'two or three french or italian boys were singing the marseillaise...'

'in the street two or three french or italian boys were singing the marseillaise to a beautiful harp and violin accompaniment...'

today (in 1871) the reverend kilvert will be going to hereford to see the dentist (and his laughing gas apparatus). he will use the railway line that used to run between hereford and hay and then on to neath and brecon (imagine how useful that would be). there he will hear two or three children playing la marseillaise (this he will enjoy despite its revolutionary reputation of which he would not normally approve). 

la marseillaise got its popular title when volunteers (fédérés) from marseille sang it while making their entrance into the city of paris on 30th july 1792. 

today a lot cooler 22C or so (at least according to bbc weather). cloudy in the morning possibility of some rain in the early hours of tuesday morning. 

tomorrow (tuesday) actual rain all day. 

horsemouth watched a reaction video to argus  by wishbone ash. the guy gurns away, he hears the bass, he hears the guitar, the drums. he's an ex-guitarist he can hear the guitar tones. he hears yes and jethro tull and he hears intimations of iron maiden.

he has also been watching loads of le homme sans visage a georges franju/ jacques champreux fantomas style shocker which he has managed to find entire on a certain streaming platform. 

horsemouth has remembered he has his own mixcloud page and has added all the golden glow mixes he sourced tracks for. it provides you with a kind of indication of the sort of stuff he listens to (when he's not listening to one of  howard's ambient mixes which he did yesterday).

above you see a photo of horsemouth's room back in the wen (yuck messy isn't it).  messy and uncomfortable but beautifully arranged to maximise storage.  at the moment it looks like horsemouth's return to the wen for the 23rd to the 27th is on - he will probably  travel back the day of the 22nd so he can pack and get his brother's eldest to take another load of (mostly) books up to the wilds. 

horsemouth is much less fond of the room since he agreed to the bushes in the front garden being chopped down. 

horsemouth is not moving his furniture so he will have to find ways of either passing it on or dismantling it and hiding it in the junk room of the house. 

ok horsemouth is enjoying the cooler day so far. 

a fair example of the kind of things he is interested in and writes about

'as I sat at breakfast I heard the drone of the bagpipes... I find them intolerable. a droning, wailing whine, no tune. I had rather go into battle to the sound of a barrel organ.' - kilvert, journal, 13th july 

tomorrow (in 1871) the reverend kilvert will be going to hereford to see the dentist (and his laughing gas apparatus). he will use the railway line that used to run between hereford and hay and on to neath and brecon (imagine how useful that would be now). 

there he will hear three children playing la marseillaise (this he will enjoy despite its revolutionary reputation). 

horsemouth is up earlyish. he has fed the chickens (who seem to be off their food) and opened up the green house (he should probably cover it over with a sheet to cool it down still more). 

horsemouth has received an invitation to a share-and-share-alike cultural productions page. he will probably accept in the hope  that someone somewhere may find his stuff interesting. 

he used to play guitar (he still plays guitar) and has recorded. he has voice-overed and acted in a self-produced film. he has written slabs of theory. 

these days he mostly 'writes' a daily blog (about not very much). he has done this for a number of years. once in a while he will 'publish' something on substack. a few times a year he will go to a gig or receive some of a friend's music and then he will tell you about it. 

a few times a year he will release some of his own music (or suchlike). 

he's mainly interested in diaries these days. diaries and writing. the above is a fair example of the kind of things he is interested in and writes about.

he writes in the third person using a persona horsemouthfolk in honour of the famous reggae drummer (and actor) leroy 'horsemouth' wallace. 

'now at least the moon is full (and I walk alone)'

'now at least the moon is full, and I walk alone, which is best by night, if not by day always. your companion must be sympathetic with the present mood. the conversation must be located where the walkers are, and vary exactly with the scene and events and the contour of the ground.' 

'at the foot of the cliff hill I hear the sound of the clock striking nine, as distinctly as within a quarter of a mile usually...' 

h.d. thoreau, a writer's journal,  12th july 1851, walk begun at 8pm. 

damn it. it's the anniversary of thoreau's  birth and  horsemouth didn't know it (drat). 

it is actually the morning of the friday (as horsemouth types this). it is a hot sunny day and horsemouth is hiding indoors. he is slightly bruised by beer after last night's bell-ringing. 

in a few more lonely minutes it will be the afternoon. 

and it's the following morning of the 12th. horsemouth is up and has fed the chickens. he's looking at the cabbage white butterflies (knowing that soon he will be removing their caterpillars from his runner bean plants). the birds seem to have eaten all the easily accessible gooseberries so horsemouth will have to go after the more difficult and dangerous to reach ones. 

hopefully the heat wave will break in a few days and work outside will become more possible. 

last night (or was it in the daytime) a bit of the french tv show that nuits rouges was made out of. in the evening a history lesson on the CCRU. nothing on the tv (that he would want to see). he's reading volume two of anais nin's journals. she has bought  a printing press but she has gifted it to her n'er-do-well friend gonzalo to help him with his political work. only once she gets to new york again (in volume three) will she buy another one and learn to operate it and begin self-publishing her own works. 

walking after midnight (a full moon to the south and near the horizon)

last night a full moon to the south and near the horizon (allegedly).

in 1851 thoreau is going through a phase of walking by night (as the chapter in his a writer's journal is called by its editor laurence stapleton). 

long passages these - typically three or four pages. 

