everything starts with a photo (and continues with a film)

'everything started with a photo. I didn't know that this image existed or that I possessed it - who gave it to me, and when?' -  Édouard Louis, a woman's battles and transformations.

hail road to aldi bookbox (the bookbox on the borderlands). spectacular play there exiled from hackney guardian readers. a pleasantly skinny and fashionable book  (and a similar skinny and fashionable author) and in the harvill leopard colophon (he now knows this term from the outlaw bookseller). a hardback too.

horsemouth has read it in an afternoon. permit him to regale you with his opinion of it. 

the photo in question is a photo of edouard's mum, young and feisty and from before he was born. by the time he is born her life is shit (even before it was born it was shit too). she has two kids already and an alcoholic husband. they live in some shitsville in northern france, domestic abuse, alcoholism, poverty. edouard gets out, to the lycee and the university (he recognises this as a revenge on his upbringing and upon his family) and strangely, eventually, she gets out too, to paris, to a new boyfriend, to decent(ish) work (to life as a carer).

happy ending.'and yet. and yet she is happy. she keeps telling me this..'  

and yet, as edouard says '... I know now that what is called literature has been constructed against lives and bodies like my mother's.' 

there are several photos in the book. there are several phrases and paragraphs that are repeated in italic on their own page. 

that everything starts with a photo (and continues with a film)

last night patrick keiller's london (1994) was on tv. now this was a very important film for horsemouth. at the time he had a very filmy girlfriend (his life revolved around sight and sound). as a result of a series of unfortunate events (all of them horsemouth's fault) horsemouth was displaced from the boredom and misery of his existence in the badlands of squatting in hackney and forced to move, pay rent and go and go get a job.  indeed as a result he ended up living in ladbroke grove, brixton, off brick lane, off columbia road, out in poplar. the job (the one he kept for the next 25 years) was one that forced him to travel all over london. he used this travel to engage with the city he lived in as a whole (and to buy more books). he began to dig himself out of his boredom and misery and up into the light.

eventually life took him back to hackney (but he no longer felt the way about it that he did when he left). 

soon enough the relationship itself fell over. nonetheless. life had become good.

the film is from one of those frustrating moments in history when the old is over as an ideological force but simply will not leave office (the exhaustion, bankruptcy and corruption was legendary - and in a way that is what this film documents). the ghosts of the miner's strike were not yet gone. the new thing had not happened yet and the future, seemingly and resolutely refused to be born. 

when it does come (and this is beyond the timeframe of the film)  it is the things can only get better  moment of tony blair's election victory with a thoroughly neutered and tory-lite labour party (the thing that we know is coming again). in this way london is once again a film of its time. 

yesterday was rose simpson (of the incredible string band)'s birthday. she came out of the woodwork a few years ago for the anniversaries and published a book reconnecting with her time in the band and the joy it brought her (and trying to route around the painful later years of it as it all went scientologically bad). she tried to recover the musical instruments she played and photos from her time in the band. horsemouth lies where she has got to with it. 

horsemouth has got out the rugs and begun barricading himself in for winter. horsemouth types this of a morning sitting up in bed. he is wearing two jumpers, jeans, socks. the work has finished, he is back in hackney, back to the life of leisure and boredom that detonated his life previously. but it is 25 plus years later (and he is 25 plus years older). he has read a book translated from the french and watched a film from 25 plus years ago where two intellectuals discuss cities and politics and literature (and french poets at that - baudelaire, mallarme, apollinaire). horsemouth has not had to give up his intellectual and internationalist hobbies (and could even take a foreign holiday if he wished). 

that said he barely makes it up the hill to the high street these days.