Markers

Only the yellow markers remain, two slanted lines running parallel at each consecutive right angle of where the tent was once pitched from one end to the other of the vast playing field. There is a scattering of hay here and there and some paper bags, uncollected. The event has come and gone. Alongside that field, in what would have been beyond the margins of the tent, there is the dog run which has barely got going yet. It is now established as a weekly event. People are beginning to gather. Dogs run and are called sharply by their owners as they scatter here and there over the surface of the ground once lost to the tent. One jumps and grounds another in mid-flight.

A man lays out a lime green kite on the ground in the field adjacent. It is one and a half times his size in every direction. I look away. When I look back it has gone and so has the man. Up in the sky something flutters, it's feathery multicoloured tail blowing in counter-direction to it. The man is way off at the other end of the field, a small figure in opaque metal blue running into the distance and becoming less and less distinct, tethering a line over his shoulder I think. There is no wind and the kite begins to falter and wind it's way back down. The rope goes slack. The man stops, turns and waits. Then he starts walking the long distance back through the field towards me. It takes forever. Later as I too make my way through the field in the opposite direction I see the remnants of the dyed individual feathers; red, yellow and blue lodged here and there between the tufts of prickly grass that I am picking my way through. The sound of helicopters overhead is unceasing and makes me bend more than I need to. It is what finally got me to move. Trains continue to cross one another at the far side of the field blending with each other before seperating out again.

Chairs

I go down below the level of traffic. People are spread out on the narrow grass verge, where the sun still filters down. It is pockmarked with the shadows of leaves already curling in the low range of the sun. Pink tables and chairs made from a single thickness of metal cut out consecutively to create slats in the back of the chairs and radiating holes upon the surface of each table are situated on an uneven stone patio under the full impact of that sun. The laquered pink enamel paint that covers all the surfaces inbetween the cut-out holes flares upwards. I sit down on one of these chairs out of a group of three or four left empty around one of those tables. I look up the vertical wall surface of the towering cathedral with the light directly on it. My neck aches to try and find the very top of it. I skirt across the pink surface that departs horizontally from my belly, reach into my bag and take out the wrapped up chocolate brownie. I break it in half, put the rest back into the bag and eat the remaining part in my hand. It is thick with chocolate and creates a rush to my temples. My eyes water. I stare out. My nose seems to flare up and itch. There's a man balanced on the edge of a wall by the entrance of the doorway who keeps rolling back on to the grass verge and then tipping forward again so that the underside of his flanks and thighs must make contact with the cold undersurface of that brick wall. He is saying something to the people as they go in and out of those wooden swing doors. His belly hangs over his trousers and the white shirt below the pulled tight jumper is clearly visible. He has dark hair that grows forward over his ears and continues over his chin, brushing his moist and potruding slightly parted lips.
A man and a woman approach me. They eye the tables and chairs and begin folding up the empty ones , collapsing them like a deck of cards. They go all around the patio floor picking out the uninhabited furniture, then linger on the side-lines and wait. I say something to the woman about musical chairs. I sit firm for a while and so do some others- we eye one another in a celebratory way, then slink off one by one as if we had something better to do. I go into the cathedral and am handed a program for evensong. I sit in the pew which is bathed in light, filtered, cut and moulded by the coloured glass in the windows which breaks up the story-line of those series into the molten wax of a mobile aquarium which I and others now inhabit.

