Of Note In A Fast Weekend

And whistling stones have a new hit, a curve, an ogive that terminates at a window with glass over the floor and a rock in pieces here, shattering more than silence. And we sigh and board it up and speak to someone who oozes sympathy just like they have been taught. Sigh again! I wish I was back in the thirties when boredom was less destructive; we left our doors open then because we had nothing to steal and only revolutionaries threw rocks - or petrol bombs - or tantrums. Those heavy-skirted women made their point - all those windows gone in one day and off they went to prison where they had tubes down their throats and were force-fed.

And there is old music here, Mouth Music at volume and length and speed, some happy-clappy rig and jeel and keep all the feet tapping along. Folky Spice they were called until some token bloke joined them to bash the bodhran quietly at the back while the short-skirts of the real product tipped out two thousand years of occupation into a happy crowd. That made me tingle, all soprano folk, made to mend nets by or make tweed to. And from all those days of the enclosures when they secretly bashed out acres of illegal tartan. And then they are back to the bar to get drunk, diving into their soft beds at three o'clock, having flirted with men who really should be wearing heavy sweaters and standing with their fingers in their ears. Things are so different now.

There is so much baggage in everyone's life, and the worst of them has written it all down in a book. Nothing she has said so far makes me think she has anything to hate her mother for. I wait for the bombshell that wrecks this comfortable life, the middle classness that she will not admit. I will ask her to define her class and how it made her how she is for she has not done so yet. Seems like someone else agress with me. That night is over and we wake to no snow again.

And fifty-quid man is off shopping with his 39 pounds in his pocket, chocolates from the little ones to their mother but no cards as they have made their own. Well smaller one can hold chalk without eating it now and has drawn a curve which could be flowers. Older child has decided that four cards are required though one is for her mother's mother. This magazine has Joy Division on the cover, that shot of Ian Curtis smoking in the snow trying to stop you guessing what he is thinking about deep behind that genius poet's face. Smaller child rips out four pages of the very article I buy it for and so it is read like a jigsaw. Natalie's favourite song does not have her father on it. Brave choice there but she is right. A cool girl there. Smaller child also like the yellow "Beyond Punk" CD, well the cover itself anyway. He tries many times to turn off the music though he waits until the Human League is on; the real stuff, Pere Ubu and Cabaret Voltaire are Ok for him. He tries to eat the box for some reason. I though he was beyond putting everything in his mouth now.

Food tonight is complicated, not like my less pretentious fellow bloggers who go for cakes and easy things. We have Tempura, Fish and vegetables in batter and some home-made dip as we went in the wrong direction today so no visit to the Chinese Supermarket. The insides of Squid (£1.19 at Morrisons - Tesco in the middle of a Saturday afternoon has NO VEGETABLES and an atmospshere of desperation) are not designed to be seen by humans. It takes me half an hour to turn those tentacled, eyeballing cephalopods into bland white and fryable latex. But it all works, light batter and garlic dips. Daughter eats them happily and even my wife eats the shrimps - she hates shrimps; they look too much like they do when alive but with the batter they are happily just like scampi which she tells me is always just mashed-up, white fish. Maybe it is. I don’t know

The film is, at last, Lost In Translation. I finish it both heartbroken and uplifted. There is so much about this film. It seems that it was made like Eno made Wah Wah, taping all the time to take all the stuff you normally throw away and turn it into a version of the actual product. Or to use Eno again, Sofia took all the silence after the end of recording and kept all the little bits to string together as the actual film. She should have put all the deleted scenes in. The bit with the robots was gently touching. Japan away from the hotel was good, culturally aware of its past but get back to the city and you have a perverse view of how the Japanese see Western society, all cute but clean and slick with it. This is a country emerging from an economic crisis and we are envious. I see the snow falling on the Zen gardens, coating those rocks that seem to move by themselves. We sleep happy with the knowledge of the future and all possible universes. Charlotte is a philosopher but one of few words as in 'in the words of ..'

And now Sunday is cold but in spring; the sky is clear and every contrail is visible in the deep blue distance, miles of cracking air, full of ice to mock the songbirds who are busily gathering ideas for courtship and nest building. I take my son out hoping to get him to sleep but he stares interested at everything, especially fascinated by the seagulls whirling above him. I take photographs in this perfect light, enough to fill up disks and disks. We are together. Back in the Sakura Matsuri, that silent snowfall that comes after all others, asleep in the start of new life, making picnics in the parks. I pray to Rachel that Spring will not be silent but I have not faith outside that of science, and now back in the dirty old town, the father and daughter both dead for nothing, I need a rest.

Now we have kidnapped on the box and we are back with the Scottish variation on that repetitive soundtrack to everything, some highland pipe drone from the once-banned instrument. Could never hate the pipes; that sound is so much part of the hills that hide it. Maybe they have readjusted the story to fit what best meets the anger of the people descended. I read that book so many years ago in the traditional way, under the bed covers with a torch and I cannot remember who is bad and who is good in it. I read Treasure Island the same way and it was the first book I forced myself to finish even though I hated it. And that is the end of the weekend.