decalescence by Simon Aulman

Yes I seem to be back. This will be the only place I'll be for a while. Yesterday I got the 5-55am train to Basingstoke except it wasn't 5-55 - the storms delayed it quite a while. For the last few weeks I've done this ride/walk at least once a week. For the first couple of hours of my walk home it rained. Then nothing. Then as I was on the high ground about 7 miles short of Winchester there was daunting cloud over Winchester with flashes inside it boiling away and it overwhelmed me and I hid among bushes as the lightning switched on and off - I'm not embarrassed to admit that after our house got hit by lightning and half-destroyed and made the front page of the Lymington Times I switched from liking thunderstorms to be frightened of them.

This was the first of my long walks this autumn when the paths had clearly switched from being fairly dry/firm to being wet and muddy and slippery and annoying and hard work and when I reached Winchester I felt I'd made my point. I got the train home. Tomorrow I'm driving to Bodmin to see Rachael Dadd again. Nonsensical attempts at walking home from Basingstoke, ridiculous long drives to Cornwall to see the already-seen. These pass the individual days, but don't really pass life very well.

This morning, walking down London Road I so so so so so so nearly walked into Morris Dibben and asked them to send someone round to kick-start the whole process of selling the house and me being homeless again (the only time in recent decades when I have truly felt alive). But, well, I didn't. Not today. But that is how it will happen. I'll nip out to Sainsbury's for carrots and I'll come home with an appointment time for someone to call round to look round and bring me round to whatever senses remain.

A couple of days ago a friend and I walked into the Standing Order and chanced to see someone else we knew and we joined her and put the world to rights over lunch - though I ate nothing. In the evening I and other friends were in the Standing Order - again I ate nothing. I leant back in my chair while those around me vented, and I felt very happy. Why have a home/house - for here, in this warm carpeted cosiness there is TV news and friendly people and burger and chips and an apple juice is about £6-50 - I could walk from town to town, the days in Wetherspoons, the nights under bushes as the lightning turns the day alive, there are cinemas, there are even gigs to go to if you are desperate, and having so little to lose will always make you more alive and interesting (in a good way) and will win you extra friends, if that's what you want, though I don't think I do - too many things lately have been things I'm glad I was doing alone (if I was) or wished I was doing alone (if I wasn't) - it's a riddle now that every day feels so much more finite and precious, but thinking too deeply about the ways to spend them just spoils them, and weirdly it's maybe best to just unthinkingly spend them as all-the-same as possible, which when I am homeless they will be.

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simple and admittedly nothing very amazing - tracks recorded long ago, they were going to be part of one of my typical bitty albums, but I can't now be bothered to add to them, will shoot them out there and get them out the way and start from new whenever the mood strikes, photo Herts a month or two ago