distortion intentional by katharine eastman

Yes ta and no not at all and I do hope your Christmas is going well and sorry to boast but I doubt it is going as well as mine - I have pretty much cancelled every social thing and apart from one day during the next fortnight I think I shall be totally alone. Obviously this points to the fact that I am an awful person, maladroit or maladjusted or whatever, a failure, everyone hates me, no friends, everyone says I'm a weirdo blah blah blah, and all that stuff is true - but what decided it for me was that big meal thing I went to over in Zizzis about a week ago - some good friends, some so-so friends, some annoying people, some strangers, we were bonded by something beyond words - and indeed at the end of the table where I sat hardly anyone wanted to say anything. And I just looked at them all and said to myself No I will not do anything social this Christmas.

For example yesterday. I was meant to go off for a family thing. But then I realised that it would be a room of people staring at their phones. I can have that experience on the top deck of a bus. So I said No and got on that bus and went for a long walk. What a beautiful day. The wind caught the hat of a man and lifted it high and I caught it and we laughed and he thanked me twice. A man's greyhound tried to climb a tree to chase a squirrel. I crossed a river by using a bridge that was underwater - fact ! (it was shallower than the alternative.) A million tiny things, none of them involving bored people staring at their phones.

Towards the end of the day I shopped in the local Lidl and tried to get out but the barrier wouldn't let me and for a while I was that old stupid confused person you see so often, that person who never got the morning's memo about how life has suddenly changed yet again and everyone is duty-bound to do things differently - in this case I was of course meant to scan my receipt on this post and then the door would open. New Idea.

Don't ever let them convince you that it's you - that you must keep up - that any time you are left confounded by the sudden new lurch in the way that everyone else is behaving that it is you who is behind or stupid. Not a bit. Other way round. It's all the obedient twats who are so eager to conform and be first to join in with the way the world is turning - they're the stupid ones. I walked for miles - from Langley to Frogham, mainly crossing heathland like what you see - an almost endless boggy path without any doorways to scan your receipt - there is of course no wildness left anywhere, everywhere is controlled and I'd be a fool if I thought that my life on the moors is freer than it is trapped inside Lidl - so that is why I turned everything up a bit too much here, the clipping etc is deliberate - there isn't enough of it, not enough to turn a humdum piece of music into anything worthwhile, but these are my days now.

recorded this morning, photo cows on the path from Kings Copse Inclosure towards The Noads and Ipley and Lyndhurst and Minstead and Fritham and Frogham and the bus to Salisbury and the bus home back where I started from and sit now, alone.