A side door unlocks and a row of men in grey smocks down to their feet drift out one by one. There are gaps to this process so that they apear quite randomly to appear and suddenly to be there. Singing begins.
A deep male voice. Then stops. Croaks. Rebegins in a different key. This stopping and starting goes on for some time. The woman with the evensong program continues to hand out the folded paper to those in the pews. One by one they decline and within moments most have got up and left.  I am handed another program and the woman informs me that it won't be the boys singing it will be the men. I don't understand this comment. Something changes in the light as the sun moves fractionally down the building. The aquarium feel begins to go and things begin to concretize into set aspects. I too get up and go. I walk around the heavy dark lower regions of the outside of this grey building, past the throngs of people coming from the other way and make it to the river front by the side of a pub where many people stand with honey coloured glasses.
We are in shadow. I look out across the water to the other bank still flushed by the light. The bridge too is in the light so that the glass windows on the passing vehicles flashes on and off as each one consecutively passes  through the ray of the sun that bounces back to where we stand and vacantly gaze out beyond the already ensuing coldness of this bank. I make my way back on to that bridge but before I get there, as I am circumnavigating around the other side of the cathedral, the small battery operated open fronted pick-up carrier, now laden down with all the pink slated chairs and tables, all folded and pressed flat one against the other, passes me by. The woman driving it half turns and glances at me as for a moment we run along side together, before it overtakes me and goes off under the tunnel.

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Wikipedia: Mesh

Meshes are often used to screen out unwanted things, such as insects. Wire screens on windows and mosquito netting can be considered as types of meshes.


Wire screens can be used to shield against radio frequency radiation, e.g. in microwave ovens and Faraday cages.

On a larger scale, in terms of the spaces in between, chicken wire and chain-link fences can also be considered a type of mesh.

Metal and nylon wire mesh filters are used in water filtration, and making of beverages such as coffee.

Wire mesh is used in guarding for secure areas and as protection in the form of vandal screens.

Wire mesh can be fabricated to produce park benches, waste baskets and other baskets for material handling.

Wire mesh is the separation medium in vibratory screening units.

Mesh is also used as pockets for Lacrosse sticks.

A huge quantity of mesh is being used for Screen printing work.

Mesh

I`m looking at the green scum on top of the pond which is broken up in places so that the wind unsettles that water and the scum rearanges into different parcels that merge and break because it is influenced though always with a slight delay. I`m wondering about the sense of putting a wooden fence all the way around this man-made pond at the edge of the now dried up and out-of-use filter beds. At the far end of the pond there is a slab of concrete wall that carries on for a bit and then turns into scrub and the ragged and withered ends of blackberry bushes. The fence might as well have ended there but it doesn't . It carries on all the way around, barely two meters breadth away from that concrete slab. I think, "That could only happen in a city".
I am standing on the small dipping platform that has a wooden barrier that presses from my solar plexus to my floating ribs when I lean against it. I see a figure in the far distance moving towards me. I spot that figure at a long way off by the luminous yellow jacket that stands out in all that green. As he gets closer I glance sideways. He rolls his eyes backwards. Even when he has gone I keep staring on past the point where he had just been on into the scenery. There is a wet slightly chilled humidity to the day. I have cleaning products in the front of my bike; two mop-heads, a general disinfectant and a bathroom de-scaler. In the back of my bike I have dried noodles. I get back on my bike. Crossing the red bridge with metal flaps like wings to either side which effectively block off the view to the river and are the perfect surface for graffitti, I glimpse a heron standing on one leg on a grey water pipe which is exactly the same colour as the heron. Before that I went past the rows and rows of metal goal posts which stretch out over the vast playing fields and line up this way and that progressively, as I free wheel the bike. A massive truck filled with rubble thunders along the dirt track in front of me, than veers off just past the bridge and disapears behind foliage that sets apart the river from the field. Far off on the horizen the spokes of many seperately working cranes bow up and down on the raised mound so that at that distance they are each set at a different phase in their working lives upon which the Olympic games will one day open. I disapear along the bridge.  A girl sits on top of the bank round at the other side just past the underpass. She looks up the track at a group of three sitting at the bottom of a ridge by the path, then gives out a sound which is part laughter and part lament. As I pass the group further up one of the boys says "I'm going to go and piss next to her". Further up there are horses in the distance.  Behind them a bread  factory rumbles. There are pilons up above; wire cord strung out between splayed out metal legs rivetted to the ground that rise into a triangle.

