I went travelling for six months nearly two and a half years ago, and whilst I was gone my domain name expired and someone else registered it.
They didn't do anything with it, and it's been fallow for that time. I haven't written in that time either, so it's been a fallow time all round.
Now I have this website back I am hoping to regain some inspiration, so hopefully I will be filling these pages again soon.Added @ 09:39 PM on August 23, 2006
I think I've mentioned before that I'm off on my travels in an attempt to rekindle my creativity (and have a bit of fun perchance). I fly tomorrow, starting in Chennai (Madras) in India, after a twelve hour layoff in Dubai. Then it's over to Thailand, down through Malaysia to Singapore, fly to Australia where I hope to learn to dive at my relatives school in Queensland. Then I shall check out New Zealand, and do as many pacific islands as my whim and budget take me to. You can read somewhat of what I'm doing here, if it interests you.
Added @ 01:44 PM on March 11, 2004
I'm not writing or doing anything to speak of. My creative life has been entirely stultified by work. To that end I am quitting my job and my flat and going off travelling for a long, long time until I feel more myself again. I don't know when I'm likely to write again, but if and when I do I'll probably put some of it here.
Added @ 04:33 PM on January 15, 2004
Ink black, and the long night of the soul has begun. Thrust underwater, these lungs would still choose to inhale. This heart will beat until rent, bloody from its cave. These words cannot be unsaid.
Added @ 11:58 AM on May 16, 2003
In the birdsong, something wistful. Something to shake the blossoms on the branch, then launch off into blue. To coast on the current, flip-switch a wing twist, and dive under branch into shade. Something to mock the glare off a cat, and flit quick from claw and away.
Added @ 06:11 PM on April 14, 2003
I've been on a bit of a hiatus recently. I've been increasingly unhappy with both the musculature of my writing and my lack of subject. I'm not sure how long this can continue, but it has been crystallized somewhat by the recent deletion of this site by my sometime web host (and by my subsequently discovered poor archival strategy, and the loss thereby of some writing). I'm hoping to rediscover some inspiration, but until then I don't want to feel pressured to write here, so I won't. Unless I write something I'm happy with ...
Added @ 06:42 PM on February 11, 2003
I've been on a bit of a hiatus recently. I've been increasingly unhappy with both the musculature of my writing and my lack of subject. I'm not sure how long this can continue, but it has been crystallized somewhat by the recent deletion of this site by my sometime web host (and by my subsequently discovered poor archival strategy, and the loss thereby of some writing). I'm hoping to rediscover some inspiration, but until then I don't want to feel pressured to write here, so I won't. Unless I write something I'm happy with ...
Added @ 06:42 PM on February 11, 2003
This site was eaten by a grue. I'm working patiently to save it, but it's touch and go. All of the custom stylesheets were lost, as well as almost everything I had written here since February 2002 (although I did find some snippets hiding under a rock on my hard drive). It will take a while to get my head around this, let alone to reconstitute the site and to start writing again. Meanwhile, your kind thoughts and words are appreciated, as ever.
Added @ 11:27 AM on January 15, 2003
This site was eaten by a grue. I'm working patiently to save it, but it's touch and go. All of the custom stylesheets were lost, as well as almost everything I had written here since February 2002 (although I did find some snippets hiding under a rock on my hard drive). It will take a while to get my head around this, let alone to reconstitute the site and to start writing again. Meanwhile, your kind thoughts and words are appreciated, as ever.
Added @ 11:27 AM on January 15, 2003
Friday slides under evenings blanket and snuggles up to the night. It's quiet, and the warm air brings rumours of traffic and trains. The clouds are crowded in, searching for the sun, and the earth spins slowly in an effort to shake them off.
Added @ 05:21 PM on February 08, 2002
Limbs sleeked in liquid, I dive further down. The skelter of sea-bed is a landscape of half-shapes: a coral encrusted city by Gaudí. I roll and kick feet seeking to move closer, when the current pulls me back up and out of the dream.
Added @ 02:16 PM on January 26, 2002
Skyrolling, wrapping the sunshine in cold, thin air. Puffing out clouds, bird flocks and aeroplanes in a hazy breath of eyelight and dancing under rain. Inhaling the night, and stardrops melt the tongue as the moon drips melody and the darkness smiles.
Added @ 01:00 PM on January 15, 2002
The winter howls, and warmer seas beckon. Sit back from the computer and enjoy the silence for a while.
Added @ 03:10 PM on December 21, 2001
Hanging in the neuron fizz, a glimmer of a glimmer of a thought. Ephemeral, it sidles behind distractions - weaves a fog behind it to obscure. Dashes between traffic, up steps and down alleys. Doubles back, and side-slips. It's gone.
