The COVID-19 Diaries. Week 6

Monday 20th

Today I receive a text message from work. It says ‘Back on 4th’ after some deliberation I type back ‘August?’

With my time at home now a limited resource I start to think of all the things I’d still like to do with it. It seems ridiculous that after 20 straight days off work, the vast majority of  which I’ve spent within these four walls, I see the remaining days as a diminishing resource and start to panic at the thought of the things I want to get done not getting done. I can’t say I’m looking forward to going back to work but neither am I dreading it.

Tuesday 21st

A day that will be remembered for the kitchen chair collapsing under Mrs Fisher whilst eating our evening meal. We bought two chairs from Ikea as a stop gap ten years ago and have used them daily ever since. They’re of the collapsable variety made from two bits of plastic and aluminium tubing. We’ve often joked about how long they’ve lasted when they only cost us a fiver each. Today Mrs Fisher has been using her kitchen chair as a work chair, seeing as how she was complaining that the chair she was using yesterday was giving her back ache. Mrs Fisher later admitting to shuffling said kitchen chair about under her desk to get comfortable, deducing that this action must have weakened its welds resulting in the thing collapsing under her. Mrs Fisher suffers no trapped fingers or broken bones, only hurt pride and a few aches. 

A day that will also be remembered for the arrival of two Smell & Quim releases, one of them being the magnificent Hospital Productions reissue of Cosmic Bondage. After beginning life as a one hundred copies Barbie doll tied up with string with a cassette hanging off her neck, its now transformed into a magnificent double neon pink vinyl album with a sleeve housed in a printed transparent slip case. Impressive to say the least. I play it in the afternoon drowning out some building work going on next door and reminiscing about the time I went to see Smell & Quim at the 1 in 12 in Bradford where I saw this very release on the merch table. Why didn’t I didn’t buy one is something I’ve asked myself ever since.  

Bollock freezing this morning with a north-easterly breeze blowing away all the clouds and bringing cold air with it. I call in the Co-op for urgent supplies while Mrs Fisher stands guard outside. She spots a two pence piece on the pavement and we debate the pros and cons of picking it up. Normally I pick up found coins and put them in my loose change whisky tin [which is now almost permanently empty due to constant use of contactless payment] but what if it has the virus on it?  In the space of four weeks I’ve gone from nonchalantly picking up loose change to worrying about whether it has the ability to pass a deadly virus.

Wednesday 22nd

I’m reminded of the Bill Hicks sketch where he talks about the dangers of overdoing CNN and Fox News. This was during the first Gulf War when American news channels showed nothing but DEATH FLAMES BOMBS DESTRUCTION 24/7 on a rolling news agenda that made it sound as if the end of the world was just around the corner, then you looked out of your window and all you could hear was the chirruping of cicadas. Its a bit like that now. Isolate yourself from the news and it seems like any other day, albeit with quieter roads, closed shops and queues outside the supermarkets. Except that there’s a virus out there that they haven’t got a cure for and the government seems to be about as much use as the Keystone Cops after an hour on the bong.

   

Thursday 23rd

Mrs Fisher tells me that she’s just heard the traffic news on the radio and that of the three incidents reported one of them is the road to Brighouse I use to do the shopping. I decide to take a different route and drive past the big Tesco, my usual shop of choice, which I haven’t been to since the lockdown kicked in. Seeing that the car park is deserted I turn in and do the shopping there. When I get to the checkout the bloke in front of me is chatting away to the check out girl about how much he misses going to the pub and that now he’s always drinks too much because there’s nobody to tell him to stop when he’s drinking at home. All this followed by gales of laughter. From him, not her.

Over the bridge heading towards Brighouse someone has spray painted the words ‘Gary Gravas Grass’. If they did this by leaning over the bridge I’m impressed because all the letters are of even height and all the s’s are the right way around. The alliteration is also impressive.

I buy the local paper and post it to my mother who lives on the west coast. Since Covid-19 its thinned out somewhat with advertising, sport and sections on ‘What To Do This Weekend’ replaced by sudokus, crosswords, word searches, lots of stories about how people are coping with the lockdown and government sponsored ads telling us to respect the two meter rule, wash hands etc… The only section of the paper thats getting bigger is Deaths which has grown from half a page to nearly two, almost all deaths reported being amongst the elderly. Some notices say that the funeral service can only be attended by close family with some funerals being screened live by the funeral directors. 

