Brigand of the Year Award

Strange phrases have been popping into my head over the last few days. This was one of them and cascaded a whole vision of a gathering somewhere in the Mountains of Sardinia. Maybe something like the 'terrorist bazaar' at the start of the James Bond film which was on on Christmas Day.

I was hoping to be listening to The Hurting by Tears for Fears on which the original of Mad World can be found but I forgot to bring it in with me so :-

Listening to - The Guitar and Other Machines by The Durutti Column.

Being awake in the middle of the night has meant that days are beginning to roll into each other so that it is difficult to decide when something actually happened. But then again that is just a contraction of what most people's lives are actually like anyway as far as I can tell. I know that this feeling is because the only life I can pinpoint accurately is my own and therefore anyone else's will seem dream-like in comparison but it is quite a strong impression. My prose is getting a bit loose isn't it? I once wrote about how so many blogs seems to be written out of the blue with the idea that the target audience is totally familiar with everything you are writing about so that great swathes of meaning are missing from the text; the only person able to understand everything is the author. But then isn't that also the case with a great deal of poetry? (Who said, "it certainly is with yours"?)

I want to start writing about the big things again. Somewhere down the valley, the fires burn brightly and the warmth fills the houses. Here is an empty world in the sparseness of the last lost county. It is as if everyone has been sucked up to some other place maybe just for a visit or maybe in some real version of 'The Rapture'. Here is a room lit only by the flames from the fire, a whiskey glass on the table beside the armchair. The spirit evaporates and makes curly shadows on the wall. Have the animals gone with us? It is cold and dark outside, maybe midwinter with the promise of Christmas to come. Maybe it is the empty days of early new-year. I cannot tell for this is a land without technology or clocks or calendars. It should be snowing but wishing it to seems wrong. I may be creating this world but some things should be outside my control. Control people but never the weather. It snows without help from me. Music filters in from some other room, the radio perhaps which means that the whole world has not lost its people, just this house, this field, this county.