Added @ 11:26 PM on December 13, 2001
It's quiet underwater. Gravity is suspended, and the trick is not to fly. Swooping low over valleys to avoid flocks of fish, sends a tremor of breeze through the coral forests.
Added @ 07:49 PM on December 10, 2001
Slugabed, stretching the bliss into limbs and curling: no luxury like an expanse of warm blankets and no feeling like deserved laziness. Until I awake.
Added @ 01:49 PM on December 02, 2001
And by night we lie snug in darkness, manufacturing monsters.
Gnarling the days thoughts into wizened embryos, we seed our dreams and sleep. Fitfully, we fight them, twisting the covers as they feed on our fears. They grow soon, and many: hurling bold spears or lurking with axes, hiding round corners to throttle or stab. Some we defeat, but still more escape us. By daylight they sneer under corners of thoughts, plotting and whispering for the evenings release.
And by night we lie snug in darkness, manufacturing monsters.
Added @ 11:26 AM on November 26, 2001
We are all, always falling.
We accelerate downwards at a constant ten metres per second, per second, until our velocity is slowed by friction to a constant rate.
Standing on the ground, our rate of descent is zero, since the friction it offers is more powerful than that awful sucking.
We are only a stumble away from the parapet though, only ever a step from the plunge.
Such is the nature of gravity.
Such is the nature of death.
Added @ 01:24 PM on June 03, 2001
Memory is the ocean, and sea monsters gnaw bones under its dark, comforting blanket.
The breakers scourge the shore, glotting it with washed up facts and half-remembered fictions, piled in strange, twisted minglings of seaweed and driftwood.
The gulls swoop raucously to snatch gullets of fish: casting their song like a net for rain.
On the horizon, a small tug chugs by, sending plumes of oily smoke to trail the sunset sky.
Added @ 12:06 PM on April 19, 2001
It's raining again. Not the torrential deluge that plasters the whole world against your skin, but a gritty, bitty, irritating drift of fine water droplets. Not cold or windy the sky, but dark and brooding: like a glowering eyebrow shadowing the landscape.
The city seems quiet, through the glass. The lights sweep the road as if seeking some grain beneath the thresh of surface water. They will get none.
On the corner, three shadowy figures argue by gesticulation and stance, trying to keep from the weather. They seem to meet some resolution: a quick glance over shoulder and a loaded handshake finishes their business in a flurry of directions.
The dusk rolls in steadily.
Added @ 06:44 PM on March 15, 2001
On the bus: joy-tripping, mind ablaze: loving this and that, and each other. Each light-sparkle, ear-dripped sound or scrunchy feel expands it. I want to share the experience, but the bus doesn't stop there.
Added @ 07:01 PM on February 07, 2001
Words are an imperfect medium. These stuttered, symbolic communications are not representative of the flowing imagery of thought. If by chance the readers mind is triggered to visualise as the writers, the experience will be momentary and lacking in detail. Nevertheless we struggle to be heard, for without the struggle is silence.
Added @ 12:11 AM on January 24, 2001
What draws a mind to a mind? We are the invisible hurricane which causes the dust to dance and take form. We are the strategy moving the chess game, the choreography in the ballet, the beat to the drums and the message behind the words.
Added @ 09:17 AM on December 12, 2000
Frost-rolled breath, and streets scrunch. Air scrubbed clean and invasive. Wind whippets inquisitively. Sky drops dark, like a gunshot in the night.
Added @ 06:23 PM on November 22, 2000
Lay back and feel existence. Sea gently rocks boat, beneath blue folds of sky. Time has become a dream of sunlight, and waves dance off myriad small slices. The bluffs cradle the bay, gnarled with olives and sweet lull of cicadas. Below, fish legions coast the coral for snatchfood, or flicker in shoals like migratory herds. They dart now and then, like a needle piercing silk, to flash briefly in the glint before slipping back down.
Added @ 07:45 PM on November 20, 2000
Where are the lines which seperate inside from outside? What I am includes what I have ingested. What I am not contains what I have expelled. The atoms which compose me are constantly replaced. The thoughts which define me are constantly replenished. This stream of consciousness is regularly interrupted. This mind is regularly changed.
Added @ 07:04 PM on September 26, 2000
Sitting on the bus, I am struck with a sense of everything. This mundane journey has interconnects. The attitude of leaves on trees strike chords with me. Glances seem full of life histories. The pattern of things, in moving, moves me. I want to relax and just spread out for ever: a conscious ripple in consciousness.
Added @ 07:07 PM on September 22, 2000
Flying free, following a school of rainbow fish, I spin and turn in the water, like a kite stuck on air. Stopping, I watch a parrot fish attacking the coral. Below, a starfish crabs across a rock. The light shimmers, acidic over the surface: like a plasma field in glass. An octopus crawls up my arm, no nuisance until the shoulder, when I shake it free. I could live here on kelp and snatched salt fish. Returning to the surface is a shallow reward, my snorkel a thin lifeline to the mundane.