At the top of Whitechapel Road a man waits in his garden as two blokes unload a big box from the back of their huge white van. Further down the road the van passes us, pulls in and the process is repeated. We cross to the other side as they’ve parked on the pavement and as we near them we see that the bloke on the ground is struggling to take the huge box from the bloke on the back of the van. After some too-ing and fro-ing, to me, to you, the box drops to the floor landing on one of its corners. Theres a bloke stood in his garden, shorts and t-shirt, arms folded watching everything unfold whose package this most surely is. The delivery driver who dropped it says to the man ‘Bloody heavy that mate. What’s in it?’. ‘Its a garden shed’ he shouts.  

While tapping away at the keyboard Mrs Fisher comes in to see if I’d like a cup of tea. We both notice that the social calendar is still showing March.

After returning from yesterdays walk I decide to make a soup out of everything thats left in the bottom of the fridge. My main aim is to make a pot of curried carrot soup but after roasting some peppers that don’t look too appetizing [now that they’re marinating in their own juices] Mrs Fisher suggest chucking them in with the carrots. Its a masterstroke that promotes this humble dish into something far more substantial. Cheers all round and time to break out the Rich Tea.

Friday 24th

During a coronavirus press briefing The President of the United States suggests to one of his medical experts that injecting disinfectant cures the virus and that this is something they should be looking in to. This results in the manufacturers of disinfectant issuing public safety notices asking people not to ingest their products. It seems like a defining moment and when ‘all this is over and everything gets back to normal’ it’ll be one of main talking points. ‘Hey, remember when Trump said we should be injecting disinfectant’. 

A later walk this morning as Mrs Fisher doesn’t work Fridays. We see the Timid Lady in the distance and she immediately crosses the four lanes and divider of the motorway bridge to escape us. It must be the warmest day of the year so far and for the first time its short sleeve order.

I ring my 84 year old father to see if he’s alright and if there’s anything I can do for him. He tells me he’s fine and that he’s had an ant infestation in his kitchen. This after accidentally standing on an ants nest in his greenhouse and bringing them in to the house.

Saturday 25th

Whilst waiting outside the Post Office for one of the three people inside to come out, a man who sounds like he’s got a really bad cold joins the queue behind me. While we’re stood there a local ‘character’ I haven’t seen in years comes past [i.e. someone who’s always in the pub and seems to know everybody else in the pub and all the local drug dealers, minor celebrities, coppers etc...]. Its 9 a.m. overcast and there’s a chill wind blowing but he’s wearing nothing but flip-flops, shorts and a t-shirt. They exchange a short greeting, the man behind me being the more enthusiastic of the two. While I’m at the counter getting my packets weighed he reaches the counter next to me and in a snivelly, blocked sinus voice says ‘Can I draw £9.85 out of me account please’.

In the Discount Pound Shop there’s a man in the queue in front of me wearing safety glasses and a mask. 

Walking back from town I pass what is locally known as the ‘Iron Bridge’ as its wall are indeed made out of iron. On both sides and in white spray paint there’s more of the Gary Gravas Grass graffiti.

In the last few days I’ve seen a kestrel hovering in the fields behind where we live and the sound of a woodpecker near the bottom of Whitechapel Road, neither of which I’ve ever seen or heard around here before. There also seems to be more goldfinches and an abundance of feathered wildlife in general. 

Sunday 26th

Yesterday turned out to be the hottest day of the year so far. After the initial cloud cover burnt off the sun came out and all the neighbours with it. At ten o’clock last night we could still hear some of them singing.

Up early and up Moorside before eight o’clock. We cross the road by the motorway bridge as there seems to be a constant stream of joggers heading our way. A car heads towards us at walking speed with its hazards on. Presumably broken down and coasting as near to home as possible. We see the Timid Lady in the distance and we go to cross but she goes to cross at the same time so we head back and as we do she acknowledges us with a slight wave of the hand. Despite it being quiet warm she still wears her white mac. Then theres The Cheery Man still all in black with black woolly hat jammed down over his eyes.

Shit Creek - The Land of the Remember

Crow Versus Crow. CVC 016. CD

50 Copies.

SUN FLOW ER [Works on Paper 2018-2019]

Andrew Wild

In the land of the cryptic crossword the word ‘flower’ comes up with great regularity. Its there to trick you in to thinking of roses and tulips and daffodils when in most instances its relating to things that flow. Unless its a double bluff. Evil bastards, cryptic crossword setters.

