Thank you

I love this blog. It is all about the writing. It is not about being good for my career, (anyone who knows me knows I have never been able to do careerism), it is just about the need to write.

There is no one here to tell me I am being libellous or striking the wrong tone. I can just get on with communicating, telling the simple stories with my life. I can shade my words with all the passion, humour and resistance spirit I cannot fit into my published work. This is David Southwell writing, not David Southwell as an author with the job of writing the 101 on parapolitics.

I am in control here. Unlike my books, I am totally responsible. The mistakes are all mine. If you have a problem with what is written, you can take it up directly with the boss. This in itself is one of the beautiful things about blogging, the direct feedback relationship it allows between writer and reader.

One of the pleasant elements springing from the nature of that relationship for me recently has been receiving so many messages of goodwill recently. I am very touched and very grateful. Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to wish me a quick recovery. I promise I will try to get back to making regular dispatches as soon as possible.

Days Walking Down Sniper Alley

I am sorry there has been a lack of entries recently. There are entries I want to write – among them ‘Geno Washington’s Fight Club’ and ‘This is how Mr. Grasso Kicks Out the JAMS’ – but life has been difficult. I have moved away from ‘slashing my wrists’ in public (seemingly much to the annoyance of some readers), but I am currently experiencing somewhat unravelling circumstances.

I feel like I have spent days walking down Sniper Alley. When bullets strike too close, turning stone to violent storms of dust inches from your face, there is a gradual erosion of the soul. This is one reason for the dearth of new material on English Dreaming, English Rain during August.

Although I have my ‘funny book’ going to Frankfurt, I have also been working on the proposal for a project with the working title Counterfeit Truth. When you pour words professionally, sometimes there are not enough left for personal use. This has also been a factor hitting the blog over the last couple of weeks.

While I have no intention of whinging or dwelling on it, the final factor in the ongoing drought is my health. Trying to write, trying to forge the words and bind them together when pain takes all your strength is one of the ultimate acts of resolve. Imagination and will is the root of all magic. I understand that on days like these.

My Sort of City

I will be sorry to leave Marseille. I have resonated with the place. Raw, contradictory, syncretic. Restaurants full of books, a Black Madonna, good café coffee, the stepped streets of Les Panier. My sort of city.

Surprisingly given that I am the most moon-white Englishman man you can find, even the weather agreed with me. Marseille in July is hot and dry, tempered to my taste by sea breeze and fag-end Mistral. I feel my body recovering in this climate. The asthmatic miasma in my chest evaporates. My hay fever stops. Old wounds of flesh and spirit begin drying out after years behind dampened bandages. Even the deep rooted arthritis in my left foot responds. The 154 metre climb to the Notre Dame de la Garde makes it throb like buggery, but two minutes sitting on the steps of the gaudy basilica and it is back to a dull ache that lets me walk on for hours.

There is a tradition of praying to the Black Madonna of the abbey of Saint-Victor for the recovery of lost memories. In this healing climate, I can even believe that the black spots in my grey matter and the damaged nerve paths could repair. Whether I would want to recall everything misplaced in the wreckage left behind by the TIAs is another matter.

Beyond its curative properties, Marseille is a place I know I could write it. We all have our blue sky dreams, but if some publisher would advance me the funds, I could easily transplant for six months to a small room in Vieux Port or Le Panier, returning home with my überwork. Being divorced from hearing English often makes it easier to put in black and white, especially if every evening promises an apéritif break to be taken on Rue Sainte.

Above Essex Nowhere

I hate cliché. Hate writing it, hate living it. This morning I walk out at 8am through London drab. A tired grey sky makes it seasonless. No rumour of summer. Cool drizzle beads on my face. By the time I turn off of Oxford Street 40 minutes later I am damp and rheumatic.

I work for three hours. Basement publishing. More cliché. Wrestling with an index; trying to impose order surrounded by dunes of dust, forgotten books and dozens of broken Apple Macs. A dripping track soundtrack only broken by the feet clacking over the skylight.

At 12, two lines into ‘T’, I down my pencil, straighten my manuscript and make my way back to Oxford Street. The 23 I catch crawls towards its destination. Iain Sinclair to cushion the passage along painful places of The Strand, the Law Courts and Bell Yard.

Even when London is left, the grey continues. It bleeds into the aborted futurism of Stansted airport. A back of the lorry fake Antonio Sant’Elia design, blighted by Essex weather, has become a temple of dull paranoia. The two hour security lines and machine gun police create concentrated fear. The same instructions to comply are broadcast over and over in assorted languages including German. Close your eyes and you are in a parallel universe where the Nazis won the war.

It is raining by the time I walk across the tarmac to climb the steps to the plane. The wind, buoyant from the easy journey across Essex flatlands, whoops in my face like ugly football supporter from a rival team high on victory. The grey sky keeps everything in low definition. Cold, wet and oppressive, I am living the line by Luke Haines that helped name this blog.

Sitting between strangers, my aircraft terror begins to coalesce. The black hole in my brain – the injury from my last flight with Anne-Marie – exerts an awful gravity. Fears are sucked from the chasms of memory, ghosts ripped from slumber. The old language of dread reasserts itself. The smoothed down acronym TIA regrows its teeth, glorying in power regained as transient ischaemic attack. Ryanair roulette. Every time I fly, I know it could happen again.

Noise builds. The thumping, expectant power you feel building as you taxi becomes a purposeful, concentrated roar. A sudden skip in the stomach and then flight. Above Essex nowhere. A flattened quilt of fields in dark greens, browns and colours so tired they have given up and become exhausted shades of yellow are stitched by hedgerows, trimmed with ribbons of black tarmac.

For a few seconds it all goes white. When detail returns, we are cruising above a landscape straight out of the adventures of Rupert the Bear as drawn by Roger Dean. Mountain ranges of atmospheric water vapour come complete with secluded valleys that could house the palace of the Bird King, a mist village or floating island. When the continents of cloud eventually begin to fail and become hydrosphere archipelagos, the fields below are French.

Even from thousands of feet up, you can see the difference between England and southern France immediately. A landscape drawn from a divergent colour palette, sun-whipped soil scrapped thinly over limestone. No hedgerow enclosures. Arid peaks and dry valleys. Scattered vineyards. A flash of the Rhône. When we make the Mediterranean, the sun bends the wings of the plane, turns the water below into a blinding expanse of gold. Turning over Marseilles, I struggle to understand how a city of little more than a million and a half people could stretch itself across over such a wide area.

I land in another cliché. Blue sky. Technicolour movie blue. Total absence of cloud. A palpable hit of lavender carried on the warm air. Sunlight so strong my automatic English reaction is that it needs watering down like pastis. My phone’s loyalty morphs from T-Mobile to Orange F. For once there are no problems at the border. Smooth transition from one state to another. Everything is blue skies.

Normally I hate cliché, but this one, exchanging grey for blue, this is one that I can hack.