A previous winter walk

Pitch black, 7.30am, rolling down the hill like an ambulant corpse, following the tail end spliff smoke of another worker on their way to the hive.

Playing the bus 'so we meet again' game during the short stretch between The Grindstone and Roslin Road, couldn't make out the number plate, grime, grit, smeared from slush splash yet to be cleaned. Game abandoned.

Choices:

Down the greasy Victorian paving on steep Roslin, with potential for slippage, or take to the tarmac/cobble mix of the middle.

Take the middle.  Road's fenced at the top, little danger of being run down.

Short-cut by the Environment Centre or stick to the pavement? Chance of treading in leaf-masked dog shit is high so take the pavement by the massive, student-filled houses.

Past a giant silver condom in the shape of a VW camper van, the vehicle silently bearing up under the ignominy, built for freedom and the open road, cocooned in an anti-rust, featherlite skin.

Northumberland Road, its surface delaminating already before the freeze, now flaking with tarmac psoriasis.

Toward the Spiritualist Church, it's changed hands, being re-roofed. Once here a 2nd degree acquaintance declared himself to be Christ arisen whilst being in contact with ‘the other side’ causing pursed-lipped mayhem before subsequently absconding with a white witch from Cemetery Road.

Here we are, in the office, how did I get here.

Is it OCD? Part 1

“The urge to collect is too strong” said Barbara

Then looked around the park to see if she'd been heard

“Will it never end?” she cried

Sobbing she stapled ant number seventy six thousand four hundred and twenty one in to her portfolio

Is it paranoia? Part 1

He cuts his nasal hair

Lying on his back on the floor

Thus preventing spearing his brain through a nostril

If his chair were to collapse mid-trim

A constant fear

Nightfall

I wrote this recently about an incident that occurred 40 odd years ago when I lived on Kelvin Flats.

Nightfall

Night fall
Sand soak memorial

Blown to rust
Our breath catches
The lost brother on the breeze

Power slide

So I went out in the car, not having used it for a week or so.  The battery was flat so had to bump start it.  Bump starting is no problem living on a hill, stick it in second, hand-brake off and then gently dump the clutch and off we go.

Drove out to Redmires and found some snow.  Discovered that I could make a light come on on the dashboard by losing traction when doing a bit of a Clarkson on the snow.  I did this a couple of times.  All in all about 3 or 4 hundredths of a second of motorised hooliganism.  Never seen the 'slippery surface' light come on before, traction control has a lot to answer for.

Earlier on had had a brief moment of depression brought on by listening to football commentators and football interviews on the radio.  The same questions week in week out, asked by bored sounding interviewers of bored sounding players.  The same question to the manager about the opposing team, the same hollow response from the manager about not underestimating the opposing team, being an organised unit, etc, blah, fucking blah, drone.

One day all of us will be cosmic dust and this pointless use of energy will be recycled into some, no less pointless, other event.  In the meantime hopefully we won't bork up the planet too much for the flora and fauna that will inherit it from us.

Compulsive. Memory. Song

Do you have a song or songs that when you hear them that you want to repeatedly play?  The sort of thing you do when you’re a kid but that strange compulsion is still there with particular pieces of music?

Today while dicking about on the YouTube listening and watching bits of classic 70s music I stumbled upon this:

Taste: Blister on the moon.

This song is very familiar to me.  I first heard it when I was given this album in the early 70s:

Here's a track listing:

Side 1

John Mayall - Room to Move

Blind Faith - Well Alright

Cat Mother and The All Night Newsboys - Can You Dance To It

Jack Bruce - The Clearout

Cream - Doing That Scrapyard Thing

Side2

Fat Mattress - Everything Is Blue

Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger & The Trinity - Indian Rope Man

The Savage Rose - A Girl I Know

Taste - Blister on the Moon

The Jimi Hendrix Experience  - Little Miss Strange

The stand-out tracks for me are The Clearout, Doing That Scrapyard Thing, Indian Rope Man, and Blister on the Moon.

The one that I can still listen to repeatedly at high volume until my ears bleed is Blister on the Moon, I have to replay it about 10 times every time.  I can’t resist the guitar of Rory Gallagher teamed with the anger vented at a perceived imposition of control, and the resistance to it, expressed in the lyrics.

That is what I have been doing today.

That is all.

I have a confession to make. I once stole an elevator.

Yes, an elevator, not a lift. This was no ordinary device for conveying humans between levels.  

It was a cage style design that travelled up through the centre of a staircase. Painted black, all gloss black and in beautiful condition with polished brass controls and fitments. Each floor had a cage door that had to be pulled to to enable transit. The external cage continued up through the centre of the stairs to the top of the building. There was another cage door internally which wouldn’t allow the elevator to move until the door was shut properly. Once moving it was wise to keep fingers out of the cage gaps.

The elevator moved by manual operation of a brass lever. One direction for up, the other for down, and by returning the lever gently to the centre the elevator would stop. If the elevator was called from another floor a bell in the cab would ‘ding’ and a white enamel disk would flick into one of the holes on the floor indicator panel at the top rear of the elevator.  Multiple floors could be indicated on the horizontal panel as there was a hole for each floor, the floor number painted at the back of each hole.  There was a moving arrow on another brass plate near the top front of the elevator, this indicated where the elevator was in relation to the floors.  This machine was straight out of Raymond Chandler, exactly the thing a client of Philip Marlowe’s would travel in up to his office.

Usually an elderly man operated the elevator, but on this day the he wasn’t in his seat. The elevator was empty.  I decided to take it.  I shut the outer cage door and then the inner.  I moved the lever in the ‘up’ direction and almost silently it lurched into motion, I had no finesse.  I started and stopped a few times, and tried both directions. Up and down, and lurching less.  There’s a limit to how much touring can be done in an elevator and I had an appointment to keep, so after a short while I decided to get out.  On finding my floor I had to nudge the lever up and down to get it to settle at the right point which would allow the inner cage door to open.  I left the elevator and went in to the offices.

When I came out the elevator was gone.  I walked down the stairs and past the operator now back in his seat at the ground floor.

That was in 1979.  I went back to the building some years later, the 1930s style elevator had been replaced with a completely enclosed modern design.  A shame.  As a 15 year old those few minutes controlling the elevator were quite entertaining, and there must have been plenty of others that had fun doing it too.  I didn’t think of it as time travel but in retrospect it was the tail end of an era that had somehow clung on in a Manchester side-street, hands-on history.

The NHS orthodontist I visited has gone too.

I cannot find any pictures of such an elevator.

This is the building now:

On Google Streetview St John Chambers