Sun Flow Er is a collection of Andy Wild’s mixed media artworks as produced between 2018 and 2019. Works that I like to think compare to Schwitters’ cut and paste collages only with acres more white space. Pictures of actual flowers torn from magazines overlaid with aging masking tape, compressed rags and net curtains, meshing, graph paper. One of my favourites is Rose Hill and some circles of paper with a line descending to a small dark square, a balloon of sorts surrounded by three different sized squares. Its the indentations and markings that make these abstractions so rewarding and I wouldn’t mind seeing them in the flesh one day. You should see them for yourself and maybe buy one to hang on your isolationist walls. 

Mr. Wild is a man of many talents; artist, designer, radio show host, maker of podcasts and head cheese at Crow Versus Crow, where his artwork adorns many a cover thus giving his label a definite aesthetic. They are things of joy to behold and are of the kind that get you thinking that a lot of work and thought went in to them. 

The Land of the Remember is evidence of such; inked lettering splattered Steadman style style, set amongst the Wild abstract collages and inside, hand written liner notes and a mathematical diagram that makes no sense to me whatsoever.

Who Shit Creek is though I have not the faintest idea. I can only relate to you what I heard which was a series of segued tracks which were the result of an almighty improv jam between Astral Social Club, Pink Floyd [early 70’s version], Robert Fripp, Soft Machine and a gamelan orchestra. 

All just pointers of course but it gives you some idea. Fourteen tracks spread across fourty minutes, all of it a freewheeling, heady, sprawling, fizzed up, escalating, dizzying, droney improvised collage. A bit like Andy’s work. Could they be the same man? 

The droney key wheeze of track three [‘Meatspace Infinity’] is punctuated by plucked strings, the end result recorded on to a cassette with a loose jack-plug so that there’s plenty of tape stretch and sound fragmentation. ‘This is the Trap’ is where Robert Fripp comes in with his high up the neck speckled notes that shimmering and cascade. The opener ‘Happy Skeletonzz’ and ‘A Raga Called Cherie’ owe their dues to ASC with the latter being smeared in a Doors-y, Mountain like keyboard solo,  

https://crowversuscrow.bandcamp.com/

http://crowversuscrow.blogspot.com/

Matthew Atkins - Imaginary Cartography 

Minimal Resource Manipulation

MRM 028

15 Copies.

Is there any real need to review something that came out four years ago, in an edition of fifteen? Well, there is if its any good but here's the really weird thing; after coming across this release last week during a lockdown spring clean, I duly listened and was impressed enough to find out more. So while listening I performed a diligent online search and the first return was from Norman Records who rather miraculously still have a copy for sale. Yours for £7. Whodathunkthatone? That's two people within a radius of ten miles owning a copy of something that only fifteen exist of and that until last week I never knew existed at all even though I had a copy. And its four years old. It is good though. In case you were wondering.

From what I can gather Matthew Atkins is a London based sound artist, field recordist, sonic manipulator who, on this evidence at least, uses his field recordings/audio verite as a base upon which to adds layers of droning ambience, piano, cello, electronics. This results in tracks like 'Tropical Algebra' where the sounds of Atkins shuffling through boxes of 16mm cine film offcuts and foreign coins is mixed with the ominous sci-fi soundtrack like drone, like when the five astronauts who've managed to escape the burning mothership are left standing on a desolate planet surface and all they can see is rocks and mountains in the distance.

Or 'Winter Frost' where somewhere in the background, probably Morton Feldman, is tinkling a few piano keys as the close up sound of a hamster eating a carrot is reverbed and looped around it. The kind of closely mic'd sounds that have fans of pure sounds creaming their pants in delight. 

An austere and soberly paced collection of compositions that gives you plenty of space to wander around in and explore. The sonic equivalent of finding a second hand bookshop in a town you've never visited before and in that bookshop finding a book you've been after for ages and it's only a quid and it's been signed too.

E. Granby Granby - Cold

FPBJPC - Concert Performance March 8th 2017

J.S. Hogan - Ahh - I See Pan

Melkings - Movement Musik

Possett - The Golden Handshake That Almost Broke My Wrist.

If you get bored during the lockdown you could always play spot the genre with this lot. Go to the Regional Bears Bandcamp page and listen to ninety minutes of J.S. Hogan attempting to translate the conversations of a deep sea diver, or Movement Musik’s lo-fi floor scrapings, or FPBJPC do for improv what the Nazis did for racial harmony. Have a good old listen and get back to me. Because I have absolutely no idea.

I can get my head around Possett because I have some kind of a mental map where Possett fits in, that being somewhere between the gurgling dictaphonic gibberings of Dai Coelocanth and the soundscapes of Stuart Chalmers. I can get my head around E. Granby Granby because they/he/she/them/I use a saxophone but the rest, and here you should all take a bow, create the kind of sonic mind fug that you only thought existed on expensive art records released by the likes of Jean Dubuffet and Joseph Beuys, the kind of art gallery stuff that spans four LP’s and costs £200 and comes with an art print thats a fecal smear.

