road without looking and got run over. Nothing unusual there except he got run over by a milk float.

MY CONCLUSION. The goverment and the experts are both wrong. One medium doesn't privelage itself over the other in terms of social danger. They both make people stupid, careless, and a danger to themselves and others in entirely equal measure!!!

After about five months away from this blog I am tempted to write about what I have seen, where I have been, and what I have done. But I'm not going to so you'll have to imagine instead. (Unless you're friends with me on FB in which case you're exempt LOL).

Sometimes a blog break is a good thing. More proper blogging tomorrow.

I'm going to have an easy day as I have a private view to go to tonight and my eyes are entirely strained from too much time working on the computer over the past few days.

This morning I am going to go through boxes of old belongings that should have been sorted out a long time ago. What treasures (or junk) might I find?... I wonder... I'll let you know...

I just watched 'The Hospital' and this week it was on teenage mothers.

One of the questions from a Doctor to an expectant Vicky Pollardesque mother to be was 'Is the Father a blood relative?'

Perhaps the programe should have been called 'Deliverance'...

The scene... I'm driving down St Ronans Avenue.

There's a man, walking along, wearing normal clothes but with a very lifelike horses head mask that covered his entire head!!!

VERY Wicker Man!!!

Only in the Island City ...

PS I was looking out to see if the Salmon of Knowledge was going to join him.

Across the city campus I'm walking from Eldon Building in Winston Churchill Avenue to Park Building behind Guildhall Square and I'm going over the little bridge just past the Courthouse and Uni Halls of Residence...

A man cycles towards me and the other pedestrians across the bridge from the other direction. He passses the woman in front of me, looks at her, and shouts

'PENISAURAS, PENISAURAS'!!!!!!

before cycling off.

Only in the Island City...

Today I am in my hometown on a visit…

The pub in the centre of town is being demolished, my old college has been annexed into a campus of the college that was its competitor when I was there, and the photography shop that had been in town for fifty years is now a bookmakers. The registry office I got married in is now a snazzy office building, the supermarket has been turned into three separate shops, and the old cake shop that I used to have coffee in on Wednesday afternoons when I was a student is now a discount store.

I’m now in a new coffee shop typing out my thoughts on a Macbook to post tonight and looking every part the cyber yuppie that I intended not to become when I was a student here. How different I am now from what I was then! The best part of three decades since I used to walk from the college to the now gone cake shop with Jack Kerouac in my hand and my head full of art and poetry wearing a tatty old jacket and scruffy faded jeans. I wonder where all the people I knew then are now. I know the stories of some and we’ve caught up with each other over the years. Some never made it and I paused earlier outside the college remembering one good friend who died in a drowning accident when he was 26. I wonder what he would say now if he could see how the town has changed beyond recognition from how we both once knew it? What would he make of me now? Do I bear any resemblance to the person he knew all those years ago? I would hope so. Time however changes everything and the street is full of ghosts today.

After I’ve finished my coffee I’m going to walk to my Grandparents old house to see what it’s like now and I may drop in on my relatives who live in the next road. Each footstep I take today seems like a memory and they seem to weigh strangely on me. There is so much that I have left behind me, especially in the last decade. So many hard times but also so many good times. I never felt like this was my hometown when I lived here. I wasn’t born in this town and I was never attracted to its environment but it has grown on me; sometimes like strangling Ivy and sometimes with a degree of fondness.

Later I’ll set course for the Island City and I’ll look forward to seeing the Spinnaker Tower appear over the crest of the A3. It’s not my hometown but it feels more like my hometown than anything else since I left the real one and I’m glad of that. Maybe it’s time to park up the virtual Vardo and allow myself to feel truly at home for the first time in a very long age. Kushti Bok my friends...