dannybirchall

[dannybirchall]

For years it said HELLO AUNTIE JILLY on the concrete wall of the bridge in blue, unevenly-spaced capitals. An unremarkable bridge, carrying the A10 over the line to Enfield Town, as it cleaves the borough between the good side and the bad side. An interwar artery, opening up the half-timbered suburbs that stretch into Hertfordshire, the Great Cambridge Road thunders northward, lined then by factories and warehouses, and now by hulking retail sheds. I hope that Auntie Jilly lived a long and happy life and drove over the bridge often, smiling to herself at her hooligan vandal of a niece or nephew. 

Years later, riding up on a moped, Rob and I unleashed our own bright red spraycans on the wall, and painted (for reasons of available space) FREE THE B’HAM 6. It was part of a night of spraypainting that culminated in covering the windows of the conservative party constituency headquarters of Michael Portillo (on the good side of the borough) in stencilled hammers and sickles. We retraced our steps the next day to take photos of ourselves alongside our handiwork, posing in helmets at bus stops alongside POUVOIR POPULAIRE. Our FREE THE B’HAM 6 was still extant, but the hammers and sickles had already been wiped clean.

A couple of years after that we left my dad, and lived on the road that ran alongside the bridge, down at railway level. Opposite our front door was a steep flight of steps up a scrubby and neglected bank to the road itself, but there was no reason to go up there, no bus stop or shop or anything but four lanes of traffic.

This evening I paid a visit on streetview and reviewed the last ten years. The bridge is depressingly featureless; ridges on the new concrete sides of the bridge preclude the application of new slogans. Or perhaps nobody has anything interesting to say or needs a bridge to say it with.

[dannybirchall]

A visit to Prospect Cottage at Dungeness. The previous day’s rain has cleared, and the sky is bright, though it’s still brisk and windy on the headland. The fish shack is busy, serving rolls, flatbreads, and fat chunks of caramel chocolate brownie; visitors shelter in the lee as a group of twitchers with binoculars set off across the beach to observe straggling swallows headed south. To the south, the power station squats like a friendly, obscene, hulk.

At the cottage a team of gardeners are hard at work on Derek Jarman’s garden with wheelbarrows and secateurs, filling buckets with shingle and tending to the windswept plants. Chatting briefly to one of the team, I gather that they come down three or four times a year to tend to the place. She says they don’t manicure the plants to maintain them, but cut them back so that they can flourish again.

I only know this place only from books, from hearsay, as legend, but speaking of it already feels  like an intrusion, and so I retreat to the cafe. I take photos from lots of angles, squatting and kneeling down, getting my knees wet on the shingle. One photo: a ring of gorse around an upright branch of driftwood. Later at home I compare my photo of the circle to a photo from 1995. Then, the gorse was barely there, a series of of low shrubs hugging the ground. Now it forms a chest-height suburban hedge, but the wood is halved, lost to some storm.

The plants are important here, but I find it hard to write about them because I lack the vocabulary. When Jarman writes about his garden he uses words like Santolina, Viper’s bugloss and Valerian. These words have their own internal beauty, but for me they have no correlative, they conjure up no images. Looking around I can see stunted trees, bent back in steps to the prevailing wind, scrubby bushes squatting tight on the shingle like limpets, cabbagey growths thrusting up between the tufts of grass. But I can’t name them. Perhaps we can meet at ‘frothy’. Jarman writes with exuberance of the froth of flowers, and perhaps I can name froth here too.

The sculptures make more immediate sense to me. I can speak of an upright rusty iron cross, marking space between flower beds. I can specify ships’ timbers pegged with brown and riveted ironwork. More driftwood, holding donut pebbles aloft. On the way back to the car I pay the kids fifty pence apiece for each perforated pebble they can find for me.

