We Walk Along We Could Be Famous

The desk here has a high board in sight line, on the top of which is a lockable cupboard with a hinge-and-slide door. It has a number of developer-type books inside it along with a calculator (who still uses a calculator?), a dirty mug and various un-sorted piles of white paper. To the left of the desk, creating a second wall, there is a metal filing cabinet, which allows me, at last, to put up a bit of the magnetic poetry set which has remained unused since the move from building 2 to building 52. I cannot find the tile with the word ‘Nigellike’, which we made up with the transfer set provided. The word is used in the poem in this post that we made up on the old filing cabinet. Today, the first line of the poem on the cabinet is ‘The delicate language shadowing their music.’ because this is all the words, I have lifted from the box so far. There are a number of photos stuck to the metal as well. There is one black-and-white one of a standing stone at Callanish and a photo of a collage I did which combines the drawing of Sylvia Plath from the cover of Collected poems with a page from the Codex Mendosa. There is also this strip cartoon.

The desk itself is just a mess with various bits of technology. I have one computer but use two screens most of the time, which is an advance of having to print things out and match electronic and paper versions of the current operation. To the right of the desk, there is a row of offices, usually empty, which have glass on both sides with blinds. The view from these offices is of the main road outside the site with fields beyond. This is a change from the sixteen years I spent with a brick wall as the view from my office window. One floor up from that and I would have been able to see the welsh mountains.

Try 2.

“Oh! That was too fast!” she says angrily. Immediately she worries that she has been heard but it is too late to fret for long; there are other things worth worrying about in this world. She thinks about the sky for a while, the detail tonight is unusual, something for which she cannot find words, though the internal impression is enough to not need translation into language. The clouds boil and roil on a single plain, caught by the low sun and she feels like some tiny organism held in check under the surface of a shallow puddle, watching the oil on the surface. And of all this, mostly it is not seen; we all go around with our eyes on our feet or the ground in front of us, not seeing the clouds and the sky and all that is above the horizontal. It takes space-bound men and women to see the possibilities, the chance of traveling up to those clouds, so stir them around with a ballet of technology as you whistle through.

The colours range, building in depth from the pink-tinged grey at the start, through the deep reds of sunset and on to the subtle contours of twilight. With few cars, they have the road to themselves, a mile-long stretch of rapidly vanishing tarmac, radiating the heat of the day back to them. To the right, straggly bunches of thorn have given way to sparse woodland with promise of full-blown fairy-tale forests in a few hundred metres. There is some drizzle though she cannot tell when it started; it has been gradual and maybe it has been there all day. Her clothes are not damp and rain feels the right thing for now. I cannot leave all this she thinks. So much to see and do here and I’ll be homesick, planning my escape back to dad and that lovely calm in the house when we read. She thinks of the low music in the background and the fires and the books and records that occupy most of the space in their house. I would learn more there I think. They want to teach me things rather than teach me how to learn. What dates, what maths? It’s all rubbish. I want to sit and learn and write and be happy. Sending me away will do nothing but make me sadder than I am now. So badly is she worried by the future that she begins to feel herself starting to cry, tears on the edge of bursting their surface tension. She thinks of other things, neutral things, Cricket and the Fibonacci sequence. I must look that up she thinks again. This is all she thinks. Maybe I could write this without the instructions. Plays are so much easier to detail; you give some meta-instructions at the beginning and the make-up artist and scene-makers do the rest for you. So much to think about! I will steal some of dad’s records, he has so many, that a few will be Ok. With this she is happier, thinking of the cosy smells of home seeped into the cardboard of the sleeves of these vinyl gems. She is the Vinyl freak, made happy and real by old blues and growly voices from across the water. I ran into her sometimes, her with her coloured hair and laconic replies to my obviously pointless questions. I wrote her poems occasionally, and she curled her lip at them, missing the point possibly. Oh poetry! She thinks. I wish someone would write some to me. Quite the little feminist she often thinks she is but doors opened and little kindnesses secretly thrill her behind the snarl and taciturnity she puts on to mix with the others of her type and accent. Cooly she has turned down so many casual requests for drinks and back she is alone with her dad’s records or walking out taking photographs for her art. She loves nobody outside her small family.