FOUND REVISION CARD

1ST RANK SYMPTOMS OF SCHIZOPHRENIA; (72%)
.Perceptual - auditory hallucinations - 3rd person
- thought echo
.Thought - delusional perceptions
- Passivity : insertion, withdrawal, broadcasting
.Other passivity phenomena eg volition, affect, body.

A LITTLE BIT OF HISTORY

I’m reading one of the PEVSNOR ARCHITECTURAL GUIDES. This one’s written by Andrew Foyle and it’s about Bristol. It was lent me by Furst when we met in Starbucks yesterday.
He said, ‘I’ve got a book for you.’
‘The Pat Barker?’ I said.
‘It’s slow,' he said. ‘I can’t get into it.’
‘So you’re lending it to me?’
‘No,’ he said and reached down left and into his bag.
‘Nice one,’ I said. ‘Thanks,’ when he handed it me.
Index of Localities, Streets and Buildings
Stokes Croft 31, 253, 259, 284n.
The chapter was Walk 10. Kingsdown to Stokes Croft.
“...Spring Hill, or Montague Hill further w. Both emerge on to Dove Street, dwarfed by Dove Street Flats, by the City Architect’s Department, 1965-8. Three fourteen-storey slabs with lower linking blocks, and of little architectural merit. Despite protests, a swathe was cut through the shabby and part-derelict Georgian houses here, to provide 347 flats, just a handful more than the number of houses demolished: the conservation ethos had yet to gain acceptance, and building new was cheaper...”


Foyle, A. (2004) Bristol, Pevsnor Architectural Guides, Yale University Press,
New Haven & London

THE PROBLEM

‘You want a bag?’ she said.
Wilkinson's, Union Street.
In the basket: non-biological washing powder; ground coffee; tin of sweetcorn; a Wilkinson's re-usable bag.
‘Er, no thanks,’ I said, then, ‘If you do this first,’ giving her the re-usable, ‘I’ll use that.’
She started scanning my shopping.
‘Actually, I will have a bag,’ I said, ‘for that,’ pointing at the washing powder now held in her hand.
‘You can’t make up your mind, can you?’ she said.
‘There’s too many choices,’ I said. ‘That’s the problem.’

SCRAPYARD FIRE



I saw the smoke then the fire at the scrapyard near the M32 as I traveled towards Temple Meads on the local train, early Saturday evening.
The white coach near the end of the film was carrying Bristol City fans home from Wembley where their team had lost the play-off final against Hull City. The text you hear me receive is someone saying it was a loss for the whole city not just the football club, my thought also.
I think the fire is a fitting symbol for the end of Bristol City's dream of playing Premier League football next season.

A report on the local BBC website said the following:

Fire at scrap yard 'deliberate'
Fire at Sims Metal
The smoke from the blaze could be seen for miles around

Some 50 firefighters have been dealing with a large blaze at a scrap yard in Bristol, where old cars are thought to have been set alight deliberately.

Crews were called to the Sims Metal yard in the Saint Werburghs area of the city on Saturday night.

A brigade spokesman said it was thought vandals had set the vehicles alight.

Station manager Matt Hunt, of Avon Fire Service, told BBC News the black smoke could be seen from as far away as Somerset.

ON THE WAY TO WORK

I shared the lift down with a woman works the streets of Brunswick and Portland Squares. I’ve seen her there, gave her cigarette papers one time.
‘On the way to work?’ I said.
‘Between jobs,’ she said.
She wore bright red lipstick and between the tops of the backs of her shiny black high heels and below where her leggings, contoured her very thin legs and small bottom, ended, the exposed skin was covered in scabs.
A few floors below our conversation a man with a bike got in.
None of us spoke to the other until I said, ‘Thanks,’ to the woman each time I walked through the door she held open for me as we left the building.

BROADMEAD RUSH HOUR

this is the Haymarket, Broadmead, today 19th May 2008, at 5pm. Usually it's crowded with buses and cars and...but today it was blocked off at the bottom of Union Street due to "necessary" work on the New Broadmead shopping centre. I could get quite used to this absence of traffic.

