Today a very good friend sent me this image and article from the Guardian.:

Guardian Article

They used to work with Blast Theory and so did I, as you probably know. And of course it resonated with the project, The Thing I’ll Be Doing For The Rest Of My Life, a commission by the Aichi Triennale - Awakening.

In 2013, I went to Japan to make this work, while everyone else remained in the UK. Matt had gone the previous year to interview fishermen who had been in the tsunami, in 2011 and to see the affects for himself of the devastating disaster. Perhaps as a result it is closer to my heart than almost any other project.

We pulled the fisherman’s 20-30 tonne trawler out of the water with fifty volunteers. We used similar slides to help ease the move. Our gloves were white. I like to think some of the same people volunteered here, or at least were in the pool. Or perhaps when our volunteers saw this article in the press today they remembered and felt a connection.

Here is a group of people pushing a train off of a woman in Japan from the same year.

You can read all about it the work on Blast Theory’s website.

The Thing I'll Be Doing For The Rest Of My Life

https://www.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/the-thing-ill-be-doing-for-the-rest-of-my-life

And my writing about the project is here.

https://thethingillbedoingfortherestofmylife.co.uk/

I guess it could be called a blog. For me it was a central part of the work, not the comms, not the story exactly, more the currents stirring underneath it. It feels like a significant turning point in my writing.

(Image by Jonny Goode)

This happened a couple of months ago and I’ve been waiting for my moment. It’s been redacted so that the only names here are my former name and that of my dad.

-

So that I wouldn’t be caught off balance, I had a set of questions, a whole script in fact of how I thought the call would go, so that I was fully prepared – see I Don’t Know If You’re Alive in my substack:

.

But I needed a different script.

-

I find the number of the home and call. I get through to the main company number and not the specific home and listen to the options.

STE-0033 Call 1 Transcript.

“Thank you for calling St Helens Care Village

Please listening carefully to the following options as they have recently changed.

Dial 1 for Hazel

Dial 2 for Spruce

Dial 3 for Pine

Dial 4 for Beech

Dial 5 for Poplar

Dial 6 for Chestnut

Dial 7 if you would like to come and live with us

Or please dial 8 for reception

To repeat this menu please press star.”

I hear twelve repeats of beep, beep, and hang up.

Immediately I realised this is a good rehearsal of my nerves and slightly laugh at my incompetence.

Dial 7 jumps out at me.

-

Between this call and the next I ask to borrow a zoom audio recorder from a friend. I hadn’t prepared properly and needed to get more production on the moment.

The technical set up

a. Set up the zoom recorder – green velvet cushion from the sofa is placed, comfortably at one end of the large table near the sockets.

b. Battery life good in both items, fully charged – the recorder and my phone for the call.

c. The zoom is switched on - its’ stereo microphones face towards my phone.

d. The phone is switched on and placed with its’ dual stereo speakers facing towards the zoom.

e. Volume is turned up to maximum on my phone.

f. Phone screen is set to the keypad ready to dial.

g. Previous test of how to record on the zoom complete – look out for not pressing record properly, double check.

h. Press speaker mode on my phone, so that I can hear and record whoever picks up. And our conversation.

i. Press the red button twice to record - if the red light is steady, it is in record mode. If it is pulsing, the recording is on pause before the call.

j. Dial number.

STE-002 Call 2 Transcript.

“Welcome to Blossom Care Group

Please select carefully from the following five options.

To enquire about living with us please press 1.

To join our team please press 2.

If you are a current team member or would like to speak with HR press 3.

If you have a finance or pay role query press 4.

For the estates or IT teams press 5.

To speak to the estates team, press 1.

For the IT team press 2.”

I press 1.

“You’ve reached the voicemail of the Estates Team of Blossom Care Group. Please leave a short message after the beep.”

Beep.

-

I’m just about to leave a short message when my front doorbell rings.

Phew! I’m obviously not ready yet, I needed another practice.

I press the red button to stop recording.

A few minutes later after having made of a cup of tea I sit down and steady myself.

a. Press record.

b. Dial the number on my phone.

c. Press speaker mode.

d. It rings.

e. I get through.

STE-004 Call 3 Transcript.

“Thank you for calling St Helens Care Village

Please listening carefully to the following options as they have recently changed.

Please Dial 1 for Hazel

Dial 2 for Spruce

Dial 3 for Pine

Dial 4 for Beech

Dial 5 for Poplar

Dial 6 for Chestnut

Dial 7 if you would like to come and live with us.

Or please 8 for reception.

To repeat this menu please press star.”

I press 8.

Six beeps follow – beep beep, beep beep, beep beep.

I clear my throat, hem hem.

“Good morning, it’s St Helens Nursing Home, it’s Rachel speaking can I help.”

“Yeah, I wonder if you can. I’ve got a rather unusual question. My dad Brian Rowbottom, I’m his daughter. And er.”

“OK.”

“And I wonder if he’s still resident with you?”

“He is yes.”

“OK, he’s still alive, my God, he made it through Covid.”

My voice has gone immediately horse like I have a sore throat.

“Oh gosh, it’s been a while then, yeah.”

They laugh nervously.

“Yes, it has, it has.”

“Wow. Wow. He’s still with you OMG, that’s amazing. I had no idea, I er, wasn’t involved when he was transferred into the home. And yeah, it’s a long story as family things often are.”

“Ah. What’s your name sorry?”

“Julie, Julie Rowbottom.”

This is my name from when I was a child.

“OK.”

They sound a little unsure.

“I’m his daughter, and erm, I haven’t seen him since er, just before he went into the home.”

“OK.”

“And his wife Anne died. And but, er, Wow, wow. How’s he doing? “

I am particularly high pitched now.

“Yes, so he’s doing?”

Yes, he lives in, on the top floor with us, cause obviously as you could remember,

it’s split into three floors.”

“Yep.”

I lie as I’ve never visited.

“And he has a lot of social interaction with people.”

“Yep.”

“He had a special chair to like help his body, so he’s nice and comfortable all the time. But yeah, he’s um doing well, the last time I seen him. He comes down to our events and like sour singing sessions or our music sessions.”

“Yeah, yeah, wow incredible. Wow.”

“Do you live local?”

“No, I don’t I live in Sussex.”

“OK.”

“So, I live a long way away. But erm I have to think about whether I can come visit or whether I send something to him.”

“Yeah, of course you can. There’s no, there’s never any visiting times here you see.

It’s always an open-door policy anyway here for people to come in for family.”

“Yeah, yeah OK, yeah that’s amazing.”

“Did you want the address here?”

“I think I’ve got it.”

“OK.”

“Er well er thank you and your name is Rachel?”

“It is yes, yes. I work downstairs as a part of the admin team.”

“Thank you, Rachel, so much. Wow, wow, I just thought. Wow. That’s Amazing, that’s amazing news.”

“Yes, yeah I bet.”

“Yeah. Thank you so much, thank you so much. I don’t really know what to say.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I’m a bit stunned, I’ll be in touch.”

In the background I can hear them quietly say - yes, I can imagine.

“Thank you, um thank you.”

“Your so welcome, take care goodbye.”

-

After an unclear length of time, I call my friend as promised.

Finally, I’ve decided to pull together The Middle Room writing about my dad, from fact information, my memory of events of what has happened or what I rem ember to be the case and fictional moments/ imaginative possibilities that have filled in some of the gaps in a way.

Let’s say it’s a book, I’ll see as I revisit, re-write and compile.

Talking to a friend yesterday about the structure of their zine and why they are doing it, it struck me – ah yes, why am I doing this and what are the pieces that I want to include.

Either I do it or I put it away – put up or shut up Ju, you know that’s the deal.

So, I wrote a rough list of what to include, these may be chapter headings, it feels like they could be and my reasons for doing it. And going through my notebooks I found two other versions of this already and a set of reasons why.

It may have a vaguely chronological architecture, what it was then to what it is now, it may dart back and forth.

I have given myself a timeline and a deadline which I have plotted out in my calendar. And a set of work I need to do.

There is a whole stack of unfinished/unprocessed writing, some I have published and some not. There are letters and text conversations I have transcribed, and phone calls which I haven’t. There are photos I might look at and there is a book, the last present which my dad bought me. Here it is:

To complete this work, amongst other things, there is a piece of my history’s puzzle I need to sort out.

The following writing, which has sat unfinished for quite a while now revealed this to me. It jumps about a lot, especially who is who.

When I came across this clip, I immediately stopped in my tracks. It is a recording or documentation of a piece of choreography a friend of mine made, with another dancer I don’t know while on residency in Japan. This is improvisation, maybe contact improvisation, I have not asked them about this, but I know that there are rules or decisions or arrangements that have been previously made before they began dancing. I have a lot of questions and gaps in my knowledge. For me this isn’t important here.

Watching it I could feel, can feel, something very powerful happening. Like certain pieces of music, I have to overwhelm myself with, remaining saturated for as long as I can, as loud as I can in headphones. This was/is the same.

Obsessive observation needed to happen.

Stay focused Ju, let your body feel what your eyes are getting a sense of. I could get strategic about it and write my noticing’s along a timeline. Instead, I wrote down impressions and hints of things it was trying to show me. There is some order to it.

WATCH VIDEO

Charlie Morrissey Video

You come into the room, onto the stage, arm raised, I am here, reaching out towards another, whoever you are. And then another comes in, a ghost, a fraction of a second later and a slither of time behind you. She is your shadow, protecting you from the outside, showing a care, protecting the inside.

Bird arms take off, the arc from wing tip to wing tip, a moment of drifting, cruise control, floating on an air current. Then the tips drop down with a flip at your wrists and the flight is over. Did you ever take off?

Scooping up invisible water from an invisible pool, looking down, no sound, no wetness, a dry arc of your left hand, a libation of loving air which you scoop up onto your chest. Now distracted by something off somewhere, you turn your head to the left and find your spot. It comes with a lunge-like stance and repeating three times you reposition your head – you feel the position, without thinking you sense if it is what you want it to be, oiling your joints, like you have a mechanical bird head, feeling the pleasure, the twist of your vertebrae, your neck rotates as you look over your shoulder.

You both look into the pond, one over the shoulder of the other. There is something to notice, one of you apes the other, hoping to sense it too – it’s reassuring to you that the look is worth having. Ultimate love.

Somehow you are behind now, you have changed places, I didn’t see that happen. And each of you could be each other and the circular nature of it all whips up.

Did I skip a whole section here? Is this how it ends, doing what?

I WATCH THE VIDEO AGAIN AND RECORD THIS INTO MY NOTES

Bumping into the air.

Hands.

I was almost saving your life; you were almost changed into a rising statue.

Watching you, there is a tilt of your head towards something I cannot see.

This is a strange new place.

I am safe on your back; you are strong under the tree.

My head turns. There is nothing off-balance, no weight.

I will always help wash you, I will always sleep on your back.

We’ve got each other in such a light way. Your head slides left and right.

From the top of your head, you draw a line down across your face. Arms out, ears turned to listen to something. You wanted to fly and take off the ground. I wanted to help you. We both changed our minds. Instead, we scoop water up. I don’t remember what you said to me, but we dipped down and rose up for a moment like a co-joined monument. Then I looked away, off into the distance.

Then behind and then in front.

Watching my body spasms –like I want to join in, it is remembering something from before.

-

AGAIN

It’s a solid shape, the space that you’re both in and as you move about you carve it out from inside. I think of Rachel Whiteread in reverse. I am watching you on my computer screen. The outer volume remains with a curious network of empty gaps inside. Some solid pieces float about where your arms and legs didn’t sweep through or close down a movement into your body. This is a mould.

Can you see this?

You feel no drag or resistance. You breathe normally as you move about in this air colour jelly. All that is left is your void.

