henrybrook.com

on the south cliffs, to warn sailors away. Next, a lighthouse and today a tall granite cross monument to Lord Tennyson, poems flashing out across the waves.

nudging through the channel lane, watching the mist curl over the faraway downs. What’s better than a ship to carry you away from your everyday cares and land anchors?

in the post-equinox storms, the town’s mask slips into another version of the what-I-see. Visitors stand mute in doorways, pressed back from the hiss and sudden street mists but it’s all calm here in my cracked-leather cabin. I’ve hours looming all to myself at the empty apartment, paramour pages waiting to carry me back out on the Murmansk run with Captain Harinxma, dreaming of the light above the Arctic Circle line, wondering how he’ll survive. I wait for the town picture to clear and take hold, so that I might return to the books.

these thirty years and more. This week I’ve been listening to Chet Aktins and I finally wised up, that cat can play. Segovia, Django, Robert Johnson, brook no prejudice, chase it down until you finally understand. He’s up with the greats, his playing speaks to the heart.

since the blows of the Great War but you’ll still discover scar traces in London’s turns and alleyways.

get slower, shorter, older and later. This must be the new normal the financiers and politicos talk about, worse is better, standing is more comfortable than sitting. This must be the recovery at work and I’m the one at fault for not seeing the beauty of it. Commerce comedy in mind, though life and death to my morning rumble on the Paddington line, I remember Yossarian, dumbfounded and horror-struck in the bomber cockpit with clouds beneath his feet, hearing the news that Milo Minderbinder has traded away all the silk parachutes.

and the blossoms come out. Old, mothball Albion dusts down the colours for the spring promenade. Let the young take charge and save us they will.

just missed me, silvering the highstreet as it slid north. And I remembered Of Love and Hunger and Fanshawe shivering under the sheets in his buffeted room atop the boarding house, alone and broke, not even a shilling left for a pack of fags, rain greasing the windows, smell of kippers and damp carpets drifting up from the guest lounge. Maclaren-Ross earned his shelf space in the Library of the Dead with that one book, with its puddled roads, warm beer and shut terrace doors. And when the storm passes, Fanshawe mutters to himself,

Some other town’d catch it now.

England changed so much, and changed not at all.

of spring on the sandstone. And the gateways stand open, new stones cut and laid to replace those eroded, rain-bit, gouged by bike handlebars, dissolved by car fumes and the salt wash thrown up from the road. The town gets ready its clean suit of stone.

was a humble, sea-spat shell, a fragment of Caribbean shore. I don’t feel guilty resting it on my palm, it’s only on loan, I’ll carry it back someday and restore planetary balance.