Magic roundabout

I packed some of my things up at the Vicarage.

I found someone asleep on my bed on the top floor. His feet stank. I angrily shook him awake, a thin-faced man in his 20s, maybe even 30, who I’d never seen before, with collar length frazzled hair and a distant unconcerned expression on his face. One of Ben Beresford’s mental patient friends, who he’s presumably met at the hospital . . ..

I told him to get off my bed and he did, his glasses dangling askew from one ear, nowhere near his face, where they remained for the rest of the evening. . . He was quite polite and spoke with a sort of unnecessarily precise and slightly mad emphasis on each individual word. He said he’d felt tired and fell asleep on my bed.

“Are there any other beds in the house?”

I directed him down to Ben’s room where he fell asleep on his back, his head propped against the head-board of the bed, a cigarette in his mouth, his glasses still hanging from one ear.

He reminded me of Dylan from Magic Roundabout.

Transient fruits

I helped Lee and Pete move the rest of their things to the Grey House on a sculpture park trolley, borrowed from the Art College. We had an amusing time steering it down hill as it weighed a ton and was difficult to control.

The Grey House was opened as a squat on May 29th. Alex and Gav slept the first few nights here; the police were told, the owner of the building informed and legal warning notices put up. It was decided not to go through the Watermouth Housing Association as everyone is by now sick of Morris’s unrealistic promises and his mania for publicity and his Squatting Cause.

The owner of the Grey House is a Mrs. Coldman-Hicks, who’s slowly dying in a mental hospital; her son said that we can live here until she finally pegs out and he wants to sell. Lee showed me some of her insane letters, some to “The Col. of the Guards Regiment,” scrawled in a childish, almost illegible hand, that rant on about the people next door and their “machine” that when they switch it on hurts her right eye and right leg, the postman who keeps people prisoner and all the visitors who steal from her. She even had her solicitor send the next door neighbour a letter saying that “our client kindly asks that you refrain from putting your hands through the wall and stealing her money.”

Her son obviously wants shut of the whole business. Gav said he was very decent about everything and put just one condition on their living there, that his fiancée’s daughter be allowed to move in to the basement. But when the daughter turned up she brought along three friends, all of whom seemed to want to move in too.

Mo has moved out of Castle Mount Court as the landlord wouldn’t renew her tenancy so she is now living in Pete’s back room. Apparently I could have had Alex’s room because Alex said he was going to Amsterdam, but now he’s delayed his departure until the summer so that Gav can go with him, but at least he offered me his front room while I clean up the basement. I can hardly complain when it’s free, and Pete’s offered me his room when he goes to America in late August.

Until then I’ve got several possibilities. I could stay here another two-and a-half weeks until the end of term and move into Gareth’s room at Westdorgan Road as he’s going home for the summer, or I could try find a place on my own straight away. There are advantages and disadvantages to both schemes.

Guy moved out of his flat into a bedsit of his own in Ledwell Street. It’s £25 a week and he said it was very difficult finding a decent place; he hung around newsagents waiting for the first edition of the Herald every morning, trailed round the agencies and made numerous and fruitless ‘phone calls and trips to see dingy pigsties let by sharks and con men before he found his current place.

I know this would get me down, but a single room on my own would be ideal. Moving into Gareth’s room is easier but I can’t help worrying I’d get caught up in the enjoyable but fatal round of going out and staying up into the early hours, or sitting about talking or taking drugs . . . transient fruits, soon rotten. Plus Westdorgan Road is miles from central Watermouth . . ..

I just can’t decide. The rent at Gareth’s is £17.50 a week; the rent for a bedsit is bound to be much higher.

Grey House

I came back on the noon bus which reached Watermouth a little after eight in the evening. It was a boring journey down, with all the customary stops, and when we finally came upon Watermouth the sun was setting in a golden blaze, painting the hills with light.

