Glastonhurst Gravenblog Report

Before

The previous three nights I played solo shows supporting Charlotte Hatherley in Birmingham, Bristol and Exeter. In Birmingham the audience was seated; this sometimes creates an atmosphere of slightly forced, Jazz Club reverence. It is difficult to tell whether the audience likes you or whether they are just staring at you like dead fish because they can’t really move without making a spectacle of themselves.

We got there late and I didn’t have my usual two hours of drinking and practising time to prepare myself, but I think I pulled it off.

The set was thus:

Tunnels

Entertainment

Saints

Cities Beneath The Sea

Nicole

Bluebeard

Trust

The Diver

Black Holes In The Sand

The Bristol show was bizarre. I was playing in my home town to an audience who mainly didn’t know anything about me (that’s the idea behind support slots, I’m told), and were happy to talk over me. I was happy to talk back.

“I’d like to dedicate this next song to the guy at the back loudly discussing the decline of Ceefax. Dude, you are so right about Teletext. Complete also-rans. I’m just as passionate about this as you are”.

But the same guy talked all the way through Charlotte’s set, and then fawningly got her to sign a poster afterwards. He hadn’t come to listen, he had come there to talk about being there whilst he was there. How blissful it must be to truly live in the moment like that.

Charlotte performed as a two-piece with band mate Charlie, ignored the buffoons, commanded 95% of the crowd with her own new material then reeled off clever acoustic cover versions of Wire’s ‘Outdoor Miner’, Simon Dupree and the Big Sound’s ‘Kites’, and Kim Wylde’s ‘Kids In America’. The following night we played The Cavern in Exeter. It sounds like a cavern. The room was empty so I made some noise and some people came in. We had to leave immediately afterwards, so we missed Charlotte’s set that night. The place was rammed though, and I imagine it was a triumph.

Glastonbury

Friday

I reached the site at 9 am on Friday. After driving back from Exeter, my manager Michelle and I had been up until 3 am finishing the press release and biog for the new album. Even with special performers vehicle passes, laminates and wrist bands, it still took two hours, a couple of U-turns and some wildly conflicting directions from bewildered stewards to get to where the rest of the band had set up camp the night before. The wonderfully ordered chaos of Glastonbury is very egalitarian in that way. Artist, staff or punter, you will at some point find yourself deeply confused.

I reached my tent and tried to sleep. It was baking. Tranquilizers and Strongbow, woke up at 4pm. Drinking started immediately. As Charlie Brooker points out, for those of us who don’t count wading through rivers of mud and inhaling the gut-churning stench of shit amongst their hobbies, maintaining a constant, stable level of drunkenness is the best way to enjoy Glastonbury. Though this was nothing compared to what is currently happening up north.

Everyone but me was finding it relatively easy to remain upright. It turned out that my Wellingtons were in fact ‘deck boots’. These are flat bottomed and designed to provide suction on the wet wooden decks of sea vessels. Ignorant city boy. Then they split down the middle anyway, so I bought some boots from a fascist hippy (I assume he was a fascist, like thousands of other young rebels worldwide who hoist flags depicting the murderous totalitarian dictator Che Guevera)
Our first set of the festival was on the Late and Live tent, at 12 midnight. Though we were delighted to be invited to play, it was a bit of a bummer because it made it impossible for me to see Hot Chip and Bjork, two of the acts on the programme that I was most excited about. It also meant that at least 100,000 Gravenhurst fans had to miss Bjork and Hot Chip too, and piled into the 200 capacity Late and Live tent. Seriously, the massive crowds at the main stages were a crude CGI animation hastily contrived by the panicking BBC producers who hadn’t done their research.

We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, and that guy Pete who won the last Big Brother was totally wigging out down the front. In our final track, a ten minute-long cover of The Kinks ‘See My Friends’, I closed my eyes, tilted my head back and had a private Spacemen 3 moment. Robin had extra ‘shape-space’ on the right-hand side of the stage, and the most adventurous shape he pulled made his fake moustache fall off.

The set was:

The Velvet Cell

She Dances (new one)

Hollow Men (new one)

Trust (new single coming out on 23^rd July)

Song From Under The Arches

See My Friends

My mum tells me Pete from Big Brother is friends with Ken Russell. I want to meet Ken Russell. I want him to make a pop video for us.