At an artist’s studio near the lighthouse, someone has created a ‘bleak moderator’: an oval shape you can spin to choose alternative adjectives to the obvious. A line reads:

fecund

renegade

wistful

real

[dannybirchall]

If you were asked to draw an archetypal 1990s nerd, you might start by sketching in some NHS-shaped glasses, pale skin with freckles, slightly too-prominent front-teeth and a weakish chin. You could add a continuation of the pale skin, covering a skinny body clothed in a short-sleeved open-necked shirt, black drainpipe trousers and an average pair of trainers. A lot of sharp angles. More rodent than actual mouse. This would also look quite a lot like my friend Steven.

If you looked at this picture until you began to imagine that you could also hear something, you might also add an accent, Leedsish, and a tendency to speak too quickly, with words tripping over each other in a torrent of enthusiasm. You might hear him say jokingly that he hated older people (all of five years older) who still acted like they were young, or that deck shoes were the most ridiculous thing a human being could wear on their feet.

If you ran a yellow highlighter pen along a calendar outlining the time that we were friends, really friends, then it would be exactly the length of a single beautiful summer.

If you opened your clipart folder and placed two images on an A4 landscape-oriented  page: firstly a line drawing of an office meeting around a table, with participants looking towards the centre of the table; and secondly a cluster of business women holding briefcases, scaled so that they appeared to be the object of the attendees’ attention. If you did this and then typed beneath it in a large font (60pt or so) LITTLE LADIES ON THE TABLE, SEE, then this would still make me laugh every time I think about it.

If you searched Amazon for the novel he wrote, a fantasy about an alternative universe called ‘Elsewhere’ with a chalky white silhouette of a boy with a hole in his head on the cover, then you might be surprised to find that you can’t buy a copy for less than ninety-four pounds.

If you wanted to recount the time that he worked at American Express and hacked into the inter-office messaging system, but got one crucial digit wrong and sent a complete stranger a pop-up message saying ‘you are gay’, then I would cringe, but I wouldn’t object.

If you needed to imagine the last flat that he lived in, in Birmingham, all that I could tell you was that it had a lot of J-Pop posters on the wall, sorry.

If you drew the day that we trudged over the pebbles on Brighton beach to the edge of the sea, and threw his ashes into it before returning to the pub, then you would need a lot of grey.

[dannybirchall]

We were ready for the internet long before it was ready for us. We’d read the pulp paperback cyberpunk novels with their neon nightscapes on the inside of the computer, and eldritch consciousnesses alive in the silicon. We’d watched open-mouthed as a teenage Matthew Broderick hacked into the Pentagon’s nuclear infrastructure and averted nuclear war by teaching a mainframe noughts and crosses. We’d switched on our own BBC micros and watched the command prompt blinking:

>_

white on black, ready to connect us, connect us to something. 

We knew that it was already out there, installed and controlled by the american military, global corporations or advanced scientists. There was life in the wires, somewhere, but we couldn’t jack in or hook up, and so instead we read the books, watched the movies, tapped nervously at our disconnected keyboards and dreamed fitfully of cyberspace.

When the connection finally arrived, it wasn’t sleek and black, wearing mirrorshades or jacked into the grid. It was a pale grey wire connecting a beige box to a British Telecom telephone socket, it was a tinny crackle that sounded like static on a cheap synthesiser, it was a program called trumpet winsock, a program called kermit. It was a bank of terminals in an over-lit repurposed university seminar room, and filling in paper forms for access to the network. It was the cursor still blinking, maddeningly slowly, waiting for a message to arrive.

Once we were connected, we began to find each other. It was difficult at first because we knew that we were out there, we’d read in the print magazines (already unknowingly but unalterably destined for oblivion) that people were using this thing to find and talk to each other. But we didn’t know who we were. Equipped with email addresses, strange alphanumeric strings attached to institutional names chained with full stops, we joined email lists, and waited for messages from strangers to roll in to our accounts. Extended diatribes about Jacques Derrida. Notices of anarchist meetups in Portland. The text WACO written in capitals fifty times in the shape of the state of Texas, white on black.

Word got out that we were ‘on line’, we were ‘connected to the internet’. We wrote our email addresses down on scraps of paper, handed them to strangers we’d just met at parties. We scoured the back pages of fanzines for the contact details of people far away who we thought might like us, might be like us. We received emails in return weeks or even months later. Hello, I am sending this email from. Signed off with a full name. Writing letters that were already not like letters. Over these cables and wires, tethered to the earth, we started talking, a conversation that hasn’t yet ended.

