Monday, June 20, 2011

grrrr!


















i spent an hour trying to book rail tickets online with southernrailway.com

they wanted me to set up an account

i don't really want an account i just need a ticket and i'd be glad to pay

they insist i set up an account with my e-mail address and a password

then they said the password was invalid

then they asked me to set up an account again

then they put the fare up

so i'm going by bus ... it takes twice as long to get there but the booking system is comparitively open and transparent

i wonder how many customers they alienate on a daily basis ?

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Yet another 3BT

















Staring intently into a dress shop window, leaning forward on her crutches, a young woman with only one leg, but it really is a very nice dynamic sort of a leg … with a very smart high-heeled shoe at the end of it.


Just after four in the morning, in the last shadows of night on the north edge of Clapham Common, at random but in the space of only about two hundred yards, ten young foxes busily searching the short damp grass with their noses.


On a zebra crossing by Putney Station, I side-step an oncoming goddess, a modern Atalanta.  She is tall enough to look over my head and is wearing very short muddy shorts over sinewy thighs ... and a pair of muddy football boots with the laces knotted together are draped over her shoulder.

Monday, June 6, 2011

3bt

Two girls recline on a low broad wall, one combing the hair of the other whose head lays upon her lap.  Each has hair the colour of ginger biscuits.

The cafeteria in the Wellcome Collection is furnished with chairs upholstered in pastel-coloured plastics.  A little girl wearing a dress patterned with white and pink and purple hearts chooses without hesitation to sit on a pink chair.

A text message arrives from the cancer ward.  She lives and breathes and they haven’t excised her sense of humour.

Monday, May 30, 2011

in my mind's eye, some people never age

whilst elsewhere, an anonymous spaniard ages gracefully ... well its either arrested development or accelerated regression
















artwork by roxanne

3BT ...

A dilapidated bus station.  It is cloudy and a cold breeze chills the little country town.  In a small yard surrounded by a low wall, a couple of girls, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, shiver on a bench outside a pub.  One has a plaster cast on her left arm.  Maybe their parents are drinking inside.  Suddenly they leap up and dance frantically around for a couple of minutes, shaking their arms and legs and heads to imagined music, almost as if they were trying to detach them, running about the yard and jumping on the furniture with an extraordinary lack of inhibition, as if they were burning up a lifetime of joy in moments.  An English rite of spring ?

An old stone bridge with low pointed arches spans a wide chalk stream bordered with willows, its fertile waters feeding long drifts of flowering water crowfoot on which both yellow and pied wagtails run to and fro.

A text arrives in the evening from a friend I feared had died.