ALLOTMENTAL

On our way back from the plant swap on Stapleton Road station - ‘They weren’t very welcoming,’ Furst said when I called round later that evening, I agreed saying, ‘I was “that man” with her,’ - we met, coming in the opposite direction down High Street, one of her neighbours, the academic one doing a Ph.D.
I pointed out, when we said we were on the way to the allotment, my appropriate clothing.
‘Last time you looked like a businessman,’ said Acadame who’d suggested, while sitting on a bench on the cycle path when I’d passed carrying garden tools, that what I wore was, "not fit for purpose," a phrase used in a report commissioned by Dr. John Reid when Home Secretary to describe the Home Office systems for assessing asylum seekers and refugees.
Today she, Acadame, was with her son and a woman who’d owned the house my second wife’d moved into after coming to her senses and leaving me just over a decade ago.
‘Hello,’ I said, nodding.
Those closest to me and who know me best, which might not be that well at all, have often said when in my company, ‘I need a drink.’ So I’ve decided to fence off areas of obsessive interest to myself, that is things affecting my day to day life and long term future, and not talk to anyone about them thus keeping my paranoid scenarios as comfort through those sleepless nights of present.
There is something to be said for solitude, how it allows use of others as objects in an unchallenged construction of a reality that justifies whatever schizoid position one adopts as an alternative to relating to people as people which at times can seem overrated with all those demands for respect and consideration. Which leads conveniently on to...
I’m due to meet my mother for a late lunch this afternoon and wondering why. I don’t like her and feel either pity or frustration listening to her go on and on about herself and her loveless life excusing her total lack of empathy and compassion...
...sound familiar?
...I learned from her while sitting at her knee, the one she slammed our heads against telling my father, if he noticed when he got home from work, the bumps and occasional black eye, that we’d tripped and fell. But mostly they were too busy fighting about the latest secretary he was shagging.

LUNCH

Lunch was okay...eventually.
She was going on and on about my brother and his children until I said, 'You abandoned me.'
'I did what i thought was best,' she said.
'It wasn't.'
'Grow up.'
'I was a child.'
'You're an adult.'
'You had a choice.'
'Take some responsibility.'
When we said goodbye at the station after walking through the Old Town she said, 'Well I enjoyed it.'
So did I,' I said. 'See you next time.'

DO YOU LIKE THIS?

‘Can I put the light on?’
‘Okay,’ I said
before leaving, finding somewhere
dark to spend
time.
The door closed, the curtains drawn.
Thoughts through a thinker, clouds in a starless purple sky...
...as I wonder where you are -
- Stonehenge ‘84, blue microdots and we’re all out, a long way from where we started, people swinging past on the main drag, she whispers in my ear, ‘Do you like this?’

found writing

BLOW

Blow spirit blow!
Blow happiness and smiles into our
lives.
Blow spirit blow!
Blow love and kindness into our lives.
Blow spirit blow!

BETWEEN MY LEGS

‘What are you doing?’ I said to the the young, gorgeous, exquisitely made-up woman rested her head on my left shoulder.
‘You know,’ she said.
‘I’m not interested,’ I said. ‘I can’t be, the position I’m in,’ adding as I walked to the far end of the platform on which we stood waiting for a bus, ‘You’ll have to bring it to the group.’
We’d come down off the hill overlooking the M32, had a feeder housed a bus route.
‘Is that new?’
A motorbike, rider in leathers and open face helmet, went up the feeder.
‘Can it go that way?’
Eventually we arrived in town where we met a man led us through traffic free streets to a wooden building with the promise of shelter and a hot drink. Inside the main room I tried the doors finding them locked I began to panic.
‘You can leave after the performance,’ he said.
Once outside I went to the Department.
The Department is an anarchist. She is also Boss by virtue of decisions made always in the best interests of the Group.
I told her, with the enthusiasm I’d seen others have before me, of three ideas I thought could work.
‘Well, go on then,’ she said, also dismissing me with a wave of her hand. ‘Don’t talk about it, do it.’
Reprimanded, retreating, if I’d had a tail it would’ve been between my legs.

AT THE TOP OF THE HILL

We walked up the cycle path on our way to the allotment yesterday afternoon. One bike went past toward town fast then another but as it did so the rider said, ‘Alright?’ and I, recognising a red-faced McPool said, ‘Alright?’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘Fancy seeing him on my way to the allotment,’ I said. ‘What are the chances of that?’
‘Who was that?’ she said.
‘He lives on my floor.’
‘In the corner?’
‘No, the other end.’
Things had grown some since last time at the allotment and I spent a while cutting grass between beds.
‘Here’s the cat,’ she said.
The cat hangs out at the allotments came towards where we worked then skipped past jumped into the long grass of the adjacent plot then out again and crouched over a black unmoving object.
It was a bird, a magpie, wasn’t moving, thought it was dead, wished I’d brought my camera to film it being eaten, but then it moved. I shooed the cat away, picked the magpie up. It sat in the palm of my hand, warm, heart beating, eyes blinking, no effort to escape.
‘I think it’s wing is broken,’ I said.
‘Put it this bag, here,’ she said and put some of the grass I’d cut in the bottom of a paper carrier, a soft bed.
The magpie stayed in the bag we pegged for its own protection.
Throughout the three hours of weeding, digging, and planting we checked it was okay but the last time, just before leaving, the magpie was dead. Although its eyes were open and still slightly shiny, its body was cold.
‘I need to bury it,’ I said. ‘Keep the cat from getting it.’
‘Somewhere we’ve not dug over or planted,’ she said.
I wrapped the magpie in a paper shroud, buried it under a concrete slab beneath the elder near the shed at the top of the hill.