Added @ 03:59 PM on September 02, 2000
As it has grown, bigger in mass than the largest oak, wrapping itself round these buildings to stretch out in the sun, this vine has seen the entire sum of human emotion. Love, laughter, petty squabbles, washing, eating, dancing have all soaked into it, grown with it, withered on it and passed it by. If it could speak but a few words it could tell a tale wiser than the wisest man, more poignant than the sappiest novel, more in touch than the most alive primate.
Added @ 02:20 PM on August 29, 2000
What is a thought? Sometimes a tiny fish, leaping momentarily from out of the wave to glint darkly in the sun. Sometimes the bolt of lightning, sizzling down from crashing thunderheads. Sometimes the flock of minute birds, quartering the olive grove in search of insects.
Added @ 11:05 AM on August 27, 2000
We carve the cerulean waters of the Mediterranean with our boats blade, cutting and running from the brooding brow of the cliff, with its gnarled topping of olive trees.
Added @ 09:05 AM on August 22, 2000
The train roars, rickets and bales through the tunnel. As it bursts forth, sunshine. It squeals brakes, and hauls itself back from the bridge: sidling up to the platform with a shrug of the shoulders. The doors hiss open, spilling people and I. The footbridge a funnel: the wave of us rushes for it, breaking like white foam through the doors of the station.
Added @ 11:03 PM on July 06, 2000
At any significant moment of philosophical realisation, a release of adrenaline can be observed in the prickle on the back of the neck. In meditative contemplation of one's place in the universe, this can sometimes give rise to a tidal effect, where one can observe one's changing emotional awareness simply by watching the waves of hairs rising and falling on the skin of an arm.
Added @ 06:40 PM on June 27, 2000
If mind is like a bird then the valleys it swoops over are emotions, and the trees it nests in are memories. It quenches its thirst on drips of wisdom fallen with the morning dew, and feasts on tiny whirring thoughts which busy themselves in the heather.
Added @ 12:05 AM on June 14, 2000
Washed out in this sea of thought, I roll among the breakers which tease the rock into sand. Soaked in salt and the whip tang of bird cries on the breeze, I allow a strange comfort in this slow dissolution, as the waves blur the boundaries between idea and ideology, between idiom and idiot. I have acquired that smooth-textured, driftwood appearance and become inured by that to the years.
Added @ 02:38 PM on June 10, 2000
Happiness is often a stance one takes to the world. Short of the times when the pain is all that's real, or the joy unsurpassed, most experience is quite neutral. If I am disposed to like it, then it increases my happiness. If I am disposed to dislike it, decrease. Many times then, we are setting ourselves for disappointment in a situation filled with opportunity. So the more I can learn to be disposed towards enjoying experience, the more my experience will engender enjoyment?
Added @ 06:56 PM on June 09, 2000
Imagine that I wish to describe the feeling of smoothing my finger over this clean glass, under running water from my tap. I could say it is similar, but not the same as a clean, dry glass. I could say it is unlike a smeared glass, dry or wet. I could say it is squeaky and bubbly and smooth and clear. I could say it is like a pure note produced by the harmony of the glass, the running water, the sensation in my skin and the context of my mind. But I am always saying it is like some other feeling. Or unlike. I can never describe this feeling without reference to other feelings. I can never perfectly describe this feeling to anyone without this glass, this tap, this finger and this mind. This is the imperfection of language.
Added @ 04:51 PM on June 07, 2000
Outside I can hear the sound of fellow primates hurtling along a concrete and tarmac surface in combustion-powered metal boxes on wheels. The surface they travel on is supported about twenty five feet above the ground, running about fifty yards from the pane of glass through which I can see it. It is supported on concrete pillars over other such surfaces which run orthogonally at ground level, but these roads are not so busy. The pitted roar of the traffic is punctured now and then by the rising and falling wail of a police vehicle, out to punish some offender of society's rules.
Added @ 01:04 PM on June 06, 2000
I send this message from a brick and mortar box, some twenty five feet above the ground. I am lit by a current of electricity flowing through finely coiled wire in a glass bulb filled with gases. I tap out this code on a plastic block, embedded with circuitry which is activated by spring-mounted plastic buttons. I see the message displayed as I compose it, on chemically coated glass which glows in tiny multicoloured dots where it is struck by a stream of electrons. The electrons in question are controlled ultimately by a microscopic machine constructed of billions of electrical switches, which responds to instructions stored in patterns of magnetic dots on spinning disks, and sometimes to the code I tap in at the keyboard.
Added @ 12:23 PM on June 06, 2000