[dannybirchall]

I’m falling asleep on the upper deck of the 73 bus.

I’m falling asleep because I’m very drunk. We started in the Bricklayers Arms at six, after work, and carried on through to closing time. After that we went on to the Troy on Hanway Street, a first-floor bar which will disappear before long, even before Crossrail sinks its claws into the area. 

I’m drunk because things aren’t going well at home, and they’re going to get worse. I hate coming home sober more than I hate pushing my key clumsily into the lock and tripping through the door, trying not to wake her up. I’ve passed out drunk in Best Turkish Kebab this month, and I’ll nearly knock myself out on its shutter before the year is out.

The 73 is still a routemaster and although the upper deck is less than a quarter full, the tightly packed seats still lack legroom; I’m lying across a double seat, with my head resting on the metal handrail that runs across the back. When the bus idles at lights, the vibration of its engine travels through the body of the bus, the handrail, my skull and my body. It’s soothing, like an electric toothbrush, and I fall asleep.

I wake up to the bus’s lights flashing on and off to let me know that I have finished my journey. The bus has terminated at Hackney Wick. I check my coat and my pockets, grab my bag and stumble down the curving flight of stairs at the back of the bus, out into the cold air.

Hackney Wick isn’t yet what it will become, all microbreweries and art galleries, hipster graffiti and new apartments. The olympics are still a twinkle in Sebastian Coe’s eye. It’s long-since ceased being ‘industrial’, but it isn’t yet quite ‘post-industrial’. It’s also grim as fuck at one ay em and I don’t know my way home from here.

A month or two later, when I am at home, she’ll call me: also drunk, also late; from a park she’s unable to find her way out of, and it will occur to me that maybe the same things are happening to her that are happening to me. (Later still, I will remember that the 73 bus route has never ended at Hackney Wick). But I don’t call her from here. 

Instead, I have an idea. This is the ultimate bus stop on the route. From here, I can just about see the penultimate bus stop. If I walk from here to the penultimate bus stop, from there perhaps I will be able to see the antepenultimate bus stop, and from there the preantepenultimate bus stop, and so on. And in this way, walking backwards where I slept, I will retrace my steps to where I should have got off, and to the place I should be.

[dannybirchall]

The last seven alt texts I wrote, a poem

Two tight coils of leathery-looking dried fishskin, one upright and one on its side

A white stone, veined and pockmarked; below it a short stick

A silk purse-like bag with a faded pink draw-ribbon; next to it the desiccated corpse of a frog with a five-figure number faintly stamped on its forehead

Three pieces of bone of which two are large and knuckleish, one short and nondescript

A bone necklace laid out in a figure eight on a blue background

A configuration of several objects including a small piece of flint, a piece of turf, a wooden necklace and a calf’s tooth

A pair of mole's feet, detached from a mole's body, held in place with tarnished wires

[dannybirchall]

Today I am daydreaming about the afterlives of the minor royalty of 1980s indie rock. Those who achieved magnificence at the Brixton Academy, at the Town and Country Club, magicians of sound and feeling, who now live among us, in slightly better houses than we can afford. The bassist from the Cocteau Twins, maybe. The drummer out of Slowdive.

I think that they must live their afterlives somewhere pleasant, in places that don’t require magnificence, that provide comfort without being dull, where the residents tend carefully to their window boxes but also hang provocative fine art prints on their walls. That corner of Hampstead just behind Parliament Hill, perhaps. A nicer bit of Golders Green, or a suburb with wide roads in South London where nobody goes.

One of these men, with his long, ever-so-slightly balding hair and expensively stylish but definitely comfortable three-quarters length overcoat: he’ll walk to a shop, to buy a newspaper or some skins. It’s the middle of a weekday, and the streets are quiet, some mums out with young children and not much more. He doesn’t have a job because he doesn’t need one: the canny investment of his royalties plus a second career in the industry has seen him all right.

