alcoholic sibling by Simon Aulman
"ambient", but the sort that's meant to be played as loud as a noise thing
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Yesterday a friend and I went to London - Chelsea - Kings Road - to do the poor people's Chelsea Flower Show, where you wander down the road with millions of people and look at some bunches of flowers that some shopkeepers have put out. I liked it, and I don't like gardening and I know nothing of her attractions.
Our favourite bits were whenever we wandered off the boring same-as-any-street-in-the-world Kings Road, suddenly it got quiet, and suddenly we kept on seeing blue plaques. The first one we saw was Diana Dors - when I first caught it out the edge of an eye I thought it said Diana Ross - it wouldn't have mattered - they'd've both been thrilling - DD actually was thrilling. Then we simply couldn't stop seeing them. My own favourite was Jean Rhys.
One of my regular London walks takes me past another of Jean Rhys's London homes - over near Primrose Hill - in that same area where Sylvia Plath did some of her living and all of her dying. But yesterday's surprised me. I m certain there are guidebooks which tell you where every blue plaque is. I am certain there are apps that tell you where they all are and what route is the shortest way to see them all, and the Guardian has published articles by some old josser who holds the world record for doing them all in the fastest time and how that ambition kept them suddenly happy after a life of doldrumming.
But anyway - we don't have those books or those apps or those phones, and so everything was amazing - and please feel free to snatch my idea and write an article for the Guardian saying that the best joy of all is to be had from not doing stuff that makes for good Guardian articles. I love Jean Rhys - love her more than Dylan Thomas and Bob Marley and all those others whose blue plaque on a pub wall said they'd all drunk there once or twice - I made the obvious mistake of first reading Wide S Sea - you need to be in love with her to love that one. But I wasn't put off, and of course it was only when I read her early ones that I did fall in love with her - love those books of quiet frustrated sadness, knowing there's a world just out of reach, you're too timid to grab it, everyone around you is either too timid too or else can't even imagine it exists.
So then you read a biography of her (I think I've read three) and it's exactly like those early novels, word for word, every day of her young life. I've never met an alkie I didn't like, didn't instantly feel comfortable with - and I'm sure I'd feel the same with every alkie I've never met. I don't think I could live in that flat. I'd rather be homeless. Diana Dors and Osbert Lancaster and Carol Reid and Charles Rennie Mackintosh etc etc all lived in much nicer places.
I learnt decades ago never to drink when depressed, and living in Jean's flat would make sure I never drank. She must be the first alcoholic I don't think I'd understand.
This piece of music is one of the very very very rare instances where it's a good idea to keep on keeping on, in the hope that things will stop getting worse and might suddenly get better. This was trying to be some loud beat-y thing, but that was awful, so I tried to make it all smooth and ambient, and that was even worse - and got worse and worse and worse the more times I put it in the blender. Till I just turned everything up to 50 - and I actually think this is that rare ambient track that needn't be poured down the loo disguised as diarrhoea.
recorded this afternoon, photo Chelsea yesterday
