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]