At some point that day, the BBC team managed to pick the wrong people for a vox pop. They crossed paths with my band mates Robin Allender and Alex Wilkins.

BBC person : “what’s been your favourite act so far?”

Robin: “umm… Amy Winehouse… I didn’t see her… I read her name in the programme… it was really good”

This was broadcast live, and presumably discarded for the edited ‘Best Bits’ coverage on BBC 2. I saw it on the ‘TV On Demand – Watch Again’ function. Someone may have uploaded it to you Tube, I’ll see if I can find a link.

Saturday

Eight years ago I found a coat in a club. It said ‘SPIEWAK’ on it and probably cost £300 as a result. It isn’t really waterproof, so I decided to go back to to the totalitarian-apologist and buy something more suitable. I chose unwisely; a £15 raincoat keeps the rain out but your own sweat in, so after a few minutes of slogging through mud you feel like a slug in a condom.

Around 4pm Ed Harcourt played The Park stage. Thankfully the rain eased off. Apparently, Ed hadn’t been to bed since Wednesday. I had spent some time with him the night before and he seemed, like me, Inclined Towards Having A Good Time. But Ed is a professional, and during the beautiful ‘Until Tomorrow Then’ the consummate showman climbed up onto the PA speakers and serenaded the crowd solo through an antique broadcast microphone.

At some point on Saturday we hatched a plan for me to watch my label-mates Maximo Park (oh my boys… my boys…) from the side of the stage, then invade the stage, give Paul Smith a Morrissey fan-style hug and kiss and then run off, and presumably be ejected from the site, or possibly arrested. Naturally we didn’t have passes for the main stages and hospitality areas, but two security guards and two simple Jedi mind tricks later, we were at the heavily fortified Other Stage Artists and Crew entrance. At the last hurdle all I could play was the nepotism card. Fortunately, Maximo’s manager Colin probably thought he owed me a favour after kicking me out of their dressing room at Brixton Academy when he mistook me for a drug user. Maximo’s drummer Tom quickly explained ‘who I was’ and Colin was unnecessarily gracious and apologetic. He hadn’t realized ‘who I was’. I reassured him that I barely knew who I was.

So the security guard went to ask Colin, and a few minutes later I was about ten yards behind the band amongst a gaggle of screaming girlfriends and some quite important looking people. It was suggested that I push as far to the front of the backstage viewing area as possible, to perhaps be caught live on BBC TV, pale, twitching, and chewing my own face off. A girl got cross with me.

Girl: (shouting) “IF YOU ARE GOING TO STAND THERE YOU’VE GOT TO DANCE! COME ON, DANCE!

Me: (shouting) : “WHAT?”

Girl (shouting) : “YOU’VE GOT TO DANCE! COME ON, DANCE!”

Me (shouting): “I’M GOING TO POISON YOU LATER”

Girl (oblivious, shouting) : “YOU’VE GOT TO DANCE! COME ON, DANCE!”

Me (shouting): “I KNOW, BUT I’M GOING TO POISON YOU LATER”

Girl (oblivious, shouting) : “JUST DANCE!”

I carried on doing what for me counts as dancing, and mercifully I ditched the extremely ill-advised stage-invasion plan. The crowd was going insane, Mr. Smith was totally in his element, and the band were properly rinsing it. They finished with ‘Going Missing’, which is my favourite track from ‘A Certain Trigger’. Looking at the BBC coverage, I was relieved to discover that I cannot be seen at the side of the stage.

After that I met up with my friend Sophie and brushed past a famous person -one of the blokes from Top Gear. On my way back to the tent I stopped off at a Portaloo. A sticker on the back wall read “THE OFFICIAL JO WHILEY TOILET’. I had a relatively early night; we had to get up to play The Park stage at 12.40 on Sunday.

Sunday

At around 12.40 it started raining quite hard, and then eased off at around 1.10, when we finished our set. Most of the audience thought they were going to be watching Adele, because that is what it said in the festival program. Something mysterious happened just after it went to press and we were asked to play the slot instead.

I told the audience who we were, quite a few times, in case we gave Adele a confusing reputation. I said something along the lines of

“Hello, we are Gravenhurst from Bristol. We are not Adele. We are Gravenhurst. After 72 hours on this festival site we are now operating at optimum performance levels, and improving all the time”.