Back at home, he carries on a creative project: illustrating a children’s book or something like that. It’s good, and it’s satisfying: it makes him happy and it will make him money, but there’s nothing magical here.

He doesn’t often think of his fans, the people who shook silently when he walked onto the stage, whose insides were liquified by the sounds he made, who borrowed against their pocket money to buy his records the day they came out. They saw themselves in him, wanted to be up there on stage as well as down there in the moshpit, but he wasn’t like them. It wasn’t about social class or talent: it was about being a performer. There are performers and there are fans.

As dusk falls and the light to work by fails, he goes out into the garden to breathe some air. It’s an old and well-looked after garden, modest in size. There are few weeds, and few flower beds: leafy bushes predominate; in the late summer evening the air between them is still cool.

Towards the back of the garden he sees a rustling in one of the larger bushes and moves towards it. He thinks that it’s the cat returning for dinner, but it’s not. Stepping closer and looking down, he catches his first sight of me, elbows and knees stained with mud, a kitchen knife clenched between my teeth, ready to take everything he has away from him.

[dannybirchall]

Venice / Silver Lake / Watts

Camden Market-on-sea: to the left the pale expanse of sand, breakers, and surfboards; the languishing gym equipment of muscle beach, the waving palms and sinking sun, the Pacific edge. To the right, the Egyptian Exposition, Venice on the half shell, dreaming that 'history is myth'. T-shirt stall after t-shirt stall, the same bad jokes punched home in different fonts, hotpants declaring 'Fuck Trump'. To the left again, hugging the edge of the sand: grey-headed guitarists on homemade rollerskates, pitch after pitch of bad folk art laid out by beneficiaries of the green doctors offering forty-dollar medical marijauana evaluations. A man uses a magnifying glass to carefully turn the sun's rays into execrable poetry on plywood. Further from the beach, the cool walls of the white cube and Hockneys, Keinholzes. A black baseball cap that the desk staff at LAX will later mock me for, all the beaches in LA, why would you go to Venice? In Mao's kitchen, they've got halfway through translating the menu into a series of jokes about the People's Republic. Weiwuer lamb is not really compatible with orange ginger chicken. The hipster burbs: where Santa Monica turns the corner into Sunset, at the Black Cat there are craft beers and scathing talk of Brexit. Paul flashes his medical marijuana card, takes me to his roof and we overlook the sharp bumps of the residential hills poking up before the mountains proper. In the Mad Men Californian light, the home turf of Transparent. Bursting for a piss, we race up the steps where Laurel and Hardy wrestled their music box; everywhere in LA was once Hollywood. Back on Sunset, a sign declares 'Donald Trump makes me want to smoke crack'; Bernie's supporters have been slow to take their placards down. Cliff's Edge serves up mezze plates of brussels sprouts and goose nduja, farfalle shared piece by piece. It's hard to say what I'm doing here. Too much history: Sam Rodia came to the USA, drank his way through a marriage, and bought a house with a triangular yard where he built a ship of rebar, salavaged ceramics and broken seven-up bottles, a ship for his spiritual journey home to Italy. A tiny man of eighty, bending steel bars under the railtracks, climbing up and down his own towers to strengthen and embellish. An unfinishable task, he finished it and left it behind. Several intersections away, the shape of the towers still echoes in the street art. In the Watts Coffee House, the history of black music is on the walls and on television. Grits, biscuits, eggs and fried chicken are on the plates in front of us. Nickie grew up in Watts, where the gangsters used to tell her parents if her brother was misbehaving; when someone shot at her father it was time to move south. She smiles, chats, switches fast across the eight lanes of the 105 and to LAX.

[dannybirchall]

Consider the intimate violence done to a book as you push it hard against the platen, making an illicit PDF. The pages are spread flat to make the best digital impression: later you will stitch them together in your desktop, shrink the file and upload it somewhere. (Perhaps the checked cuff of your shirt is caught just outside the margins of the scanned  pages.) Returned to its shelf, the physical object now bears the scar of its double, its digital phantom. Our spines are broken, the books whisper to each other, not because we were read, but because we were shared.

