back, front and sideways from the jollydaze

well dear reader,

the summer holiday is almost over and it's nearly time to go back to the grind. i've been off work since the end of june and i'm having difficulty remembering just what my job is! "but what has he been up to all that time?" i hear you say , followed by "my god his hearing's good!" then "and his imagination" then "hang on, i didn't think that!" and then "..or that! but my word i have in fact just thought all of that, and as i read i find that i am in fact thinking exactly what is written upon the screen. uncanny! the lad must have someof the magick powers about him, a touch of the ol' aleister crowley, or perhaps even the great doris 'i have a john coming through, is there a john in the hall' stokes."
and all of that is true.
interesting though, isn't it? how you never hear from doris stokes any more now that she's dead. you would have thought there would have been no stopping her popping across to fill us in on the goings on in limbo. (just try and explain that grammar to an italian doctor who insists on knowing the correct names for the grammatical elements before even trying to understand what is actually being said.) that part in brackets is of course optional.
so what have i been up to then? you know i have no idea! went to gateshead, home of the now defunct Isaac Tucker &Sons brewery. Isaac was me mam's great, great granda or something. in gateshead i met the startlingly trousered concrete poet of the potteries - monsieur sol nte. amazingly flexible for someone made of concrete i thought.

best thing i've seen in years - a very polite, if not a little timid too, gallery assistant at the BALTIC centre for contemporary arts (gateshead) trying to ram a motorcycle crash helmet onto sol's be-dreadlocked bonce and them him taking off slowly and unsteadily to do three laps of the gallery space on a tiny, mini-motorbike. i think i actually guffawed, and i thought that only victorian gentlemen did that.

what else? shaved all my hair off, drank a lot of whisky, got conjunctavitis, bought an new shirt, some new dr martens and some braces a shed load of cds and a computer game. yes a game! was sick of doing little and worrying about the fact that i thought that i'd might as well doing nothing constructively and in a way that the act of doing nothing and wasting my time actually took my mind off the fact that i was in fact doing nothing and wasting my time.

been listening to a lot of old ska from the 60's and the late 70's - i'd forgotten just how much i really like it and that to has helped take my mind off the fact that i have reached a bit of a sticky bit in the biopgraphy of sol nte (which is brilliant in parts!) in fact here are the last lines:

“And the others we make by carefully cutting out pictures from the Weekly Kebab and Curry Courier and making colour photocopies of them.”

see what i mean? well perhaps not. but i haven't written anything for weeks, i keep having ideas but never get around to fleshing them out. i'm on page 50 (A5 pages) and intend to send the whole thing to roger stevens for editing. seeing as how all he does is shuffle around in his BHS plaid slippers, sucking on a clay pipe, reciting humorous verse and rushing to do the vacuuming and wash the dishes before Jill gets in from work i reckon he'd be perfect. i suppose i should ask him first though....naaaaa! (hello roger !)

"...Ken’s wife Phyllis as she looked up to see a large woolly devotional candle which seemed to be trying to steal a falafel, encouraged by a priest; another scream from Sol as he realised that that stray spark theory has in fact a solid foundation; another scream from Phyllis as she realised that that wasn’t a falafel...

I'm having trouble keeping him out of prison.

I did spent nigh on 2 months working with Alison Knowles which was wonderful, but i've written about that...Oh i spent some time with mark bloch recently, we had an amble around venice together - very nice chappie. but what else? spent a lot of time playing with the hooligans who turned 2 on the 13th august. they had a great time in england. CARPETS! they have no fear and like jumping off high things.
well the hangover is hanging on...
over and out of it


"“What the hell am I going to do with a shiny lasagne?” he asked Hector Singh, head chef. Singh wasn’t really Hector’s surname, it was Sows but he thought that Singh sounded better, considering."