Pause

I smell something and stop. Hang around the fruit and veg stall. Finger the yellow courgettes. The tiny plum tomatoes. So red. There is an abundance. A man with tatoos on the hanging flesh of his arms, with his shirt sleeves rolled up past the elbows sits beside the stall. The leg ends just before the fold of the knee so that infact there is no fold. Rather this parcellng off of the limb with the skin scrunched together like the twisted top of a well filled paper bag. It is honestly done. His muscles are firm above the knee. He is checking responses all the time, his face twitching , criss-crossing the flow of people that need to walk around veering out into the road because his wheelchair though well-back against the outside white wall of the building, faces another man at eye-level, also in a wheelchair. Sunlight glints off the highly polished metal surfaces of both sets of chairs which are now angled directly in the line of that sun. A woman stands behind the back of this man where she would need to be to push the chair. Seeing that this is not going to happen because the two men are deeply engaged now in conversation, she heads into the flower shop next door. All this I see from across the road as I wait propped up in the shelter on one of those red plastic ledge runners that are never too large to accomodate you for long. Across that road as the people begin to gather and spill on to either side of the glass panelled bus shelter, I can still smell distinctly that smell. I am led with my eyes to the back end of a lorry where the pull-down syncopated door has been run up as far as it will go. A man in blue overalls stands in the road and reaches into a box by the side of the open ended lorry and pulls out, handfulls at a time, tufts of fresh mint which he bunches tightly in the hollow of one hand gripping together his fingers around the stuff so that even from here, his white nuckles show, then trimming the endings which potrude out from the bottom of his hand before rapidly twisting and winding a length of dark string around that bundle, brushing over with the flat of his hand the top leaves as if to shake free any detritus and spread out more fully the leaves selected then placing the new bunch in a seperate box beside the one where the loose foliage is being drawn. Down on the tarmac of the road under and around his heavy dark shoes there are filaments of leaf, odd twiggy remains; a heap of stuff of no more use to him. The two men in wheelchairs continue to talk, the one with his back to the wall scanning still the passing crowds as he sits with his tatoos in the autummn sun. I am scanning too from over the other side of the road and at one point our eyes match, pause in that way, and then continue. I glance up. There is a man with thick grey hair sitting at a table on a chair beside a window which has no glass in it. In the next room men are moving around. That window in the next room is also just a hole in the wall. The walls are not white. They are peach coloured; the colour of wet plaster. The woman from behind the wheelchair who went into the flower shop comes out with what looks like a card in a brown paper envelope. She hands it to the man in the chair whose back is to the road. The bus comes. I get on and find a seat by the window. I will be going backwards. I smell engine oil. Further along I see an old woman with her head out of a top floor window eating a piece of fruit, letting the juice fall directly onto the pavement below. In Trafalgar square there are many people having their photos taken around the fountains. Whole families who each take turns to exit the portrait and take a photo of the remaining group who rearange and subtly adjust expressions each time. A large woman with a small sleeping baby passes the baby to her husband who props it up on the end of the runner to the side of the steps leading up from the main square. Enfolding himself around the stationery figure of the sleeping baby he smiles.

Areas of interest

I notice a cat on a portion of overgrown land fenced off all the way round. The land is an overhang by the side of a railway track. The cat was sat on a stone in the middle of that growth.

There is a cancellation. I was not told about it. I have time on my hands. There are other things I could be doing. I could be buying a mop and a bucket.

I leave. I cross the green and end up diverting into the green square of the bowling green. I prop my bike round the back of a bench and walk around in order to sit on it.

The eyes of a man glance over the edge of a window in a portakabin at the back of the bench. Before I sit down I notice that the door to the cabin is open and I see cleaning utensils propped up against the inside wall of a narrow corridor.

I sit on the wood of the bench which is worn away in places - cracked and splintering into powder so that the upturned screws that were driven in from underneath are revealed boring into the now lost wood.

