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no one understands how we got food from the clouds

by sonja berlin-jones

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1.
no one understands how we got food from the clouds 23:22
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I like this one - and unusually for one of my bits of music it is best if played loudly.

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Yesterday afternoon I walked over to Asda to buy some carrots and eggs. Nowadays it's 50:50 whether anywhere will have anything - I've not seen eggs in Lidl for weeks, and Asda usually has no carrot. Asda had about 4 boxes of eggs left on that fine sunny afternoon as the places in the city were Sunday closing. And it had its carrots too. I was starting to feel lucky.

I walked on to the cinema and read my book and went up to see the film - Moonlight, the one that won the Oscar about 3 years ago but which no one has ever heard of, I've seen it several times, like it more and more though we will never be in love, it was a free showing and I was needing some way of levelling off from my high. I sat in the middle of the front row. There were about a dozen people in the cinema, and they all sat towards the back.

I feel more alone in a cinema than I do in my one-person household. I spread. I put my little backpack in the seat to my right, and my glasses and crisps (sorry) and cans of Appletiser and hat on the seat to my left. When the film was over I put myself back together again and left the cinema and as I was handling my backpack to swing it onto my back I realised that its bottom was wet. I take most disasters quite calmly - guessed the eggs had broken, or maybe the bag of carrots had been very wet without me noticing in Asda.

Out in the daylight, over in the park, the sun disappeared and the light disappearing, I paused and took off the backpack to investigate in detail. The eggs were fine. The carrot bag was dry. There was nothing else in my backpack that could've leaked. I smelt the wetness at the bottom of the backpack. It was wee. No not mine. Of course. I haven't reached that stage yet. But obviously the person who'd previously been sitting in the cinema seat to my right had had a wee during whatever film they'd watched.

I guess it was God's Country. I've had many squalid dirty years in my life, times when I've been homeless and times when I've been drunk for weeks and never moved from my armchair, I've done and lived within things of my own vomit and pee and pooh and blood that I will not tell anyone. So a bit of someone else's pee on the bottom of my rucksack didn't faze me. I put the thing back on and walked the rest of the way home.

Nothing inside seemed very contaminated - I'll eat the carrots, eat the eggs, the bag will be washed and hung out on the line for several spring days, its immunity boosted again in the sunshine. I remember my friend Heidi telling me that the reason she and her partner always sat in the lonely front rows of cinemas is that they were the least popular place, and least popular especially with old people who like to be near the exit to hasten their frequent visits to and from the loo during the film. But now the leaky people have moved to the front row. More and more I feel that there are fewer and fewer places to escape to.

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title = richard jefferies 1885
photo - vanessa oliver 2023
music = me yesterday

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released April 3, 2023

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sonja berlin-jones Southampton, UK

katharinebeastman.bandcamp.com

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