The set was:

The Velvet Cell

She Dances

Hollow Men

Trust

Song From Under The Arches

Black Holes In The Sand

I’m not good at counting audiences when I am in the process of Rocking Out, but apparently about 300 people were watching. This was truly touching; It was really pissing it down. Crimean War Field Hospital with better tunes and more effective medicines.

That night was the absolute high-point of the festival for me. I saw the fabulous Circulus, a medievalist prog folk band. Fairport, Jethro Tull and Early Music = Wickerman, Lake and Palmer. Fantastic. They were the only band I saw that truly rocked. And they were the only band I saw who wore wizard’s robes and animal masks. Then I got pissed with Martha Wainwright and Ed Harcourt. Networking? Name dropping? Sue me. It’s nothing compared to brushing past that bloke from Top Gear.

After

Damp.

'Clive Burr was a better drummer than Nicko McBrain' - Discuss

Maplin technician in not-pedantic shocker

I went into Maplin to buy a soldering iron. My flatmate's gas soldering iron melted itself. I asked the technician about the battery powered ones and he said 'For kids. Electrical is best, and it's cheaper'. When I told him the gas one had melted he said 'yes, bad design'. Then I asked him about a an S-VID to SCART lead and he recommended not buying theirs and showed me how to do it much cheaper using separate leads and drew three different diagrams for me. What a dude.

His name is Michal, he has lots of tattoos and is from Eastern Europe. Or he could be from France for all I know; these skilled, helpful migrants all look the same to me. If enough of them come here, they are in danger of wiping out the "Pffff....Nah mate, you won't get it... it's gonna be at least six to eight weeks for parts..." mentality that keeps our Nation strong, resourceful, efficient and welcoming to outsiders.

Ashton Court Festival

Very good news that Ashton Court Festival, Bristol's community festival will be going ahead. The extra costs incurred by the new licensing regulations, plus the ₤8,000 bill for graffiti damage and the ₤11,000 bill caused by people vandalising the estate, have left the festival owing over £100,000. As an independent and not for profit organisation they are entirely reliant on sponsorship and gate income to survive, so there is no margin for error. Find out more here.

I'm a little disappointed that the festival team rejected my specific strategy of wholeheartedly embracing corporate sponsorship whilst keeping Ashton Court essentially a community festival. By working closely with Imperial Tobacco, Bristol Community Festival could secure it's own future whilst giving the people of Bristol an opportunity to celebrate a key part of their city's rich economic heritage. But never mind.

The full line-up hasn't been announced yet but Gravenhurst are playing. I want Iron Maiden to headline. That's unlikely. Impossible, in fact. I've listened to Iron Maiden since I was eight. They got shit after Seventh Son of a Seventh Son though. People say Iron Maiden are silly. That's like saying a horse has hooves, and what sort of scoundrel would deny a horse his hooves?

The results of a rigorous two-week programme of lifestyle awareness

Week one - moderate consumption of beer and wine

Read this month's Prospect magazine. Read the Economist. Read half of Nick Cohen's new book 'What's Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way'. Watched two Adam Curtis documentaries, 'Pandora's Box' and the 'The Mayfair Set'. Watched Andrew Marr's 'A History Of Modern Britain'. Finished mixing two songs. Achieved various administrative goals.

Week two - bag of weed, cider

Read half of Viz. Listened to Iron Maiden. Watched 'Conan The Barbarian', 'Commando', 'Death Wish', 'Death Wish II', 'Death Wish 3', 'Death Wish 4: The Crackdown', 'Death Wish V: The Face of Death' (boxed set), several episodes of 'Walker: Texas Ranger' (starring Chuck Norris, solid performances over several decades), 'Roadhouse' (starring Patrick Swayze, who knows full well that his crowning celluloid achievment was playing a nonce in Donnie Darko), 'American Psycho' (yet again), and all six episodes of 'Garth Marenghi's Darkplace' with the commentary on. Found myself idly searching Ebay for a copy of Michael Winner's last film, 'Parting Shots', starring Chris Rea. Thought about buying a bomber jacket with a picture of a panther on the back. Failed to achieve various administrative goals.

You may know him as
Swearengen.
But to us he'll always be
Lovejoy



8 PM Lovejoy Lovejoy and Tinker get more than they bargained for when a routine evaluation goes awry. Lighthearted drama (Rpt.)
8 PM Lovejoy When a routine evaluation goes awry, Lovejoy and Tinker get more than they bargained for. Lighthearted drama (Rpt.)

