Idling the time

The bliss of awakening on a Saturday morning thinking it's another work day before discovering that you can lie in.

That's such a simple and rich pleasure of life. An after a lie in, after returning to whatever dreams I had, I can get up slowly and make a coffee slowly and put on my dressing gown and sit and look out at the birds in the garden and wonder what shall I do with the two empty days stretching out before me.

Time stretches out enormously. So there's the first thing, I'll make another lino print, this time of a woolly mammoth.

I got Aimee a lino printing kit for Christmas from the art shop near work. It's my favourite shop, the London Graphics Centre near Seven Dials. It smells of pencils when you walk in, and there's a superstore like array of materials, notebooks, inks, paints, card, portlfolios, a million pencils, crayons, paint brushes, pastels. I had to go in yesterday on my lunch break because Aimee phoned and asked if I could get some gold spray paint because she wanted to spay a guitar, something to do with work.

She never really leapt into the lino cut printing, even though she'd wistfully dreamed a lifestyle where she did that sort of thing, so I bought it for her and she hasn't used it.

I have, on the other hand, borrowed it a few times and found myself heavily drawn into the process. I like to start and finish it all in a couple of hours. It's very gratifying, like a mantra, roll ink, stick lino on paper, peel lino off, roll ink, stick, peel, roll, stick, peel. And then see how it comes out. So I had the idea to do something with mammoths.

I read something on the BBC website at work about how scientists are close to being able to create a part elephant part mammoth foetus which would possibly one day lead them to being able to make a hybrid animal. Whether the ethics are right or wrong I do think it's good to be curious. The scientists came up with some sort of justification, it seems a bit far fetched but apparently, herds of mammoths will be good for global warming. They worked out that herds of mammoths used to trudge around Siberia and compact the soil with their heavy feet, and that helped the ice stay in the soil. It preserved the permafrost, keeping the heat out. That what we need apparently. So that's a good reason to have them. Even though it'll never happen because it doesn't sound very realistic considering all of the other things going on in the world.

So yesterday at work I printed off a few pictures of mammoths and chose one which I seemed just mammothy enough and now I'm going to do a lino print of it. Maybe give it a psychedelic coat or something.

I need to clean up a bit before I start on the mammoth. But because it's Saturday I can do it slowly and just enjoy the fact that I've got nothing to do, except make tea and watch Aimee bake a cake.

I invited a friend for tea, he's going to come with his five year old son. When I was in the art shop yesterday as well as the gold paint, I bought a build- it-yourself flying paper toy kit. It's so the boy doesn't get bored when we're having tea but also because I quite like paper flying toys.

Aimee said she'll bake a cake. I asked her if it would be a lemon drizzle cake, or a lemon and ginger cake, I don't know if that's a normal flavour but I was in the mood for a bit of spice, but she insisted on it being a victoria sponge. I tried to argue my point but she she claimed to have an unstoppable craving for jam and cream, I don't know if that's a normal craving or she just made it up. But I conceeded because whoever bakes the cake chooses the flavour. I'll just make the tea, some nice darjeeeling and a flying paper toy.

After that I might just sit in the garden and wonder if the mystery cat will come and what else I can occupy myself with over the next two days. A weekend seems like a very long time when you choose to do nothing.

Trip to Venus

Quick, get it down as fast as you can without stopping. That's the only rule, making sense of anything is not important. Just let it come.

I have a technique that sometimes helps me get to sleep during moments of midnight insomnia. I imagine that I become weightless and float out of bed, usually straight towards the window, who's gap, even if it's tightly shut, I can still squeeze through by turning into mist like a vampire.

Then I lie face up and feel the coolness of the night and rise towards the orange grey sky. Either side of me I can see the wall of the house, the windows and curtains of the upstairs rooms float past, the trees at the end of the garden get lower and lower, and once I pass their tips the lights of the city reveal themselves to me like the curtian raises on a stage and I turn to see London and all the landmarks glowing in the night.