-

I DECIDE TO WATCH IT AGAIN AND DRAW THIS TIME

Here are some of the drawings.

-

What were you thinking during all of this? All these years. I will ask you. Will I? No, I don’t think so, that feels unnecessary and impossible, cruel even. Would you answer? Will you answer? Did I forget something here? Do I know I have lost some thoughts? You can’t tell that you can’t tell this, can you? She would have supported you given what? I remember her enough. She has a hovering touch, a supportive guide, not quite making contact, but there just in case and to draw out the shapes as you pass through.

THE VIDEO STOPS

This is not it exactly.

Under the table I drag my left foot out to the side and try to stretch my leg, my knee still hurts and won’t do it.

WATCH AGAIN JU, ANOTHER PASS

I put my hand out towards you – I am welcoming the air but not you. I go to pull the cord and then we both remember something, there is a sharp twitch.

Here let me try it you say.

I notice your practical workers clothes made of natural materials. The blue colour matches your blue eyes and grey hair. My eyes are blue too.

Always looking down into the pool, always staring far beyond what anyone else can see.

I am looking off, you are looking at me, to guide me or accompany me somewhere softer than movement. I am the yoke, a piece of invisible fabric that sits across the top of your back and shoulders – everything amply falls and flows from here. Let me come close and help carry the load, like the yoke of an aeroplane guiding a plane on course.

I WATCH ONE MORE TIME

I feel my leg under the table again as you walk in.

And the space between my arms and the side of my body as I stretch down.

I feel where the shoes elastic is too tight over the arch of your foot and I touch my foot remembering, feeling like you are on the other side of time. I imagine helping to place your feet into your slippers. We’ve both grown old at the same time but not together.

I can see your clean fingernails, your delicate wrists and forearms.

You must be about ninety now. I am sixty-one. I assume you’re dead, but I’m not sure.

-

Unexpectedly the grip of my dad surfaced when I was watching and then writing about my friend Charlie Morrissey’s piece of dance. I started thinking about Alzheimer’s disease.

I don’t know if he’s alive and I’ve decided to call the home.

I love this work and I love how Charlie dances – check them out here:

www.charliemorrisey.com

The other dancer is Kirstie Simpson

Before I get into it, maybe you’ve wondered or not, if I’m seriously committed to writing as I’ve not showed up here for a while? Possibly you’ve not wondered this, but I have certainly worried about it or how to get a visible flow going. I am guessing neither have you wondered where is she and what it she doing with herself? This piece may explain some of how I spend some of my time, not a lot, but a little. And still there is the rest of the time, what the hell is she doing? Yes, what the hell am I doing or what should I call it? I’ve been telling people I’m summering, by which I mean taking things slow, really slow and have been working on repairing a torn meniscus which has dictated my physical speed and played havoc with my mind. There has been the garden which I’ve only just learnt how to go out into and trying to decide whether my studio is in the attic or outside or both? Anyway, I’m sure these things will reveal themselves to me and I will make some decisions soon.

And so, there is this, Dungeons and Dragons.

Since around the spring of 2023, I’ve been playing Dungeons and Dragons or D&D, once a week, almost every week with Frank my son and a few other friends. I don’t think there is anything else I do so consistently except some basic bodily functions and roll around with ideas.

Currently on Monday evenings, with some variance, we go from 5.30pm – soft intro, gathering, some eating, the game starts at 6pm and runs until 9pm. My son is the instigator and Dungeon Master, the person who sets the scene, holds the world, controls the game, who knows the rules, deciding when to be flexible, a bit like a referee – sometimes based on previous behaviour of the player or the stage of the world and game play we are at.

Now I am Ajana B which to my ears is a bit LA with grilles and medallions, but I’m not this alas. I live for the hunt of evil, to protect my colleagues and to serve the emperor. Judge me if you wish, as I once judged D&D, thinking this is not for me, it’s not my thing, I don’t relate to the people who play it. But once you lift the stone, or at least when I lifted my stone, there was life hiding in the shallows, swimming about, strange but alluring, in a way from the outside I could only gawp at in disbelief.

So, I want to share some of the things that have grabbed me, for a little more insight into how I spend some of my time whilst I am summering.

1. Laughing

So much that my abs get a full work out each week playing. Most memorably when I suggested and then was shot up Dover Cliffs as if I were an arrow by another player - the details are a bit blurry; all I remember is the person being very large and the pain from laughing so hard. My rolls of the dice were so bad that any attempts to get up the face in a usual way were totally exhausted.

At the time I was an English/French nun called Sister Augustine Clementine with a billowy robe, which is how I chose to be a nun in the first place. Underneath I wore leather armour and underneath that I had tattoos which I kept hidden of the 10 Black Commandments of the Black Scripture. I wore knuckle dusters around my neck like Lee Miller in World War 2. It is the 100-year war.

I never knew there could be so much fun in fantasy.

2. Surprise

Just as life is full of surprises so too is D&D. I don’t know what the Dungeon Master has up his sleeve in terms of twists or turns of plot, some drawn lightly in advance, a lot improvised, small or large, they keep on coming. There is often a tell when we’re about to go off the deep end by the look on Frank’s face – a sparkle in his eyes, a knowing grin or a change in his voice, stretching words endlessly, staccato-ing them out, moving his hand about with a sassy curl and flourish. But what is coming is a surprise and more the sweet for it.

The forest Faye or fairy scene is a particular favourite of mine from our Pirates of the Bloody Seas campaign where my son started moving around the room, performing some wild words and not stopping. It almost went on too long. We all started to look at each other like he had dropped something. We were whipped up into a trance and transported to a scary and mesmerizing realm, where we didn’t know what was going on or whether we had little control of our characters.

Surprise comes from other players too. Suddenly, a dramatic impulse takes hold and they rush, to attempt an impossible kill, or jump, or save, or to perform an action hard to describe. They jump in a vehicle to drive having never driven before and we race across the landscape like we’re in Mad Max. Are they acting out of character? Maybe. Are they being more of their worldly selves, possibly? Or are they fully inhabiting this fictional space, as the fictional person they have created? It could be all of these things?

This is not LARPING – Live Action Role Play – where you are given a role to play – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_action_role-playing_game nor is it a Re-enactment, again where you take a part, usually in a battle that needs to exist.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_reenactment

In D&D the characters exist because we or I have decided they need to exist.

One of my favourite re-enactment art works is Jeremy Deller’s Battle of Orgreave – this is the video documentation of the project. It’s very special, a landmark piece of art, I recommend watching it.

More recently Victoria Melody’s theatre piece includes re-enactment. It is called Trouble Struggle Bubble and Squeak. https://victoriamelody.com/projects/trouble-struggle-bubble-and-squeak-tour

But they are not games and the architecture of D&D is a thing of legend. The longest running campaign is currently at forty-four years. The longest running session was two hundred and nine hours.

Back to the plot.

With expert steer from the Dungeon Master, we create our characters, choose their class, devise their background story which usually or ideally explains how they come to be here now and what drives them. And what they look like.

I was once Kaurel Boneweaver, in our pirate’s campaign. I could pull my spine out spontaneously and use it as a whip, while another spine would immediately replace it without any lag. This still shocks and delights me to think that I was once her and that she came from me.

3. Location – symmetrical, asymmetrical, co-location and Community.

Once in a blue moon, when the stars align, we are all playing in person. Now, one person is always online, they’ve moved recently and often it’s two or more people online. The Dungeon Master is at university for another year, so in term time he’s a face on a screen. I always play at home. It’s just the way it is. I love watching my friends peer into the screen, in the same place as the week before. When they look closely at the screen or are very animated it is almost like they are in the room at the end of the table. I know they’re not, but it’s important to try to minimise the membrane of being in more than one space and lines of sight bother me. One friend always has a blurred background on, and you can hear the gulls out on the street and see great snacks disappearing out of reach. The friend who has just moved, moves around a lot and sometimes they’re stretching or eating a Pot Noodle or is that an Itsu meal in a pot? I love it, it’s another set of worlds or glimpses.

Regardless of locations it’s social, a community, a regular connector come what may, however you are, unless you just really can’t make it. To be somewhere with others when you are feeling low energy, tired and low, is very, very, welcome. (If you can’t make it sometimes your character is jockeyed by someone else and they get to decide what your character gets up to. When you come back the following week, the person who has jockeyed explains what you’ve been up to.)

Frank is very knowledgeable about what type of communities the game appeals to, and he is the most gracious and welcoming host to everyone.

At the start of each session, we generally check-in with each other before we play, not a formal check in per se and between some of the sessions, the DM will call us to see how we think our character is doing, how connected to the own background story we are feeling and how we can evolve or improve this. He will make suggestions, he has been working on it and researching history. It’s a huge amount of care and commitment; Frank is very good at this. I’m not sure if it’s usual to do this and the edges of the world bend, the game gets a fresh injection, and our characters are re-invigorated.

4. Blending and Blurring

So, as Frank checks in on us and the boundaries soften, our serious play and devotion to where fact and fiction, the real and the imagined meld take on a bigger significance, and I feel the impact of what taking part in culture can do. It makes me think about wellbeing – improving my mental health, how I deal with certain elements in my life or personality quirks. Our real-life personalities and those of our fictional self’s bleed. And there is a bleeding between our last characters and current ones.

Often a sense of the day comes in – if it has been a bit all over the place I might self-report this as a kind of warning – a pre-emptive apology for what I might do. But everything is ok, everything is mostly allowed.

There are changes of pace and natural hiatus in the game and this is helping me to rest more in my real life because I must rest and hang out in D&D. And I got restless and bored, now a bit less. These are transferable skills I know that might seem odd, but I totally believe there are real world benefits to playing the game for me. Ah she is playing D&D, I hear you think and this is what she now believes right! Well yes!

5. Surrender and Safety, Steep Learning and Stamina

I have no responsibility here to set up or run the game, to know all the rules. Here I am a participant, and it is quite a relief. I will never be an expert and some of the pleasure is in ultimately letting go. Bring me back to the fold Frank, scold me for my brain that cannot hold it all. Three hours is a long time at the end of the day and I need some back up to engage.

This is a world where no matter what goes on for the real me, in my real world, this feels emotionally safe for me, even with extreme jeopardy and this is very compelling to me. I can be whoever I want/need to be whenever I want/need to. I’m not always the centre of my universe, I don’t always have to fully take part, I can get out of my head and show up however I am – it’s marvellous! Originally, I had some kind of host anxiety, tidy the house, make nice food, is the toilet clean? And I worried about not knowing enough, getting it wrong, fucking up for other players. But I’ve completely relaxed into it, even though I forget the rules, float about sometimes and don’t always make the best choices. This is what’s changed for me. Maybe I’ve brought that to D&D as well.

Only this week I bought a huge, metre tall, powdered wig in our Warhammer 40K Campaign. Frank described it, once I had bought it, as having a cuckoo clock embedded that goes off all the time, outside of my control. And when I’m not wearing it, I must carry it about, in the special bag I spent the last of my money on. What was I thinking? A bad purchase, I’ve been here before. Now I am trying to imagine how it can be used as a weapon or an object to persuade with. And yes, you did read that correctly – Warhammer – those ugly metal like creatures that resemble chewed up silver metal bubble gum. I hate the way they look, but I am a human in this campaign and try not to imagine them when I’m playing.

For a while life cannot nip at my heels and I love it here.

The Wider Ranch Saloon – Event 5

Saturday 15^th August – My House In Brighton

6-9pm

Frank and I will be running the next Wider Ranch Saloon together at our house in Brighton – dates. Frank will talk about how to play, his process, character building, game player care and I will talk about the unknowns I found through playing. It will be a bit of a conversation, with questions and chance to try a few moves out.