Information is minimal. Even through the Regional Bears Bandcamp page. Maybe this is a good thing. To listen without prejudice. I made notes of course but did little digging, instead counting my ignorance as a blessing. Thanks to the lockdown I had lots of time to. The J.S. Hogan release has two thirty minute tracks bisected with two shorter tracks. Here we have the kind of formless meanderings that can lead you either to sonic nirvana or the nearest nut house, depending on how strong you like to take your experimentalism. Most of track one is like a muffled Clangers soundtrack, outtakes from an Open University documentary on molecular biology as shown at 6 a.m. in the winter of 1973. Track two is the deep sea diver conversation, track three lost me somewhere while four is gig chatter and unidentifiable hum. After the best part of ninety minutes of such things the last five become violent sheets of static. Placed there no doubt so as to wake you from your slumbers.

Movement Muzik move in much the same area with two twenty minute tracks that sound like live to condesor mic electro-acoustic gig. A bit like listening to Adam Bohman test his kit out while someone recites pages from a history book with an American accent. Like they deliberately recorded an electro-acoustic set onto a fifty year old Boots the chemist C120, then dubbed off five copies onto a TDK C90 that once I had ‘Now Thats What I Call Music 23’ on it just to see how far they could degrade the sound before it crumbled to nothing.

FPBJPC’s ‘Concert Performance March 8th 2017’ is one of the worst things I’ve ever listened to since … ohhhh since I started remembering. It begins with some piano tinkering that gets polite applause before incorporating a violin and with it something that might have been recognised by visitors to the parlor of a wealthy Viennese doctor in 1926. We get atonal sax parp and military drum rattle, Parisian accordion squeeze and a spoken word performance enacted by people who got their inspiration from fence posts. If you last long enough you also get an accordion version of Radiohead’s Creep. Kill me now. 

At least I could go back to E Granby Granby whose looping, slightly delayed, over-dubbed sax riffs play some kind of sombre snake charmer act. Like instead of trying to get the snake to rise out of the basket they’re trying to get it to go back in. Ten tracks of sombre sax riffage that could have been recorded after the ingestion of large doses of largactyl such is their soporific nature. Honk if you want more.

After suffering much of the above for most of a lockdown afternoon it was with relief that I fell in to the arms of Posset. At least here I knew I was in safe hands. I clamped on headphones, stuck my knees under the table and let Possett lead me by the hand. I’ve not heard much Possett of late so I was glad to be back in the saddle, letting the North Eastern hero stroke my inner ears with looped Dictaphone drone, where a spot of heavy breathing down the old telling bone finds twangs for friends, where voices are truncated down to the merest of inflections where they’re rewired and retooled, where a conversation becomes a work of fucking art man. Call it whatever you want. I call it a Godsend.

There are seven tracks within which to fold your noggin. They all encapsulate what is good about capturing the world via the wonders of Dictaphone and cassette. Stutters, moans and the ramblings of mad men ply their trade between the glorious gibberish created from sped up Italian speak your weight machines. Springs are spronged. The inevitable destruction of wobbly tape continues its inexorable decline in to the pit of deadly despair where a V-Tech speak and spell machine relates its dying wishes to a set of clockwork comedy teeth.           

https://regionalbears.bandcamp.com/merch

Curried Carrot and Roasted Pepper Soup

4 bell peppers [or whatever you have left over but not too many green ones as they can become too bitter]

1 large onion chopped

carrots chopped - whatever you have left over but at least 500g.

1 tsp cumin seeds

1 tsp medium curry powder

1 green finger chili

2 Indian bay leaf

2 garlic cloves crushed

thumb sized piece of ginger grated

2 tbsp of olive oil

25 g of Butter

1.5 liter of stock - veg or chicken

coriander.

Method

Heat oven to gas mark 6/400

Brush the olive oil on to some baking parchment and place in a roasting tin. Place peppers on baking parchment and roast for an hour turning every twenty minutes. Place in a bowl and cover with cling film. Leave to cool.

Melt the butter in a heavy bottomed pan.

Pierce the chilli several times with the point of a sharp knife and saute along with the onion the cumin and the bay leafs for ten minutes on a medium heat.

Add carrots and cook for another 10 minutes.

Add curry powder and grated ginger and cook for 2 minutes.

