Nowhere Notimes (part 2)

The pirates have taken their ship and their cannon and gone raiding. I'm in the kitchen washing potatoes but I see them go, and I also see one of the guys from babysham pulling an Elmer Fudd and sneaking along with the signs from their camp while they left it unguarded.
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 I'm talking to a drag queen called Jessica behind the Italian camp's luxury. I say I don't know what a lapdance actually involved, and she says she's never given one, so we rectify that.
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The pirates get back and a big roar goes up when they realise their signs are missing. I come out just in time to see a tricorned and gilded posse advancing with their ship towards the Pervy Whims cottage, now boldly displaying the Pillage Village sign and with its garden filled with gay men, exuberantly breasted women, and sympathisers swinging their handbags menacingly before launching them in a volley.
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A couple are saying their wedding vows under the main stage in the Middle of Nowhere. This community means a lot to people. I sit near the back with my new friend Jack. #I could never get married', I say to him. He asks why and I say I was in a relationship for five years and I was so happy, and I thought it was great and perfect.. and it ended and I'd been so wrong about the whole of it. And I cry quietly and my voice breaks up and I'm apologising as he says 'Come here, you', pulls me over for a hug and holds me until it's bearable again.
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 The pirates get past the wall of handbags and discover that the happiest camp in the world are pretty good with their tools and have screwed their stolen signs to their territory. They are a bit nonplussed until they remember they came armed and make with a shower of ballpool balls, cutlasses and jets of water.
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 I'm feeling the heat and ask for easy, shaded work in the afternoon. Chris leads me to the gate where Natalie is painting, and says I can cut her stencils. She sketches some evil grinning little sperm and I cut them from tetrapaks so we can spray them on. The gate is designed by Ellen and spreads like a red cone, opening as a square-fronted temple and tapering to purple and pink drapery. The theme of the event is Rebirth Earth, and the gate will begin like Indian temple and finish as a vulva.

As me and Natalie talk it becomes clear we have similar phallic, curlicued visions for the temple freize, and we roller and draw the pieces together and they match. It's a novel experience for me to work with anyone artistic, let alone someone whose lines go the way mine do.

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Krampouz, the French camp, are doling out exquisitely thin proper french crepe. I eat mine with chocolate from teh biggest jar of nutella I have ever seen while wearing a leatherman style peaked cap I find around, and they let me borrow it to wear for the evening. So I paint on a moustache and strut around.

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There is a rope bondage jam and I always have more to learn, so I head up to the camp and partner with a beautiful lost boy with orange stripes on his cheeks. He's never been roped before, and he's so young: I tie his arm across his chest like a patriot and his other arm behind him, and check in with him every other knot to see how he's feeling. He seems to like it and his friends laugh in surprise to see him so bound up. I think he looks beautiful, and then I let him tie me.

I hope he keeps exploring.

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Babycham has a cabaret and Megs comes on stage and sings Minnie the Moocher acapella. Her voice is like granulated honey and she stomps and owns that dusty stage.

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I've been drinking and dancing all day but I don't want to stop and so I'm dancing like a mad thing, jumping up and down and climbing platforms and doing some burlesque of pole dancing on a rough squarecut pole. As people wander into camp friendly puppy me goes over and asks them to dance with me, I want to befriend everyone and make them happy. 'Nah,' says one girl,  'It's funny just watching you.'
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I get hold of the laptop and put on the Cramps I've been jonesing for all week. I dance and mouth 'tomorrow we'll fell like we've been hit by a truck'.. He smiles and drags out in a voice like the purr of an engine 'It's sooooo hard to imagine you as a psychobilly fan.'

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Now, I wanna be face-to-face.