We hope you come along if you can. You don’t need to be a D&D nerd, or a gamer at all, but you might be. You might like performance, story or are interested in how taking part in culture mirrors or blurs with the rest of your life. Or you might want to connect with other people. And in the classic Wider Ranch style, there will be vegan nibbles and drinks and something to go home with.

Tickets are limited so please email me – jurowfarr@gmail.com to book a place – it costs £15.

We look forward to welcoming you into our home.

So Deeply Hospitable is a phrase from the 2024 book by Olivia Laing – The Garden Against Time, In Search Of A Common Paradise.

This month’s event is called I’ll Let Myself Out. It’s based on an idea that I could read to you while you’re in bed falling asleep or relaxing at home and then I will discreetly disappear.

I’ve been thinking about it for a while, going to people’s homes when invited, to read to them as they are in bed at night or lying down during the day, relaxing or resting or recovering. This has some challenges I realise, trust, boundaries and privacy for example, but they are not too difficult to consider and I am trustworthy and respectful and very practical too. Right now, I’m not being read to live, although I listen to a lot of podcasts - it’s a little bit similar to me, not the same, they are my washing up companion. Sometimes they read to me in the bath. Here are a couple of my favourites, you can find them on other places where you get your podcasts:

I love reading to other people and I love being read to. I always read these posts out many times to myself for mistakes. No matter how many time I read them out loud, there are always errors. What can I say?

Technically this is my second event, officially my first, where I will read to you some of my work in my lounge - whether your are sitting at the table, on the sofa or lying on my psychiatrists couch or floor. It will be comfortable and relaxed, with mood lighting and treats. Some of the work is specially written for the event, some not - I am working the balance out now.

Set in my home, The Wider Ranch is a ticketed event to gather people around an area of enquiry or idea, be that mine or another person invited in. As I get used to my new home it is an occasion to try things out. It might look like a small party, a testbed or workshop, it might be conversations or sets of questions, or simply a couple of hours together to explore new ways of gathering and connecting. Each one has a theme, each one has drinks and vegan nibbles, and each one has a takeaway.

• Event – Saturday 28^th March, 6-8pm, at my house in Hanover Brighton.

Email – jurowfarr@gmail.com to book at space

Tickets – Places are limited and it costs £15 per person, booking is essential, thank you.

• Booklet of the events readings

If you would like a copy of the texts from the evening but cannot attend, please let me know - jurowfarr@gmail.com

This costs £10 including postage and will be available after the 28^th March.

• Reading to you in your home

If the idea of me coming to read to you in your home appeals to you and you would like me to do this for you or someone else, let me know – jurowfarr@gmail.com

I’ll contact you to discuss how this might work and you can book me in.

I will offer one reading event free to someone who needs this, all others will have a fee, just so that it is clear. We could call it art, a service, a gift, entertainment, perhaps it is therapy-esque or however you wish to describe it – this doesn’t matter to me, I would just love to do this for you!

Looking forward to reading to you!

Warmest as always

Ju x

There is a tiny nipple that draws all the skin of the kumquat together to a close, where it once connected to its’ tree. Like the belly button perhaps, a strange vortex, which can give you the heebie-jeebies if you probe it too much trying to go further inside. She rolls her finger tip around and around the jewelled knot, feeling a strange pressure deep in its’ flesh somewhere, a faraway connection, spooky and at the same time erotic between her legs. This is the place. Like large olives in shape, they are small citrus fruits which when squeezed can release aromatic oils making them taste even sweeter. Do we release something that makes us taste even sweeter when we’re squeezed? she wonders. You eat every single part - this feels dangerous and exciting. They are hermaphrodites, self-fertilisation organisms or intersex. (There is a wider acceptability of this in the animal and plant world – we must catch up….) After tipping a small group of them from the brown paper bag into the glazed bowl, she gorges on them, stuffing one after another into her greedy mouth finding it hard to stop. You set yours down next to you on the table. Another friend a few days later licks hers - no, this is not going in. Like a murder of crows, she calls this group a ravage or gorge of kumquats. Friday comes to mind:

You starred at me cooly from the open front door, returning to finish a job. You are the plasterer’s mate. I felt like I had upset you. It soon became clear.

In the kitchen where I make tea, you asked if you were being inappropriate approaching a client on a job and declaring that you’ve been eager to come back to my house. You fancied me from the moment you saw me. Wetness in your eyes, sparkle.

I’m not sure I answer as you cup my face and kiss me on the cheek. Wow!

It’s exciting and I am prepared to be ravaged as he says – “I want to ravage you”. I want to be ravaged. And it feels, apart from the professional situation very desirable. And I am thrown in the seventies with The Postman Always Rings Twice.

The doorbell rings. I open the door, hoping it will be him. It is. My heart races and I become breathless. Sweaty palms, hot and wet. He has a delivery for me.

“Where would you like it?” he asks. He needs to deliver it and I want him to deliver it. Anywhere you’d like. Right here will be fine in the narrow hallway. I can’t wait any longer.

He steps inside the door; pushes it closed as he pulls down his tracksuit. There is no underwear and he swiftly pulls mine down too. Liquid floods my mouth, he pushes his tongue into my open lips - I want everything ravaged. Lifting me up against the wall with his big cock, he gives me his delivery, and I bang against him, one foot on tip toes. His hand grips my arse, spreading me wider, rocking me backwards and forwards onto him. It all stings and melts and I am weak in the best possible way.

This is the Hollywood Way. It had all seemed too fast and undetailed before, maybe unrealistic? But no, here we have it, sex with a near stranger. No foreplay, no afterglow, a dirty, lusty urge played out in all its splendour.

Here, there are no gussets to navigate, or awkward bra fastenings, stinky or unattractive socks and no tricky belts. No promise of relationships or connections, no depth, just pure sexual desire.

-

One of her reoccurring fantasies always had lines about delivery in it. Almost anything that needed to be delivered into the house, specific parts of the house, instructions about where to put it, that she needed to be given it again and again, because she hadn’t received it properly. Vegetables appeared frequently, similar in shape to some vibrators so easier to bring the libido to her surface. Tools and workwear gave the look, linked to the job to be carried out, keeping the flow of the mental picture alive. A wonderful roughness and function about the whole thing, kept the pace up. The locations, the kitchen work top, a cupboard or utility room with little space, the hallway, just behind or against the door. Outside at the back of the house, the side entrance or passageway might feature, the rough garden furniture chaffing against her buttocks, the bricks on the back wall of the house rubbing her thighs, underneath the tree, the soil mingling with sweat and come, inside the shed, sawdust and oil sending rushes to her mind as splinters got fucked into her skin.. This all blurred and swirled around into a shapeless but very a useful masturbation smorgasbord, hot and cold fantasies, an endless palette of combinations. Building materials play a lead character. Temperature a supporting actor. A diagram of this came to her mind which included a spectrum from arid to drenched, from silence to ear splitting noise, no words to beautiful babble, strokes to fumbles, control to none. Like a drawing representing a crude star, lines criss-crossed in the middle, the middle was the fuck made manifest by all of this – real or fantastical.

She had written down her fantasies before. Many had been played out, there were always more. This was the first time she had tried to map them or work out what the component parts were as a diagram. Now that she had drawn a star shape in her sketch book, the centre of this innocent doodle took on new meaning.

The Hollywood way – architectural details, services, bodily urges quickly sated. Yes, this she could handle. Even if this was not going anywhere else. Even if the ravage didn’t actually happen. To imagine it with a very real person, a very real possibility, was very different for her. Now with her stranger, she would have to wait and see. Or she would have to make it happen.

Even though I only moved in mid-November, I’m going to be running a regular event at my new home soon. Hopefully monthly and probably in the evening - called The Wider Ranch Saloon. It will be an evolving creature to try things out – ideas, writing, gatherings, mini workshops, mine and others. Hosted by me and two hours long to begin with, there will be drink and nibbles, lovely people and the thing.

With limited places available - it will be based on a first come basis and in Hanover Brighton.

If you are interested to be kept informed let me know and I will send out information about each one in advance.

On 14^th February 3pm-5pm - the day I supposedly was conceived on, I will be hosting an on-ramp event – to test it out. Having ordered myself a cake on the auspicious day, I decided I should share it and realised this is the perfect occasion to try to begin trying something new out.

So, I would like to invite you to come eat cake and drink teas, and to sew labels onto a piece of clothing, yours or someone else’s.

The cake is provided by @sugarandspicebrighton – see image below and is vegetarian, plus there will be a variety of milks and teas and other nice nibbles.

To book a place at £15, please let me know and I will email you my details and location. jurowfarr@gmail.com

If you would like to buy a set of the labels, these are £15 with postage on top.

Please let me know and I will email you my details jurowfarr@gmail.com

I look forward to telling you more as the events unfold and I hope to see some of you on the 14^th February.

Warmest wishes

Ju x

The cough landed like zest on the open pages of her book before she realised what it was. A forceful expulsion of air from the lungs at nearly 50mph, driven by the muscles deep inside his substantial chest and abdomen. None of this was visible to her naked eyes but his shoulders were wide and his arms strong - a Viking her best friend would say. There was a bit too much overall hemp for her, but he looked interesting – a builder, or maybe he was in land management or a tree surgeon? Probably none of these.

Instinctively she wiped the drops away with her right hand. Right page, right hand. She was lefthanded. The moisture that had spritzed out of his lips didn’t make contact with her fingertips but rather the cushiony fat pads over the lower two joints. The four fingers moved as a group like they were a mitten or a flipper. They didn’t sense the wetness, or anything at all really, they efficiently and perfectly performed the job, like a giant kitchen spatula.

But there he was on her skin and as droplets inside her book. Page 21, The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong. Looking across the lines she read:

“He dressed and laced his boots, then reached into his jacket’s inner pocket. Under the crushed pack of Marlboros, gum wrappers, a few coins, he found his contact lens case…”

Yes, it was him.

The book which had just arrived in the post was a present to herself after hoovering up ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’. She would take it everywhere with her for the next few days.

When she looked at her palm he had disappeared, through her semi-permeable skin and had dispersed out into the air. Yet there he sat at the table next to her, nothing in front of him yet to drink, eyes locked onto the phone screen. He must know the people who owned the café she surmised.

As she lowered her gaze, she imagined his DNA floating about in the clear droplets from his dead lung cells which had just been coughed up. Like iridescence on water, marbled microscopic pieces of dust, pet dander and excess mucus, had been sent by the Greek goddess Iris as rainbow puddled messages from the Gods, out from deep inside of his body and into the world. The saliva was clear at a glance and mesmerized her. There’s always so much you can’t see even when you know it’s there, even when you look. Right now she believed this almost more than anything. As forensic scientists know, when saliva is dried on paper, the liquid portion evaporates but the biological materials including the DNA and white blood cells remain adhered to the paper’s fibres.

As his was a fresh sample he would remain detectable inside her book for quite some time. Maybe some of the book printer’s DNA was inside her book too as well as some of her own – a trio of moisture and DNA drying out together at different speeds. Wow, this must be happening all over the world right now – her mind was boggled.

Turning over her left hand, her eyes scanned across the heart line, or distal palmar crease. Almost horizontal it ran out about two-thirds of the way across her palm, finishing with an upward flourish at the end, starting from an indent just underneath her smallest finger. This is not the health line, so imminent death shouldn’t strike she thought to herself and well, palmistry was not really her thing. Having figured out that she was at least two thirds of the way through her life, her luck in love had just run out. But she didn’t believe this either. Curious, she flipped over her right hand, to find the same line patterns here, as if they were identical twins. Lines ran everywhere across her hands which seemed to have been very liney from the get-go and more liney than most people she knew her age. Secretly she liked her dry old looking hands, it was as if her hands kept the score - they looked like her mum’s hands and showed how full her life had been so far.