8 PM Lovejoy Lovejoy foils a gang of art thieves with the help of Tinker and his extraordinarily unlikely black lesbian wheelchair-bound sidekick. Lighthearted drama (Rpt)

8 PM Lovejoy Lovejoy finds himself in the frame when a painting is stolen from an estate he is routinely evaluating. Lighthearted drama (Rpt.)

8 PM Lovejoy During a routine evaluation, Lovejoy beds a series of wealthy but increasingly hanging middle-aged women. Lighthearted drama (Rpt.)

8 PM Lovejoy Lovejoy's divvying skills are put to the test when a routine evaluation turns up a forgery. Or is it? Lighthearted drama (Rpt.)

8 PM Lovejoy Eric does something completely fucking dunderheaded, much to the wry amusement of Lovejoy and Tinker. Lighthearted drama (Rpt.)

8 PM Lovejoy Loveable rogue Lovejoy lands himself in deep water when a routine evaluation takes an unusual turn. Lighthearted drama (Rpt.)
8 PM Lovejoy Rough diamond antiques dealer Lovejoy finds more than he is looking for when a country estate is routinely evaluated. Lighthearted drama (Rpt.)




Cast List
Ian Mcshane as Lovejoy
Wrinkly old cow as Lady Jane Felsham
Dudley Sutton as Tinker
Chris Jury as Eric
Posh Bird as Beth
You don't really find her attractive do you? as Charlotte Cavendish (1993-94)
Really, she is pretty rough as Charles Gimbert

Production Details
Written by:
Ian La Frenais, Dick Clement, Terry Hodgkinson, Douglas Watkinson, Roger Marshall, Jeremy Paul, Others
Directed by:
John Crome, Ken Hannam, Baz Taylor, Others
Produced by:
Robert Banks Stewart, Emma Hayter, Colin Shindler, Jo Wright, Richard Everitt
6 series, 71 episodes
Transmitted: 1986-94
BBC Television
Witzend Productions
McShane Productions



With respect:

http://www.tinkerhasaposse.com

Political Correctness Gone Right

Bristol City Council in correct decision shocker

This film is Shane Meadows's finest work to date. The notoriously inept Bristol City Council got it right; teenagers should see it, it's a powerful film, and cannily released on St. George's Day, it may coincide with a British National Party turnout in the local elections. Suffice to say it is unlikely BNP members will be off to their local art house cinema to see this. It is more important that their children see it.

http://warpfilms.com
http://www.thisisenglandmovie.co.uk

Greetings from the new bottom of the same lake

Here we are at our new blog address. Note the address bar- there you are. You can change your bookmarks accordingly. Good on you.

Our dedicated team of police divers have copied all the previous posts over to this new blog address. This means that if you want to read some old posts from this blog ("brimful of coruscating prose, wry asides, and many occurrences of the words 'fuck' and 'fucking'" - The Salisbury Review) you won't have to go to the old blog.

See you at the bottom of the lake.

Breakfast Lieutenant aka. Bad Club

Click here for
"Now That's What I Call Deeply Harrowing! Volume. 1"
-an Amazon DVD list

Anton Maiof showed me how to play the IMDB Game. The rules are as follows:
Open IMDB. Only quiz master may see it. Choose and click on a film from Top Ten. Players have to guess, based on the film, a recommended film on that page. Winner stays on.

Legend has it that in the course of playing this game, Anton and friends were led from Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant to John Hughes's The Breakfast Club in only four recommendations. What happened next was explosive. It emerged that the two films had almost the same running time, of 96 and 97 minutes respectively. This meant that the two films could be shown concurrently, with the very real possibility that Emilio Estevez's pot-fuelled back-flips would coincide with Harvey Keitel sobbing, moaning and calling Jesus Christ a 'rat fuck'. Plans are under way to show the films together in a split screen format at the Cube Cinema in Bristol.


Funtimefunbreaktime

Guy N. Smith versus Garth Marenghi

The following quotes are from the works of Guy N. Smith and Garth Marenghi. Distinguish the parody from the parodied.

1 ) "Gordon would you … take me away from here? Take me with you, where there aren’t such things as wolves, Black Dogs and people cutting their heads off with saws".

2) "But what chance did they stand against this army of attacking pheasants?"

