'low income londoners won't be priced out for a while'

says a headline in the grauniad (that's good to know).

horsemouth rose at 3pm (having been up earlier between 10 and 12 to see sean out of the door and off to the bus). having played the gig horsemouth proceeded to get terribly drunk and stay up late and so was hungover and vomitous in the morning. he hopes he was chatty and made sense enough at the gig because he was paying for it the next morning.

by 3pm the hangover had abated and horsemouth began to shuffle round the flat and to check out reports.

horsemouth thanks everyone who came out and commiserates with those who couldn't make it or arrived late. he particularly thanks john smith and andrew minty for singing a song each with him. horsemouth was once again cursed by feedback and microphone placement issues - he opened with the werewolf (by michael hurley) with john smith on backing vocals and then into gentleman john (lyrics by horsemouth, music by rust groat) which went tolerably well excepting that his fingers were being mutinous and he was assailed by feedback issues. really horsemouth lost the audience for a while here and took a while to recover - the mercifully short guitar instrumental went ok as did the golden one taken solo (largely written by john smith but with some input from horsemouth) , as did I still miss someone (johnny cash) wth andrew minty of the duvals singing. but recover horsemouth did with the devil song (entirely written by horsemouth) and worldes blisse dirge (a trad.arr. - a traditional 12th century song arranged by horsemouth - in fact he'd only finished working it out the morning of the gig) and with a first airing of noah (written by john smith and his good self with the aid of book divination). horsemouth fucked up the second line and so had to comp about for a bit until he could repeat the verse again (he hopes no one noticed - john smith noticed but said it sounded good). finally horsemouth indicated the approaching solstice and got the audience to sing in the bleak midwinter (they were really good) with him singing the bass and when he forgot the words again he simply got them to repeat the first verse. by reincorporation we reach the end.

horsemouth wishes he could give you a great helpful blow by blow description of the other bands but he was off getting drunk and talking shite to people - fake teak were good in a heaven 17ish, early Depeche Mode kind of way, monteagle had a good trancey americana thing going on. in between that horsemouth was mostly out in the carpark - he thanks albino for putting him on again.

he starts referring to himself in the third person (right to buy)

the day of the gig dawns bright and clear - horsemouth has just avoided prayer for the day (always worth doing). in the courtyard a magpie is running off the pigeons.

today is the anniversary of the bringing in of the right to buy policy. not the right to build policy or the right to have enough money to buy policy or the complete supression of the value form policy etc., but a policy that decimated social housing stock by forcing councils to sell off their housing and one that enabled the government to raid the proceeds of those sales while denying councils the right to use them to create social housing to replace (or at least ameliorate) the loss of stock.

horsemouth is conflicted on how best to faff out the day (they can't expect anything productive of him surely, he's an artist and a musician) - he could go and faff it out up in hackney or he could shuffle round the foreshore of the seaside towns.

john hillaby's journey through love has reached the point where his wife dies. his watch keeps stopping. hillaby takes to drink (he always liked drink, it gets him through rainy days when hiking). all of a sudden he starts referring to himself in the third person - horsemouth knows this one, 'who's there?' asks the cyclops, 'no-one' replies odysseus. his wife was a psycho-analyst (like lampedusa's wife), he realises he knew lots of people he could ask for help but had not. he finds a cutting in his files to distress himself with, a terrible flies trapped in a web resorting to cannibalism kafka-esque nightmare (the spider by frans vans pauen). he begins the journey down the chain of books and songs and associations and to question his walking and writing.

he travels to the US to walk the appalachian trail (5000 miles of backwoods - maine to georgia) and gets lost in his memories almost immediately. the wildlife is different it makes little sense to him. the forests are already logged out. after a brush with hypothermia and lost again he makes straight for the nearest road, bus and airport out.

augustine of hippo says 'when a thing is everywhere the way to find it is not to travel but to love.' 

apparently noah (like the vikings) first released a raven to guide him to land but it did not return - then he released a dove, the loon (or great northern diver as it is known here) was apparently one of the few birds to survive the flood independently (4004 bc according to bishop usher).

horsemouth's gig

for horsemouth everything progresses keenly -he's trying to get his 'set' together for saturday night but frankly he has far too many songs (though not enough that he's co-written or written by himself it seems to him) - he could just show up and play whatever feels right until he runs out of time. this is what he does anyway really. horsemouth has two planned guest spots that's about 7 to 10 minutes right there out of a 30 minute set. 