The man next to her was joined by someone else, a woman. She closed her book as her friend with the beautiful forearms and an expansive ruddy décolletage turned up.

“It was one of those friendships that came on quick, like the heat on a July day” same page higher up. And she proceeded to laugh her way into the awakening Saturday morning with him.

This woodblock print is Courtesan Smoking by the Japanese artist Kitagawa Utamaro from somewhere between 1755 and 1806 when he lived, probably 1790’s. It is a high-ranking courtesan or oiran, which means she would have been famous, from the pleasure quarters – an Ukiyo-e or “picture of the floating world” which typically depicted daily life and entertainment. The print is an okubi-e, a close-up portrait view of the upper body, which was a popular style at the time.

Utamaro was considered a master of this, the bijinga genre - pictures of beautiful women.

Ukiyo-e, the floating world, takes its name from the Buddhist term, ukiyo, which expresses the notion of the fleeting nature of life. During the Edo period, even though the nature of society was formal and highly ordered, impermanence was celebrated and not mourned, these depictions of daily life were sanctioned.

.

They are in the room with me and I can feel their skin next to the texture of the soft indigo kimono, a yakata, or item of nightwear, with a tie-dyed pattern, each flower shape fitting easily in my palm. Japanese tie-dye is next level although this is quite a humble version. The ease of it all, the fabric around her waist perhaps an obi or kimono sash, has a Sayagata pattern on it of interlocking Manji (Swastika) in a persimmon, orange, pink colour – the overall decoration represents life and strength, eternity and harmony, and good fortune in Buddhism, typical of the period.

The yakata has fallen open to reveal her breasts.

If you look closely at the print, you will see the smoke exhaled through the courtesan’s mouth, embossed into the paper.

Her mouth pursed making room for the smoke, which is still alive leaving her lips and she gazes off along the scored lines of the trails. But she is not looking at the smoke. She has other things on her mind. The pipe is likely made of bamboo with a silver mouth piece, fashionable at the time, it is a slim pipe, part of the before, the foreplay to me, to others the post, the afterglow. Her right hand has just lowered slightly to blow the smoke out of her mouth, it is held there on purpose, an invitation, her thumb placed confidently at the end of the mouth piece which has just been in her mouth. This is control. The pushed-up sleeve held by her left hand directs the eye to the tender underneath of her upper arm - she will let it all fall to the ground when the time is right. Her wrist is casually bent, her fingers are on the verge. And of course, the line along the nape of her neck.

During the Edo period it became common for women to use an oily hair product to create the smooth look and in order not to get it onto their clothes, the kimono was pulled back away from the body - all other parts of the body except the hands and face were covered. The practice remained to show this area long after this time when new hair products were developed. I pull back the collar on the back of my shirt I am wearing to reveal the nape of my neck. I can’t see it, but I can imagine looking here at the line, the overlooked or hidden part and it feels charged. I’ve forgotten the last nape I noticed, when I go out shortly I will pay attention.

The white makeup (oshiroi), suggests beauty and elegance. It represents the spirit of the geisha and illuminates the face in dim lighting. This is not a mask to my mind but something other worldly, it promises to take me somewhere else with only black and red accents of makeup to show expressions. It is thick and does indicate a mask as the hair line is left bare for this purpose. Two shapes of bare skin indicate the wearer’s status and the formality of the occasion – a W-shape is more everyday, for a Maiko or an apprentice, and a V-shape is for more formal or for special occasions usually worn by the more established geisha.

I can’t tell which she is.

She is alone under archive glass in my new home propped up next to some books. I want to believe it’s like a Nan Golding snapshot of real life, post or pre seduction, her pipe, that cigarette you might share with a lover or might light up for yourself to digest the situation or increase the tease or tension.

-

Stepping out of the station onto the pavement to wait for my friend I smell the cigarette before I notice him in my peripheral vision. I look to my left.

Much younger than me, I guess mid to late twenties. Arse perching on the window ledge of the Swiss Chalet style railway building - white baggy outsized t-shirt, relaxed cotton fibres a subtle aroma of masculine fragrance, soap and his skin blending around the neck-line. Jeans, faded black, softly shaped to pool about his legs, showing some vague contours, leaving some contours mysterious. And a shaved head, a number 1, I guess. He is looking out to nowhere in particular.

Out of his mouth comes the smoke. It travels up above the pavement, indenting the air and swirls along for a couple of metres before twisting down into my now slightly open wet mouth. I take it down deep into my glossy throat where it burns inside of me. My head spins with the rush. Turning very slowly so that I don’t fall over, the see the smoker drawing the smoke into his mouth. I go with it, into his wet salivary mouth, curling around his smooth enamel teeth and over his rough tongue muscle, slipping about on the skin inside his cheeks and sliding along on his soft palette under the hanging uvula and into his trachea. Further I go deep down into his lungs suspended on either side of his chest, a passenger into his unseen floating world. I filter into all of his alveoli and flow out into his blood stream

As he breathes out a part of him flows up into my nostrils and he travels down inside of me - a fine shredded tobacco scent, held in droplets of moisture spreads itself out and gets lost in my body somewhere.

He doesn’t notice any of this. This is perfectly asymmetrical. There he remains looking into the distance, occasionally at his phone, slumped against the wall, as cool as fuck, looking post or pre fuck.

It was a day that people like to describe as crisp, she had before. But today it was different, like she had never seen it before – well she hadn’t and she had probably thought this before too. Everything was new again, really new and exactly as it was the day before except that today the paint was just dry, everything more vivid.

Nice socks she thought to herself as she looked over her left shoulder. But was it the socks?

Glancing back for a double take, there he was, sunglasses, grey hoody up, dark blue padded jacket zipped up on top. Matching dark blue sweat wicking flimsy shorts, the long socks tight up to the knee over toned calves, paler blue and Asics trainers, in shades of grey, barely worn.

He looked like her in another life, another time - out striding through the freshness, feeling the stinging air run amuck over her skin, his skin. She planned to say something as he passed by about his socks.

Maybe six paces back, he came up behind her, walking in lock step, staying there for a while. A bit too long? Was he approaching or looking on to where he was going? The former dangerous and fun, the latter more likely. Fine. Her body was undeterred.

Like they were two ends of a hot corridor - the sun was warm on the back of her neck, and with him in its’ path, the sun must have been warm on the back of his neck too. A temperature was rising. Not boiling, no loins on fire, but potential flames, some crackling and fizzing, a restlessness in her toes – a certain sign. Is that why she didn’t like her feet being touched during a massage, the souls of her feet being direct highways to her clitoris?

He was mid-late thirties and as he got level with her, roughly the same height, five foot five. Her sense of other people’s height was based on some kind of interior size sensing and not on real inches or centimetres – this way she would sometimes be larger than anyone taller than her nearby. This way some people she had known for a very long time were her height, even though they weren’t. But he was her height for sure.

The socks were great, up to just under his knees and folded over evenly all around at the top, about an eight-centimetre turn down. These were not coming down easily nor were they biting in too hard, as the three bears once found, they were “just right”. Stretched over his nicely turned gastrocnemius, ‘the belly of the calf’ muscles, like two plum tomatoes, travelling down the lower leg along the soleus muscles converging into the Achillies tendon. Ah the Achillies.

In her draw at home, she had several pairs of knee high socks – some seemingly should be worn with Lederhausen, wool, red and green, itchy, where Heidi meets Finisterre, one pair Miyake’s for flashing moments of patterned circles and more serious design situations,

sports socks with strong geometrics and colours and some sheer ones for smooth calves only, sort of impractical like flimsy panties. His socks fell into her sensual category. She imagined pulling them on like they were stockings and walking out of the house, down the road to the gym. Everything freshly laundered and showered, it was all almost brand new like the painted day and ready to bedazzle.

Did he bend down pretending to tighten his laces and show his visible pant line stretched into the shorts when he got just in front of her revealing his smooth arse?

Next to her bed this image materialised as a piece of sculpted marble, with a thin ridge, waiting there patiently all day ready to be stroked. Every night she would run her finger-tips backwards and forwards over the line until she fell asleep.

Using herself as a kind of imaginary test dummy, her knees gave way and she sank down onto the pavement when he was out of sight, pretending to tighten her laces, trying to evoke the sensation of how the technical fibres would have felt stretched around his buttocks. Breathing out almost in a pant, her breath was shortening, turning to steam as it hit the cold winter air leaving her now slightly flaring nostrils.

Dropping further she rolled about on the ground covering herself in the unexpected scent, like a wild crazy moose in rutting season, her chest heaving. Channelling her inner moose, she closed her eyes and dragged her tingling fingers up the contours of his calves and stopped when her palms spread wide over his shorts.

Play dead for a while she lay on the ground until a chill started to seep into her body. Slowly she got up to her feet, stunned. Had she just been rutting or fucking? Hope had slipped in. No one noticed, or she didn’t notice them. And she carried on to wherever she was going, only now she had forgotten and was breathless.

I have gone into space on planet earth, like Sigourney in Alien and come across new and strange life forms. This is not a side track although I could wax lyrical about the movie, Sigourney, the precedent of the films etc. No this is my daily nectar, the stuff that comes across my path or where my path weaves, that I extract from its’ site, transport back to my temporary home for further contemplation and research, amongst everything else. It gives off big energy, wider than its’ girth, which hangs around in my mind, adorning the space for a while, revealing its significance.

But what are they?

I’ve never seen anything like this before on the ground in England. It’s true I’m a seed-pod nut, forgive the pun and in deep store I have a collection, I might show you one day. But these? I collected a full clean poo-bags’ worth and brought them with me. Onto a serving platter with a gold rim, which I also found on the street and arranged them all with their holes facing upwards. They are like a village of huts, the holes, openings for smoke to rise out of from the fire down below. With an asymmetrical set of ribs that hold the structure out under some sort of nutty, woody, tension. In between the ribs, the stretch has set to fit the growing that pushed from inside.

Next to google image search.

This is the protective casing, maybe the nut, that surrounds the acorn in its’ cup when it’s growing on an oak tree. Similar to the spiky limey ball that surrounds the conker, except with the oak, the acorn comes in a presentation cup and then the nut case, I’m not sure why. These woody pods are a womb perhaps, that keeps the amniotic sac, the acorn cup protected, which holds the embryo, the acorn, the seed until it is ready. Then the nut falls off the tree. The squirrels eat what’s inside, squirrel food, a seed to continue the tree species and for me or us to appreciate their structure and purpose.

Their one job, to protect the baby, the seed, at all costs. Therefore, they are formidable and hard, but they will rupture when ripe, because they have no choice, at that moment organic and science-fiction matter yields.

They remind me of the moment in Alien where Sigourney discovers the Aliens’ lair which has been an incubator for all the Alien baby’s to be born into. It seems many do not survive, but those that do, well, we know they really are quite a force of fictional nature to be reckoned with. I wonder what the percentage survival figure is for the acorn incubators transporting the seeds to make fully grown trees. It’s a delicate and important job requiring the right temperature and humidity, which can be regulated, I am guessing by the tree for optimal growth and hatching. There are three kinds of incubators according to AI, poultry, infant and bacterial. With Aliens or life forms not yet discovered or appreciated, I make it at least four but no one is asking me.

And in case you’re interested you can buy a chicken egg incubator online very cheaply. And they have a range of styles, from the sterile laboratory look to the hospital bubble with arm openings, child drawn house shaped and classic microwave design, and one’s a little bit more Tupperware or seventies party food presentation dish style. All tastes accounted for, maybe? My mind is blown again, that we sit in our homes watching over the eggs waiting for the moment.

