Is the frog puzzled?

Completely out of date now, as I’m currently covering over my footprints in today’s heavy snow (with more clean, crisp snow, careful not to choose the dirty stuff as it’s got to look like I was never there), so that I can see if anyone walks around outside our house in the night. Anyway, back to last week…….

Today it all started with a puzzle from a late-pulled Christmas cracker, that was either a happy frog, a sad frog or the piercing for a penis (depending on the observer and the dangling or the not):

There then followed my walk in the pitiful excuse for snowfall, which included a fake snowman tree, whose multiple lost glove-gifted hands looked somewhat creepy in the murk, but was followed by a more straightforward – snow patterned fields:

and a splash of sunset over my bridge of sighs:

Then the pièce de résistance, a face in the wall (can you tell where it is yet?):

My accompaniment: Dutch Uncles (‘Out of Touch  in the Wild’), Storm Corrosion & King Crimson (‘In the Court of the Crimson King’). 

Cutty Sark

New year, same old grey clouds:

(the miracle did not happen…and there are nowhere near 50 shades of, although what happens in the undergrowth, by the sides of the path I tread, is anyone’s idea and open to endless speculation and prophecy…in the distance the tall ships probably sail on by, but up close and personal they make a very pleasant bedfellow and heartwarming travelling companion in my ears (Tall Ships ‘Everything Touching’) as I trudge through the liquid scenery. I notice a bird’s nest, empty now but perhaps…….

Almost Christmas with Sweet Billy

Christmas greetings! (from the aliens amongst us)….it’s a strange story involving a car (but no directions), some directions, the pavement, moss, an antenna, soil, weeds, an umbrella, the Royal Mail and 2 dogs (not humping!)

First off there was the car that pulled up in front of me, as if to ask for directions, but whose occupant (an apparently perfectly normal woman) got out….but did not ask me any questions at all! At this point I needed a few pointers (and got 2 – but with slight disagreement) to the right direction:

Somewhat unsurprisingly this involved the pavement and I needed to get ahead (but let’s ‘face’ it, that pattern is more than a little strange):

Through the tunnel and into the blue:

which led directly to my next two discoveries…an alien tentacle (masquerading as an abandoned antenna):

and moss which was just too green (like ‘hair so green only your mother would know’!):

A stone thrown portrays the man with the man in his mouth:

and the tide had come a long way in:

I felt a little negative (how very Christmas dare me!):

but I also really paid my dues; like the beginnings of some demented carol…one umbrella (thrown up like a drunk against the bus shelter), two (unleaded) dogs barking & three weed fishing nets (put out to dry for the new season):

….but only one suspicious pile of soil (who else could have put it there?):

I look up at the bequiffed cloud man; whose brain sadly rapidly disappeared in the high winds, leaving nothing but a hole for clear blue sky and then there was pure antique Post Office (the rust clearly wide awake for the Royal Mail):

and in a spirit of decay, then, as always, finally the multicoloured phlegm street; all the precious pieces spat out by the local Aqualung’s broken lung….having said all that, today’s musical accompaniment was the sublime and utterly gorgeous, Sweet Billy Pilgrim ‘Crown and Treaty’.

Death of a garden centre

The Stream is dead (long live The Stream), but at least a pattern is emerging…….

And just after the sunset:

In the sparkling of ice crystals from the roof of my car, I find the following:

and although it took a while (and a bit of digital manipulation), all is now as clear as crystal?:

Trapped darkness like the sadness of the dead garden centre below me…polytunnels once taught, complete, now just semicircular metal skeletons, polythene flesh tattered and flapping ineffectually in the breeze. Seed beds now weed beds and bird scarers once brightly coloured now bleached, disheveled…and all forsaken, forgotten & forlorn. Was that why the new path I had chosen on the hillside up above (the high road) had now died, dried up, frozen, an icy dell full stop leading precisely nowhere…..but with some very pretty decorative touches!:

and all synced to Deftones accompaniment – a truly wonderful group to go walkingz to, their latest epic release (Koi No Yokan) being just that, EPIC!

Or him?

I’m practicing with Kate Bush‘s ’50 words for snow’, as last night we had torrential rain and, while today saw the re-emergence of ‘The Stream’, it was accompanied by quite an icy nip in the air, so who knows?

Mind you neither the ‘light fireworks’:

the bleached bones of the roadside mini-forest:

or the Fertility Symbol pavement portrait:

seemed particularly bothered.