At the Vicarage I found a message in my room from Lee telling me that they’d found a new squat  at 66 Maynard Gardens and that I had a basement room and should “Come and Join the P-A-R-T-Y.” Most people had already moved their belongings out of the Vicarage. Gav’s room was empty, scattered with paper and litter, and Lee’s room was almost empty too . . ..

So with a little trepidation I walked down Albany Mount to Maynard Gardens. Number 66 is a tall grey house with black window frames and a plain wooden door in a terrace facing the main road. Everyone already refers to it as the “Grey House.”

Lee and Pete were both enthusiastic about the new place and quick to point out that I’d made an error in going home when I did. They noisily showed me round. Below pavement level is a basement that’s very dingy, filled with clutter and thick with cobwebs, and the view from the window is a procession of feet and wheels. There’s a back room down there also, which is equally choked with rubbish and looks out onto an overgrown, mossy and dank high-walled yard. On the ground floor are two main rooms (occupied by Alex), a narrow front hall leading to the stairs and a long narrow kitchen illuminated by a skylight. Beyond the kitchen is a toilet.

Gav lives on the first floor in the best rooms in the house. They’re carpeted, with bookshelves and tidily decorated, and there’s a small balcony overlooking the roar of traffic in Maynard Gardens. On the second floor is Pete’s room, also carpeted, and Lee’s room and a bathroom are on the third floor. There’s also a toilet on the landing between the ground floor and Gav’s room.

All the rooms have sinks with taps that work and the toilets flush. There’s running water in the kitchen, and even hot water!

Happy memories leave a bitter taste

Robert and Carol came today and stayed into the evening, back from a week in Stakedale with kids from school which they said they enjoyed, save for the drunken excesses of the rest of the staff.

As twilight deepened into night, the five of us talked about the tragic nature of time and life, the existential nature of perception, the grasping ego, and how we return to the places we love time after time because in pursuit of an illusion and an anticipated reality that hardly ever conforms to the ‘actual’ reality. Happy memories spur us on, but we never find what we’re looking for. The best we can hope for is that we stumble across some new moments of insight and enjoyment . . ..

We can’t process the moment of harmony, the moment whose essence escapes us the more we stand back and intellectualise it. For one brief moment we realise and we can see.

There were moments in Calverdale when I felt I couldn’t say exactly what it was I wanted in going back there, but at others—such as the time on Half Stile Hill watching the eclipse, the river Calver beneath us bathed in golden green light—the pulse of certainty was strong and I knew: ‘This is it . . .’ Our fixed mental conceptions of a particular place, event or person victimize us and we find time and time again that the reality of now—the present moment—fails to live up our expectations, and we’re surprised and disappointed.

I’m reminded of the story I read somewhere of a man who went back to the house where he’d grown up and where, as a boy, he’d helped his father plant a seedling. In the intervening years, the seedling had grown vividly in his mind into a mighty tree, yet when he returned to the house he found out that the sapling had been cut down not long after his family had moved. What then was the greater reality for that man? The treeless garden of the present, or the sturdy spreading tree of his mental landscape?

Most people would say the former, yet for the man, the mental tree was real for many years. We’re the incurable victims of our preconceptions and fantasies. We can’t be freed, for these tendencies are linked inextricably with our hopes and desires. Where lies freedom from the cycle of conditioned responses and action . . .? We spend lifetimes pursuing our illusions while here and now reality slips through our fingers even as we see it, feel it, hear it . . ..

Robert and Carol left for Dearnelow at ten-thirty. They’ve booked a fortnight in the caravan in Calverdale for August.

Swallowed up in time

Drove back home today instead of tomorrow as planned. Dad was ill with a cold and the weather deteriorated overnight so we cut the holiday short. We came back through Low End, Marpeth Nook, Kit Bank Bottom, over the Stonewath Pass to Ainderdale and got back at two-thirty.

The past six days at Friar Beck have been enjoyable and Calverdale has become one of my favourite places. The things I declared would be, ARE.

My perceptions of the holiday strengthen as its actuality is swallowed up in time.