Nowhere Notimes (part 1)

 The buses have arrived and I rush down with the crowd to meet them. I don't know what I'm doing but I'm genuinely thrilled to meet a new batch of people who I trust to be cool, show them how excited I am and show them what we have built for them.
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On the ukelele it says 'this machine kills diminuitive fascists'. __________________________________
The firespinning pit is opened up. I've had a few drinks but I've been spinning years, and fire is irresistible.. I pick up a heavy staff and realise The billowing cotton skirt I'm wearing is incompatible with fire, so I strip it off and spin in my pants. The area is surrounded by leds and onlookers chatting and half watching. I step in and let the familiar sensations of shifting weight and momentum, and the zip of roaring fire past my head, take over. I only hit myself in the leg once.
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Ginger Dave *is* hotter than Malaka.
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 After a day at the presses working on the newsheet, Abi is spinning feel-good soul and rock and roll to the Werkhaus. Tristan tells us proudly 'That's my wife. Isn't she something? Go, Abi, go!' Wearing a dust-covered duster, Til (who's been working on lighting all week) takes my hands and we spin out into my best attempt at a swing dance. I don't know the moves but spinning round like kids in a playground and being whirled into twirls and passing over and under and weaving round hands is really fun, and whenever I go the wrong way I just dissolve into laughter, because I can't stop smiling and everything feels golden.

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 "This is exactly the right place in the world for me to be right now", I message home after a first day working until I'm tired with sexy, energetic, practical dreamers, sick, helpful cynics with genuine smiles.
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It's Pride and we take to the playa dust to process after the converted-caravan pirate ship as it bears along the Samba crew, decked out in rainbows for the occasion. I can't say no to the samba beat and I bounce along beside and behind for an hour or so, wearing blue body paint and chainmail. We finish up at Ubertown and a DJ breaks out a mix of mid-nineties cheese from the back of the radio and speaker studded art car. It's golden hour as the sun sets over the rocky mountains surrounding us, and the crowd try to remember the moves to the macarena. Eventually, pirates, post-apocalyptics, dusty freaks and holiday makers wiggle their hips, jump, clap and turn ninety degrees as one, with not a hint of post-modern Shoreditch irony to be seen.

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YOU CAN'T *MAKE* ME STOP DANCING, I write on whatever I can find. ___________________________________
 I'm delivering the paper to smiling, welcoming faces at each camp I visit in a desert-blow parody of surburbia. 'We don't have paper boys and girls, we have paper freaks' comments someone.. it hadn't even occurred to me that my outfit was outlandish. Pinstripe shorts, red fishnet stockings, boots, 10cm long spike collar and a cargo-net top is what I'd wear normally, given free choice.
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 All is full of dust and love.
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The last day starts with a hot mess served by an unnaturally cheery Nurse and a team with pink facepaint lipstick smeared round their mouths. It's lush and accompanied by whiskey and Annika declaiming 'First proper food I've had all week. I don't know who's running this kitchen but they're shit. Proper food at last.'

Annika runs the kitchen. She raids our ice freezer for bottles of booze people have stored there and declares them destined for punch.

'It's not stealing, it's non-consensual sharing!'

She aims the judge at unsuspecting mouths.

 'Do you consent to this punch?'

'Yes...?'

'NO! THIS IS NON-CONSENSUAL PUNCH.'

And whatever, we drink, and the punch keeps being racked up, and Werkhaus has a party going with vodka and juice on ice at fucking 10 o clock on the last day because we can. And also because we can we hijack the music and put on some non-electronic music. Those of us who love our rock smile as the real instruments make the air shake just like they did when they were recorded.

'I didn't realise how much I missed guitars', says Natalie. Fuck it's good to hear guitars again.

You've gotta FIGHT. for your RIGHT. to PAAAAAAAAAAAAAR-TAY!

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I lose my heart on the burning sand.

Love is a packed lunch

My rucksack is smallish and black and has everything I need for the moment. It's not much.  In the back, wrapped in a bag from Marks and Spencer's, there is a parcel of food for me that my mum made. A small prepacked salad, a Tupperware container, an apple, and a small foil- shrink-wrapped chocolate bar trying to be healthy. I open the Tupperware and the sandwich inside has been cut into a tangram so it fits under the protection of the plastic box. Two large slides of soft whole meal bread, hand sliced lettuCe, soft cheese and cheddar -  product of careful knife work and considered selection.

My mother continues her 26 years of care for me, much of it involving food preparation and her lifetime of serving for a family as cook and more. She doesn't think about it anymore - half custom, half duty - but I feel loved by the care she puts into preparing a perfect little meal for me.  She's been feeding me fruit since I was little, but it's been more important since my dad died of bowel cancer. My odds on getting it too aren't great, but are improved by fruit and veg.