A RADICAL HISTORY MEET (Thursday)

He texted: Tonight - talk on Stokes Croft. Bridewell Island ?old police station? 7:30 radical history group
I texted: You going?
He texted: No working. Saw it in the Metro
I texted: Might pop along if i can find the way in

I found my way in with a little help: ‘Through the corridor, left, up the stairs,’ he said, making it easy.
Three talks - 1) Packers Field; 2) Castle Park; 3) Stokes Croft - the theme, the enclosing of common land for the benefit of a few, to the detriment of the many, and how to oppose this transfer of “ownership” by proposing the space in question be declared, “Town Green.”
What each speaker implied, was that these conflicts are part of the frontline of a class war, common usage being under threat from the progress of private/individual profit and Bristol council is one the side of developers and not the people of the city.
Toward the end of the Stokes Croft talk I said that, even though I lived in the area I hadn’t heard about the protest march of three weeks ago. I wasn’t angry, I was frustrated and understood the need to build a movement slowly to avoid the fate of the recently deceased Transition Montpelier.
In a few weeks the PRSC is opening an office in the Souk shop that’s closing because it can’t compete with the Tesco’s on Lower Maudlin Street. And while on the subject of Tesco’s, they’re in negotiations with the owner to rent the Jesters building on Cheltenham Road.
I left the meeting wishing I hadn’t spoke, that I’d kept my head down. At the flats I waited, until the drunks from the fifth floor had time to call the lift from the top, get in and go up, thinking how hard I find joining a group and involved doing things with others, that really I’m so much better at and more comfortable being invisible.

TIME AND CHANGE

I’ve decided to change my life but not sure for what so while I think about it I’m going to start living a bit more local. That means shopping for as much as I can on and around Stokes Croft meaning I’ll avoid Broadmead unless absolutely necessary.
Like this evening: I went to the newsagent at the end of Jamaica Street, which has become the first place I go.
‘You got any coffee?’ i said to the man who now greets me as a regular customer.
He turned round looked behind him, ‘Real coffee?’ I said.
‘No. We did have but we sold out.’
I left there with an Evening Post for jobs, only four thirty, and a pack of digestives. Then to the off license next to Mackies, you know the one, open all hours, bought pitta and coffee.
Next Mr. Tomato the veg shop where one borderline avocado was seventy-nine and the overripe one half price.
‘You use the internet?’ said the man serving.
‘At home,’ I said.
‘Look,’ he said, turning the nearest screen on the counter toward me. ‘This is downstairs.’
I could see four or five computers on tables against the far wall, one person sat in front of one of them.
‘You serve coffee?’
‘I put a few up here,’ he said, pointing at the back of the shop, ‘and have a coffee machine there,’ at the end of the veg display.
‘Real coffee?
‘Yes.’
‘I’d use the internet here if there was real coffee,’ I said.
‘Yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then this is for you,’ he said and he gave me a flyer. ‘The first half hour is free.’
Ashley News had nothing I wanted today so I went on to the Star where I waited ten minutes while the receipt reel was changed.
‘Sorry about that,’ he said when he gave me my change. ‘About the wait.’
‘Okay,’ I said and meant every word.

MISERABLE TWATS

We were at the St. Werburghs May Celebration and stood watching the Rag Morris dance. She’d laughed at them, wasn’t sure why.
‘I was going to film them, put it on youtube, call it, “TWATS”,’ I’d said when they first started.
‘You could say it was filmed by “Miserable Twat”,’ she said, adding ‘Would it hurt you to smile?’
‘I don’t trust why people walk around with a smile on their face,’ I said. ‘Is it because I’m cynical? I don’t know, but when I see them with what I think’s a hippy grin, like everything’s alright with the world because everyone here’s happy and having a good time, it irritates me, big time.’
‘People smiling and being happy irritates you?’ she said shaking her head.
‘It’s difficult to be around, is all,’ I said. ‘You know, I feel so out of place.’
A short pause - Hey Nonny No.
‘I have to look away when people walk past and smile,’ said her friend who she’d called walked over with arriving a half hour later than we’d agreed to meet.
‘Why’s that then?’
‘I don’t know, I just feel uncomfortable in places like this...’
‘Like what?’
‘With lots of people...you know...and it’s so white, I don't like it,’ the friend said and then, 'That's a relief,' when we left.
‘You two should form a club,’ she said to her friend and me. ‘Call it the “Miserable Twat Club.”’

BIRTH AND DEATH

‘I’m going to make a speech at your birthday,’ I said.
‘You mean talk about yourself,’ she said.
‘How well you know me,’ I said sadly, unsettled from then and the rest of the day.
On the train I bought a single to Clifton Down before we left Stapleton Road station. For the journey I stared out the window past the gas storage tank, was low, Eastville, until we reached Montpelier and I looked up...
...Sure Con, stood waiting for the door to open, full-bodied shoulder length hair, rucksack over one, and what looked like a didgeridoo case over the other shoulder...
...I’d lived two years as his tenant in a house opposite the Star and Garter on Albany Green...
...his father drowned off some south sea island coast a few months after I’d moved out and I sent him a card said, ‘Sorry for your loss.’
Loss is a characteristic of change.

BOO