It's not long before I can see the whole city and my bedroom looks a very long way down, the house barely more recognisable than roof in the street and the garden just a dark patch. I look around at the city with a giddy sense of vertigo but still go up and up until the air becomes wispy with cloud and the lights below become hazy and soon the whole city is just and orange glow under a layer of cloud.

It looks small, like it's tucked up under a duvet.

Then I go higer and higer and the air around me clears and the faint outline of the country comes into view, and the earth seems to curve at the horizon, and I turn around and lie on my back and the stars stare down at me.

Then I go faster and faster and pass the moon, whose lit side mirrors the crescent earth and the pair recede like a man and his dog. I enter the blackness and I'm free to go anywhere in the universe.

Last night I went to venus.

I'd seen it through my telescope a few nights ago. It has been around in the evening sky since christmas. I first noticed it on the drive back from the north east to London. My brother, who was doing the same journey in a different car text me to ask what the UFO was. Then over the next few weeks it got brighter and brighter as it came out from behind the sun and reached out as far as it will to the east, away from the setting sun, high in our evening sky, shining white bright like a star. Only it doen't look like a star when you get close up. I looked at through my tlelescope a few times. A couple of days ago, when it was getting lower by the evening, coming in to overtake us in our orbit before getting lost in the glare of the sun once again, I got home from work and took the telescope out. It's a heavy thing. I got it for my 21^st birthday, it's like a piece of soviet history, built with no frills and built solidly to do it's purpose and never ever break. I stood it out side in the cool air so the mirror and the metal tube could adjust and then pointed it through the skeleton trees to Venus. It looked like a crescent moon. It does when it starts to over take.

It sparkles. It was so bright, the photons had left the sun ten minutes ago, lit up the top of Venus's clouds and carried on towards the earth, towards London and my back garden and the telescope pointing through the skeleton trees and down the metal tube and bouncing off the curved mirror before being focused by the glass lens into my eye and hitting my retina where they eventually gave up their energy to me. It looked nice.

I floated to Venus. It got brighter and I turned over to see the full sunlit side of the planet. It dazzled me. I lowered myself face down until the surface was all around me like an ocean of cloud tops. Then I went down and the orange haze got thicker and thicker till it was no longer bright and it continued getting thicker and thicker and the light of the sun became gloomy and the depth embraced me like a tightly wrapped duvet, and I went down and down until it became dark and after a very long time the ghostly shapes of Venusian mountains began to loom above me and I lay in a plateau on some dried out lava bed scattered with boulders and the air was so hot and tight around me that it was making me sweat. And the air was so acidic it was making me sick. There was nobody around, no body on the entire planet except for me. The water had boiled off a billion years before and wrapped the planet in a suffocating embrace that trapped the heat and would never let it out again so that little by little, every long Venusian day the whole world got hotter and hotter, and the atmosphere thicker and thicker until it became hot enough to melt metal and the air so toxic it would dissolve any thing but stone and the pressure of all the clouds so great that it would squeeze the blood out of my head like a strawberry in a gorilla's fist.

I decided to leave Venus. It wasn't helping me sleep, I should have opted for a more pleasant destination, somewhere cold like the Oort cloud, but before I had time to leave Venus my alarm went off and I had to accept that It was going to be another day on planet earth.

The Quest for Cushions

It's important to be lazy sometimes. I used to be quite good at it. I could go for days without even getting off the sofa. I'm not as good any more, I feel guilty and obliged to go out for a walk, even if it's just a totally pointless walk. I'll go out to by milk even though I don't really drink milk. I'll get a paper and never even read it.

But once the walk is done I can get back to being lazy. There are a couple of options. I've got a sofa, there are lots of cushions, there's a massive bean bag. The bean bag is great for watching TV. It's so big it feels like you're floating.

