another stab at the words

(for the film)

you can't see me...

you can't see me because i'm not there...

you can't see me because the angle is too narrow...

you can't see me because it's the wrong time of day...

walking, stumbling, carrying my bicycle over the rockier bits,

immensely impractical as it is, having a bicycle down there...

all about poetry, and nothing to do with practicality,

except that it was practical tonight, having cycled north from G's place in gypsy hill, wanting the darkness and the desolate nature of the beach, wanting to listen to a few john martyn songs while i rested from cycling at that midpoint on my journey home, walking from the tate modern to waterloo bridge where i got back on my bike and cycled home to finsbury park...

my own G in bed,

walking, stumbling, as you do on the rocks and the shifting sand,

you can't see me because my phone was dead and i didn't have my camera with me...

no visual record of that walk, only the mud & the sand on my bicycle tires and on my shoes when i got home...

my bicycle, which in a way, this film is all about, i started filming from this place because i passed it each week, cycling accross town between two different teaching jobs, it was one of two places where i put down my camera to film the same scene on different days,

this walkway covered in trees that you see before you, my main experience of this is cycling along it,

sometimes also playing chess with one of the booksellers underneath waterloo bridge,

the national film theatre on the left a useful toilet, and wrapped up for me in london, just before i moved to this city that late august day ten years ago when me & luke hedge caught the train in for the nottinghill carnival, my 1st carnival, wide eyed and foolish, luke leading us up to the national film theatre that night where by chance nick cave was providing the live soundtrack to a french surrealist film of joan of arc..

a few months later having moved here, finding myself by the river one night, sad & alone but revelling in the romance of this river, these skies, a romance that hasn't left me these ten years...

the poetry of this place... step by step, bridge by bridge...

something about improvisation, about that stumbling walk along the beach, carrying my bike at times, step by step, bridge by bridge...

millenium, blackfriar's rail, blackfriar's road, that strange bridge that doesn't exist, just pillars,

walking passed the jetty from which this is filmed, passed the side of this walkway... lowtide... the whole area only temporary,

something about walking there, in between the land and the water,

step by step,

about this being the improvisation...

improvisation not just the water... as i'd seen it before, but the graceful or clumsy steps between land and river, some solid sand some mud...

but my bed now, maybe more of this tomorrow, very glad to have found a way in to the words

x