september swarm by katharine eastman
Recommended for quiet listening, somewhere way off in the background .... no, further away than that - right back in the backest background you've ever backed in to.
Well while I was on tour in Kent last weekend I went to Canterbury, and yes you really can imagine - history bores me to bits and I didn't even get up close (let alone inside) the cathedral - I just had to get as far from the whole horrible tourist-swarm as possible, and while I was walking up the Stour, about a couple of miles from the city, I noticed one or two more bees around than is normal - being crazy about insects I knew at once that I was close to a nest. But it was stranger than that - it was a swarm of bees - calmly resting on a fencepost near the path. A swarm in September. That shows how confused everything is by this amazing weather and eternal summer.
I don't mean to talk about Kent like I've never been there before. I've been lots of time - but not so much to the east coast or the north coast or the middle. Just along the south. And since I stopped driving, a couple of years ago, I've not done much travelling at all. You know when your gran fell down the stairs and suddenly had to stop driving forever - how depressed she got - that loss of "independence". And when grandad went blind and he too couldn't drive - how sad he was - life felt over. So I've been lucky in that I just stopped driving cos it bored me, it was too much faff, suddenly the country became bad tempered and less indulgent re my own very laid back style of driving, plus my van insurance went up to over a grand a year, and one of my eternal pet hates is filling up the tank at the garage .... sooooo many reasons to stop driving.
Public transport and walking are the most brilliant things about Britain. Actually, they are the only brilliant things about Britain. Plus the general niceness of almost everyone. Plus the fact that we let ourselves be led by idiots all the time and they fuck everything up so badly and that keeps life interesting. Bees swarming in September - even tho it was about the most inland that I got over the weekend, it did feel like On The Beach, which is where I was all the rest of the time - I almost never saw the sea without someone in it, whether it was 6am or 8pm - it's like all the insects and the people are fleeing something.
recorded this morning - yes I know it is 4-30am - and I've also already had breakfast and watched a DVD film, but the life of an international "experimental" minimal musician is lived without regard to the clock or other bourgeois triflings. Photo near Canterbury on Saturday