[dannybirchall]

His ex-wife is building a new roundhouse on the edge of the settlement. We can see it from further up the hill, bales of straw stacked up alongside the timber frame. When you build with traditional materials, he says, it's not like mortar and cement, that fix on your hands and become useless. You can work straw and clay as they dry, they're malleable: sympathetic with the climate. Everything here is well-made. The shower door locks in its open position to form an outdoor changing room. The tree-house perches on a living tree, made of strong and shapely wood, little sawn timber. Traditional rammed-earth cottages butt up against an adobe communal area replete with pizza oven. Water from a borehole, solar electricity, greywater irrigation. I've filled the plunge pool, he says, we'll water the garden with it tomorrow. I'm interested in healing, she says, I'm originally from New York. My friends and I are looking to buy somewhere like this, some land. Permaculture is the thing, but I would like to run a yoga centre, with courses and retreats. We drop her at a roundabout in the town, to hitchhike north. Israel is a difficult place now, he says. The politics, the living, everything. We've tried many different places, and now we've come here to share his dream. In Israel the heat is dry like this but more, these tomatoes would dry out in a couple of hours. This is not Costa Rica, but things grow here. Further north it's cheaper, but this valley has a community. We're going to stay here for this school year, she says, it works for the family. At the bottom of the hill, her sons throw rocks at other kids. The dynamic changes, she says, with the other kids that come along; it's hard for outsiders. The kids make swords and bows and arrows from the wood in the workshop. I wish there were no other kids here, she says, I wish I just lived here by myself. Her mum takes her north for a few days.

[dannybirchall]

We were in the middle of splitting up, and once I'd got off the bus and into my office, I called her at work to see if she was OK. She seemed mildly surprised to hear from me, hadn't considered calling me herself. People clustered around the television in the magazine's office, talking about a ring of fire around the city. I might or might not have heard the bus go off; we were near enough. My friend emailed me a crudely-photoshopped image of Nicolas Sarkozy wearing a suicide belt and I sent him back one of a Tetley Tea man likewise. In the early afternoon we formed walking-home posses, by the points of the compass. Hackney was our destination, but by Islington buses had reappeared and we finished the journey that way. I don't remember ever feeling scared.

[dannybirchall]

We're smoking weed and watching an execrable adaptation of an execrable Martin Amis novel when the telephone rings. It's Andy and he wants to know why we spraypainted trotfists all over the wall of the hospital where he works and is a union activist. The night before, Rob and I had been all over the borough on his scooter, jacket pockets stuffed with paint cans, doing some revolutionary decoration. Our chief achievement was covering Michael Portillo's consituency HQ in hammers and sickles, but we also found time for a few slogans on busstops, and the aforementioned trotfists. Andy's voice is a thin and persistent, complaining whisper. You've made it hard for me to organise, he says, what you've done is childish and stupid. He goes on and on. I want to take his voice away from my ear, to pass the phone to Rob, but Rob's oblivious, a fat joint stuck in his grinning face, his eyes locked onto Dexter Fletcher's, riding his scooter into nowhere.

[dannybirchall]

tourism / terrorism

I was in New York as a tourist not long after the attack on the twin towers. On my previous visit they'd been a visual anchor, a destination to aim for from my Chelsea hostel on my first day in the city; now they were a vacancy. Walking towards their absence, tributes grew thicker on the streets, tiles and fabrics tied to chain link fences. At the site, hawkers sold ten-dollar postcard books telling the story from impact to weeping eagle, explicit images that would later be erased from the official narrative of mourning. On a later visit still, I saw on the lower east side the only memorial mural to feature the world trade centre as we best, last remember it: spewing mirrored plumes of smoke from the upper storeys. I was in Bombay as a tourist, not long after the attacks on the south of the city. The Taj remained a dead zone, cordoned off and patrolled by bored-looking policemen. In the desultory snack bar at the railway terminus photographic evidence of the atrocities adorned the walls with all the matter-of-factness of signed pictures of local celebrities. And drinking with the boho-mix in Leopold's cafe on the Colaba Causeway, I spotted a blond tourist in conspiratorial conversation with a waiter. He shifted a picture to one side and showed her a bullet-hole, a small souvenir they kept. I was in Belgrade as a tourist, not long after bombing sorties against the city to punish the regime for its role in the Kosovan conflict. A suburban avenue that led to the final resting place of Josip Broz Tito (I was apparently the only visitor that day) was lined with former government buildings and agencies. Devoid of post-conflict use and unrepaired, they still bore the marks of the missiles. When steel reinforced concrete is hit with force it doesn't crumble but collapses like sauce around spaghetti. Locally they're known as 'NATO monuments'. Taking pictures of the ruins I was only slightly taken aback by the look of disgust on the face of a passing shopper.

