Friday 30 September 2011

On Anna's recommendation - a short film by Runa Islam

Video two - A sketch for a London Gateway Video Poem

Video One - Video Notebook

Estuary Prologue - Early Draft

I am developing a text pieces as part of my response to the Estuary Dialogue project. It is a fluctuating thing. At times - as you can see in an earlier post , it is a fairly short poem, but recently it has evolved again. Here is a extract of my present draft of a longer piece of fiction set in a near future:


Estuary Prologue
           I stand and listen to the renewed silence of the Stanford marshes. Look out at the Thames estuary, and beyond that the weak outline of Kent. Look out at the marshes I played in as a boy. With its huge flat sky and its marshland maze. The marshes I got a knife pulled on me. The marshes I came back to the day mum died, walking aimlessly through the needy mud in the stinking, salty breeze. The oil refinery still sits in the distance, standing warning tall in all this flatness.
           My filthy overalls hang on me as heavily as wet cardboard, the respirator hangs limply from my bruised hand. Barely able to sit up straight on the mud, my feet dangle toward the shore uncomprehendingly. I think about my name for a moment and how far I have come away from it in these last few days, how alien it sounds to my own ears.
            Pristine traces of curlews and waders like a repetitive scrawl in the mudflats. A conservation area of some renown throughout Western Europe. No sign of the birds now.
            I hope the others will come for me – I have no more energy. I hope someone will come to hear my warning, this thing that has marked me out for so many years. Hear my warning, make my sacrifice worthwhile. But more than this I want someone to hear my story. To believe in my memories, the ones that are mine now, even if this name is not.  
            I hope the sound I can hear is the beating of the new arrivals not just my own heart. I see everything becoming specks of electricity on the untroubled estuary waves. Huge indifferent river. Smelling of brine and rotten waste. And then coffee. The beautiful coffee from the Plaza cafĂ©. How much I would give to be there now.
            I have to close my eyes, I do not want to. No sooner do I wake, than I close my eyes forever.

Wednesday 21 September 2011

Fingerprint detective

In my quest to find out about the owners of copies of the novels Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, I have bought a copy of each secondhand, from Amazon. I really want a dog eared number but of course most buyers want them in good condition so we will see what comes. When I get them I hope to scour them for evidence of their previous owners in particular, with fingerprint detection. I have just been searching the internet for the right material to detect what they call 'latent fingerprints'. Apparently on porous surfaces such as paper you need a chemical spray called Ninhydrin. In my quest for this information I got talking to a really helpful man called Hugh who works at a company called Foster Freeman who manufacture machines for detecting finger prints. He has given me the name of a consultant they use who is a top expert in the fingerprinting field. I am so excited. He was vaguely bemused by my project as most people phoning are from companies or organisations such as the police. It's amazing to hear about all of these complex worlds out there that you know nothing about.
Anyway, I have ordered some of this spray from a company in the US at some expense but can't wait to receive it and start forensically documenting these books.

Tuesday 13 September 2011

The Remarkable Likeness of Being: Faro


This is Faro in Portugal. I've just returned from a short break there and I was very excited by it's similarity to the Thames Estuary, in terms of its marsh and site for birds. They even have flamingoes there in the winter months which has a link to the Thames as there were rumoured to be a colony of flamingoes there in the 1980's who had escaped from a zoo in Essex. 

I know the weather is slightly different and the lagoon is fed by the Atlantic sea but the terrain reminded me so much of the Thames Estuary. Faro itself is an interesting place, a small city or large town? It has an historic walled centre and as you venture further from that, the buildings become more modern. When we flew into Faro, we had missed the bus and so my husband Pete decided we could walk the 2 miles. It was quite an interesting walk, rather like an Iain Sinclair novel because we ended up for most of it, walking down this busy highway. I find it fascinating what you see in the gutters of the roads; numerous plastic bottles of course (universal tokens of convenience), plants, old tyres and scraps of tyres, discarded mobile phones, chicken bones.
Houses that once must have been quite pleasant were suddenly abutted right up against the extended road system into Faro. They still retained the architectural riches of the past, on friezes and windows but were misplaced and brutally ignored in this urban development that we were part of in our tourist seeking mode.
Faro had one or two nice artist spaces so I contemplated the idea of bringing the estuary dialogue project to Faro. Any Portuguese artists out there who would like to collaborate on the collaboration?