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Leaving the Palace

November 20, 2011

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Painting

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On the day Maggie came to power

I was oblivious to what it would mean. Sixteen. At school I fought with the teachers and tried to avoid the O-levels looming just ahead. And in the evening, we went to Barbarella's. To see Iggy Pop. Crunching over broken glass, and lifting feet stuck to carpet with beer and ash. Broad Street before it was redeveloped. No go canals full of trolleys and dead dogs. A ragged dirty city, where men tumbled out of The Antelope on a Saturday night and threw up beside bus stops where grannies in their Sunday best would stand on their way to church the next morning. We took the night bus home - May 4th, - and sat upstairs, smoking, joking, as people stumbled their way off the bus. Tight drainpipe jeans. Men's jackets from Oxfam. Remembering Iggy Pop pulling down his trousers to his knees and waving his penis at the crowd.

Suicide attempt

Today, an ambulance passed me at the traffic lights, lights flashing, and I remembered how we followed the ambulance through every set of lights, down the Stratford Road, past Lipton's Grocery and the fish shop, past The Antelope, down the hill and past The Mermaid, leaving the ABC on our right (where we sometimes queued on a Saturday) then left onto the number 8 route and past the bus terminus. I knew things were bad, they must be bad, us driving through red light after red light, my dad gripping the steering wheel, not speaking, not a word. Through the lights on the Ladypool Road, through the next set on Moseley Road, then the long straight stretch downhill and up again, and into the Accident Hospital. The ambulance already there, and my mother lifted out, tied tight to the stretcher. The boys, white faced, beside her. A long day of waiting. Sun shining. Dust. Fish swimming in a tank. Nobody saying anything. Nobody saying a word. Endless day, and b

Oh what a beautiful morning

...and I find myself searching for a word that can describe the strong flood of emotion that sometimes arrives as we stand and look at the beauty of the world around us, or listen to an outstanding piece of music.... There doesn't seem to be such a word. There are words and phrases for surges of negative feeling ( like panic attack), but not for the positive surges. If anyone knows one, please let me know. (In my dream last night, I knew the word, but in the way of dreams, as I woke, it disappeared...)

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Leaving the Palace

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