the whole bloody lot

For the umpteeth time, the multi-coloured proprietress of kinky-cultural site Bearded Eloise has been kind enough to get excited by a bit of this is my england poesy to stick it up at her place. This time she went for the recently hatched BOMB THE PAST, a short tale of t-shirts and memory decay. Cheers, my dear.


Any road up, do take the time to have a gander at Emily's other wares. She's recently been encouraging her readers to send in tales of their various sexual peccadilloes. Whips, chains, the whole bloody lot, as someone once said. If that's your bag, you should have a look, I suppose.

NOT JUST FOR BREAKFAST

persistent

so there's somebody who loves

going back to the same wall

again and again:

he writes a slogan,

it gets painted over - 

so he writes another one, 

waging war on global capital

down an alleyway in Camden

PROPS FROM/TO WASAPIX

WasaCom is a firm that aims to combine Swiss quality with Italian creativity and is active in multimedia content, web design and related fields. They operate a network of nice-looking blogs, including the picture-aggregation site WASAPIX.COM. This now recommends this is my england, describing it as "one of the best UK blogs around" and commending this site for its "positively colored urban visual emotion".

this is my england is happy to return the compliment, suggesting that readers have a good look around the SITUATIONALLY SUBJECTIVELY SUGGESTED goodies there.

I blame the parents

Three kids. About twelve or thirteen years old. Wearing the immaculate uniforms of a good school. Walking up a hill, three abreast. The pavement is narrow and the road to their left is frantic with morning rush hour traffic. To their right is a tall and impenetrably thick hedge. When a man comes into view, heading downhill towards them on his way to the station, there is confusion. Briefly frozen, they don't know what to do. The man realises that these daughters of affluent families expect him either to take his chances in the traffic or to press his good overcoat into the wet leaves, sharp twigs and spider webs of the hedge. It has not occurred to them that one of their number should step aside. It's their pavement. It's their world.

your little world

What is your world?

According to British Gas, you live on a tiny planet that consists only of your house and its garden. Your home, it seems, is your world. The vast darkness of deep space separates you from the least distant of your fellow human beings, who live in their own entirely detached homes. There don't seem to be any worlds on which people have near neighbours - in terraced streets, in blocks of flats, or in big Victorian houses chopped into bedsits. Instead, having been freed long ago from the debilitating confines of public ownership, the dynamic and wildly successful utility company pays its handsome dividends entirely by serving a solar system of customers living prosperously in splendid isolation.

How did you end up so far away from everybody else? How did interplanetary distances open up between the former components of defunct 'communities', 'neighbourhoods' and 'society'? Did you (or your parents) rise up in the glorious dawn of the property-owning, share-owning democracy? Did you get on your bike in the pursuit of betterment, peddling away from slackers who lack the moral fibre of aspiration? 

Buy your own planetoid and stay there. Shrink the state. Treat adults like adults and stop nannying them with addictive, enfeebling public services. Volunteering and public-spiritedness will fill the vacuum when it comes to the genuinely needy and the genuinely vital tasks. After all, it works across the pond, doesn't it?

Mr. Natural says

BOMB THE PAST

put some music on, she said,
choose something, she said,
but it was hard -
a million albums
a billion EPs
a trillion twelve inches
a zillion CDs,
and my hand
closed over her round brown breast, and
my knuckle knocked
the thick ring through the nipple,
and I think
I drew her smoke
over my teeth,
and I guess
I passed her cocaine
over my heart,
and I know
she was quietly bad-tempered
in the cold, disconnected bedroom,
but
I'm not sure
how much of this
is made of words said later,
like how much of it comes
from telling the tale -
the persistence of memory
slides as my clock melts
and the only thing left
is the slogan
on the t-shirt
from under her bed
that I still have
even now:

BOMB THE PAST

a girl at university

yearning in the motion of her hips
dullness in the lightness of her words
brightness in the quickness of her mouth
madness in the mildness of her brow

distance in the violet of her eyes
purpose in the focus of her gaze
money in the feeling of her touch
diamonds on the soles of her shoes

BUM