Without really thinking about it I am rubbing the wood which remains between my forefinger and thumb, like tobacco. I am breaking off pieces and then rolling it like that into soft pulp and then into slivers or dust letting it drain away between my fingers.
I am breaking off larger and larger pieces where the wood still cracks as I get more and more involved as if it were bark from a tree. I find it relaxing to do. But I`m suddenly aware that this is a bench, the gnarled and fangled ribbing of the supportive and rusting metal structure on the underside through which the screws as they were sent into the wood were once driven, reminds me of that.
Does the man in the portakabin witness my act? A criminal act.

Two men, one young, one older enter the bowling green. They ask me if it is permitted to come in to this area. I say "Yes".

They glance towards the window of the portakabin. I look too but do not see any one there.
My phone goes off. I answer. I get up to leave.

She was a friend of mine

She stopped me in the road. Caught my attention. I stopped, straightened up from where I was bent over. Turned. Looked. There was a pause as our two faces matched. "Do I know you?" I said. She contined still smilling, still open, holding in tension that possibility. Believing in it. I scanned my memory of possible fits. Trying to make it work. She collapsed it. "Sorry I thought you were someone else". She moved off. Stopped outside a bookshop scanning the titles.

Earlier in a cafe with my back to the open door that led out into the road, I'd fixated on a bucket out in a backyard which could be seen through a series of two doors left ajar that lined up from where I was sitting. Drops of water bounced in and out again of this nearly full bucket so that the surface water rippled continuosly. I could not tell where the water was coming from because the door frame cut off midway my vision of the water descending. It was probably coming from a pipe because, as I knew full well- although I actually looked up to double-check- it wasn't raining. A man came in by that door and closed it.

Two pieces of furniture on the pavement struck me on the way out just before the incident with the woman where I said "Do I know you?" It was a small uphostered chair with an interesting curvature of the back and smooth nicely finished wooden legs and an even smaller side table made out of a single piece of polished yellowing plywood curved back on itself into an S. Together they created a beautiful clashing of surfaces. As I walked along the street I in fact kept looking back at these always adapting angles that lined up differently on every step and turn that I made. At the moment when I look back for the last time an old woman, tiny in frame who is bent over with her neck pressed into her shoulders with a soft downy and open face comes out of the shop dressed in brown and positions herself round to the front of the chair.

I actually got to the foot of the bridge where a sign warned of essential work being carried out. I could see a digger over by the old filter beds across on the other side of the canal where the level of the water drops suddenly to divert into the parallel flow of the River Lea creating an affect like a water fall with a constant sound that I like to hear when I am tired. That is by the side of a fig tree dusty from the road above where figs never grow to full size and by an old round lock house where the slates on the roof are beginning to fall. A man sat in the driver seat of that digger with his head far back. It was not moving or making any noise at all. I turn back and go in the other direction past a pub where there was a sign advertising an 18 piece band the weekend after next. But before I got there a man and a woman passed me. The man called back to me asking me if the bridge was closed. "No" I said.

I am passing building constructions, some almost completed, the cladding hugging it from the ground up. In other sections you can look right  into the timber framework of the various partitions that are demarcating rooms, corridors, individual living units. Some of the new glass windows look out onto the canal and some look in onto the playing field where the coloured frames of a children's play area can be seen in the distant. They are even dredging the canal, piling up all the rubbish in various cordoned off sections of water for later collection. Down the other way the Olympic Park is under construction. There's a recession everywhere else but in this derelict part of Hackney of  pre-war vacant Wharehouses and unexploded bombs the ground is being meticulously cleared and prepared for this housing project, one of many satellites out from the hub of the Olympic village.