Add stock and bring to a simmer. Cook on a very low heat for an hour stirring occasionally.

Turn off heat and leave for an hour, Remove chilli and bay leafs.

Remove skin, stalks and seeds from the peppers, cut in to small squares and add to the carrot/stock.

Blend with a stick blender, adjust the seasoning if needed. Serve with some sprinkled chopped coriander.

The COVID-19 Diaries. Week 5

Monday 13th

Sunday spent nursing a hangover. The first in a long time and brought on by a huge gin and tonic and two bottles of wine. Shared of course. I suppose it doesn’t help that I also shoveled down several packets of crisps and some chocolate mini eggs. Its not a great hulking hangover where you spend half the day between bed and bog but its one that gnaws at my head, a sharp pain behind the right eyeball. By five o’clock I do what I should have done earlier and kill it off with some paracetamol. The hangover didn’t stop me doing anything, its not like I had anything planned for the day, except going for a walk. It threatened rain all day which was my excuse not to venture outside when the real reason was I couldn’t be arsed. This resulting in my total steps for the day being around ten, that being the number needed to go to the bin and back. A few steps were taken around the house of course but for the most part I sat and read and fell asleep and buggered about on my phone. Somewhere outside the NHS was up to its knees in the biggest crisis in its history but in here it was a toss up between which Tenniscoats album to play first. 

Its a bitterly cold Bank Holiday Monday morning and after a false start where Mrs Fisher returns for a warmer layer we set off up a deserted Moorside. To break the monotony Mrs Fisher calls off the names the floribunda we pass, me chipping in with the obvious ones. A house near the top of the road has a wall covered in aubretia and a cherry tree thats in full blossom. A riot of colour as they say, though I’ve never seen colours rioting. There’s been some kind of newspaper campaign to get the citizens of the UK to take more notice of the passing blossom season and to celebrate it Japanese style, as campaigns go it doesn’t seem too outlandish but I’ve yet to feel the effects of it catching on. 

The walk is uneventful but for one instance involving a cyclist. A cyclist in that its a bloke who looks like he’s slept at his mates house the night before and has borrowed his mate’s son’s mountain bike to get home on. Not a cyclist in lycra, Oakley glasses and day-glo crash hat, flying past you as part of his daily 50k. This ones coming towards us on the pavement at such a slow speed he can hardly keep it in a straight line, despite the road being completely devoid of traffic and their being an actual cycle lane. Mrs Fisher immediately steps in to the road muttering curses under her breath while I head straight for him thinking that he may realise he’s in the wrong and drop onto the cycle lane. But no, on he comes and when it becomes obvious he has no intentions of moving I step aside and in unison we both shout at him ‘WHY DON’T YOU USE THE FUCKING ROAD!?’ He looks up genuinely shocked and almost wobbles off, Mrs Fisher sending him on his way with a barrage of expletives that go some way to purging her inner coronavirus demons.   

Tuesday 14th

I could turn left at the top of Moorside and break the monotony of the daily walk but left means narrower streets, more urbanization, no views and a shorter more boring walk. Turn right at the top of Moorisde and when you cross the motorway bridge you can see Castle Hill and the moors over Huddersfield on one side and on the other the outskirts of Bradford. Its not much but it gives me hope [and a view] and for a few moments each day actual tangible evidence that the world still exists beyond Brighouse.  As we cross the bridge I say to Mrs Fisher, ‘Look the moons still up’

‘Where?’

‘There’

‘Where?’ 

‘There, There.’ I say pointing over her shoulder.

‘Where, I can’t see it?’

‘Its the fucking moon what do you mean you cant see it?’

‘Oh, there it is. I was looking over there.’

Out of nowhere a jogger comes past. We’ve been so engrossed in the moon that we’ve let our guards down r.e. joggers and here she comes at a gentle pace with her earpods in, pony tail waggling away, not two foot away from us. Mrs Fisher immediately pulls a face and starts talking about vapor clouds and wafts the air like she’s trying to waft away an annoying fly.

At the bottom of Whitechapel Road The Speed Skater passes us on the other side and takes the small hill up to the school in his stride. The cherry blossoms that line one side of the road here are now in full bloom and look amazing, but annoyingly are hard to photograph. 

In the park we throw down two stale pitta breads for the birds/rat and when we get to the bottom end the squirrel appears. Mrs Fisher throws down some almonds and while she’s doing so another squirrel appears. I manage to video one of them whilst its eating and we both take comfort from this small but much appreciated contact with nature.  

