eveley wood by katharine eastman

(Hazel Down won't be topped for a while, but this one comes close-ish in a very different way - my second favourite album so far - it lacks the highs and lows of Hazel Down, instead being more aloof and austere and just doing its own calm relentless thing without worrying what the world thinks)

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I'm so deep up my own bum with music that I'm not paying much attention to the news and I misread the roadmap and I thought everything was getting back to normal last Monday, but obviously not. In these days that now truly feel finite I've joined the oldies who try to pack each one with something real.

I live to be like my mentors - my grandfather, a true eccentric, and Ron, the father of my wife's best friend, another one who burnt up in a forty-year burst of unforgettable doing-as-he-pleased, Kip my friend in town who has gone off the chart, Dave who lived in every inappropriate dwelling and the homelessnesses in between, now vanished into London, and my girlfriend's dad, another one whose life would delight neither Boris Johnson nor the Guardian.

None of these people care(d) for possessions, and the only time I came close to them was when I too got rid of everything. Somehow, since then, I seem to have acquired stuff - not too much, really, but I'm still left with the headache of working out if I can fill the fortnightly dustbins to get rid of it all in time - and every time I go out I take something with me to put into a municipal bin.

This morning I left home about 7-30am and first went to Sainsburys in Lordshill. A bizarre shop which now has 2 exits and no entrances. Truly. There were two people trying to enter thru what used to be the entrance, but which is now marked "exit" and the security guy was waving his arms way off to the right, into the haze of a far-off horizon. I too couldn't understand how you were meant to get in. A woman joined us.

Only women are brave enough to cut thru the bullshit, and in the end the security guard gave in and waved us in thru this new second exit - yet another Covid rule ignored, just like all the others over the last year. I've never been much of a fan of Sainsburys, and now I am not anything of a fan - they had no figs and no Montezuma 100% dark chocolate - theeee two most essential grocery items, surely. I can't be alone in knowing this.

Instead I bought some of their bullshit Extra Special apricots dried for seventeen years on the suntanned buttocks of Fijian penguins. These were a big mistake and led to a near-constant four hours of loud farting.

Up thru Romsey and beyond and I parked in a scrappy area by a scrappy little allotment in Horsebridge, near King's Somborne. From here I walked north up the Test Way to Stockbridge - a boring trudge, hedged-in and viewless, with virtually never a sight of the river or anything. Very few people about. Normally after half an hour's walking I start to get high, but it didn't happen here.

The Test Way is too proper, too organised, too phoney. In Stockbridge I walked down the high street and bought a carton of apple juice in the Co-Op and started - just started - to feel quite happy. At the top of the high street the walker just keeps going in a straight line. For about a hundred yards you have to walk alongside the A30. But it's worth it for what comes next - the bridlepath leaves the road and heads south-west over huge open fields, high up, views all around, the hawthorn coming into bloom, and now that I know all about skylarks they too made the day very happy - yes I was happier now than I've been maybe all year.

This long pathway reminded me of the Ridgeway. It's so long since I've been along the Ridgeway that I don't know if it still has the same mystery that it used to. I doubt it. But I'm a luddite and it's my job to doubt it. For sure, back when I used to walk along the Ridgeway on my trips north there were often gypsies up there, some in benders, proving that it was still possible to live a life apart. Now, there are never any gypsies along paths like these, and I suppose "lives apart" are less apart now than before.

We're all being conformed - often willingly - our phones do it, our wish to belong does it. The bridlepath glances off a small quiet road like a billiard ball bouncing off a cushion and all along this and the previous part there are views to the left of a massive field of massive solar panels, regimented in stark spooky ranks.

As a luddite it is my duty to hate such things - but I can't - there are some modern things which for some reason I like - fields of solar panels are one thing, wind turbines too, and pylons are another thing - I can't get angry at pylons. And I quite like motorways. And though I lazily/clichedly moan about smart-phones I am often glad that my girlfriend has one.

All this while there are ridges of hills in all directions - the greyness of Broughton Down off to the right a little. And this is where the walk became so beautiful that if I'd let myself I could have cried a bit - the path become a junction and there are no sounds except the skylarks and the may is blindingly white and tucked into the corner there is a seat and it feels like the most special private discovery of a lifetime, a moment out of a children's book or something by John Cowper Powys.

I sat here and ate Extra Special Sainsburys cheese (Comte) which - again sorry for the lazy cliche but it really is true - smelt like old socks and if this is extra special then god knows what bog-standard tastes like. But their bread was great and the Co-Op apple juice went down in two brain-freeze gulps and the soup I'd brought was shit and ended up soaking into the ground - sorry for the pollution.

Now back - slowly - towards people - Houghton. Across the Test and back down to where I'd started. In one way it hadn't exactly been one of those full-life-living experiences that I'd wanted for each day - yet I will never forget its beauty - a morning that started cold and ended hot.

I drove back towards home. Yesterday at Regents Park I'd suspected that something was getting a bit sticky with the gearbox or something. And today I had confirmation. Right outside the Plaza in Romsey my clutch gave in and I couldn't get into any gear, couldn't move at all. Yes that was me behind those traffic-news reports.

This is the first time I've ever had to call out a rescue service. Ian arrived in his orange RAC van and turned an experience which I had always dreaded into a smooth continuation of one of the happiest days of my life. He's my age and sees the world's madness the same way I do and the same way most of us do - though we know we can't do anything about it except moan to each other and take comfort from the fact than we aren't alone - it's not us, it's them - and all we can do is stand aside and let the world go bullshit-crazy until it self-destructs.

So my van is now at Cadnam Garage until after the Easter holiday - when I probably wasn't planning on going out anyway. And what the fuck am I talking about - all this bullshit about LIVING life every day, like I'm just another smiling clone in a Nike advert. Fukkit - maybe I'll just stay in over Easter and get drunk all day and all of the nights in between.

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(recorded 31/3/21 using acoustic gtr, photo today near Eveley Wood, Houghton)