I cross the bridge further up. I see that the cows have been put back on the marshes where they have been absent all summer. I collapse by the row of mature trees just down the slope. There is an upturned red traffic cone near to where I sit and some discarded paper. I think about moving the cone or at least standing it up but don't. I lie there like that. On the ragged grass with powdery earth between the tufts. When I open my eyes I hear the trees. My neck is stiff but I manage to twist it behind my left shoulder just enough to catch the flickering motion of leaves curling this way and that on themselves. It is an arangement of light and dark crashing in on one another. Stealing the space in a constant flicker. The wind is picking up. I walk behind the man and dog much further off now at the far end of the field. I turn onto the raised up decking which is a narrow path made of slats and slats of cut and nailed together lengths of wood. These are then covered with chicken wire pulled tight across the slats and also bolted down. I am passing the cows and at a very specific moment when I look over to where one of them is sitting the other one standing their horns appear to lock together. It is as if they were physically connected even though as I walk on these horns again float apart. One of the cows turns it's head.

Bringing back the receding line

A child in a pram who is being rapidly pushed away in the other direction fixes the top of my mango icecream with his eyes. It is beginning to fall, melting over the cone and over my fingers which are holding the cone. As the child moves further and further away he turns himself around in his pram so as not to break his gaze from the top of the icecream. He uses his forefinger to point exactly where he is looking as well. The road is busy. traffic is zooming around the back-log of buses queuing up behind the bus stop. A plant is being wheeled across this road on a trolly by a man who owns two shops, seperatd by that road. He keeps stopping and starting so as to let this car or that flush past him before he continues again. The cars do not stop. They just move around this obstacle wherever it happens to be at the moment they come across it.

One continuous movement

A man with a small can of gold paint sits on the pavement applying it delicately to the skirting and brocade work around a pub. A green balloon half full floats across the road. A woman touches the back of her neck with her hand from the inside of a window, then pulls a strand of this hair between her thumb and forefinger. Two policemen are holding the WALK sign trying to fix it back on the pole at the side of the road. The wires dangle out of one end of the box-unit. It lights up as they are both cradling it in their arms between them. There is barely anything in the first section of the shop that is being slowly emptied of all merchandise. Everything is piled at the back end where people make their way. On the shelves on the way in there are boxes and boxes identical in size all with pictures of grey stones on them. People slow as they pass. One man runs his palms over the demonstration stone by the side of one of the boxes where on the picture, water flows. I go into a church where there is free music. Electric guitars and a sweeping voice from a small head leant far back lifts me. It is a great harmonic clashing of colours, reflected back down in the high windows up above the dusty low hanging lights.There is this mounting presence that is building and I find myself becoming affected intensely. Then it stops. They begin to pack up putting the instruments away into the black cases in a matter of fact way. They leave the stage. I get a coke and go outside. I notice the spire is partly covered in cladding that gives it half way up, a square shape. When I return there is a man playing a finger piano and bending and straightening his legs in time. I stop in the park. There is movement in the grass. Maybe Squirrels. But no they are small rats. You know that by the way they are moving, never stopping, forging through the undergrowth with bellies floating just over the ground. It makes me want to hold my own stomach apart from the fascia around it. The rats cross along a fallen tree that spans above the water and reaches an island in the middle. A black cat runs on to the swollen and woven strands of tha base of the tree and then on to the thick end of that crossing. There is a scurrying sound. One of the rats drops off and hits the water. The cat continues. There are children in coloured clothes hanging on to the inner branches of a small tree over in the distance. A man calls to them as he moves towards the tree. He takes a picture from up close suddenly becoming very still. One by one they drop out then jump up from out of that grass as one continuous movement.

On that day

She is worried about litigation. Altough the platform is only two inches off the ground, if anyone should fall, knock into one another, bruise or begin to feel low in themselves, it is the society that will take the blame. They will deal with complaints, use every strategy as a pick-me-up. Soothe and cajole these little known strangers who will suddeny become their charge; their concern. Do they need it? Would you need it? Would you take on that risk? The possibility of a fall. A wrong foot in a moment of absent-mindedness.Who can blame that on this organisation or that. A lack of preparedness. Is it possible to prepare for a fall? Aren't you rather putting it on the agenda in that way? But health and safety is an issue. And as long as they are up on that platform during the demonstration it`s the Society that is liable. So go ahead with the show. Even allow participation. Any kind that is considered necessary. But make sure that people are seen to be going ahead with those moves which are simple for some and difficult for others, in a casual way. A matter of mere coincidence that they should take up with those particular moves all at once. Really a bit of a non-event. Because they are clearly not on the demonstration platform that will remain empty, with a fence all the way around; the keys confiscated from all those present on that day.

