The red tent

Lee and I kipped the night on mattresses on Ian's sitting room floor. At eight the next morning, Mick came in, got some things together, and left again. At ten-thirty we got up and said goodbye to Ian, who lay awake in bed, staring at the ceiling. We didn’t think he’d heard us, but just as we were turning to leave we heard his quiet goodbye.

We made our hesitant way home, pausing to play on video games and waste £1.80 on a miserably sparse breakfast at a fast food place. The afternoon was grey and quiet. Lee and I each bought a Bavarian roll and ate it sitting on the steps right at the top of one of the blocks of flats down the road from Jervis Terrace.

Today—at the suggestion of Alex—I sent off £10.23 for my ticket to see Psychic TV next Friday, which includes return travel by coach to Prestwich from London.

Later, Lee, Barry, Pete and I scared ourselves shitless talking about ghosts and strange things that have happened to respective friends. The silence seemed to hover in the room as we talked, in the corridor beyond the door and in the dark and quiet streets outside. I’m probably noticing the absence of the TV. I couldn’t shake off this odd sense of stillness all day. It was weird: Dome 2 captures it, especially Track 1 Side 1 “The Red Tent I.”

Everything is underpinned by this backdrop of stillness and of brooding . . . . Perhaps it’s just my morbid fanciful mind, or perhaps the spirit of the dead in that crypt has possessed me.

The Americans have invaded Grenada following a bloody coup there by members of the self-acclaimed Marxist government who executed the Premier and say they will leave when peace, “democracy” and law and order are restored. In the Lebanon, 200 US Marines and several dozen French soldiers of the peacekeeping force were killed when suicide-squads detonated two trucks containing high-explosives alongside their bases. Cheery news.