I am confident that you will not be delighted to hear that I have bought a (the) recorder from Lidl. My previous one, from a charity shop, was about 50p and could only play one note. My new one was 34 times that price but still seems to only make one note. Never mind - only 2% of my musical effort is taken up with the actual microphoned music-making - the magic happens when I get round to manipulating it with the computer software - it is here that the remaining 7.03857% of creation occurs .... (the remaining 90-odd-percent is spent spaffing about sleeping and talking and getting cross with everyone I meet and walking to train stations and reading and watching films).
And that's it. That is my life. Terrifying. The even more terrifying thing about it is that it's truly a lot less crap than most of my friends' lives. I'm sure your own life is totally fulfilled and wonderful, spent in prayer and meditation and doing good charitable works with large bouts of fascinating invigorating healthful sex every day and deep meaning of life discussions deep into the next morning. That's great. But this side of the screen most people's lives are totally shite and empty and no one would miss anyone if all of us died today.
Sorry to come over all gothy teenage-tantrummy but that's what happens when you get old - second childhood and all that - they're the only two times you can tell the truth and not get sacked for it or give a fuck what HR think of your inappropriate thought-crimes blah blah - but just take it as read that one day later you'll look back and realise that everything you did today was as useless as my dead cousin Peter's final decade in bed in adult nappies in front of a huge TV watching porn 24/7/eternity life without end or beginning. At least he wasn't struggling for hours most days of his life to give what little money he had to people richer than himself, which is what everyone else seems to be doing - so tho his life was a total fuck-up it wasn't as much of a fuck-up as everyone else's.
Yesterday morning I scraped the minus-9-deg-C ice off my car and picked up my favourite ex and we drove to Fritham before the crowds spoilt everything. Of course we were half a century too late. Virginia Woolf used to live or holiday at Fritham. How the place has slid. First we went to the end of the road, to Eyeworth Pond, a large pond by the standards of the New Forest, frozen all over, no one else in the car park, we wandered on solid ground, out in the sun it was strange to see the snow, knowing full well that we're on the run, to hear the traffic on the way to Fordingbridge, the cracks of ice as we walked on streams, I must admit I loved it, she is one of the very few people I know who hasn't been turned insane/damaged by the pandemic and this new world that seems so suddenly very cruel and unfeeling and always on the edge of exploding.
Then we drove to nearby Janesmoor Pond. This much more than Eyeworth was a pond from my childhood. Decades ago my favourite grandparents would drive their black 4-ton leather-upholstered sun-visored Ford Prefect off the road and park anywhere and you could in those days cos no one cared cos there was no one anywhere, and we'd all sail our tiny yachts on Janesmoor - I don't even remember it having a name back then. Now, today, there are proper car parks around Janesmoor - google-map-satellite them and you'll see for yourself that there's now enough parking for about 300 cars - and apparently in summer that still isn't enough.
The pond itself seemed much bigger than how I remembered it. That normally never happens. Normally everything turns out much smaller than remembered. Then we went to the Royal Oak in the heart of Fritham, a pub that's smaller than your house in a village that's smaller than your road. We drank and had food - I think it's admirable that their menu is just two things - ploughmans or soup. Obviously, fifty years ago, when I last went, it was just crisps or beer - my brothers and I having the crisps and shandy outside, nana and grandad having the beer inside.
It's not just weird that children weren't allowed in pubs, it's that children could be left alone outside pubs. Fuck, I don't want to be one of those old gits who says I'm glad I'm not young anymore and that I saw the world when it was better - cos I've just got the same selective memory we all have, and I'd love to be young again, to have all this that now exists, and accept that everywhere now is no more than fifty yards from a car park and a main road, that everyone is the same and getting samier every day, oh to be liked, and as safe as that requires, this music started as a recorder but the software has mercifully changed the sound of all that, it is as reassuringly dull as all this stuff always is, every bit as safe as required, but it's not likable, and that is the only good thing about it.
recorded yesterday, photo Janesmoor Pond near Fritham yesterday morning
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