On reality

I have been to talks by several illustrious scribblers in the last few weeks, but the one thing that really stuck in my mind was something JG Ballard said. Life is a fiction. What we see out there is just an illusion. He said that he realised this when he saw Shanghai being ripped apart overnight, night after night. He spoke of apartment blocks which had had slices severed off. It was like looking into a giant dolls house. You could see the furniture, the kitchen, the living room; all left suspended in the moment that their occupiers left.

Is this the real world, or is this just fantasy, said a wise man, I forget who.

thought byte

yesterday, today was tomorrow.

The Search For The Pinter Hat

I have of late, I know not why, become obsessed with the idea that if only I could get hold of the right hat, all my creative difficulties would come to an end. It’s not any old hat, you understand. It is a very specific hat. It is the Pinter Hat.

Let us look at the archaeology of the Pinter Hat. It is closest in form to the Breton or Greek fisherman’s cap. Not only a paradiddle of the working class, these are men who on a daily basis wrestle with the greatest of nature’s beasts, the sea, and do so to bring us the most basic of essentials, sustenance. These are men who are not only salt of the earth; their beards are encrusted with the salt of the salty sea.

But the Pinter Hat also references the stetltastic world of the Old Country, peasant days of herring and rye bread, poverty and pogroms. Later in time, it conjures up the spirit of the East End anarchists and their fight against fascism.

In the present day the Pinter Hat continues to connect across boundaries, to the toothy nudnicks doing the bagel run on a Sunday morning in Golders Green and Broughton Park.

If only I could find such a hat, my fiddlers would fly, my dybbuks would haunt, my golems would walk again, and all would be speaking in a peculiarly clipped aggressive tone of voice, ranting against the injustice and absurdity of the world.

Where to get such a hat?

I began my quest in a specialist nautical supply shop in Covent Garden, but I found the traditional Breton cap to be too firm in the base and too round up above. Maybe thick wool is not the right fabric.

Next came the Stussy Castro cap; good in its own way but too military, and when worn with a white singlet it does look a little camp.

My friend M lent me one of his squad, a cotton cap which was not unpeasant, but it was tan, which is not one of my approved colours (I am a Summer in the House of Colour system), and there are hygiene issues to consider in the used hat marketplace.

Last week I came quite close, picking up a beautiful black cap for £45 in Agnes B. Black is also not one of my colours, but I couldn’t resist, and although it is woollen, it is a particularly soft wool, and is shallow enough to sit pertly atop my head. I am happy with the hat; I will wear it, especially when we get into the heart of winter.

But it is not the Pinter Hat.

The return of the window eating birds

Of late my early morning alarm call has kindly been provided by the builders, who are adding an extra floor to a house two streets away, chucking debris down a long plastic chute; it looks like a series of bottomless buckets chained together. The chute has been cleverly designed to maximise amplification of the noise. As such it reminds me of the Japanese principle of suikinkututsu whereby water trickles through stones into a buried ceramic chamber, which makes the noise more expansive. The builders are, again in the Japanese spirit, very considerate, and only operate the chute for an hour or so each day, usually from about 7am.

This morning however I had a new delicious aural treat to bring me round. The return of the window eating birds.

Rather than the warming sound of debris tumbling down a 5 mile long chute, I am woken up by what sounds like a pneumatic drill very close to my head. It seems that the window itself is amplifying the noise of the beast pecking at the window frame.

Last year the culprit seemed to be a little yellow fluffy thing – as a poet I ought to know the name of birds, but I don’t. This year the rascal was kind of grey with a reddish breast. Whether one has grown into the other is not a point that I am able to advise on.

I am sure that one of them must be a finch, which is of course the patron saint bird of Finchley and gives rise to the town’s name. It is said that if the finches that reside in the famous Bothy ever leave, then the ground will open up and the whole of Finchley will be swallowed up in apocalyptic earthquake. Those living across the great divide (also known as the Eruv) that is the North Circular Road, ie Hampstead Garden Suburbs, will be safe, as technically that is not Finchley.

I see from my records that I contacted the RSPB about my bird problem in the first week of September 2005, so the window eating birds are late this year. The RSPB recommended that I treat the area with aluminium ammonium sulphate, saying that I could get this from the chemist. However all the chemists I spoke to told me that this would have to be specially ordered, and could only be obtained in industrial sized quantities. I was a little reluctant to do this in case I was mistaken for a terrorist building a home made bomb which I would then place by the Naked Lady, thus ripping apart the Finchley - Hampstead fault line, which diverts at this point from the North Circular to run directly between the Naked Lady’s legs, and then back up that funny slip road.

So, on a neighbour’s advice, I tied pieces of tinfoil to strings which are dangled out of the window.

This seems to work, only as the tinfoil catches the wind, it taps very gently on the window – ratatat-tat paterpatpat.

This gentle drumming is in its own way as annoying as the chute and the pneumatic drill.

CONTEMPLATING JAZZ

CONFUSED

Confused? Nervous? Suffering from palpitations? Perhaps your body is slighter larger than it should be for your nervous system, resulting in neurological features such as tenderness in one or both of your gluteus mediae (also known as "tight arse").

Is nothing true? Is everything true? What are the unknown unknowns, and how will we know when we know them?

Is modern life rubbish?

Are there more questions than answers?

Join me (please) on my spiritual journey.