I'll put a couple of the cushions we got in Morrocco behind me and put my feet up on the Morroccan leather pouffe which I stuffed full of old clothes that I didn't have the heart to throw away. And I'll lie there and get lazy with a coffee next to me on the Morroccan rug.

It's a red rug, the colour of red wine. I bought it in Marrakech. It has white weaving stripes running across it. I don't know what it's made of, probably camel hair, or Atlas mountain goat hair.

Marrakech was a busy place. We stayed in a riad right in the centre, a riad is a sort of traditional house with about three or four floors and a central courtyard usually with some palms or a fountain in the centre. All buildings in Marrakech are the same hight because they're not alowed to be taller than the mosques and most of them have a roof garden or terrace. And when you look around the sky line from the roof gardens you can see all the pink buildings with the mosques sticking out occasionally wailing the call to prayer. It looks still and calm. Like a flat lake of terracotta. But it's not calm beneath the surface.

When you go down stairs it all changes. If you've ever imagined a labyrinth with strange things around every corner then that's sort of what it's like. The streets are about as wide as a pavement, and they have lots of people walking down them. In between the people are mopeds driven by kids weaving along spewing fumes and noise, and in between the people and mopeds are cats and kittens.

There are kittens everywhere. The streets are mostly lined with shops and some are covered with corrugated iron so it becomes a sort of indoor labyrinth so you can't even navigate by the sun or a slow moving cloud. By the time you manage to find where you might be on the map you turn another corner and realise you're absolutely completely and utterly lost. And that's just after 10 minutes of leaving the riad.

Children shout all the time offering directions, but someone told me not to take directions because the child would follow you about all day claiming they were now employed to be your personal guide.

I don't like to admit if I'm lost so I decided to go for the challenge of finding my own way. It wasn't the right decision.

I looked at my crumpled map and reconned we was in the vast, featureless, shaded area covering most of Marrakech with the word 'Souks' typed across it. It seemed we were in an area that didn't lend itself to being put on a map.

I suggested to Aimee we try to head for the main square or the biggest mosque but by this point she she wasn't really talking to me so we just pressed on in silence.

Silence except for the shouting of haggling from the market stalls, the bleat of the motor bikes, the miaows of cats, the calls of 'boss! boss!' shouted at me with every step I took to try some orange juice or mint tea, or cakes covered in wasps, or leather products or shoes for the lady or cushions or rugs or wooden carved ornaments or silver and opal jewellery or brightly coloured enamel ceramics from Fez and Tangiers.

We turned a conrner and when the main square opened up before us it felt like we'd defeated the labyrinth. We climbed up to the highest roof top cafe and took a seat over looking the whole city and sipped mint tea served from silver teapots with long spouts. It's nice tea – although a little sweet sometimes.

We decided that we would wait a couple of days before staring the shopping because we were a bit green around the gills as far as exchange rates and haggleing skills went. The market men would sniff us out as easy prey. So we just chilled and had tea and feshly squeezed orange juice and watched idiot tourists posing for photos with a poor little monkey wearing a nappy.

Then the singing started. Wailing voices coming from loud speakers at the top of the mosque began to echo around the square, then like ripples across the city all the other mosques began to join in and the pink sky and all the pink buildings seemed to reverberate.

It gave me goose bumps.

We decided it was probably time to head back to the riad. So we returned to the labyrinth. It was no easier getting home. But no way as stressful, the thought of reclining on the rooftop with some wine and a shisa pipe helped a lot.

Over the next few days we just conceeded that we were going to get lost every time we stepped outside, it became much easier then - just relax and surrender to the endless flow of life. I was going to pay 40 for the rug, but I felt like I'd cracked the puzzle, so I got it for 35.  

Coffee times

Drink up the coffee. Mmm it's good on a Monday morning, just enough down me to perk me up and just enough left in the pot to give me something to look forward to, the taste is good. I try to cut down, not because of health reasons but because it's just a crutch. The crutches are no good. They become heavier after a while and start to weigh me down. But Monday mornings are hard to stomach without a good coffee.