Don’t know where that ‘leaves’ us:

or him?

Prawn cocktail

The large empty packet of a prawn cocktail flavoured snack was elegantly silver-pink against the black & white (Friesian interlopers not normally in that field) and (hangnail) red all over of my hands (so little blood so far spread).

Close by the sadness of the fern army….once so urgently verdant; now laid low, the battle against nature’s winter failings lost:

One mole hill, does not a field make? Happy with its lot in life? Not feeling the need (for further excavations)…..or just all alone in the world?…. with no earthly need for nature’s confetti:

I go past ‘Tiny Feet’ – all that is left of this dead squirrel’s last (de)composition – it takes the ‘Discipline’ of a King Crimson (ha, ha!) and I wonder what others think of me as I pause to take yet another surreptitious photo at the rock face. There is no ‘heat in the jungle’ here, only rapidly, spookily, encroaching mist, surrounding me while I listen to the cautionary tale of how to almost get shot by gang members hanging round and looking suspicious in Notting Hill Gate. It all makes me wonder what Rorschach:

would have made of it all…and did the wall really fall or was it pushed?:

Then I think of the sad news that one more local firm has gone to the wall as I pass the house where I had imagined squatting if I had failed the interview (for the job I already had!):

and find myself wondering if THIS is all there really is….

21

God Speed You Black Emperor‘s ‘Strung Like Lights At Thee Printemps Erable’ and a small crowd cooing round a pushchair strip me of my last defences……and then there was the white shopping bag of surrender….

I note the photo defect. Should I add it to the ‘evidence’ for hope of more than all of this, found in yesterday’s ‘S’ (for show me a sign….or was that just, symptomatic?) Is it a dead heat? 21 RIPs and still the pain so visceral, so coruscating, so unbearable, tearing and ripping, burning, with no escape…ever?

Are you out there?

Swan songs

Bit of a fair weather friend with the all-f****ed-up ones (Fugazi), but having had to absorb endless verbal ‘Hits’ (‘End’ and otherwise), this, my only album of theirs, has on occasion given great succour…..but today (shortly after I started my walkingz) something smelt decidedly fishy and it wasn’t the cooking, it was the pot; which didn’t call the kettle black, but was followed by a curry smell (that didn’t do me any favours either). Suddenly I found myself staring at the gate to the underworld (including an imp and its (something darkly) familiar):

Then there was an explosion of sunlight across the ferns:

which left me puzzling…was that an ‘S’, a swan or a backwards ‘2’ lit up in the autumn leaves?

and how did the sad eyed, strong jawed facsimile of American Dad fit in?

What did it all mean? Why was the eerie shadow guy pointing to signs of the autumn (of our civilisation?):

while the evaporating pavement art man screamed ‘Help….I’m just perfect but soon all my features will disappear!’:

and to accompany this – the beauty, soul and pathos of Bill Fay (‘Life is People’) followed by the sheer rock power and theatrics of Black Country Communion (‘2’), oh those blazing Bonamassa solos……

Mellow Yellow Mulch

My walkingz heart is heavy; images of potential employment downfall set against a looped background of recently observed desperate shoplifters appeals for release. I take solace in the extraordinary songs of Mark Eitzel and Ken Stringfellow (the Stringfellow it’s more than OK to adore!) whose latest (‘Don’t be a stranger’ and ‘Danzig in the moonlight’) are on heavy rotation and the perfect backdrop to the sandstone wall’s gallery of (entirely free) erosion art (http://lightflickeringthroughleavestoo.tumblr.com/) – don’t worry if you just see a bunch of not entirely dissimilar rocks, you’re not alone! Indeed I’m beginning to worry about my mental……sometimes it’s all just too (mellow yellow) mulch…….

Too vivid:

Too grey:

Divine inspiration

The clues were coming thick and fast, in the leafy hollow under the spreading chestnut tree (poetic license applied for), first there were the two large, suspiciously body shaped plastic wraps, the upside down, defaced ‘Sold’ property sign and a single aged & pale mussel shell (so far from the deep blue sea):

..then close by, plastic tubes (disguised as spent military munition):

oddly fluorescent stones:

that did not make up the cairn:

and finally the tree man (complete with wood sprite (upside down) & snake):

whose leaves were clearly suspect:

….and in the background, perhaps most tellingly of all, the haunting, divinely soulful Bill Fay’s is singing songs of life, death and what happens between and beyond……