wild camping by katharine eastman
naturally distorted even at apparently low volume, it's just the way it is - like the country going to shit, if you stop fighting it you actually come to quite enjoy it
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Yesterday it was another walk to Salisbury and I can report that apart from two vital areas things were much dryer than last week and the clouds were smaller and the day was so bright and there was that scent that you forget for almost all of the year, bluebells everywhere, and still no one about.
Salisbury itself was a disappointment. It's usually one of the less dismal towns, but yesterday everyone seemed very grumpy and horrible - and yes of course it is ludicrous for me to visit a place for about ten minutes and speak to one person and then extrapolate from that the mood of every inhabitant. But I was there for much longer than ten minutes and spoke to lots of people and I can't remember anyone who gave off any radiance of joy or even thinking it'd been worth getting up that morning.
I do know how irritating I can be and by being a bit more cheerful than average it really can piss people off. But even so. For the voyage home I had to give up on the buses. I missed the 11-40 by about one second. By the time the 12-40 should've been coming into dock the board said it was 40 minutes late, so I nipped over to Tesco for a minute to get pears and when I came back the bus had been and gone. I gave up and walked to the train station, just wanting to bid a big Fuck Off To Salisbury - it's a lovely place to walk to but it's just as shitty as every other shite town in the UK nowadays.
My only happy moment in Salisbury was when I nipped into the library, upstairs to the art galleries - I didn't think much of the exhibitions - the one about Cranborne Chase Landscape looked like random bits of litter that'd been picked up and stuck to the walls and no I am not exaggerating or anything, that really is what it looked like and might actually have been. So I was soon back out in the sunshiny streets and I sat on one of the four benches that are very close to the library main entrance. There was a busker there, about my age, even less adroit on the gtr than me, very bad indeed. But on the other three benches, plus on a couple of wheelchairs, were a group of about a dozen men, all about my age, all surely too smartly dressed to be seasoned rough-sleepers, but not posh either. Most of them were drinking booze from cans, some held bottles. They weren't noisy or aggressive or causing any kind of problem, they all seemed to know one another and they chatted and swigged quietly among themselves. They actually seemed happy. I wish I'd spoken to them.
What a life ! - that is the way to be - that is really what I want, I wish I was brave enough to do it - I've been drunk in cities before, for years, I've been homeless, I've lived very rough, I know what it's like, I know how very long the days are, I know it's not great but I know it's not terrible either, I know that for someone like me it is nothing to fear.
On my walk to Salisbury, about an hour short of the city, along one of the long stretches where I never meet/pass anyone I spotted the tent in the photograph. About a hundred yards off the path, there was no one about so I took some pics and then a man emerged - my eyesight is an old man's but I could see him waving at me - it was like the magical end of So Long Frank LLoyd Wright when just before it fades out you can hear a voice saying "so long ..." - a beautiful brushing against something that tells you you don't have to be trapped in this awful miserable modern life that almost everyone has chosen for themselves and they're too fucking stupid to see that it is their choice.
recorded this morning, photo yesterday