I got into coffee at a young age, I remember actually wanting to be hooked on it for some weird reason, wanting to need it in order to function. I blame Agent Cooper from Twin Peaks because he loved a cup of black coffee and he seemed to get all the girls flocking round him with out even trying. So at school aged about 15 I would sit in a gloomy little break room on my own with a strong instant coffee pretending I was enjoying the taste, trying to be different.

I didn't really enjoy it and nobody paid any attention to me. I probably only tried to be a moody caffeine fiend a couple of times, but these strange little memories seem more vivid than what happened in most lessons. Except the time Richie Richardson set fire to the chemistry lab and nicked off to leave Mr Kunzer to put it out.

I remember seeing Kunz through the window as we all peered in after the lesson. He was getting the fire extinguisher and squirting it out with an intense sort of calmness. I always felt sorry for Mr Kunzer because he forgot how to write ages before when his wife died in a car crash and he had a mental breakdown. He wrote all wonky as if he was using the wrong hand. And he was a soft touch too, he had no control.

I always liked Kunz so I had no qualms the next day when he asked the class who started the fire. Everyone kept quiet as school boys do when they've been asked to snitch. Richie Robinson was off on a plane on an early school holiday or something, and had done the stunt as an end of term dare, an attempt to impress the more popular kids. I didn't like that he'd done that to poor old Kunz. So I spoke up in the silence.

Richie Robinson did it.

And that was that, I never really liked him anyway. I'd broken the classroom code but I knew I'd done right. That was the Agent Cooper coming out. All in a day's work.

In the late nineties I would sit in central Manchester with my oldest friend Alec in what was to become Starbucks, it was called the Seattle Coffee Club back then and as a coffee shop was quite a novel thing we felt pretty sophisticated sitting by the window, lounging along the breakfast bars sipping enormous americanos, looking at all the swanky Mancs walk down the posh shopping street. We enjoyed some pretty ruthless people watching, sniggering and mimicking and imagining conversations and imposing personalities onto every character that passed.

Sometimes we'd have two coffees and by the time we'd leave we were so wired on caffeine that we'd have to stop in the Moon Under Water for a pint, just to take the edge off before we got the 192 back to Longsight. Thems were the days.

A few years ago I was forced to take a temp job that I knew I'd hate. It was some sort of project support for an over-enthusiastic American woman called Carrie who worked at G4 Security -the much hated and badly managed security company who messed up at the Olympic games just two months before I worked there.

They were in the process of being taken to court by the government for breach of contract or something.

I didn't care about the job or anything about G4S, all I wanted was to be presented with a mundane task, so I could just daydream the hours away, not sit around feigning enthusiasm having to 'brain storm' ideas about the 'bigger picture'. It made my toes curl so much they almost fell off.

I hated that job. It was like going to double maths. One morning I was in such a bad mood walking along Victoria street to the office that I got into an argument with the fruit seller who was pitched out side.

He wanted a quid for a pair of battered old pears. I offered him 50p because they were all brown and soft but he was rude and I told him his fruit was rotten and some words were exchanged. I'm not very good at arguing. So I just went up stairs and did the same thing I did every morning which was go into the tea room and make a really strong cheap instant coffee with warm water so I could neck it in one go. Not because I wanted to perk myself up for a day's work, just to give me some sort of comfort, some emotional crutch to endure the drudgery of life.

And now it's Monday morning and I have to face the rush hour, the commuter train, the teeming pavements of central London and my hum drum 9-5 existence.

I can't give up coffee, it's my only hope.

Black hole epiphany

It's morning again. I sometimes sleep well, more often badly. I try to sleep, lying in the darkness trying to be oblivious to everything. This time it lasted for hours. I try breathing techniques that don't really seem to work, then I try thinking techniques that don't seem to work either. So I lay there for hours and time seems to change like it's going slower.