today is a bright sunny day unless you are in the oil industry (the 'beggar my neighbour' policy of the saudi's and the americans are having harsh effects not just in russia but though by way of compensation it looks like current oil prices will bugger the shale gas extraction industry for a bit also, rendering it unprofitable). the weather looks like it will hold - horsemouth will go for a womble and a read. horsemouth is reminded that while his life is remarkably dull and comfortable other lives are marked by drama. on the balcony horsemouth's clothes are drying. 

horsemouth has gone all festive and treated himself to a stilton.

yesterday he was out looking at houses (mob handed) then he returned and was enticed round to andrew minty's by the offer of soup. they played guitar and sang for a bit. the first rendition of I still miss someone was particularly fine. 

upon hearing robinson crusoe being read aloud

oh halcyon(andon) enablers of horsemouth's book addiction:

horsemouth has started on john hillaby journey through love - previously he read his journey through britain that minty lent him, a great solitary walk from land's end to john o' groats. here hillaby is on his home turves (if that is the plural of turf) - yorkshire, highgate, kilburn, his eckchens - his little points from which he understands the world. he worries that by telling us about them he will curse them - but he does so anyway.

he starts one evening by breaking into the old reading room, a disused hut near thorgill, there he finds the remnants of a few old adventure books, stevenson, conrad, scott that the farmers and iron miners used to read. he tells us the story of an illiterate welsh blacksmith who upon hearing robinson crusoe being read aloud in welsh decided to learn to read. he notes that those who read these adventure did not then go away but stayed (at last the ones still around to talk to).

in april the snow comes, unable to journey he reads the 'wise, dispassionate' letters of chekov (like lillian hellman he's a fan). there's the possibility of a walk and talk tv series - but the stakes are higher, we know (from reading the back cover) that his wife is about to get ill and die.



the lyke walk - the walk of the dead celebrated in the lyke wake dirge runs nearby, an old dear solemnly threatens the locals that if she's not treated right she'll come back. it's a harsh pre-christian landscape, or maybe post-christian one, a world of eco-systems and botany, of death and life intermixed.



yesterday horsemouth made some progress with the worldes blisse dirge - he's playing it on the steel string guitar with a capo cunningly placed to give a buzzing noise - perhaps it's a runner. the writer, some 12th century miserablist, honestly states that life is a crock of shit and better when it's gone. it's at least mercifully brief - the song that is. (horsemouth learnt it from edward lee's music of the people - there's a version on his myspace page).

horsemouth is interested to note that cheviots being an upland sheep (and a kind of sheep increasingly popular near horsemouth's parents) are prone to scatter rather than bunch together in a flock when threatened. horsemouth wishes to surprise (and impress) the locals with his knowledge.

yesterday (bright, sunny, warm for the time of year) horsemouth walked down to greenwich (he visited the chip shop and halcyon(andon) - and then out to woolwich (via the thames barrier, seeing it from the other side as it were, turning to the river when he could), the lorries queued to use the ferry - a knackered and footsore horsemouth took the dlr home.

those books in full;
 journey through love - john hillaby - one quid
tout ubu (with illustrations livre de poche edition) - alfred jarry -one quid
pages from the goncourt journal - jules and edmond de goncourt -one quid
capitalism and material life 1400-1800 - fernand braudel - one quid.

the revelation of the sources of power to be found on the back of the clayton peacock

horsemouth is a little disturbed to find that not only did he unconsciously (honestly) lift part of john fahey's the death of the clayton peacock for his extended slide guitar piece (roughly up to 0.42), he also lifted part of his revelation on the banks of the pawtuxent (roughly 0.17 to 0.20). the first he suspected it was fahey - he just couldn't remember which one, the second he was surprised and horrified when it popped out of the speaker at him.



horsemouth's magnum opus (as recorded a few years ago in mr. nick's bathroom) goes a little something like this:
first the main theme from jean renoir's film partie de campagne (kosma/ monteiro),
an interlude from deep river (trad. arr. fahey - either a showtune adopted as a spiritual or a spiritual adopted as a showtune horsemouth can't remember which),
the statement of two themes from the death of the clayton peacock,
 an answering theme from (as horsemouth now discovers) revelation on the banks of the pawtuxent, the re-statement of the peacock themes with interpolated chords moving in minor thirds.
some (horsemouth hopes) original material involving ascending chords in minor thirds (bearing a similarity to something by the bartok influenced jonas hellborg's the word album),
a pause,
some material from gustav holst's mars -bringer of war played in four time, variously re-titled the martian war-machine stomp by hawkwind or 14-18 mechanised warfare blues by horsemouth.



horsemouth's guitar is tuned daddad (nashville).

of course the whole thing is too long and bloated with pretension - if it were a dead sheep it would float downstream.