Not only do the oak nuts remind me of Alien, but also one of my favourite patisseries, the canelé. So loved are they in France, that there have been corporations and a brotherhood set up to protect them. During the French Revolution, these organisations were abolished, I think they were a symbol of the Bourgeoisie. Made ideally in a copper mould brushed with beeswax, measuring about five centimetres in height, their fluted, corrugated striation gives them the appearance of a tower. Not such a tall tower, too tall to be a coliseum and too short to be water tower or a high-rise city dwelling. They protect something in their middle too, a subtle change in flavour and texture, they’re almost not sweet at all. Their ribs makes them easier to hold onto, unlike the lumpy oak nut whose texture was designed/evolved I am guessing to be hard to pick up. Try one if you eat dairy and do wheat flour they’re delicious and good looking.

Here is where this ends for now. I am out in space on earth with these wonderful little structures and nothing has burst out of them and I have not eaten them either, except for the canelé’s – the shop is too close to my house obviously. Instead, I have pierced them with an awl, a small wooden handled tool that is used for making holes. And I have turned them into my medallions to take me into Autumn. I hope you like them.

And like seed pods I have quite a collection of necklaces too in deep storage. Perhaps I am just missing both, perhaps I have just birthed some necklaces from the incubator protectors.

NB: If you were yearning for scientific terminology I apologise. There was a whole other section here about why I am resistant to some kinds of learning or showing off general knowledge. This may come at some point but is currently gestating somewhere just out of reach.

Every cell seemed to be effervescing like she was slowly gathering pace towards a volcanic eruption. By the time she got to yoga the force of it was in full throttle - yin yoga was exactly what she needed. Today, there would be no standing poses in this class. Perfect - she wasn’t sure how long she could stand up for anyway.

“Move gently in towards the pose but not into or onto pain” the teacher calmly imparted. “Pain is not what you need.”

“We will hold these positions for between thirty seconds, and a couple of minutes and I will give you some alternatives, so please only do what feels right for your body”.

“This is your practice and if I say breath in and you are breathing out nothing bad will happen. If you need to move, notice this, try to relax and if you still need to move, do so in a considered way, slowly and quietly.”

Her breathing was all that she had to concentrate on or return to for one hour. Nothing else. “There is nowhere else you need to be, nothing else to do, this is exactly where you need to be,” she heard. The voice was right of course and so she repeated this inside to herself “And let any thoughts that come in, pass by like train carriages going through and then gently return to your breathing.”

This was her hour. She lowered her gaze (Drishti) and closed her eyes. No planning into the future, no rolling back into the past. I’m paying for this, back off. Back the fuck off! I will not let you get to me here. I’m safe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drishti (yoga)

Everywhere her body or ‘back body’ touched the ground gravity magnetised her to the yoga mat, that stuck to the floor, above another studio where even more people were gripped by their own ‘back bodies’ to their yoga mats, to the floor, to the earth. As she lay spinning eastward on the planet, she remembered a conversation with her son about gravity suddenly stopping. Apparently, we would shoot off the ground at a thousand metres a second in an easterly direction. Ah towards the yin – much more calming than the yang, but the difference would not be noticed. Better than southerly or northerly directions as we’d probably turn inside out as we turned into a human smoothy. Any direction, an instant smoothy and because our head is heavy, maybe it would immediately detach and spin off like a lethal bowling ball, a sound emitting wanting to be a scream but without enough time a bodiless head, not a headless body? he thought went and:

“Breath in for one, two, three and four and out for longer two, three, four, five six – extend this or add on if you wish”.

At the start of each new position everyone was encouraged to take a deep breath in and then sigh it out.

“Let’s do that again” the yoga instructor suggested. “Do this whenever you feel like it to reset yourself”. There was a lot of sighing built up inside of her looking for a way out.

Is this why people spontaneously combust? No, that wasn’t the case at all and all the seventies’ theories were now surpassed by the idea that external factors purportedly had a bigger role to play in human combustion. More reading on this from a reliable source later.

Her sighs sounded the loudest in the room to her ears. A sigh from somewhere behind her had some solid desperation in it. To her right, her daughter’s sigh out was impossible to hear. Another sigh sounded like a Hollywood simulation of sexual satisfaction after an acted orgasm.

At the end of the hour, the voice solid with desperation said that she had found herself crying at one point. Crying is normal in yoga and can side swipe you when the tear switch flips out of nowhere. A triangular shaped pool near the tear duct called the Lacrimal Lake gradually fills and when your eye exceeds its’ drainage systems capacity, tears spill over the edge of the lake and run down your cheeks, as if out of nowhere, you can’t always see them coming.

The image of Uma Thurman being injected with a hypodermic needle full of adrenaline in Pulp Fiction popped into her head. They filmed it backwards to make it appear more realistic she heard. She couldn’t see it herself and now the idea of it seemed too dramatic anyway. But Uma’s jolt acting was great nonetheless.

Someone dressed in a bold shell suit and baseball cap, thanked the teacher quietly with a sufficiently sized smile. As always, she performed a big gratitude piece, always needing to make sure that someone knew the impact they had had on her - just in case behind their expert surface, a lot of self-doubt and natural turbulence lay in wait to get them as soon as they were out of site of the yoga studio.

“How was that?” her daughter asked.

‘I had the trippyest experience I’ve ever had in a yoga class. Let’s talk outside’

she managed.

They went for a quick coffee, it didn’t matter if she was late after this, she would just let them know

This is what unfolded:

Towards the end the yoga class, after a lot of breathing, the yoga voice suggested “Focus on the tip of your nose”. As she obeyed, she felt the air being sucked into her nostrils like endless streams of fine fabric, ruching up as if it were parachute silk, as thin as a spider’s thread, gathering up and going in, the whole sky was disappearing inside her. On the out breath it all poured forth again, an endless river of material, light as air and five times stronger than steel. It repeated over and over again as she breathed. Then her brain got involved. Suddenly she felt like a mighty dragon. What? As she sighed out her dragonish heft got stronger. Enormous. Motorways of air and enormous power raced in and out of her body. Do dragons breath out of their noses? Does the fire come out their nostrils or out of their mouths? Trippy again, over and over. For a moment she told herself she would look it up later and then she remembered dragons weren’t real. But somehow, she was temporarily transforming into one starting at the nose.

The next thing to happen was the eye floaters, you know the shapes that sometimes glide across your eyes when they’re shut. Her regulars were a curly moustache and two eyes. One day one of the eyes floated off and has not returned.

Through her closed eyes warm colours and millions of miniscule movements were dancing about, all fairly typical fare. And then a dark round shape came in when she was looking down to the right. It was gelatinous, like a tadpole eye, frog’s spawn maybe. It struck her. It was an eye. It was her embryo eye about twenty-two days old looking at her sixty-year-old eye. Her embryo eye was looking out from inside the womb, through the colours of her mother’s stomach, through layers of skin and flesh, out towards the world. This strange eye form was her as an unborn embryo. It wasn’t scary at all, neither was it totally concrete. This wasn’t a dream either, which would have made more sense. She couldn’t see her embryo body, the classic curled up shape. No, it wasn’t about that. It was here looking out of her and feeling calm, totally safe.

“Wow!” her daughter gasped “I think you’ve reached enlightenment.”

And maybe she had. Or maybe she was at a new level of whatever this was, just when she thought life couldn’t get any stranger.

The stress of fixing the door was not going to touch the sides after this and they took their time.

N.B

Dragon’s breath is also a special type of round for shotguns and consists mainly of magnesium shards or pellets. When the round is fired, sparks and flames can shoot out of the gun to about thirty metres, some say up to ninety-one metres depending on your source. It produces a visual effect similar to a firework or flamethrower which is enough to light a person, or house on fire.

Recently, usually in tricky moments and when I still have some humour left, an image comes to mind where I have fallen off a horse, but my horse carries on galloping forwards. My foot is caught in the stirrup, and I am swinging backwards and forwards nearly scrapping my skull on the ground like a scythe. There’s no pain, some theatrical blood and just the absurdity of it all. And with heroic effort and incredible core and inner thigh strength, I hurl myself back up, I get back on my horse. This is not a sob story, although there is scarring somewhere, this is the horse in my corner.

As a child I didn’t ride and used to tell my best friend, Emma, who went horse riding all the time, that it was cruel to sit on a horse. Not that I knew this and still don’t exactly. Varying opinions exist - some that a horse being led on reins around a paddock is cruel and my favourite is that; ‘no (riding on a horse) is not particularly cruel’ and ‘that it creates a great interaction between the horse and the human’. So, who gets to decide this, who wants the interaction, certainly not the horse I’m guessing. But is it bad?

The image of me going along, held by my left heel, as illustrated in my drawing, is a moment in time that looks precarious, it is a little. But I’m ok and there may even be some relief in this moment, when the wheels have finally come off the wagon, me, and there is not much left to do except let go and come off. A pain psychologist I saw about my chronic back condition liked the phrase ‘Motion is lotion’– in short keep everything moving and the debris from a wound, the dead or damaged cells can move off more easily and the oxygen can come in to heal the problem area more quickly. If there is no movement bed sores, stiffness and/or fear can materialise. Resting with pain, once the dominant advice, is not always the best option, but if you are in pain consult a doctor as I am an artist after all.

I’ve only ridden three times in my life, if it can be called riding - the sport of manoeuvring a horse while sitting on its’ back. Manoeuvring a horse suggests an element of control or skill, I have mostly grit and determination, which help a little bit and the desire to not look completely foolish. But the horse has its’ own reins, and I’m the passenger with little say in all of this. Mostly I just stayed up there, even when horse flies were spearing through my jeans and into my thigh on a farmyard or when I was jostling about having a Star Wars hallucination on the Isle of Sheppey, worrying about the intensity of the pelvic vibrations.

My third time on a horse was most recently, in Iceland at the end of last year with my daughter. See the image below where I was so padded that I looked like a toddler or one of the leads in Planet of the Apes. We had so many layers on in preparation and didn’t figure that they would also give us padded boiler suits to wear over our clothes, Ray didn’t look like this.

The ride was a sixtieth birthday present from two dear friends. My daughter and I were on Volcanic Horses, some might say large ponies with wild hair, but they are horses, totally happy in the icy terrain with us on their beautiful backs. We were accompanied out into the snowy landscape of golden straw-like grass and the sun setting, by a guide and two other tourists who happened to be polo players. The difference between us and them, was stark and hilarious. Our cute steads either wouldn’t move at all or would gallop off like their lives depended on reaching somewhere far away, right now. “Follow the instructions” was what I tried to chant silently to myself like some equine mantra – “kick to get your horse to move” we were told. This didn’t seem to work. Apparently kicking forward, with the inside of your foot so as not to hurt your toes in football isn’t a thing in riding and that’s all I had, a strong backward kick, with the heel into the side of the horse was what was needed. I couldn’t do this, I’m a vegetarian and when I did do this, I didn’t realise I had. So, in a seemingly relaxed wrist fashion, I held on for dear life.

Not moving and then bolting towards the horizon made me laugh so hard I thought I would wet myself, I couldn’t talk and could barely see for the tears running down my cheeks. Behind me was Ray on her also unco-operative horse and her laughter told me that she was experiencing the same problems. Later I found out she was mostly laughing at me looking like the Michelin Man being completely at the mercy of the horse with no name. Occasionally I would hear her shout out “Mum what are you doing, are you ok?” All I could hear was the sound of jiggling in the saddle and weeping embarrassment amongst hoof clip clopping and a loud voice inside my head screaming “when will this stop”. My neck stopped working so I couldn’t look around to see how Ray was doing or take photos, I was terrified and riding one handed was not an option.