Filling someone's basic needs, the small things that don't rank respect or recognition, the incremental preventatives rather than the grand cures - taking the time to do the things that go unnoticed, that is love.

Small town living. Part of an occasional series.

Great things about my home town, pop 75k, thinking pop, approx 35 The cathedral toilets are twinned with a latrine in burundi. Not the cathedral, just the toilets - not with other toilets, just a latrine. There is a photo and a plaque the commemorate the cultural exchange. Shops consider 3-5.30 wednesday thru Friday to be acceptable opening hours for a business. Shops selling vertiginous sequinned union jack platforms, no less. There is an asparagus festival. It features gus the asparagus man making visits, a demonstration of asparagus tying, an asparagus crown - and for those who can't make it to the festival, there is the portable asparabus. 

Are you depressed?

(a non-exhaustive checklist)

Is there a big fucking lump of inability wedged just behind your voice box?

Are your tear reservoirs always dangerously close to running over?

Do you have to rack your brain to think of things you like, or things you would like?

Speaking of that, is the future any more than something to be got on with?

Are you sleeping to avoid being conscious?

Have you taken your medication?

Then congratulations, this is just how your life is.

To hurt is human

He said he never wanted to see me hurt.

So I handed him the most recent scientific papers on the possibility of time travel, a packet of condoms, and my mum's address in 1985. Good luck with that.

London's burning.. and you've got nothing to say?

Dear Facebook and Twitter (at least those segments of it I pay attention to);

Yesterday, in response to the police shooting and killing a man in Tottenham – no reasons have been given, although theories abound and the Independent Police Complaints Commission is investigating already, which is highly unusual – there was rioting in the streets, two patrol cars torched, several shops burnt. The people living above these shops had to leave their homes and now only have the clothes on their backs. The rioters looted and burnt many things, 8 police officers are in hospital.

From a BBC report:

“Local resident David Akinsanya, 46, said several shop windows had been smashed. "It's really bad," he said. "There are two police cars on fire. I'm feeling unsafe. It looks like it's going to get very tasty. I saw a guy getting attacked." Maria Robinson, another resident, told the BBC: "The police seem very frightened at the moment, people are unstoppable. They've broken into various businesses, jewellery shops, bookies, it's absolutely crazy. They've beaten up a man for talking to the fire brigade." “

I live a mile from both regions of riots. I was away this weekend, just got back. Many of my local shops are closed – shutters are down. The sirens are running constantly. Fire engines and patrol cars stuffed with police are in the streets.

And noone is talking about this on social media, and this is fucking weird, all right? I have a lot of leftie friends who have said nothing, barring a few comments about robbing JD sports for tracksuits or other chav-baiting comments.

However, you had very strong views about:

Ian Tomlinson dying after he was attacked by a police officer

Jody MacIntyre being maltreated by a police officer

The riots following the anti-cuts protest in June

Why is this different? I don't expect anyone to support this rioting. But I kinda thought there might be concern and questions... and their lack is causing me to ask questions. I'm not telling you what to do but I am megaconfused.

Things on my mind:

Was shooting Mark Duggan 'reasonable force'?

There was strong feeling around here when Smiley Culture died under odd circumstances while being searched by the police, in April. . I suspect there are many other dodgy situations and the police rep is hardly high at the moment.

People protest and riot when they are angry and ignored. Tottenham is what politicians call underprivileged and everyone else calls poor and desperate. The burnt out buildings are just down the road from the Job Centre I was going to. It was very busy. In an environment where people are poor and desperate and put-upon, they're more ready to riot. For everyone's safety, if not our wellbeing (I suspect they don't really care about either but it's inarguable that dead people don't vote) it would be in the govt's interest to try and reduce these desperate conditions and the chasm between the guys who make the rules and the guys who take the hits.

If you wanna see how I'm scared it might go, check out the comments on this youtube video of the news reporting the events.

I've had White Riot in my head all day.

“Brixton in South London was an area with serious social and economic problems. The whole United Kingdom was affected by a recession by 1981, but the local African-Caribbean community was suffering particularly high unemployment, poor housing? higher than average crime rate.[6]
In the preceding months there had been growing unease between the police and the inhabitants of Lambeth.[2]”

Wikipedia on the Brixton Riots