User:Totnesmartin/theirquote

So there I was at a public meeting last night when, suddenly, Victoria (film person) gets a text and has to leave to sort out a domestic crisis. "keep filming" she said, dumping the camera on me. WHAT? I've never operated one in my life! Apart from when we did "Two Minds Working as None" in 1988 - and cameras have come on a bit since then. DON'T TOUCH ANY BUTTONS! Just point it at Susie and hope it works... After ten minutes I felt more comfortable with it. That's it, stand there listening to a question while I film you and I can pretend to be Stanley Kubrick! Yeah, right! And just as I was enjoying it, back comes Victoria. My first venture into the world of documentary filmmaking. I hope my second is a long way off... Country walk on Sunday: took one of my notorious short cuts and ended up surrounded by blackthorn and nettles, the only exit being over a barbed wire fence. One day I'll learn to keep to the path, but where's the fun in that? In the past few days I have been doing everything from dancing to Cuban Hip-hop to worrying about a baby jackdaw (it was in the back garden looking forlorn, with the flock (Parliament? Murmuration? Whoop?) cawing helplessly on the roof. Everything except what I was meant to be doing, frankly... Victoria doesn't want me to do music for her film anymore. This is because she's heard my stuff. She says electronic music isn't right for the kind of film she's doing. She was very nice about it, and I accept her reasoning (and her right to decide what her own film is like), but... It's Cherry Red all over again - but this time in person.  It snowed six times. Pruning gooseberry bushes without gloves (where they go? I no know!). Transplanting a Kirengesoma which msnsearch tells me I've spelt wrong - but not what the right spelling is. Bastards. Planting 2 Osmundas, with attendant landscaping - one on a slope needed shoring up. Then tending a bonfire. And speaking of bonfires...

On to the beach, dear friends, for the full moon ritual. The moon did actually come out for two minutes. Had an excellent, typically sensible (not) conversation with Laura, and we all gathered very closely round the big fire. And still froze. With a bonfire on the beach there's always an opportunity of Wrecking as a rewarding and fascinating hobby, but no American rubbish haulers or Danish sand-eel hooverers decided to join us. Which is a good thing as we were mostly vegetarian and couldn't have eaten all those sand eels. Next time it'll be warmer... until the gulf stream turns off and we get turned into Canada.

And I've still got the singing nun's "Dominique" going round my head! AAAAAAARGH! Stoke Newington: apparently tripletted with Totnes and Brighton. And possibly one or two other places as well. I got up at five and it was dark all the way up through the beautiful West Country, then light for me to see Reading - how lovely! (joke) and, on the outskirts of Londinium, lots of factories, most nice and clean, but one evil looking, lots of nasty smoke coming off it, a pollution cliche; and the name at the top: Nestle. Good job I was boycotting them already, how could such a dark satanic mill produce food, for &*%$ sake? (actually the $ might have something to do with it!)

Tonight we (Stewart Keith - new name change there!) play at the Klinker. We've been rehearsing, Stewart's flatmate Dylan calling out numbers, me choosing that page in my Lyric book and Stewart choosing the same casio button numbers. Sometimes it works. Another week goes by. I've been arguing about lions. Should lions released back into the wild be allowed to hunt their own food? Is this against the rights of the native fauna who have got used to a lack of lions. I argued that we should put nature back the way it was, and I was amazed at the strength of feeling in the counter-argument. But I still think I'm right. So there, Bristol people! This week I have mostly been: eating chips listening to London Calling throwing away old pots and pans being skint digging up madder putting it back wandering about rain dodging mithering playing with the shortwave radio studying skiving wondering what's up with that yoga teacher and why doesn't she bloody ring seeing the kingfisher again forgetting to do important stuff (again) watching (and recording to minidisc) Silent Running buying a book about the Titanic for 50p in a charity auction buying Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision after reading about it in about 1982 trying to remember if the Polecats were worse than the Lambrettas and...

PLANNING TO TURN VEGAN! Hey! That would make me a vegan pagan! Then I could do "thought for the day" and be a vegan pagan on Wogan! Shut up, Martin... Ok, so now I'm 38, but that's good. Because! 50 is the new 30, right? Right! Therefore, ipso facto (not that dreadful 80's band), 38 must be the new 18! Yeeesss! It's 1984! No dance music! No incessant football! the 12-inch rules! Prince is good! Echo and the Bunnymen have an album out! We're about to send off "Return of the Calamitous Wart" to an unsuspecting Andrew Trussler and Richard Youngs! Hooray! But wait! Not so fast with the Babycham! Maggie is prime minister, Ronald Reagan will declare war in five minutes and we're only at the start of 20 years of George Michael. And there's no internet. Oh bugger... here's the diary I kept at the time:

THURSDAY 3:55 Exeter RD&E From eye dept to A&E and back again. Where next? Did Kafka ever come here? The shadow area is getting bigger. Don't tell Jung!

6:25 I could be here until Monday!

I was stupid to leave it so long. Sunday! But I had the glums over a woman and that's far more important.

8:25 Sleep on the right side. Hospital TV - CNN! But it takes the BBC to mention the Enron trial.

Scissor Sisters playing Comfortably Numb. Appropriate lyrics for now but still a crap cover. Am I the only person in the world who doesn't get them?

8:30 Seriously consider escaping.

Dukkha [suffering]. A whole weekend of THIS?

Tomorrow call Yatro, Jan O'highway, Redworth.

8:35 A flash of light. The first today, curiously.

The purpose of hospital radio is to save on Tranquillisers.

FRIDAY 8:05am David Bowie's had an angioplasty. Everuybody's doing it! (But he's not going to write a song about it.)

Beware the blob! Gwyneth Paltrow's back, jellyfish, Paul Gascoigne to coach Boston.

Parkerswell ward is named after a healing well in Exeter. Funny that.

9:13 another flash. No 4 since I got here.

"I haven't been to Exeter for ages!" I said.

Mr Bedsix? [they hadn't put my name on the board and called me Mr Bed Six. Sounds good, actually]

12:10 The operation is at 1. What's the time, Mister Wolf?

Song in head: Departure by REM.

12:20 Chat with the surgeon. I get a choice of types of operation! Ichoose the one that leaves me with double vision, because I've got it anyway. [but they did the other one anyway!]

The Eyes Have It! On Saturday, Radio 2's chart-rundown-of-the-past was from July1983. Two songs stood out: Tantalize by Jimmy the Hoover (remember them?) was so astonishingly crap that it inspired me to write a better song... which I did, eventually. Very eventually! The other song was Wrapped Around Your Finger by The Police. Its mention of Scylla and Charybdis made me think it was OK to use the Greek myths in a song. So I wrote Disco Medusa:

Disco Medusa Stop wobbling about Disco Medusa Your guts will fall out

Hiding in the valley of stone Waiting for the hero Perseus You make belly dancers cringe And your hairstyle makes me nauseous

Which is one of the most awful songs ever done. Except Icefall which I wrote on the same day. But don't blame me, blame Sting. Recording of the album is a struggle against wonky equipment. Everything is either broken or going wrong. Basically I've recorded one track (Black Hero) and that's it. I need a replacement audio pin but the nearest shop that sells them is in Newton Abbot and they're out of stock until the beginning of next month. It wasn't like this last year when I recorded several albums in a few days each, or even in January when I recorded January Snowstorm, Forms of Self-repair and Astral Projection 2. So What gives now?