I read an easy-to-digest explanation of Einstein's relativty in some pop science book and it felt pretty good having my mind bent a bit. Time and motion are the same thing apparently. Things seem slower for people moving fast. Time stretches to breaking point if you orbit a black hole.

I used to like trying to bend my mind when I was younger, but now it doesn't seem to bend no matter what I try.

I remember being a student in Nottingham in the mid-nineties. I used to drink a lot back then and I went through a sort of change where I realised I wanted to be an artist of some kind and the course I was studying was totally unsuited to me and what I wanted out of life. 

I should never have enrolled on the course anyway, it was all business and engineering, but with A-level results like mine I didn't have a lot of choice. I had to choose from the crumbs, the left overs. I had to go through something that was called clearing, I don't know if that's in existence any more, or if they do it in a slightly wiser way. But for a youth in the mid-nineties, it was free to go to university and everyone did it. So I was going no matter what.

It was meant to be a decadent three years of partying where you happened to get a degree at the end. It was an extension of school but where you lived with friends and were expected to get drunk every night of the week. The degree thing was far down in the list of important factors when choosing where to go to university. What was important were things like, where were my friends going, which cities had the best student life and which universities had the best women to men ratio. That was all I cared about.

Some time around my second term I was walking to university looking around at the people and the buildings and I noticed how sometimes their shapes would all suddenly fall into an accidental composition, or just for a second everything would seem symmetrical and suddenly look beautiful. I realised I wanted to photograph all that.

But then I experienced this bizarre feeling of doom. It was like I'd just fallen into a black hole and it was all my fault and I'd been stupid. I didn't realise at the time but I'd been drinking every night for so long that I'd just experienced what I later came to know as The Fears. The alcoholic fears that some people get and some people don't.

In the midst of the fear I wondered what it was going to be like in the future, beyond my insignificant life and beyond civilisation, beyond the time the Earth's core had turned cold and the seas boiled and the atmosphere got blown away like a candle by the red giant phase of the sun. Then I imagined beyond the time of hydrogen atoms floating around in intergalactic space, wrapped up in the spiral arms of the galaxies, after they had all collapsed into stars and been fused into lithium and helium, and after the last stars had gone out and the universe had stopped expanding, and the gravitational interaction had brought the burnt out cosmos into a complete and utter standstill.

Then I walked past the university and looked longingly at all the art students coming out of the art department and I wished I was one of them.

It dawned on me that if there was nothing moving in the future universe, if everything had burnt out and stopped, surely there would be no time. If nothing moves, and there's never any change, then there is no time. Time is just something we use to measure the rate of change, it stops existing as soon as change stops occurring.

I stopped walking for a moment and honestly felt like I'd uncovered a secret that only the creator of the universe should know. I looked at the art students and wondered how I'd be able to convey this epiphany through the medium of painting or music or film-making. Or even writing. I was so excited.

The fears vanished and I found myself free of the dreadful abyss. But it was such a massive idea, and I was so excited about choosing the artistic medium through which I was going to convey this feeling of complete universal wisdom, that I decided that the best thing was to stop in the students' union bar for a pint.

The bar happened to be right next to me, so I went in to celebrate my discovery, to take the edge off the excitement, to open my mind to the endless possibilities that lay before me. I went into the sticky floored bar and ordered a pint of weak larger in a plastic pint glass for a pound and sat and imagined what future historians would make of this amazing day. How they would consider it a defining moment in our evolution like when the wheel first turned, or fire became tamed, or the first hand print was painted in the cave. I sat an drank on my own watched all students come and go.

Then after a couple of pints I felt hungry so I went and had a doner kebab.

I looked up the street on google earth the other day. I went right in there on the street view and wandered around trying to remember places but everything was different. All the buildings were different and I recognised nothing. It was so long ago now it may as well just have been a dream.

