Weather

Shelter – Tues 13th Jan

So you find yourself in town without a raincoat and suddenly out of nowhere there’s a downpour so heavy everyone is running for doorways and bus stops and you curse the weather and how long are you going to have to stand cramped under a tiny and inadequate awning with some bloody smoker because it seems endless and you also curse your luck and indeed you are unlucky because had you been out in the open like on the beach you could have seen the gathering storm grow from a hairy dog to an elephant to a gigantic whale till finally it becomes the huge upswept wing of the angel of obliteration before it passes overhead shedding rain like tattered curtains but before you know it dwindles from the apocalypse to merely a gigantic whale and then an elephant before becoming once more a hairy and retreating dog and then the sun bursts through and you can hardly see for all the dazzlement.

Ozymandias – Sat 3rd Jan

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

P. B. Shelley

Grey – Thurs 13th Nov

As a country, we English do grey very well. We’ve had the grey man for a prime minister, backed up by the men in grey suits; plenty of grey areas in our legal system; our film industry was probably at its pinnacle when movies were made predominantly in black and white (all right, I know, Hammer Horror films… but the colour in those was all so magnificently artificial) and women in grey populate our haunted homes. Is it bloody surprising? I mean where was the colour today? I looked and I looked and in the end all I can say is thank heavens for the Cheeky Chicken take away in West Street. I’m not saying I was hungry, but I was desperate for a bit of colour. There certainly wasn’t any up there in the sky.

On a more structural note, have a close look at the penultimate image in today’s contact strip. Now look again. Someone didn’t read the instructions properly did they?

Meringue de mer – Weds 12th Nov

When the wind is right and the sea is at a certain stage in the cycle of the tides, you get foam. Not just the bubbly stuff that is part of every wave, but great piles of suds, as if an overloaded washing machine has leaked its load, drift up the beach, bouncing and rolling with the breeze in great lumps. They last a surprisingly long time too, accumulating like yellowing special effects from a cheap sci-fi movie.

With chips – Sat 8th Nov

Day two of the howling wind. Capes stream off motorbikes like Batman and Robin, bicycles sprout plastic leaves like a false spring, the sea boils and brings forth its monsters, lovers kiss tenderly between candy coloured water mains (you have to look really close to find them though) while pigeons grow to the size of tower blocks. MAD WEATHER! Have it with chips and…

Epic – Fri 7th Nov

“Why should I not wander over the pastures in search of the wind?” (Gilgamesh lamenting the passing of Enkidu from ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’)

Who needs rain when the wind is blowing so hard you can taste salt spray within a block of the sea? Pampas grass thrashes, pigeons huddle and runners do a 3-minute mile with ease (as long as they are travelling in the right direction). How do you define something you can’t see, but can feel all around you, something so solid it can knock you off your feet and mould the shapes of trees with its fingers? You can only see what it does, not what it is.

So many questions.

Insteps – Thurs 6th Nov

Well there was me thinking about all those day-after-bonfire-nights and the childish delights of coming across burned out (and if you were lucky, unexploded) ordnance, hoping I’d do the same today, and what did I find? One lousy sparkler packet (empty) which was certainly not worth photographing. What happened to all the pyromaniacs and litter-louts? Pah! Instead I found out what the contents of a Kambi’s lamb shawarma looked like uncooked. Eeuw… I also noted that the new seafront boardwalk, still under construction, is purely ornamental. Or maybe it’s just for roller skaters?

Enjoy the blue bits, tomorrow could see a lot of photographs of puddles, and even now as I write I can hear the wind howling outside….

Two stones of the day today. Both have insteps…

Two travellers – Mon 3rd Nov

Many years ago a friend of mine recounted a conversation that he had overheard in a pub, between two old gentlemen. From the details of their exchange he could tell that they were both well travelled and had lived and worked in a variety of places across what was then the British Empire. Based on their experiences, they were considering different locations they thought would be suitable for the latter part of their retirement. One was asking the other about a variety of different countries for this purpose, but each time he suggested somewhere his friend rebuffed him. Brazil No. Mexico? No. India, China, Burmah? No, no, no. Eventually the man making the suggestions asked in exasperation: “Well, what about England?” The reply was:

“If God had intended man to live in England he would have given him gills.”

After a day like today I find myself agreeing…

Todays ‘stone of the day’ is tiny. No bigger than my thumbnail.

Grey noise – Sun 2nd Nov

Everything is noisy today, I wonder if I should start recording sounds too. Apart from the booming of the wind around buildings, it buckles van sides with a bang, the weirdest seagull cry I’ve ever heard resolves itself into the whining and yapping of a toy dog waiting for its owner to throw it a stone (seriously) which crashes with a clang into the side of one of the permanent ping pong tables under the promenade, lines of rigging ring like bells against wet metal masts and plastic bins thunder as they roll. Chips, bits of kebab and pizza carpet West Street, Brighton’s very own Little Vegas, following the traditional late Saturday night rituals of clubbers.

Did I mention it is windy? it also turns very, very wet.

All Souls Day – Sat 1st Nov

All Souls Day, the day after the night of All Hallows Eve. I assume its safe to wander abroad again? There are tell tale signs in the streets that gruesome things have been happening in the witching hours and, judging by the abandoned empties, there has been a lot of communion with the spirits… Ha! geddit? Stick to the script Chris…

Through an open first floor window I can see the head of a young man with bleached blond hair and hear him recounting his adventures. Has he just woken up, or is he carrying on still from last night? A broken drain bleeds moss onto a wall, pigeons preen and wisps of moulted fancy dress cling to the pavement.

What starts out grey and rainy begins to break up and small and tantalising scraps of cyan spread across the sky, turning it once again into a deep and crystal blue. Is it really November? I’m not complaining.

Today’s stone of the day has a distinctly antipodean flavour…