Funhouse flak

Dad gave me a lift into Easterby and I waited in the car down Buckingham Road while he went to the bank. All around me, Lockley’s demolished desolation. Dozens of starlings shrieked and screamed nearby, fluttering around a black bin liner on the pavement. An old man ambling by stopped, picked up the bag and, placing it on a nearby hump of rubble, tenderly tore open the plastic, exposing the decaying meaty morsels to the sky.

In Easterby I bought Reese and the Smooth Ones by the Art Ensemble of Chicago and another blank book for my journal before catching the bus home. I nearly bought Kafka’s The Trial.

The album is OK, especially Side One, but the “Funhouse Flak”  is a little too prolonged for my liking. You have to see them live.

HMS Coventry has been sunk: 20 dead, a sort of serious tragic-pessimism over everything, Mum's heavy desperate sighs.

I watched Villa win the European Cup 1-0 in a pretty exciting match. A magnificent sunset tonight: Dad called me out to see the houses bathed deep yellow, the sky gold across the dark horizon, pale eggshell greens fading to distant wistful summery dust-golden blues, blurred bands of hazy cloud, lit coppery orange from beneath, troughs deep blue-grey.