This soft machine.

Last night I had the absolute pleasure of moving about in a rather dysfunctional manner as soft machine reached out across the universe and reanimated, for a while at least, those mostly dormant mechanisms in my partially inebriated mind. It’s been a funny week, cloaked in sorrow.

For the first time in years I read a novel. I rarely read novels, in fact I’d be bloody hard put to recollect when, never mind what, I last read that wasn’t something other than a thing labelled as fact, in this instance I include the odd biography, as, aside from the throng of sociopaths, whose fake life stories I tend to avoid, a biography is fact. Anyway, this novel has been sitting on the chair beside my bed for months. There are a whole stack of books piling up, each a reliable witness to mid life laziness. Rachel, I do not doubt, had likely picked it up in Oxfam, I imagine it was a Christmas gift and, if I’m not mistaken, it was partnered with The Great Railway Conspiracy - The Fall and rise of Britain’s railways since the 1950’s. I shit you not. I can imagine her, surveying the shelves, selecting titles based partly on mischievousness and partly on the basis that I do, albeit slowly, actually read this stuff, the trains having presently ground to a halt on page 37; traction issues.

The novel was called Canvey Island, I can see her mischievousness shining through, and it sat, silently waiting for me to pick it up and consume its gifts. I’m not altogether sure why I stopped reading literature. Perhaps it was jealousy, I’d parked my own writing ambitions and practically thrown away the key. So to read others work is in some way, hurtful, especially if they are alive, I’ve less issue with dead authors but the ones out there, plying the trade and getting by on it, is painful, it speaks to the prison you build and the fear that keeps you walled in.

I had taken Wednesday off from work. Rachel had a seminar at the college she is studying at, which meant that, rather than us both being out it was simpler for me to stay home and fulfil the daily slew of obligatory items, ostensibly collecting Oz from school at the end of the day. I don’t take many days off, this being the first since a day or two around Christmas. Unless we are going away, presently altogether rather unaffordable, then I don’t see the value in kicking my heels, impatiently longing for bedtime to come around, I’m not keen on doing nothing but there I was, sitting around doing nothing and so I decided that I’d read a book and turned to Canvey Island. I’m not going to do some sort of review, I’m not a literary critic, more a critic of writers, there’s that jealousy thing, but there is something strange when you read a book where you are so familiar with the places, at a point in time I even wondered whether my old dad might make an appearance, baldy, as he was affectionately known during the time he ran the sweet shop, before my mums death and his own gradual dissolution. The story itself was all about life, book ended by death, beginning and end. It was a deeply moving story and adorned with the familiar it became altogether to familiar. I’m rarely moved by things, I breeze across the surface but, very much like the death of the mother at the very beginning of the tale, I felt myself also being pulled under. I’d forgotten how powerful a story could be, if only you allow it. At the end it simply spoke to me, not that it meant too, that I myself have other things to do, before it’s too late and to that end it pointed me in a certain direction, an open road to take, a gift sat idly by, this soft machine of mine, all caught up in waiting.