Yesterday afternoon I had a clear out and came across a pile of Expose Your Eyes CD’s that I’ve had for what must be two years. Its taken a lockdown but I’m finally going to get around to listening to and reviewing them. I also find a CD by someone called Matthew Atkins which I cant even remember receiving and has a release date of 2016.

Mrs Fisher makes a ‘thank you’ notice for the bin men. I have a couple of things to put in the post box so to kill two birds with one stone I tape the note to the lid of the bin and take it down to the bottom of the street for tomorrows collection. Then I walk further down to the main road and to the post box. When I return I notice that there’s an ambulance and a police car outside the old peoples flats. There’s a single bored looking copper sat on a low wall outside the flat’s back door and a paramedic with gown and face mask stood at the back of the ambulance. 

Wednesday 15th

The day the bin men came.

Another crisp spring day and not a cloud in the sky. Shorts on and up the hill. The robins there as is the pet rabbit [facing right] and the two Suzuki Jimnys that are both parked at opposite sides of the side of the road and never seem to move. We see the Timid Lady by The Pack Horse and make as if to cross the road but she beats us to it even though she’ll have to cross straight back so as to carry on down Moorside. The Speed Skater passes us at the bottom end of Whitechapel Road [again] but this time going in the opposite direction meaning he must pick the direction of his walks randomly. Or maybe he alternates clockwise/anti-clockwise?

A few joggers out, one of who takes the inside path which infuriates Mrs Fisher who by now spends most of the walk in the middle of the road where we shout at each other to maintain conversation.

We don’t see the squirrels in the park but Mrs Fisher sees the rat for the first time and comments on how friendly it looks. The ongoing roadworks means were diverted down South Parade. A steep hill filled with houses that has a long established sweet factory at the bottom. Most of the houses are terraced and have renters in them, most of the houses have small gardens, most of the houses have small gardens that double as places to keep shit before it gets chucked. This includes fridges, sofas, children toys, I once saw a freezer down here that still had food in it. Near the bottom of the road a young lad comes out in a white hooded onesie covered in cartoon characters, he lights up a big bifter and takes up a slouched position against the wall of his house.

As we reach home I notice that the flat which had the copper sat outside it yesterday now has chipboard where the door-glass should be. The lock’s been forced and is held together with white tape.

After listening to the World Service I discover that in Nairobi the police have raided a number of bars defying the lock down. Amongst those arrested are a member of parliament, a magistrate and several police officers. Whether the latter were off duty or not isn’t stated but either way I guess they’re all in deep doo-doo.

There’s talk of the lockdown being extended by three weeks and of certain industries being given the green light to start operations again. This will mean going back to work and having my chances of spreading/catching the virus go through the roof again. 

Thursday 16th

Up earlier than usual which throws the Timid Lady who we pass much later in our walk. Mrs Fisher notes that she checks her watch as she sees us approaching. 

In complete defiance of current government guidelines I decide to drive home from Sainsbury’s on the M62 thus giving the car a much needed run out and me the chance to see things that I haven’t seen in a long time. This would be more rewarding if the things I was looking at held any interest but apart from rioting cherry blossoms along Bradford Road there isn’t. No deer, goats or any other wild animals that have been taking advantage of the lack of humans. Rather than feel elated/rewarded all I can do is marvel at how quite junction 26 is at 10.30 on a Thursday morning and that the £20 worth of petrol I bought last week might last me until the end of May.

The weekly shop is lifted from the usual by the sight of this years first crop of Jersey Royals. There might be a lockdown but the Jerseys have made it through. This makes me ridiculously happy. I decide that its fish and Jersey Royals for tea and to go with it a decent bottle of white. The though of preparing, eating and drinking this also makes me ridiculously happy. When I arrive home the street is full of neighbours out doing things in the sunshine, all happily chatting away while keeping the required two meters apart. Dogs are barking, wood is being sawed, things are getting cleaned, people are down to t-shirts and shorts and just glad to be outside in the fresh air. 

Friday 17th

At the bottom of the street theres a young lad in a grey joggers with his back to us. He’s stood amongst several lumps of dogshit, one of which he’s rolling around with the sole of his trainer. We pass him at a safe distance and its only when we go wide to avoid coming within two meters of him that we see his dog coming around the corner, an old and extremely arthritic boxer.