When I look at this image, I don’t exactly recognise myself, but I know she is me and even though she looks truly terrifying and hilarious, I know she is prepared in part, and I like that part of her.

The trip to Iceland came about two weeks after the phone call below.

The Call

I had a shock the other day and laughed nearly hysterically down the phone at the estate

agent – there was bad news and this time it was not how slow my solicitor was being. No, the house I was buying had fallen through. But I’m moving out of my house on the 5^th December after seventeen years into the new one? “No, you’re not Ju, wake up!” said my brain.

The rest of the day, it was a Thursday, sort of carried on. I’d like to say as normal, which makes my life sound kind of even, but it hasn’t been even for a long time. More, the irregularity of my life for about the last eighteen months or so has been the regularity. Always when I’m describing a new event to my therapist, (now my old therapist, as there is a new kid in town) I find myself saying I’m not surprised. I’m not, I’m just not sure whether my cup is full, or overflowing anymore. Maybe it’s not even there at all? This metaphor needs to move the hell over and make way for the shapeless shape.

My second response to the call was to dance around the house to my party play list turned up very loud - this was only a temporary fix for the shock.

When I got up the next day, I was shaking so much that the coffee in my cup was spilling out all over the rubber floor as if I were at sea. Recently I heard Rebecca Solnitt say that if you’ve got a boat, you better put it in the sea, yes. So, I had set sail or was set adrift. There was no need to induce shaking, a natural physiological response to stress, this came on naturally and if I had had a plate on my lap, it would have smashed on the floor or, as is common for me, the peas would have jiggled off my fork. “Is that it?” I wondered inside, are all my peas now all jiggled off my fork?

“Then what does that look like?” asked my invisible therapist friend. “Well, this” I shrugged with both hands extended out from my body, turned upwards with a small jaunty head tilt in reply. “I am all the peas on the floor.”

So, just to bring you up to speed and to where the horse is now – well, I have fallen off again. And I have just made the awkward call to the latest estate agent about house two.

“I am walking away” I said out loud, like I am in a cowboy movie, and I slowly pick up the reins of my waiting steed, who is always there when I look over my shoulder. I imagine an infinity mirror filled with my horse with no name. She feels reassuring with her endless soft animal smiles, her big watery brown eyes that hold my gaze, and so, we walk off into the distance. Ennio Moriconi is playing Once Upon a Time in the West and I am feeling safe. The horizon is filled with blurry hills, what’s behind me is dust and I am feeling cool, not having to clench in the saddle, just for a moment.

Once Upon a Time in the West – The Danish National Symphony Orchestra with Tuva Semmingsen (Live) – 8 minutes 48 seconds.

Once Upon a Time in the West – best scenes, with adverts unfortunately – 10 minutes 18 seconds.

Don’t worry, my horse has found me another ranch, number three and we are waiting to move in soon I hope – there is outdoor space for her.

I just showed this video to a friend to try to explain what I wanted to write about and a few seconds in she said “I’m obsessed” and I said I’m obsessed too. Like the demo version of Give Me Back My Name by Talking Heads in 1984, (link at the end), I keep playing it over and over, rinsing it for all the pleasure it can burn into me, it just keeps on giving. And she said, “I’d like to be at that gathering” and I said “me too”.

It’s from “I Love Dick” on Amazon Prime now. This is Roberta Colindrez, leading the group, Griffin Dunne, is the man over her shoulder with grey foppish hair and Bobbi Salvor Menuez has long auburn hair who Roberta is dancing towards. The series stars Kevin Bacon, as Dick and Kathryn Hann as Chris Kraus.

This clip is 2 minutes 49 seconds of time very well spent.

Kevin Bacon has never really done it for me, but my god he is hot in this – you might not think so. A vest, a belt buckle and a glint in the eye, with a small knowing twist across his lips, this all builds. There is sex in this dust and denim for sure, a good hip loose swagger which smacks of too long in the saddle and now the only way to move, is by pushing one boot after another through the landscape. The sun scorches and as it does his cowboy hat tips down to check his boots supposedly, then his head flips straight back up after the right amount of time, as if a silent decision has been made after an equally silent question has been asked – this is hot too. Maybe I’ve made that last scene up. But this is not what I wanted to talk about anyway and as always, I have shared what I wasn’t planning on sharing, I can’t help myself.

Why I wanted to show you this clip and what I wanted to talk about was something shifting in me again in the last few weeks and I am trying to work it out.

It has something to do with community although the word doesn’t sit well with me. But in this clip, there is something of that, or allegiance or empowerment. It reminds me of a dance sequence from Les Ballets C De La B, by Alan Platel which I saw on the roof of the Southbank Centre in London, one summer in the early nineties. My friend Gregorio said, “you have to go see it”, it was on for one more night. He meant it, I heard it and went, and there, like this scene from I Love Dick, a group of men in-formation ranging from boys to elders danced in sequence, rotating ever so slowly, repeating a mesmerizingly simple charming beauty dance. I wanted to be a part of that too and I didn’t want it to stop either.

What matters is the beauty of the connection, yes, that, and I find myself looking for something simple, a connector, a basic spark that ignites people.

So, these are some of the signs that are hitting me right now. It makes sense to me, to you I hope so:

1. HMS Isis – Woolwich. I was invited, one of only a few people to experience a piece of work made by an artist friend John’s company None Zero One, in an all-male prison with some of the prisoners. They were not present. This was not a work devised to go out into the wider world, in front of the public. It was for the prisoners, and it was hard for me to shift my head onto this at first, but of course, it makes complete sense.

I am writing feedback for the prison piece, which is called Teleports and one of it’s starting points is imagining yourself or the prisoners imagining themselves being somewhere else. Isn’t that where we must do the work? Being somewhere else, being someone else, feeling into another experience?

I am trying not to talk about impact and measurement, but I am interested in where the rubber hits the road, if it does and how this happens, for its’ own sake and not for future comparison. Also, I’m not looking at bums on seats, rather, I’m thinking about the things that have changed me from what I have experienced and how after years they remain a part of me.

Here is a link to the company.

https://www.nonzeroone.com/projects/teleports/

2. Peacehaven Community Fare, The Big Park – Saturday 12^th July. I went to look at someone’s VR project about protected areas of coastline and life nearby. What I saw in fact was The Isle of Sheppey where I grew up, the Donkey Derby every August bank holiday along the Halfway Road, Martin Parr-like scenes of people having fun, me. While parents and guardians slinked down onto the ground around the edge of a central arena, held back by a ridiculously beautiful rope barrier, one hand on the push chair, knees folder to one side and another child and/or friend or relative, scattered nearby, their children sang and danced, earnest and embarrassed both. Like a picnic on the edge of a carpark, a heady mix of strange possibility emerged from the shared green grass tongue.

I had to check myself and look harder to see what was going on. And then there is was, my early stirrings, the awakening moments of something lurking made real.

Peacehaven is like the edge of Las Vegas or an Arizonan town, where the dusty road runs through the middle and life fades in and out. Shops like Cherry Bones Tattoo and Your Daily Need supermarket provide. Someone said it’s like a place where serial killers might hang out. And I get it. And I’m not judging, I come from the Isle of Sheppey with three prisons, where people are called Woolly Backs and worse. I am feeling the love for Peacehaven between the twinkle of creativity and some original gangster vibes, these are my people. The Swap Stall where you turn up with nothing to swap, an error or not in the planning and you can take whatever you want for free and donate whatever you want to put in the homemade cash box run by a lad who commands the situation, it’s brilliant!

And out the back a head teacher in a sequinned top is prepping and inspiring the kids for the fashion show - the routines, the walking, some sass and again, a marvellous belief in them and the power of possibility, no judgement, all enthusiasm, I gawp and marvel. A woman who makes toys out of fabric from second-hand shops – they are cheap, and they are virtuosic, and I talk to her about how wonderful they are and that I’m not going to buy anything, even though I want the octopus and the animal heads. I see her, I feel it, we connect.

3. Audience Advisory Panel – I’m helping Blast Theory recruit some local Portslade, Hangleton, Fishersgate, Southwick people, for the redevelopment of Rider Spoke. It will be an app called Rider Spoke: Here, which you will be able to do anywhere in the world. And I’ve been going into a lot of the community centres and local groups and halls and charity shops (of course!), and social worker hubs talking to people about getting involved. Something to do this summer? Something a bit different or creative right here, no need to go into Brighton. Tell us about where you live, help us build an app about Portslade? I am not an artist in project, but this section is my project, and it offers itself up to me. It’s not always easy going into places I don’t know, even though I’m confident but it’s like a performance where you must bring it over and over. And I fumble my words; I say crazy things and find myself out on a strange and joyous improvised limb.

What occurred was coffee in cafes with people I’ve been put in touch with, conversations with receptionists and directors of organisations whose clients or attendees might be creative, a bit interesting, looking for an outlet, to do something. Behind every door, and sometimes I feel like I’m selling bibles, there might be a surprise, like under rocks by the sea, there is usually something interesting to find. We will eat together for two hours, five times over a few months, while Blast Theory take them on a journey. They will be offered a voucher or small honorarium. And they will be a group, a community for a while and I will be their liaison.

4. Club Life by my dear friend Fred Deakin, formerly of Lemon Jelly – being a dresser. I am again a small cog in the machine for three nights and one matinee at the Old Market Theatre in Brighton. It’s hot and sweaty, five performers with maybe ten costume changes and I find myself picking up sweat drenched clothes that I spray with a vodka water mix to hold back the smell and hang up for the next show. This is not my work and yet it makes deep contact inside me. I hold back how I would have set it up; this is not the ask. What are they trying to do and how can I try to meet this? And as the heat causes some near fainting, I place iced water on each of their chairs between each scene, I turn the electric fans onto them, soak tea towels in water and fan the scene dock door for maximum draft like I am Cleopatra’s trusted servant Charmion. I undo shoelaces, nothing is literally too low. And I walk away happy.

The same friend who I showed the video too started talking to me about that moment when you find yourself walking along next to someone on the street and falling in step, walking in place. “Do you talk to them?” she asked me. “Do you talk to them?” I replied.

Is there some invisible connection just for a moment when you are the same, a formal version would be military drills to keep everyone together.

And even if we don’t walk in step are we charging the street by weaving about as the choreographer and writer Philip McKenzie once said?

Perhaps we are not deciding the course of direction in advance as much as we’d like to think, perhaps some unplanned infinite choreography is at play?

Whatever is going on, I have to say, that person who talks to people in the supermarket queue, to the person crying at the bus stop, to other dog walkers for too long, who pays a compliment when they feel it to someone on the street and crosses the road or runs back after someone to do so. This is me and this might be you too.

And that we may be strangers waiting to be friends or family or acquaintances or to remain sharing this one thing, just like we share the pavement together. It means nothing and it means everything. And we might have similarities that we refuse to share, because this would make us just like everyone else and not unique. We may glimpse that connection like when we go away on holidays sometimes or for a night out, we can feel more like ourselves, and to connect? A bit of perspective, a different view or context.

Being close, walking in place, taking part, being in someone else’s shoes and shifting our weight from one foot to another, one step at a time – who wants to do a beauty dance with me in these times I have no words for? Please let me know, I’m serious!

Thank you.

NB. Or you can join me to recite the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, written in 1948, at The Level in Brighton, Saturday 30^th August, at 4pm. It’s a restaging of the late artist Monica Ross’ work, which she begun in 2005 and I will be one amongst many – reciting, hopefully from memory.

Here is a link to the history of Monica’s project:

And here is a link to the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights:

https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights

I hope to see you soon.