[dannybirchall]

The relationship between archives and life is that boxes must go in the garage so that there is room for the children to play. Plastic bags are used to separate moisture and memory. The archive’s redemption is always imagined, always deferred.

The relationship between archives and life is that history is perpetually commingled with nostalgia. An item discovered in a library belongs to the present, but an item once acquired will always belong to the past. Preservation cannot be cleaved from autobiography.

The reification of the relationship between archives and life is the figure of the mother who throws away your childhood comics. The reality of the relationship between archives and life is torrenting and the .cbr format. When everything is available, nothing is special.

The relationship between archives and life will be hunting for your own childhood in the rubbish that your parents leave behind. A brownie camera snapsot reshot on a phone and dropboxed until the renewal fails. The things that other people choose to keep as reminders of you.

The relationship between archives and life is carefully filling an eggbox with broken eggshells. The suffocating pressure on the intersecting lacunae of memory and documents is what has broken the eggs.

[dannybirchall]

When the crash came, the work stopped. Funds took stock and cranes paused, limbs frozen high in the air. What was demolished was demolished, but replacements remained imaginary. A festival of animatronic dinosaurs appeared on Oxford Street in lieu of another lively work/shop combination. Renderghosts fizzled, stuck in their timeless time. Elsewhere, new vistas opened up, strange sightlines from street level to balcony. London had had a few teeth punched out and was feeling all the better for it, able to breathe. When the cranes unpaused and work started again, the resulting smile was nothing to be proud of.

[dannybirchall]

When you encounter a lone magpie, it’s best to allocate the sorrow as soon as possible. Assign it to a missed bus or a stubbed toe, and the business is completed, the account closed. Ignore it, and it will multiply like a snowball, an avalanche of ill fortune seeking your acknowledgement. On spotting a pair, the happiness will find you regardless, but may arrive in unexpected forms: a sunny day in winter, or a good round of golf for a neighbour. Of girls and boys, there is no accounting.

[dannybirchall]

First days in Neasden

It looks like the suburbs, but then everywhere does. This is the interwar dream of retreat: monochrome gables, mirrored semis, gardens rising in terraces up the hill. The boy can see buses going by from his bedroom window, bound for Golders Green and Brent Cross. Nevertheless, the new place passes the pepper test: never live further than 10 minutes from where you can obtain a fresh red capsicum at 11pm. These days, a takeaway is more likely. The previous owner clears the garage, and takes the satellite dishes down from the front of the house. A loop of co-ax still coils into the room where a previous tenant lined the walls with pictures of Coptic popes. The man from next door rings on the bell to discuss the area's fluctuating fortunes, patterns of behaviour related to ethnicity, and the comings and goings of rodents. He lends us a parking permit for event days at Wembley stadium. You can see the stadium, arch and bowl below, from the short walk to the park where we once met Ken Livingstone. There's a memorial to the victims of concentration camps, and a new cafe in a former stable: my in-laws discuss the viability of its business model. A disused train line bisects the park, rails on which nothing runs. The clanking of trains has been replaced by the background roar of the north circular. We turn it on and off with battered double glazing. The parade of shops is brutally truncated by the dual carriageway, the orbital hems in this little corner of London. Beyond lies the reservoir, the garden centre, other postcodes.