Black 2.3

... a little further on and he is passing the Vella's house ... yes ... Maltesers .. the husband a pimp, or so his father told someone last week ... the mother a dark eyed beauty with amazing legs ... the sons two thugs who liked to throw their weight around but got beaten fairly regularly when things got really tough ... things got tough very often round here ... too often for most of the kids ... mostly fists, but sharpened tail combs were becoming more frequent and now and then a proper blade turned up these days ... one of the boy's friends brthers was doing time for a knife murder ... the eldest boy was doing national service...

the fog had thickened ... or was it more properly a smog ... the street lights seemed dimmer now and he spotted a bicycle tyre around the base of the one outside the Campses house ... an act of bravado that ... he bethought himself of the daughter of the house who had died last Xmas of a brain tumor ... not the Campses, they were methodists and the kids went to the same sunday school as he had ... until the Camp girl had died ... they had prayed for her at the mission ... week after week ... and Peter had been the leader of the Boys Brigade ... and still she had died in pain ...

the boy turned into the road on his left and headed up toward the methodist mission ... and the fruit and veg stalls ... and the fish stall ...

olive bases done

The red devil twins finally finished tidying the bases of all 85 olive trees today - or at least as many as make an impact on our daily eye-lines. And rain may be coming in the next week or so. Among the detritus organic, growing amid the sawn of trunks and rootballs they discovered, brambles (enough to construct perhaps 20 or 30  linear feet of 5 foot high boundary fence), bay tree, mulberry, fig tree, and some large amount of ivy and hideous clinging weeds. Job jobbed.

White 2

This room is still white... the pure,powerful mediterranean light is still there ... I have still not opened my eyes ...the reality of the room will simply confirm what I already know ...when I do... white, white and more white... and is there anything to say yet ? ... and what have I been doing while you were away watching my younger self?... if anything?

Who did you think was propelling him along and putting his thoughts and memories in place? ... projecting him? ... I was making myself for the day too ... constructing my self to do battle with the hours ... and who to make ... deciding who to be ... how to be ... it is a thing we all do mostly without knowing it but mine is a conscious making ... each day ... and potentially anew each day ... though I do that less now than I did ... same man today as yesterday ... mostly the same at the least ...

Each waking requires, for me, a construction of a self ... I rummage around in my memory store ... in there no one thing has more weight than any other ... no facet nor no  character trait would tip a scale in either direction ... I have a headful of them from which to choose ... accumulated along a long life ... some days some shine brightly like gems ... perhaps yesterday I overlooked them entirely ... perhaps yesterday they were mere briquettes for a barbecue ... that much I still don't know ... what lights them that is ... whatever the case, I shuffle them around and pick them over like rags in a second hand clothes shop ... until I have enough for a day's living ... sufficient unto a life or a simulacrum thereof...

But enough of that for now... I have to open my eyes soon ... I have visitors arriving today ... meantimes let me put my young self upon the screen of the page for you again ... follow him into the fog ... away from this brightness... this glare ....

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