And my current tracks on repeat:

Talking Heads – Demo version of Give Me Back My Name (1984 )– 4 minutes 1 second

David Lang – Just (2014) - 12 minutes 46 seconds

The Horse Is Always Waiting – 1176 words.

Mapping – An Attempt At An Explanation – 272 words, unfinished.

Fred Astaire Is Back Again – 1147 words.

Toilet Paper Bears – She Had An Obsession - 801 words, unfinished.

Do I Want A Bit Of Your DNA Joan? – Your Items Are Being Auctioned – 249 words.

The Sky Is Fizzing Awake – Writing From Simon Jame’s Dawn Listening Workshops In Shoreham – 1065 words.

Dragons Breath/Embryo Eye – Yoga, The Next Level Or The Lowest Point? – 978 words.

I’ve Reached My Vegetarian Edge – title and notes.

The Metal Detectorist – title and notes only

The Sweet Punk Lad From Sheppey – 983 words, unfinished.

You Might Know Her Or At least Think You Do – An Introduction To something – 470 words, unfinished.

Local Ladies I Have Met – 470 words.

Hands – I Was Almost Saving Your Life - A Response To The Improvisation Of Dancer Charlie Morrissey and Kirstie Simson – 191 words, unfinished.

Can I Dance In There? – A List Of Considerations When Trying To Find The Right House – 277 words, unfinished.

On Becoming A Gun – Writing About A Flint Rock – 500 words.

On The Way To Being A House – Writing About A Brick Pebble – title and notes.

No Shit Sherlock – Early Morning Ramblings On A Good Friday – 670 words.

It Wasn’t Working - The Fly – 12222 words.

Rose Street Primary School – Mapping, Remembering And The Paisley Shirt – 1573 words.

My Mum’s Funeral – Nearly Five Years Later – notes.

Twenty Years, Four Hours Drive Away From The Nearest Other Human – Jo Going – notes.

Eco Somatics And Permission To Touch – 157 words, unfinished.

The Little Boy Was Obsessed With The Little Dog – 209 words.

In the park tonight, I found myself talking to the woman with a three-legged greyhound called Twilight about how fecund the air smelt, “like it’s virile”. Maybe I had crossed a line.

“I know exactly what you mean” the woman with no name offered. The scent was thick and heavy and hit me in the back of my throat. I didn’t say this out loud, thankfully, but the thought was there. The stranger knew exactly what this evening with no sharp chill and the ground covered with a million blossom bouquets felt like.

“Have a nice evening” we both exchanged, Twilight and her owner rushing off rather fast away from me.

Later, still in the park, practicing my yoga moves in between flinging the ball for Greta, my dog, I found myself in warrior stance. This is the one where you stand with your legs wide astride facing forward, with the back foot turned in at a right angle to your leg and you hold your arms straight out in either direction from the shoulders., like you’re a plane stopping yourself from doing the splits.

Here I was in my oatmeal, yes, my oatmeal beany hat, looking rather like my mum in her older years and thankfully not wearing loose comfortable clothing, but still in a red synthetic silk Chinese looking blouse with a Mandarin collar and it happened. It was all over in a flash like the sharp sting you get when you have blood taken and I willed myself to disappear. I did not. So, in the full lunge I beaconed to Greta with my upturned palm to come to me. For that split second Keanu Reeves or maybe it was Lawrence Fishburne possessed me. I just stayed stock still and curled up my fingers and back down again several time.

My life is certainly more than a little bit strange at the moment, I just didn’t realise until now that I was in The Matrix.

Here’s the clip in case you don’t know what I’m talking about or have forgotten what an iconic moment that hand gesture delivered to movie history.

And if you want to practise the lunge Matrix style, there are some demo videos and images online to help you.

I hope you have a lovely weekend and if you want to start an intervention, maybe this is a call for help after all, you’ll find me in Hove.

I might even go willingly.

This is an entry for the World of Interiors competition running at the moment - 500 words, the prompt One Last Thing which you would save from the house if there was a fire. I thought I’d share it and the details if you want to enter.

https://www.worldofinteriors.com/story/montblanc-writing-competition-2025

And I thought I’d share the link to the project and the blog I wrote in 2013 which the object is connected to.

-

500 Words

I lay in the bath this morning and imagined my way around the possessions my house, searching for One Last Thing that I would take with me if the house was on fire.

I’ve been living in an Airbnb for a few months, it’s a long story for another time and as a result I have a capsule set of objects, things that are essential for me to live - this group is expanding.

Going from room to room in my mind, I scanned across stones on the kitchen counter, my favourite dresses on the back of the door and the tiny Whimsey China animals on the mantlepiece from my Mum's handbag. I stopped on the windowsill in the bedroom and there it was, the perfect thing, the small wooden replica trawler.

In 2013, Blast Theory the company of artists I helped set up made a project for the Aichi Triennale in Japan.

All of the work in the Triennale was about a change in thinking – Awakening, as a result of the Tsunami 2011 and the Fukushima Nuclear accident. We visited and saw ships on land where buildings should have been and foundations of homes on bare terrain, with nature finding its’ way through the cracks. Nothing was in the right place - like an octopus, with a stomach where its’ head should be and eyes in its’ belly.

Our project was called The Thing I’ll Be Doing For The Rest Of My Life, which is a line from a fisherman in Sendai, we interviewed. He had lost everything in the Tsunami and said he would spend the rest of his life teaching people how to fish, how to make a living, a life from the sea.

We were interested in how people cope in a natural disaster, what people do to help, before emergency services arrive. We read Rebecca Solnit’s book – A Paradise Built In Hell and leant in.

A man gave us his fishing trawler which we pulled out of the sea, a woman brought cotton gloves for us without being asked, food and drink, like a pop-up restaurant magically appeared to sustain us through the night.

The boat fits in my hand or pocket. It is made from a composite wood with a veneered surface, a scale model of our fishing boat.

It’s a reminder that all things can and will all go at some point. A note to self-resilience. A desire to help strangers, who of course we all are to each other before we become friends and family. It cannot be replaced, that doesn’t matter.

Made of two pieces that slot together, it is a step, a small build, a sense that in the face of disaster there can incredibly be some hope. Never will it be a silver lining, never will it replace what was lost, always it will remind me that we don’t know, that we are incredible and while we are alive we can.

Link to the project – https://www.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/the-thing-ill-be-doing-for-the-rest-of-my-life/

Link to the blog - https://thethingillbedoingfortherestofmylife.co.uk/

Friday night magnesium was a God send taking her through with no interruptions to Saturday. Maybe it was the Mojito? Whatever it was, when she looked at herself in the mirror with her glasses on, she looked younger, softer, calmer, the red eyes less red and starey. It was the best night’s sleep she’d had in years.

The person in her head told her to lock in any differences and see how your day goes.

Then she noticed it and the thoughts vanished like they had never been there.

Inside her mouth her tongue was moving about like it was in space. Something else was in there today and it was not food.

Her mouth knew that the air circulation was disturbed and immediately her dextrous, alienlike tongue sprang into action, careering around, probing space, as if there was an eye or a magnet on the tip. In the dark vast cavity all alone, the muscle is torsion, twisted and tumbled about, like a seal playing in the ocean.

For the first time in her life she realised the tongue was an independent creature, that knew what to do and she need never get involved.

Momentarily it felt the ribbon of something pass by, it got the tiniest of touches and then it disappeared. Like an idea swimming off ahead and you can see the tail, (was that David Lynch?), the tongue just had to follow.

Rarely was she tongue-tied, (meaning actually that words are hard to make due to the lingual frenulum, the vertical strong connective tissuemwhich joins the bottom of the tongue to the floor of the mouth was too short). No, now she was in shock as she had been the host to this parasite the tongue, all along and she or it had just, like she had been the host for this beast all along and it were waking up. Opening the wardrobe door and her mouth simultaneously, she looked in the mirror and started examining the underneath. Was her frenulum extra-long , or not connected she wondered? Words seemed to fall out of her very easily. Maybe her brain wasn’t anchored well enough to her tongue?

Then she started to wonder:

1. How can I make a mould of the volume of the inside of my mouth without blocking off my airways? In her mind it was like a kind of Rachel Whiteread House cast. The fastest setting material she found took ninety seconds to dry. If would need some practice holding her breath for that long but she knew that was not impossible.

Under no circumstances must the paste reach the back of the mouth, the pharynx where the nose and the mouth join and ideally not the dangling Uvula which causes the gag reflex. And then how to get it out, as her head isn’t silicone to be peeled off or slit down the middle?

She went through it all, imagining her teeth shut in their natural resting position. Leaks through her teeth would be a disaster too and she decided she would Vaseline all the enamel and gaps in between.

The resulting form would be much smaller than it felt, maybe quite thin even, probably disappointing her.

And there would need to be a willing assistant. A good practical friend or family member, who was solutions focused in an emergency. And who might think this was an odd thing to do, would in fact help her do it. At least three people sprang to mind and one person definitely would not be helpful and actually make it much worse. The next time she’s at the dentist, she will ask them some questions and hopefully this won’t trigger any special enquiries. This is not something to try at home, alone, if at all. And you can change your mind, stop, any time, lean forward, open your jaws as wide as possible and spit it all out. There would to be a big clock with seconds on it clearly visible, a large check list and protective clothing.

There would be as many rehearsals of different scales and mixes as made her happy and a risk assessment, with the what if this then that and emergency rehearsals. This was sort of mad and she would decide later if she wanted to go ahead with it.

2. The shape and the nature of the space – well apart from the inside of the mouth being smaller than it felt, certainly this resonant, cathedral-like cavity had a hard palette across the top, almost rib-like or vaulted. Some call it the roof, more like a ceiling and there are walls and a floor. The lips form the entrance but are never called that or the door or the gateway. Maybe an opening? And the back of the mouth where the hard palette becomes soft and leads to the throat, also called the esophagus , there is a threshold, guarded by the dangling ball in the centre, the Uvula, which means little grape in Latin and can actually be split in two - humans are the only creature on earth with this. Did surgeons call it a crossing place, maybe a point of entry? Outside of the lips was certainly the start of the digestive system. Further language research would be needed here. The walls are smooth like porcelain and would be incredible to run your fingers over, the floor is a lumpy, alien terrain which is slippery, so careful footing would be required and the tongue, a resisting strong sponge muscle, which gives but that you cannot fall through or trampoline on. In between the teeth small gaps would be windows to the outside world, the teeth would provide a diffuse light and this space if a little damp could be quite tranquil. Maybe it is a spa or retreat space, designed to be cave-like?

3. The fibre itself – how did it get in and what is it? So, where was this fibre from? If it was coming up from her stomach was there a hair ball deep inside, slowly growing and occasionally shedding? She had never been a hair snapper or chewer. Or was this a fibre on a solo adventure that had gotten in somehow on a piece of food and had been struggling to find its way out every since? It probably slipped in through the front door, past the lips, or was inhaled up in through the nostrils so fast that she didn’t notice. It could have been breathed in from her bed or slurped back in from a nighttime dribble. Her dog had a stray hair inside it’s left nostril and seemed totally oblivious.

It was not bio-film, the name for that white, stringy, substance that you sometimes see stretching like sinew across an opening mouth mid-yawn, usually near the edges, the labial or oral commissures. This is perfectly usual and is made up of bacteria and debris. The rim of the lips is called the Vermillion Border. And the fibre was not gastric reflux either, the backward flow of stomach acid into the esophagus and mouth. This may have food fibres in it, but it was not this.

No this is a cloth fibre that she had inhaled or licked off her pillow, or towel fibre after cleaning her teeth, or a t-shirt fibre that she dragged down over her head with a soft pop.

