It's Still Life

15.09.23

05:10 (West Sussex)
It’s autumn, dead end gardening, rose crush, rudbeckia rot, a grim faced dance, and the moon hangs like a fallen log. I’m not pleasant company before sunrise.

08:25
My granny, the one with the goats and white rabbits, was a herbalist. She said that hair is magic. Don’t let it fall into the wrong hands, she’d say.

09:45 (We’re in France)
Look mistletoe, I say. He says it’s a birds nest, so we quibble over that for a few kilometres. And so I say, When you see a contrail, do you wonder where the jet is going? And he says, No, and I don’t either but if I said that, we’d have nothing to talk about, so I say, Huh, and leave it at that.

11:20
We just passed a tractor with a load of hay. If I were 6, or is that was 6, anyway… I’d be waving at the driver and shouting Hey!

11:35
There’s a shock of green on the fields. Winter wheat, he says. He knows stuff like that.

15:00
In the wrong hands, the spit of a frog and the piss of a rat will pickle you overnight, but in the right hands, it’ll do nothing at all. I didn’t tell him this; I kept this information to myself.

15:05
A couple of hundred miles back, we were sitting on a bench in Dunkirk down by the harbour, a low-tide-stink that seagulls seem to love, and I’m eating a hunk of ripe cheese, a baguette, and swilling a bottle of water. A very Spartan lunch, and I thought to myself, I wonder if Richard Blaine is somewhere about.

16:30
Another 176 kilometres to go today, and then Germany.

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