How to see a ghost

The sky outside is black and I can hear sirens from a police car or ambulance outside, it hurtled past in an instant. Now it's just the music coming from the speakers behind me. It's beginning to warm me up a bit. It's good to write with music on. I find that music sometimes changes the rhythm of my typing. Then it becomes a little easier to think and type because the music carries you along.

Of course it has to be the right sort of music. Nothing too alarming. Some arhythmic banshee screaming would never do. I like the scream of a banshee, don't get me wrong. I think a good spook should always have a place in some haunt or other, but when i'm trying to type a thousand words without stopping it's best not to come down with the heebie jeebies and have my wits stolen by some long faced spinster wailing in my face with a semi-transparent robe all flowing about her. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to find a ghost lurking around every corner, well maybe not every corner. I'm often carrying hot drinks or a lovingly made dinner, but just the occasional corner would be ok.

Maybe about once a month, just to keep me on my toes. I would see it and after regathering my heebie jeebies and wits I would be somehow reassured as to my place in the grand old cosmos, and feel a little as though when life stops it's not necessarily all over. Of course that depends on whatever my idea of what ghosts are at the time. My ideas change.

Sometimes I think they're visitors from a different dimension, and other times I think they're just residues of life energy forces or whatever that have gotten into the fabric of the curtains, or the fabric of spacetime and stained it a bit, and some people, I'm not talking tv magicians or mulletted shiny shirt wearing mediums, but some real people, due to some quirk of hard-wiring in the psyche they were probably born with, can see these stains like they're echoes just replaying over and over and the ghost isn't a conscious entity itself, it's just a trace, an echo. So what ever my current view that I'd be holding of what ghosts are, at the time of walking round a corner with out a hot drink or a lovingly cooked dinner in my hand, I'd feel an initial sense of startlement and then a deep sort of reassurance.

I might even attempt to communicate with the ghost. I might offer to deliver the message or help them in some way, I would of course expect something in return. I'd want to ask it a couple of quick questions about the after life, like what happened after it died, who it gets to hang around with and what's the point of it all. It might be nice, I might learn something. Of course this would only work if didn't get too freaked out. 

I've been scared out of my wits before. There was a time I was alone at home on a Saturday night a few years ago, I was doing a painting and having a pleasant time, it was when I used to smoke spliffs so I felt really into it. I needed something to wipe the brush or something, so I went - painting and brush in hand, into my bedroom. Now this was a ground floor flat, and my bedroom was at the back with gardens outside. I'd left my window open to get fresh air or whatever, and when I went into the bedroom, with painting and brush in hand, there was a man standing behind my door.

I looked at him, I was standing right next to him. He was looking at me, sort of surprised. He was a black man with some sort of skin pigment problem like he had lots of white or bleached patches on his cheeks. I wondered who he was. I tried to think if I knew him. Perhaps he was a friend of my brother's, who I lived with, and he was playing a joke or something. Then it dawned on me that the man standing next to me was a burglar. I shat myself.

I try to imagine what I should have done, or what the version of me that I thought I was would have done, but I suppose you only really know yourself when you're put into an extreme situation and you look at your instinctive reaction. I didn't really shit my self - figure of speech, but I did find it hard to get my words out when I asked - who the fuck are you?

Anyway I scarpered back into the living room and called the police. He'd scarpered fortunately before I returned to the bedroom with an adrenaline fuelled claw hammer in my hand. It's funny because by the time the police arrived I didn't feel stoned at all. It's also funny because he'd missed the little bag of weed lying on my bedside table and instead took a 35mm camera, a 1970s seconda watch and a brass ring I'd made out of a bit of pipe when I was 14 after I'd read the hobbit. I thought I'd have that ring forever. I still hope it'll turn up one day in the roots of a recently felled tree.

So I don't know how I'll react when I see the ghost around the corner. I hope I manage to maintain some sort of savior faire so that I can engage it in a meaningful conversation, but you never know, maybe I'll just panic and run away.