horsemouth is reading gary klein's sources of power - an account of intuitive, or naturalised, decision making - rather than the rational choices model of peer soelberg (1967). soelberg taught a course in decision making at MIT's sloan school of management - when it came time for the students to choose their career he expected them to use a rational choice model (you know, identifying options, evaluating options, and then choosing between them, picking the one with the highest score), instead they went with gut feeling, there was one that just felt right. when soelberg asked them how it was going they pretended to have not made the decision yet or to be using rational means, or engaged in fiddling the evaluation weightings to achieve their predetermined goal.

this (of course) contrasts quite nicely with samuel smiles' (of self-help  fame) well brought up victorians and marks the rolling back of rationality - and option evaluation (think of myers-briggs). instead people simply recognise the situation and then go for a solution similar to the ones they used before or go for the first option that looks like it will work (rather than the best optimised option), visualising what the consequences will be, if the visualisation involved too many steps they will think again. only if all else fails will they retreat to a rational choices model.

outside it is a beautiful cold , chrisp and blue day. horsemouth will probably go for a walk. it looks like work is over.

'in recording the obscure labours of humble enthusiasts'

horsemouth is back from johnny and denise's in the suburbs having let himself be bullied by the transport infrastructure (or rather the limited representation of it available online) - he opted for the 'safe' route of returning via south woodford (last westbound tube 12.05) - as a result he had to leave the party just as they were putting on the dancehall, the alcohol had done its necessary work and he was beginning to re-connect with his sociability. ah well. I suppose there will always be next year (until there isn't). horsemouth didn't fancy a drunken stagger back (via unspecified night buses) or (still worse) a hungover stagger back at painful a.m.

horsemouth is reading two things at the moment - duncan (and linda) williamson's fireside tales of the traveller children (borrowed) which includes a variant on the musicians of bremen featuring a donkey, a sheep, a duck and cockerel. so far he's only read the story about the hedgehurst king (a kind of were-hedgehog). and the introduction to samuel smiles self-help. from whence comes the title of this piece (a description of smiles' practice).

get out of denver baby

horsemouth is reading lynsey hanley's estates: an intimate history - she moans on at them for their soldification of the english class system. but to horsemouth they represent the kind of housing he can afford and if he is very very lucky (and boxes very very clever) he can get - otherwise it's a grand a fucken' month to live in fucken' leytonstone (believe). (ok ok leytonstone's not so bad but a grand a month and the work to pay that would seriously tax horsemouth's will to live).

horsemouth is grateful to the estates - and when they have a fearsome reputation doubly grateful (it keeps the ponces off). not that horsemouth is some hardcase urban survivalist nutter you understand (he just talks that way after he's worked). lynsey shows us a photo of her grans house in the rhondda valley and expects us to tut tut at its poverty - to horsemouth it looks pretty good - it looks like the kind of terraced house most of his friends lived in.

horsemouth is a child of the suburbs - both sets of grandparents were farmers and lived in the countryside (and there were holidays with them) but horsemouth grew up on the edges of towns - just outside llansamlet near swansea then near bedwas just outside of caerphilly - the estate horsemouth's parents lived on was row after row of new build bungalows on hill overlooking what was soon to be the motorway. horsemouth (and his friends) played in fields that backed onto newer estates and on river banks blackened with coal dust.

later horsemouth's parents moved (in their minds moved back) to the deepest countryside they could find - it didn't suit him - he got the bus to the local town and to the sixth form college at 7.30 in the morning and got the last bus back out at 6.30 at night (herefordshire was an early adopter of bus privatisation) - it hardened his solitude and he read a lot of books. he hung around two years and some months and then came to the seaside towns - first to go to university and then to stay first in hackney and then tower hamlets (with stints in brixton, ladbroke grove, hoxton) ... and then back to hackney again and then away (before the full horror of gentrification hit). he likes it here - poplar - it's still fucked up, poor and boring - and despite horsemouth's gangster neighbours and a murder within 50 yards it feels fairly safe.

now horsemouth's parent's place feels like where horsemouth is from - somewhere not quite wales but nearly - horsemouth is proud of knowing about ten words of welsh - the walls of the classroom at school were covered with pictures of welsh rock bands - man, budgie, horsemouth forgets the others...

horsemouth never learnt to drive, this makes 'returning' to live in the countryside problematic.

horsemouth's parents generation was the generation that left to go to work, that tasted social mobility, as did horsemouth's father's parents who after the second world war moved down from yorkshire to devon emboldened by the nhs and the new welfare state (a plan to go help found an agricultural commune in new zealand had fallen through).