'july 11, 1851. friday. at 7.15pm with W.E.C. go forth to see the moon, the glimpses of the moon. we think she is not quite full; we can detect a little flatness on the eastern side... 

the moon is silvery still, not yet inaugurated... 

now we are getting into moonlight. we see it reflected from particular stumps in the depths of the darkest woods, and from the stems of trees, as if it selected what to shine on, - a silvery light... 

how simply and naturally the moon presides.' 

thoreau has much to say. 

he goes out again the next night (but on his own this time). 

the moon will be full (more of this tomorrow). 

on july 21st he is off on a walk in the morning, thinking he will write better in the afternoon because of it. 

august 5th he is out watching the half moon. august 12th he goes for a bathe in the river by the light of the full moon. 

'the diary will never be published' (the dream)

'the diary will never be published.' - denise clairouin (as reported by anais nin in her journals, volume two.)

'I mastered the mechanisms of life better to bend it to the will of the dream. I conquered details to make the dream more possible. with hammer and nails, paint, soap, money, typewriter, cookbook...

I sewed and mended, all for the sake of the dream...'  - anais nin in journals volume two, january 1937.

horsemouth has shortened anais's list (she, the ever practical, finishes off her list with douchebag). 

so the thing with the house in the wen's electricity went well - now there's a second lot due the morning of tuesday the 29th july  (cue a similar problem horsemouth guesses). 

ok. horsemouth contemplates another walk on the common. (just done it).

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in the evening horsemouth watched judex (georges franju 1963) which he found complete and entire (and as far as he can remember largely ad free) on a certain streaming platform. god it's great (and it features a rooftop fight similar to the one in the later nuits rouges (1973) and an amazing masked ball). 

of course it's all fantomas really. but just as bram stoker's wife not wanting to have the copyright of dracula  infringed so excessive demands for payment from the estate of fantomas caused other early film serials to be chosen instead (judex), or similar characters to be invented (dr. mabuse/ nuits rouges).  

tomorrow horsemouth will have to deal with the thing that's most pressing on his mind at the moment. (ok no he's dealt with it already but there will still be stuff to deal with tomorrow). 

it is the morning. and it is another beautiful morning. the birds have been striping the berry trees. 

it's easier to write at night

 '... I had an obsession with short-wave radio and I was always amazed at the way in which the radio signals would become stronger as daylight faded. I felt as if psychic energy levels would also increase in the night.' - peter gabriel

a friend notes;

'G.P.O. had a theory that It was easier to be creative in the small hours because everyone else was asleep and there was more psychic energy floating around...'

horsemouth thinks it's easier to write at night because there's no where else you can be and nowhere you have to be and there and no people to see and no work to be done. 

to this day horsemouth thinks he should be doing 'stuff' in the day - as if 9 to 5 were special hours that were intrinsically 'work' shaped. 

'conflict with diary writing. while I write in the diary I cannot write a book... if I were a real diarist, like pepys or amiel, I would be satisfied to record, but I am not...' - anais nin, journals, volume two. 

writers (based on the ones horsemouth saw on the creative writing course at goldsmith's university) often swore by early in the morning (either before they go to work or after the kids have gone to school) for (horsemouth guesses) similar reasons. 

writers often have routines. you will sometimes find videos on youtube of people attempting to follow such-and-such a writer's routine. 

horsemouth's routine used to be to write in the morning before he went off to work. then it became to write the day before and finish it off in the morning (like he is doing now). he's waiting for inspiration to strike.

horsemouth is trying to water the garden less (to help with the possible water shortage). he's hoping that roots are deep enough and plants sufficiently well established. (he can't tell you how relieved he was to see water coming out of the taps - nor how quickly this has faded to just a commonplace occurrence).

a guitar and flute take on one of robbie basho's early tunes from a very echo-ey church. this is two or three minutes of unintelligible description followed by  robbie basho genius.  there's a whole concert up there (basho, debussy et al.)

there is a golden rabbit in the room (let the dog see the rabbit)

'I went to fez without a diary. I wanted to lie in a hotel bed, in a strange place without the diary, to break the flow of self-examination, of the diary as mirror, as assurance, diary in place of talk... life passed in fez as I passed, leaving no trace, no shreds.' 

- anais nin, journals - volume two, june 1936, journey to fez april of that year. 

the process begins again

at the house in the wen an engineer from NONO has been. he has taken loads of photos of the company head/ main fuse. he will contact the appropriate team who will come and replace it (the metal cover, the asbestos insulation) and then the smart meter can (finally) be fitted. 

in the end it all passed off smoothly

but of course we really are no further forward with this than we were four years ago (or whenever it was). the last time this was all promised. horsemouth has been with this power company since april 2021 on the smart meter tariff (when they were promising to fit a smart meter soon).

but from april 2022 he was on their more expensive simpler energy plan (their post the ukraine war gas shock tariff) so having a smart meter would not necessarily have saved him any money. 

before that  the house was with another power company (BLUB) since july 2018. 

in any event soon enough horsemouth will give up the account 

he will submit his final reading and pass the task over to his housemates.  the amount left in the account will be handed back to his flatmates (about £72 each). horsemouth thinks the free government money from the ukraine war gas price shock has been spent for everyone. 

he thinks NONO will initially ask for a higher direct debit (and in any event it will probably be divided between three housemates rather than four). 

it's a bright and beautiful morning out in the wilds. next year horsemouth thinks fewer marrows. he will get only a handful of carrots this year. it looks like he will do well with the potatoes (but he can't really tell yet). 

horsemouth is trying to formulate his strategy 

as you know horsemouth wants the government money (the government is offering some money to help decarbonise the nation's social housing stock at least as far as getting the properties up to an EPC C). that's his focus at the minute. there may be other pots of government money but right now he's not interested in them until the communal endeavour has the first pot of government money. all the other pots can all be dealt with later (is horsemouth's opinion). 

there is a golden rabbit in the room. let the dog see the rabbit.