3) "She stared in horror as the blood poured from her open wound. Why had she opened that sarcophagus?? The sand turned a crimson red, the colour of blood. Her blood. Blood. Blood. Blood. And bits of piss and shit. This was the worst day of her life."

4) "Why shouldn't a child's corpse turn into a pike? No reason at all...Maybe he was a fish and hadn't realised it up until now".

5) "It was his first taste of human flesh and he wondered why he had ever bothered with hares and sheep before".

6) "Something was pouring from his mouth. He examined his sleeve. Blood!? Blood. Crimson copper-smelling blood, his blood. Blood. Blood. Blood. And bits of sick."

7) "This doomed girl had not only risen from her deathbed but she had turned into a nymphomaniac".

8) "He did something that caused the elephant to go berserk and the potato vendor to burn to death".

9) "Mike stared in disbelief as his hands fell off. From them protruded millions of maggots. Maggots!? Maggots. Maggots. Maggots. Maggots. Maggots. Maggots. All over the post office floor, in Leytonstone."

10) "He whisked off her shoes and panties in one movement, wild like an enraged shark, his bulky totem beating a seductive rhythm. Mary's body felt like it was burning, even though the room was properly air-conditioned. They tried all the positions: on top, doggy, and normal. Exhausted, they collapsed on to the recently extended sofa bed. Then, a hellbeast ate them."

11) "Nothing else mattered...Not even the giant crabs."

12) "'No way! No way on God's Green Land can a crab be bigger than a Renault Estate! Can it…!?!"



1) Guy N. Smith - Werewolf By Moonlight
2) Guy N. Smith - Carnivore
3) Garth Marenghi - title unknown
4) Guy N. Smith - The Undead
5) Guy N. Smith - Werewolf By Moonlight
6) Garth Marenghi - Slicer
7) Guy N. Smith - The Ressurected
8) Guy N. Smith - The Dark One
9) Garth Marenghi - title unknown
10) Garth Marenghi - Juggers
11) Guy N. Smith - Night Of The Crabs
12) Garth Marenghi - Crab!!

Like Garth Marenghi and Dean Learner, Guy N. Smith is a tireless campaigner for the re-introduction of the death penalty.

Burning witches brings people together

New anti-discrimination laws dismissed in favour of world peace

Religious groups yesterday celebrated a new era of pluralism and tolerance after the House of Lords rejected new measures that would have outlawed the discrimination and harassment of gays.

Antique hatchets were buried and ancient rivalries dismissed as hitherto warring factions united against the common enemy of men who muck around with each other’s cocks. “The future of inter-faith religious tolerance and world peace lies in demonising queers” said Sheila Moustache, a Christian church group organiser.

Derek Fenton, a guest-house owner from Dorset expressed his relief at the axing of legislation that would have banned him from turning away monstrous shirt-lifters. “This is a triumph for tolerance, respect and common sense. My wife and I were unable to sleep knowing that the poo-thieves in the room next door might be ejaculating, deep, deep, into each other’s rectums. Decent folk have had enough of these minorities banging on about their ‘rights’. What about our rights? I cannot get that disgusting image out of my head, no matter what I do. I’m not even religious, and I still think they should be shot and then burned in hell”. Mr. Fenton was joined by fellow devout non-homosexual Abdul Rahman, a community leader who recently urged fellow Muslims to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Jewish Zionists to campaign to shut down a house belonging to two men who lived together in it. The two men have since moved away from the area. “It’s amazing what can be achieved with respectful and sensitive inter-faith dialogue” said John Curry, a white supremacist Neo-Nazi convicted of a series of pub bombings in the early 90’s.

Dr.Ismail Haniyeh, the Prime Minister of the Palestinian National Authority, oversaw a jubilant and light-hearted joint press conference in Gaza City alongside Israeli Premier Ehud Olmert and American Paleo-Conservative commentator Pat Buchanan. “This is a momentous occasion” laughed Dr. Haniyeh. “Once we’ve turfed out all the buggers, there will be plenty of room in the Holy Land for Jews AND Muslims.” “And after that,” Buchanan joined in, “we can set to work on the Atheists. Once they’re gone, we can concentrate all our energies on space travel, and going to the Moon, and Mars, and other places in space”.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thought For the Day

The liberal elite cannot hide the fact that paedophiles are disguising themselves as Muslim women in veils in order to get access to children by working as classroom assistants. TRUST NO-ONE.