After our evening meal me and Mrs Fisher sit and do a concise crossword together. This as part of our ‘talking and relaxing after tea’ routine, this after an afternoon spent apart where I sit in the back room writing and listening to noisy shit and Mrs Fisher sits downstairs writing in silence. Mrs Fisher reads out the questions and puts the answers in with a terrible scrawl that she calls handwriting. If shee puts a red herring in she scribbles out the wrong letters and by the time we’ve finished the grid looks like something several small flies have died on. When we get down to the last two or three clues we usually give up and search for the answers online. One of the clues we couldn’t get last night was ‘milder version’ which even after looking up online I couldn’t parse. Mrs Fisher gives me the letters we have once more, her patience now wearing thin after insisting for the last ten minutes that the answer is ‘distaste’. I still cant see it and in a fit of pique snatch the paper from her only to see that the clue is ‘mild aversion’.

An article in this mornings paper lists some of the bizarre cures and supposed causes for the coronavirus that some people and governments believe are true; for Hindus this involves drinking cow’s urine, in Brazil its fasting for a day, in Tanzania its going to church [where it will ‘burn away’] amongst ultra-orthodox communities in Israel its the same advice, which goes a long way to explaining the eight-fold increase in infected cases among worshippers in synagogues than elsewhere. In Kashmir its not G5 towers that are transmitting the virus but poplar trees. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard have invented a device that can detect the virus from one hundred meters away using nothing more than magnetism. In Venezuela president Maduro has tweeted that lemon grass and elderberry tea should see it off. The Madagascan president says that they’re testing a herbal remedy that will cure the virus but has yet to give any details. Kenyans are getting cognac in their food parcels after Nairobi’s governor issued advice saying that drinking alcohol is the cure. In Nigeria the health minister had to step in after claims that the virus could be expunged by the eating of onions and peppers. But what if you eat these things already, what if you’ve been drinking cows urine all your life? Where do those people go now?  

The Walk has a new regular in the shape of a bloke dressed all in black including a woolly black beanie that he pulls tight down over his ears and eyebrows. He’s been walking in the opposite direction to us on the other side of the road and when he gets near he shouts a cheery ‘hello’.

Saturday 18th.

I walk in to town up through the park with some bread scraps that I throw down in Bird Corner. Its only when I’m stood totally still, taking in the solitude [there’s not another soul  in the park] and listening to the birds that I notice the rat has stuck its nose out from the undergrowth and is sniffing what I’ve put down.

Despite their being a notice on the newsagents window stating that only two people are allowed in at one time and the shop frontage being all glass, a third customer comes in while I’m queueing behind a taxi driver whose come in for a phone card or something. There’s no toilet rolls on sale but he now has face masks on the counter at £2 a throw. Two doors down at the discount/pound shop they’re a pound each. I feel like mentioning it and pointing out to the old bloke behind me that he’s failed to read the notice on the door too but I can’t be arsed. At least there was no one in buggering about with lottery tickets or scratch cards. 

On the walk back up Westgate I find 50 grammes of still in its cellophane, probably bought ten minutes ago, pack of Amber Leaf rolling tobacco. I bend down to pick it up without breaking a stride wondering how much it costs these days, and thinking about how pissed off the person whose just bought is going to be when they discover that its gone missing, and that they’ll have to go back to the shop to buy another one.  

The town centre is dead as usual and this gets me to thinking about how the unusual has now become the usual within the space of four weeks. How quickly we adapt as human beings and take change in our stride. I’ve gone from taking pictures of the deserted streets and commenting on how quiet everywhere is, to accepting it as the norm. When things do go back to normal [whatever kind of normal that is] the world is going to seem a crazier place than it was before. Imagine being inside a pub on the day they’re allowed to open again? It’ll be like two Christmases rolled in to one. Best avoided.

Sunday 9th

Up at seven and up the hill by eight. A bright but chilly morning and one perfectly suited to blowing away the cobwebs stroke slight hangover as received due to it being a two bottle night. At the top of Moorside a pigeon sits by the bus stop as if its waiting for a bus except that its missing its head, which looks like its been bitten clean off leaving the rest of its body perfectly intact.

We pass Black Beanie Hat Man by the motorway bridge at Hartshead and The Speed Skater on Whitechapel Road both of them going in the other direction on the opposite side of the road. Black Hat Beanie Man is on his phone so we get no cheery hello. The M62 is actually devoid of traffic in both directions from Hartshead to Whitechapel which is something I’ve never seen before and has probably only happened on a few occasions since it was opened, this being at three a.m. on Christmas Day morning sometime around 1978 when cars were still a luxury for most people and food got transported by horses.

We cut around the back of the school so as to take some pictures of the valley we live at the bottom of. After clambering over a fence and trying not to get tangled in a vicious looking bramble we head to the bottom of the park where Mrs Fisher feeds a few almonds to the squirrel.

