I don’t know if you do this too, but in my head, I self-mythologise so much that I make an arthouse indie film out of everything I do in my head. I’m not always the protagonist of this movie, I can’t be, really, because I’m not in any of the shots, but I almost always collect small moments like reels of film and store them on the back shelves of my brain to run in front of my eyes in moments later.
It can be anything. The way the sun catches a leaf that turns green gold waving in the wind. Lightning caught in a summer cloud. My friends laughing. The way the lasers in the club cut through the smoke. Splatter of vomit on wet tarmac. Evening gloaming turning the sky royal blue before it goes fully dark. The dog running. The wind rising. The rain coming in heavy fits and bursts as though the clouds themselves have split and are letting their entire contents fall in one go.
On Saturday, I saw two Kites free wheeling by the tesco garage. Their red-brown bodies catching the drifts of warm air to rise before circling back down. Their black fingered wings outstretched above my head. I stood for a moment by the crossing squinting up at them. The autumn light too fresh and too bright to stare clearly. Last weekend somebody burned down the barn full of hay on the path between my village and the next one. The air still smells like bonfires. I walked up through the bridleway past Wastie’s, which now stands like a relic behind the brush. Windows smashed through, and all the roof tiles robbed. Turning right, I catch a glimpse of the banked fields in the valley below, green-golden in the morning, and the shimmering spectre of Oxford catching all the sun on the opposite side.
Then I went and made a tit out of myself at a party.
At the same time, a miniature tornado tore through the villages back home. It brought down a tree by the railway bridge that’s been there for hundreds of years. It ripped off limbs and scattered them. By the garage you can see two holes in the hedge on either side of the A40 where the twister had carved its way through them. Sometimes I wonder if that’s where my brain went, careering up from London on the M4. Ripping down trees and causing mass destruction.
Yesterday morning the rain fell on London like an avalanche. Trying to make up for the sins of the night before I imagine – trying to scour them away. I woke up anxious and embarrassed, the fretful wind serving no other purpose but to reflect that all back at me. It rained all day until I decided it was time to go home. Then the sun appeared, casting a cold glow over a sunday. The end of an October sky, We’re no longer in Daylight savings. Why is it called daylight savings in the summer? There’s so much daylight you don’t really need to save any of it up. It’s now we need to save it, isn’t it? Dark at 3. Cold. Awful. Dark mornings, dark days. Anyway.
Sitting on the bottom deck of the Oxford Tube we crawled out of London. I say we, and I mean myself and my fellow passengers. All Sunday weary. I forgot my headphones so I stared out the window, looking at nothing much. Berating myself for being a fool, telling myself off for berating myself at all. At High Wycombe we burst out of the chalk cut through and there I was faced with the full reality of the sun. After the storm, and my own personal bout of morning after anxiety, it rested on the horizon gold as pirate treasure. Its edges glowing. The Thames valley rolled away in layers, here green, there gold, here brown, there blue. A view I’ve seen countless times, and yet it never manages to stop being gorgeous. Whatever the weather.
Gazing out of the window I thought about the fact that everything really, is temporary. Our whole lives are meaningless little flashes, a single journey of the sun from east to west. Golden moments, stormy ones, cold ones, warm ones, lonely ones, stupid ones, embarrassing ones. As long as we’re hurting no one, does it really matter what we get up to at 01:18 on a night no one’s going to remember in 20 years but you? Does it even matter if everyone does remember it? Not really, not if you’re honest with yourself it doesn’t. Do you need to file it away in your own personal shame drawer to drag out and beat yourself up with? No. So why do we do it?
I thought about the kites I’d seen on Saturday. Hunting for carrion on the side of the A40. Circling the roofs of the houses on the other side of the hedge. Catching the light. I thought about the fact that embarrassment feels so human – and that all we really want ourselves is a similar feeling. To catch warm drafts of air and rise above it all, to get the big picture view, to see the road we walk as a ribbon through the landscape. To see its beginning and its end in as much focus as the stretch we walk now. To understand the totality of it. But that is the gift of birds, I guess, and not something we’ve access to.
As the day drew itself to a close I decided to consign my antics to the past and seal them in there. Tomorrow is always new.
While gazing, a thought wound its way through :
There’s nothing left of this weekend but a sun splintered into four by double glazed coach windows, the mist gathering over the undulations of the Thames Valley, and the unblemished dome of an autumnal sky. Nothing left of the weekend’s storms but a few tatters of cloud at the bottom of the horizon; and even these have been turned pink and gold by the sun’s retreat.
Goose FM 