Neutral pig's head island

“Those who say that fiction isn’t relevant any more should read Houllebecq – he is in a class of his own”
- Literary Review

That’s what’s written on the cover of the paperback edition of Michel Houellebecq’s ‘The Possibility Of An Island’. The Post-Modernists argue that fiction isn’t relevant anymore, and the book world is listening fearfully. Brandishing Houllebecq, it lands a confident counter-strike…

No, of course the book world isn’t fucking listening; it’s a non-issue cooked up by a reanimated corpse-journalist, rotting but somehow still walking, who very likely hasn’t read the book, instead cobbling a review together by cribbing the press release, posing a few straw men and hitting the word count with a handful of desperate cliches. If blogging really is a public challenge to print journalism, and this is the standard we are up against, then it’s a pushover. In 1946 Orwell wrote ‘Confessions of a Book Reviewer’:

In the morning, blear-eyed, surly and unshaven, he will gaze for an hour or two at a blank sheet of paper until the menacing finger of the clock frightens him into action. Then suddenly he will snap into it. All the stale old phrases—“a book that no one should miss”, “something memorable on every page”, “of special value are the chapters dealing with, etc etc”—will jump into their places like iron filings obeying the magnet, and the review will end up at exactly the right length and with just about three minutes to go.

After sixty years of journalism little has changed. Indeed, it has probably got worse. Orwell, after all, is dead.

Avoid

“Quintessentially English”

“Achingly beautiful”

“…on acid”

“…on crack”

The decline of the pig’s head in butcher’s shop windows

In the past, when people were fully aware that what they were buying was a dead animal, the customer would check out the eyes for signs of decay. Milky? Sour complexion? Then it’s been hanging around too long. The trained consumer looked for signs of a healthy animal. At least, healthy until it was slaughtered. Nowadays, the consumer’s reaction to a disembodied pig’s head would be along the lines of “fucking hell! That’s a fucking pig’s head. Jesus, that’s revolting”, and they would promptly leave. The public want their food free range, organic, humanely reared and slaughtered, but they certainly don’t want anything resembling a dead animal.

Not Partisan

According to http://www.wordcounter.com/cgi-bin/politicalresult.cgi, this blog is, amazingly, politically neutral.

Damp food, bright lights, dead eyes

The Organ, responsible for my favourite pop record of last year, have called it a day after five years, one album and a handful of EPs. They have admirably chosen to keep their reasons to themselves. A punishing schedule may have played a part in their disintegration; touring provides the musician with the classic bi-polar experience. In sympathy, I’m taking this opportunity to publish an excerpt from my last tour diary. It was nice to know you, ladies.

A snow-bound drive from Brugge to Toulouse. A service station. Damp food; bright lights, dead eyes. A notice guaranteeing a thrirty-minute toilet hygiene inspection. Above the cubicle, gaps in the styrofoam celing panels. Cameras, probably. You turn and your leg brushes against the bowl. You take part of it back to the van with you and leave part of yourself there. Now you know why the French shit in holes in the ground. The less contact the better. In/out as quickly as possible. Extract yourself from the dance before it tries to hold your hand.

A Holiday Inn south of Paris. Prison windows groan over a Legoland interzone. You open the door to your rabbit hutch and the rolling guff of a thousand lonely cigarettes swoops down your throat like a decaying pigeon searching madly for a quiet place to die. The bird surfs the slipstream of fruit-scented mustard gas; like hopeless medieval physicians pitching a poultice against a plague, the cleaning staff spray something into the air to combat the stench but for some reason choose to leave all the windows closed and turn up the radiators. Inside the apricot sweat-box the despair hangs in mid-air, blinking in the half-light. Nowhere to hide in the metal door, veneer walls and plastic curtains, it seeps quietly into the pores of its new friend. Pubic hairs on the carpet, semen grease-film on the T.V. remote, suicide-prevention half-windows. Push your face too deep into the pillow and last night’s smoker shares the bed with you. Switch off the metal wall heater and it will switch itself back on at 3 a.m. Baked lizards thrashing in the sheets. Wake up paddling in a diseased lung. The sweat beads can’t get past the plastic curtains. The cloud regroups in mid-air and you have made your contribution to a thriving, multiplying mass grave. You have become part of the room. You have made it that bit worse for the next guy.

love, love, love