Mrs Fisher is back at work from tomorrow but working from home. We decide that we’ll still do the walk on a morning but an hour earlier, this necessitating a six a.m. alarm call so we can be back by eight. We may never see any of our regular walk characters again.

Todays auspicious number is 2,487 which is the number of one pence coins you’ll need to buy a 50g pack of Amber Leaf from Tesco. 

Expose Your Eyes - The Fire Night Wonder

Expose Your Eyes - The Sleepzone Instigators / Directors Cut 

Expose Your Eyes - Peg Slelp

Expose Your Eyes - Boughs

Expose Your Eyes - Mountain

Expose Your Eyes - Tension Charge Discharge Relaxation

Expose Your Eyes - [strawberry]

Expose Your Eyes - [pink splat]

Expose Your Eyes - [3 circles]

I’ve had these CD’s for what must be over two years now. They were handed to me by their creator Paul Harrison, while having a Saturday afternoon drink in The Royal Oak, nee Dirty Dicks. This at a time when Simon Morris was still alive [he must have been there for he was always there] and pandemics existed mainly in dystopian Sci-Fi novels.

I’m feeling quite ashamed by the fact that its taken a lockdown and a gutting of the review pile for me to finally get around to listening to these nine releases. Part of the problem is that Expose Your Eyes isn’t exactly easy listening, these being the kind of releases you don’t take on lightly, especially nine of them in one go [which was always my intention] two of which are double CD’s that make for almost ten hours of music. There they lurked at the back of the box and the back of my mind, one half of me wanting to make up an excuse as to why I've never listened to them and the other firmly believing that I would listen to them and give my honest opinion while I'm at it. 

Expose Your Eye noise has been coming this way for as long as I’ve been making up words to try and describe them. Me and Paul harrison go back right to the very beginning. Not long after we’d been in contact I went to a Saturday afternoon gig at The Fenton to see him perform and watched him sit upon the floor with a keyboard and some noise boxes in front of him. I then saw him gently hold down three or four keys with an ashtray and go downstairs to the bar for another pint and when he returned he lit a cigarette and carried on pretty much as before. It was a tremendous, unforgettable gig. I didn’t think you could do that. It rewired my gig going brain.

If you were to be given these releases [not necessarily during an afternoons drinking session in Halifax] and you were to take them back to your house and play them, you might think that you were listening to early Steve Reich or eurotrash industrial techno, or the kind of ambient experimentalism that results in eighty minute tracks of ambiotic swirl.

There’s the gentle cascading of keys, the hypnotic loop of preset keyboard rhythms, tribal trance rituals of an electronic Calder Valley nature, this being ‘Tension Charge Discharge Relaxation’, a release that does for Halifax what Konono No.1 did for Kinsasha.

Over the last week I’ve sat each afternoon, in my darkened, away from everyone, lockdown backroom and let these spin over and over. Some tracks run from a couple of minutes other fill the entire disc and when you’ve got them all playing randomly for hours on theres a kind of fractional blending process going on where one track melts in to another resulting in a sonic journey that totally suits the lockdown experience. Patience is your friend though. 

This splurge of activity coming at such a pace that some releases haven’t been titled and are identified by the print markings on them; strawberry, three circles, a pink splat. Needless to say there’s no track titles either. Such is the way in the Harrison house.

The Sleep-Zone Instigators two tracks cover both discs and are long droney works of held down [maybe with an ashtray] keyboard space buzz and mid-hertz hum. ‘Three Circles’ will get you to the same place.  ‘Tension Charge Discharge Relaxation’ will put you in the hypnotic Industrial Techno groove, Peg Slelp is eleven tracks of full on noise with the last track being of a particularly toothsome quality. ‘Mountain’ has but two tracks on it and runs to fifteen minutes in total, one track of drifting ambience, the other a minimalist subterranean atmosphere of Alien soundtrack proportions. The seventy minute ‘Boughs’ moves through numerous noise passages all of them no doubt enhanced by the consumption of various mind altering materials, where computer vocal samples can be found morphing into pounding House beats, where the improvised distorting wail of a keyboard sits cheek by jowl with urgent pre-programmed loops, where the ghost of Keith Flint meets the forgotten son of Vangelis.

Do I need to mention them all? Maybe I have done already. Nobody’s counting, you get the idea by now; someone with an urge to make noises, an outsider artist if you like doing what they like doing best, putting it down on the machine, putting it out there and moving on. 

[Upon finishing these words I went online to find the EYE Bandcamp page or the EYE Soundcloud page and found no trace]