What if the fibre came from her Victorian cotton nightdress, which belonged to someone else long ago? Did it come from that or the owner? Was their DNA on it? Maybe the fibre had been going on the same adventure over and over ever since – possible, but very unlikely.

Next time one found its way in her mouth, and it was ejected, she would examine it closely. Usually, she received a fibre or a hair on her fingertips from her feral salivary snake tongue, somehow co-ordinating a dance until they met and then she would wipe it off onto the bedding.

4. Training her tongue to relax – this needed to happen so she could examine the fibre more easily, so that her thumb and forefinger could act as tweezers and extract it. Until now, she didn’t realise that tongue-tension was a thing and that it can interfere with a singer’s ability to sing. This was not relevant to her. And that there is a good tongue position and a proper tongue resting position. What the hell, language, breathing, eating, cleaning, singing – the tongue is a beast, and it can impact not just all of these and the mouth but also the eyes, the nose, the cheeks, the neck and the shoulders.

- Gently rest your tongue on the roof of your mouth it said – she tried this, it didn’t feel relaxing.

- The tip of your tongue shouldn’t rest on the floor of your mouth – this didn’t feel great, so ok.

- Try softening your mouth just 5% more than it currently is. Take a pause. Your mouth should be softly closed, and you should feel your tongue touch the back of your lower front teeth. This felt ok.

- When you find a position that feels very easy and natural notice it and when you feel stressed see if you can find this position again.

- Practice this.

Overkill for her purposes but good to know.

5. How often was this happening – she started to ask around and most people she spoke to knew exactly what she was talking about. This is a common occurrence, things get in uninvited, she just hadn’t read anything about it. Sometimes she noticed her husband, going in with a surgical precision, twizzer-like with his thumb and fore finger to come back with a fibre, and sometimes, when they were kissing, their mouths would both find one together. This didn’t happen anymore.

6. Why did she like it so much – because it was surprising but familiar. Because it was unimportant in the greater scheme of things but spoke to a seeming lack of control and turbulence abounding everywhere and just when things start to annoy you, or rather her, there is a rescue, there is hope. Of course, this was her in over-thinking mode and projecting way too much meaning onto this traveling thin line. Though she enjoyed giving it a lot of heft.

7. Finding a way out – Was it in fact lost? This thought briefly flicked across her brain and then. No stop!” Chasing a thread in the dark, it meant nothing much at all. It’s just a small thing, undiscussed, her calm part offered up and there are countless of these things.

But just, how do we know what to pay attention to? the explorer part enquired and what impact can we have on what? her concern chipped in.

On the weekend I took part in a sound workshop by the artist, my dear friend Simon James, at St Nicholas Church in Shoreham, near Brighton, England. Learning how to deep listen, recording one minute at a time and writing some thoughts about sounds. It was strangely affecting, especially choosing objects to make sounds with – I found some dry leaves on top of an old grave to rustle about with. I had an Ashes to Ashes moment, desiccated bodies, us wet in waiting. And then I found a wet J-Cloth, dish cloth, and wondered if it had holy water in it, but thought isn’t all water holy or rather precious in some way? I flapped this up close to the microphone like I was ending a Grand Prix with a black and white checkered flag.

This was the first workshop of four, one a month until August creating an installation called Echoes of Old Shoreham.

https://www.shorehamsociety.org.uk/echoes-of-old-shoreham/

Here are some of the pictures from the workshop of deep listening. The book to read is Quantum Listening by Pauline Oliveros, says Simon. It’s great and also short.

And here is my writing inspired by it all - a kind of listening journal.

-

Awake and already listening to the day, trying to tune herself in. A fanfare trumpet announces the new day through her cheeks.

A humming buzz track is there from the heating left on all night - occasional clicks, one big clunk and the humming switches itself off.

There is a warm crunching crisp sound as she pulls the duvet up around her face.

Her dog sighs, it doesn’t sound negative. And she sighs too, it’s relief. When she breathes in, the air quietly travels in through her nostrils like a small wind rushing across grass in the summer. A gull judders out a song in five or six sections – is it a mewing or an alarm or distress call? Is sounds like a ha ha ha ha ha sound, rather than a mating call which sounds like huoh-huoh, huoh-huoh, huoh-huoh. She ears hear this as a Cow-Cow-Cow-Cow-Cow.

All genders do the mating call. This pleases her a lot.

Five steps from the bed to the door, negotiate the rattly door handle – “why do I always turn it left first?” she wonders out loud to nobody in particular. Now turned right, clonk and through. Eight steps to the bathroom down the curving hallway, then six steps to the toilet.

Her cream cotton pyjama bottoms are pulled down, with a soft whoosh, her thighs make a slap as she lowers herself onto the plastic seat and then she pisses. It is not the tinkling sound she’s expecting. “Is my wee getting quieter? Are my ears really working?” she wonders inside her head.

As she stands up, she drags the bottoms along the back of her thighs and up over her arse. Then she looks down into the bowl – “Was this bowl designed for a quieter experience?” Staring into it reveals nothing, she is not an acoustic toilet expert.

Then her stomach lets out a high pitched Eeeeeee sound, followed by deep bubble grumbles from somewhere inside, a couple of drop clunk sounds, then nothing.

She settles down on the sofa with Joan Didion - ‘The White Album ‘. A squeak between her fingers and the fibres comes as she finds her place - ‘In The Island’ p.133. The pages have been read before by someone else and are starting to fall out. Someone else’s eyes have been here – she imagines their wet clicks and a soft fanning brush sound coming from their batting lashes and wonders if her eyes are making the same sounds too.

The painful red spiked cactus sits on the windowsill waiting. Waiting next to it is her coffee, fresh from the hob. A drip down the cup has stopped running and is drying, there must be a sound here. Not quite sure what it is, she reaches out to take a sip. Her hand is shaking, resting tremor, and a small seasick jollop begins in the liquid, sliding up the sides of the slippy white ceramic, threatening a spillage, then falling back down again. The coffee peaks and troughs. Inside her body the creaks adapt with her shaking hand.

Outside, one pigeon is chasing another pigeon along a ledge. There are tiny clacks like stilettoes striking paving stones but she cannot hear them. They are coo-ing, like the gulls. This could be mating or defending their territory. It looks like fun to her, whatever is going on, maybe it’s not.

Against the sharp blue winter sky there is a silent tree. If you press your ear onto it, you can hear the distant creaking inside, like a glass to a wall, something hidden is going on out of sight and it enters her world. If you put your hands on the trunk, you might feel that the very tip of the branches are dancing, being ticked by the air, giggling. Imagining all this she smiles – a wet sound releases from the corners of her mouth.

Then on the other side of the glass, she sees it – the great shadow, made from her building sensuously stroking the one opposite as the day appears. It’s a blurry edged skyline, moving imperceptibly slow like the hands on a clock, silently creeping down the barrelled façade. Lifting up her phone she takes photos of the shadow every few minutes. “Is there a sound here?” she hears herself think. Camera down, she moves her fingers slowly over the contours of her face. When she starts to notice her fingers moving, she knows she is moving too fast and slows down. Go slower, the voice says. Brush the surface with your lips like a kiss looking for a mouth. What is this sound? What is going on here? Is this seduction in slow-motion?

This is waking up. Her dog isn’t ready to and whimpers and twitches her dreams into sounds for her to hear.

The sun comes up, the shadow drops down, caressing the regency blocks, casting crisp lines around two sides of the window frames.

Nothing else is going on right now. Nothing else matters to her. And she lays resting on the sofa, afraid to get up in case she stops hearing, in case the shape of things isn’t what she thought it was. Then the long great shadow disappears.

That night I couldn’t get to sleep. Every time I closed my eyes; I could just see the events of the morning unfolding over and over again. Greta my dog couldn’t sleep either and when I flicked on the light, she was staring straight into my eyes. Maybe she was sending me a message - a friend said recently that dogs could be aliens come to observe us here on earth. I’m not sure what she was picking up or what she was transmitting, certainly we were both in the same weird zone and the magnesium was settling me down either. The silence was all I could hear - we were both unsettled, we were both hovering.

Getting up, reading, going to the bathroom, scrunching up my hands and feet and face then relaxing, nothing worked. The stuff then crept in. Yes, buy another external hard drive for my older photos, a rubber ring for my screw top coffee machine. Don’t forget to get an appointment with the GP for the pain under my nail on my ring finger. Like the thumb pain I used to have, which was dealt with up under local anaesthetic and removed tiny cists or growths by lifting the nail up. The sensations still haven’t fully returned yet – either no feelings, or pain that used to make me weak at the knees and want to vomit – it really was a thing for a while. I loved that my hand went through a hole in a surgical cloth and stuff happened out of sight. It was like a magic trick – behind the curtain things were happening with a team of people and this side of the cloth I am lying down, feeling a remote pressure in a phantom thumb.

You wrote a list Ju, don’t you remember just before you got into bed? You knew there was a lot slopping about in there. Just got to sleep, you’ve parked this stuff for today.

But no, sleep knows if you are wanting it too much, it stays away. You have to trick the brain, you have to pretend you’re not interested - eventually the brain will forget and doze off. But like with all things in our body and mind, some things are out of sight, unknowable or unreachable, and trying to breath into these smoky places is an option, but not necessarily a solution.

Then as if it were happening all over again, it came back to me, our morning walk on the beach. The sea looked strangely full as if the beach was the edge of a cup and any unexpected waves might flow over the lip. This didn’t happen; the sea just came a bit to close somehow and knowing it needed to prevent the invasion of the milky grey water, the stones were bigger and greyer here, forming a barrier.

Greta bounced her ball off her nose and it flew into the frilly edge of the tide. She didn’t move quickly enough, she isn’t a fan of going in and so it moved out of reach. First a few inches, almost gettable, then half a metre, a metre, two, three, more, quicker and quicker before we could save it. For a moment I did think about going in, but, well, cold and wet in the winter didn’t appeal and so I thought, ball, you expensive ball, you just have to go and join the great waste mass out there somewhere far away. Maybe it would reach another shore or another dog on another beach like a message in a bottle. Probably not and it will remain like space debris, orbiting the earth’s surface in the choppy soup.

Greta was stunned. We both stood and stared as it kept moving on its’ new journey. Further and further until I couldn’t see it anymore and so I turned away to come back home. Great just kept on looking for her toy and then the sad mewing began. I felt like the parent of a small child.

“It’s ok Greta, I will get you a new ball” I kept repeating. But I knew it wasn’t a new ball that was desired. It was only this hard rubber object. This medium sized orange and blue ball, with layers of saliva embedded into the semi-porous surface that she longed for. Greta and the ball have history. It’s a love story, providing hours of joy. Like with a child crying for its’ lost teddy, her crying was awful to hear. And her lead boots meant she wouldn’t leave. I kept trying to walk away thinking she would follow me. She wouldn’t. This was my lame attempt, move on, leave it behind you. You can’t have it because it’s out of reach now. “Come on Greta” I called again. All I had was distraction and a soothing voice repeating over and over:

“It’s OK Greta, don’t worry I’ll get you another one”. A trump card for parents with children, distraction, something else to look at – change the tune Row Farr, that’s what you’ve got to do. So, I did. I started scouring the beach for a good sized piece of wood to throw. My throwing is pretty rubbish, I can’t do that over arm fling where a piece of wood spins like a cricket ball in a giant arc. My version is more like a sideways slice travelling just three or four metres maximum in front of me. Very disappointing after the bendy flinger but do it enough and love starts to emerge. Greta started to get interested in this new thing, until we were much further away from the heart-breaking incident. I felt certain she had forgotten, or her brain had been tricked. Had she? Was it? That’s what I told myself.

And now I can’t sleep and neither can Greta. The ball is still moving away in the water bothering us, just out of our reach.