steve-brett

[steve-brett]

4 february. the snow was still melting. on the bird feeders out the back were four goldfinches and some siskins, as well as the usual blackbirds, robins and blue tits.

dad picked up granny on his way back from work and we had pumpkin soup for lunch. she had bought the times in windsor for some reason and so we had a look at the crossword together. there was a ‘quick cryptic’ which we did a few clues on, and i got SADOMASOCHISTIC on the regular cryptic. she said she liked my new jumper. 

we drove back over to sunningdale. grandad’s ashes were in a blue box in what looked like a giant wine bottle gift bag. we walked around to the base of the redwood tree in the churchyard. it is on quite a big hillock now, which i guess must be from all of the years of dropped leaves. granny’s mum’s ashes were scattered here in 1986. the paper bag inside the box was stapled shut. we all took turns to scatter them: first granny, then dad, jane, me and mum, and then granny again. i think granny said something to grandad as she was scattering them. jane and i cried and i put my arm around her.

we went to the nags. i still wish that they hadn’t ripped so much out when they refurbished. it would have been nice to keep the old feel of the pub. we had some family chats and i think i managed to inject some empathy into some of the poison with which the daily telegraph slurries the local area.

we walked back to granny’s and i asked her if she missed having an open fire. then i gave her a hug and we went home.

[steve-brett]

Granny kept a diary just by the phone. I don’t know how long she had done it for; the current one covered ten weeks back to the start of December. Perhaps she had started last summer after Grandad died. She wrote an entry every single day.

How she had slept — usually not very well unless she had taken a sleeping pill; going into Windsor on the White Bus; clipping back shrubs in the garden; the snooker and the rugby and the football results; my aunt visiting with groceries or to dismiss a fraudulent call; having scrambled eggs for tea; drinks down the pub with her friends; the chair yoga she was going to: it was all just simple minutiae of her day to help her remember the small stuff.

Obviously I really wanted to see what she had written about me. I was there for her birthday meal, Christmas and scattering Grandad’s ashes a fortnight ago. On my birthday she wrote that she had called me and I sounded cheerful. I wondered if she had noticed that I had not been so cheerful last year. There was nothing about how she felt at all, really, which is what I had really wanted to talk to her about.

The day after my birthday she watched the lunar eclipse. I could picture her there, sat on the bed in the back bedroom — the room where I slept, where my dad slept, where my great-grandmother died, where my dad and aunt were born — looking out at the moonlight falling on the garden at four in the morning, quiet and alone.

This is what my aunt said to me when we were hugging and crying in the kitchen of number 7 the morning after it had happened. “She was so proud of you, and she thought about you every single day. She was probably thinking about you in the morning just before she died.”

I know that is true.

[steve-brett]

it’s a cold clear morning, and that means the racing pigeons are circling the chimney pots outside my bedroom with sudden flurries of beating wings.

i’ve just got back from the most emotionally intense and enjoyable week of my life. this morning i’ve been trying to process and articulate with my pals some of what we’ve experienced at two big singing conventions and a week of learning at camp.

it has been so good to be given a space to reflect on life, death, grief, love, friendship, community, sexuality, morality, trust, vulnerability... pretty much anything. a space to reflect.

we use the words of others to express how we feel, words that are hundreds of years old or that have only just been spoken. we have a shared emotional language, and our singing is the sound of unconditional love.

it’s a space for me to be myself, and a space for me to be absolutely nothing, just the air. it’s a space left open by those that came before me, and a space that i too will pass on.

“once i wished to leave a trace; now all i hope to leave is space, in some maintained and fertile place”

here i am in my purest form, with a true friend

x

[steve-brett]

doorstep

Sunlight warms the cold red brick, Warms the beeswax on the table, Catches my first breath in the air, And the pictures of the ancient Ribbons, a Morris dance, Gold gorse and broom in bloom. I sit on the old doorstep, Watch the roses and potatoes, A horseshoe above my head, And the fountain trickling slow Under the old fig tree, Nasturtiums and mint leaves. Remember in the new house, After tea one summer evening? We laid a blanket on the lawn And slept under a starry ceiling. In the rain at 2am You carried me back in. When the buildings are gone and the colours are faded And the roads only lead to unfamiliar places, A small box of heirlooms in the upstairs back bedroom... All of the world that has gone you must let Finally disappear.

[steve-brett]

495, three years later <3

leading 129 with my bristol pals in cork on sunday

[steve-brett]

It is the ultimate honour of my life to play on a Crescent record

[steve-brett]

dinner panorama

[steve-brett]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIRdwqpjfBw)

[steve-brett]

The new Tissø Lake album Paths to the Foss is complete. To celebrate, here is the album’s title track.

The record will be released by ITLAN on CD and LP on December 17 this year. Some wonderful people have contributed to this record and I am looking forward to it being a thing in the world. Much more to follow in the coming weeks.

Tracklist: Drifting / Paths to the Foss / Adrift in Dream / I Am Like a Lake / Let Us Go / The Mist on the Lake / Øvsthusfossen / When Work Is Done / Thou Dusky Spirit of the Wood / There Is No Other (In Which One May Stay) / The Mist on the Lake (reprise)

[steve-brett]

last september

[steve-brett]

eigg by Steve Brett

[steve-brett]

me on my 24th birthday, by emma brook

[steve-brett]

ichi forever

[steve-brett]

Ululation, I am Sweeny, my body is a corpse; sleeping or music nevermore - only the soughing of the storm-wind.

[steve-brett]

[steve-brett]

come flying down the hill gathered thick, gathered low      filling up the fold, headed home a mottled greeny-blue, flecked with mildew and mould      ripe and rotten fruit growing old

i feel the warmth beneath, a new breath on my cheek      waiting for the moment to speak to wash the dirt away at the end of the day      a moment to be helpless and weak

scattered ashes, splintered branches late evening harvest i swear to leave this world behind settled embers, mid-september late evening harvest is something of a goodbye

we found out how to live, saw the true form of love      your ideals mean nothing to us pulling up the roots, the dirt crumbles away      from and soon to be in the clay

free from all sense and fear, suddenly drawing near      closer to the timeless things this is our language now, the whispers within      you still don’t know what you’re doing

scattered ashes, splintered branches late evening harvest i swear to leave this world behind settled embers, mid-september late evening harvest is something of a goodbye

truly honest / endless forest reject everything you’ve been told there is nothing at all you are owed

underwater / i forgot to reject everything you’ve been told there is nothing at all you are owed

[steve-brett]

i haven’t been reading much lately. i go to bed tired, late, my eyes tied to the thin light of the laptop. but i started reading at swim-two-birds by flann o’brien. i took it up with me to eigg, read it in the car waiting for the rain to stop the night before the ferry over, and in my old, thin, leaky tent.

in some parts the poet finn (the honey-voiced finn, sweet his word to me, and his stories good for the telling!) relates at length the old Irish story of mad sweeny, cursed for killing a priest to turn into a bird and live in a tree, eating only cresses and berries and being continuously pricked by leaves.

at one point sweeny leaps across the sea to britain. it turns out that the place he leapt to was eigg, and that’s why the artists’ residency bothy there is named after him.