My eyes hurt

It's windy. No sun . Just a level brightness. That changes remotely by degrees shifting up or down a gear but never creates those simultaneous contrasts of light and dark. No shadow. My eyes hurt. They are small slits against which this white wash crashes down. Beats its way through in to far off capillaries. Angles a way through in which I have no say. It's cruel. And the traffic is cutting up from behind. Riding on the end of that glare. Everyone is a little bit mad today. I can not look at anything directly today. Because if I do,  it burns out and turns to white. There's a chemical reaction going on. And rubbing my eyes doesn't help. It just gets further in and when I look again with red smarting eyes everything either bends out impossibly or inwards into an intensity like the pip of a transparent grape. So there is no problem reaching people. I am reeling from one to another, tripping on the flatness of the paving stones that I suppose to be curving up or down. Level ground has never been so dangerous. There is no stalling. No gripping. No traction. Just a slipping through.
I seem to slip through bodies. Things that would phase me- Cars, looks, certain postures, don't. I simply slide by. I am I think getting faster and faster. It's a way to catch up with the light. To out-run it. Or at east to play against it like a wind-surfer. Because crashing into it, swerving against it, creates that missing traction. My body becomes the blotting paper to that streaming white light.

Because I can not look directly into the bulk of bodies, I am noticing the tiny peripheral manoevres. The swaying, tilting of the arms or head. The torsion of the trunk. But it is not seperated out into these parts as the words suggest. It is simply a levering away from a mid-line that is always happening. That is human play. I'm in love with it. The little adjustements that are made. And I  manage my approach to coincide with these evolving and strange bodily yearnings that I equally follow.  It is a forest where this constant growth towards the light is percievable. Suddenly the speed itself jumps into this filter of minute to minute slowed-down formation. It is like a slow yawn. The shopping trolleys, the moving pedestrains, the vegetables, the bodies. That person, that person. The stillness of the girl looking back. The man behind the counter, weighing the vegetable that fall out and mix back through one another. We are moving in this subteranean under-water life. We can not jump the distance with any kind of sensory device. We have to wait until we are up against one another, in this melee. Falling and catching so that neither entirely happens. Suddenly distance is anticipated and closed and proximity is dotted with holes, spread out and dissipated. Everything happens in good time. People move closer whilst not seeming to.

Procession

Bricks collapsing in upon one another inside a window frame. Beyond that frame the pile of bricks mounts up all around clustering around that entrance. I crane my neck out the upstairs window on the bus rudely past the passenger on the inside of me, staying with the bricks for as long as possible. In the background, Alexandra Palace, shimmering on the hill. At the carnival I go down a side-street where multi-coloured animals fill the space between the buildings from pavement to pavement. People are enmeshed within the drapes and foam, preparing, standing this way and that, adjusting head-gear, taking pictures of one another.
I take some pictures and it looks like an animation on my screen with only the glint of eyes hinting through at the real-life aspect. In one animal- some kind of white lizard, there is no head at all. Just the odd motion or swaying from within. Then the head pops out and rolls to one side. A sleepy child sitting on the pavement waiting to begin.

Later in the thrall of people I try to make my way down a side street but am blocked by police. Suddenly that gateway is opened and I am literally pumped down that channel. I want to cross the road and get into the park. The swim of people are pressing in. I step on to the road where the parade is moving but a woman holds me up. I say I want to get to the park. She says I need to go around to the end of the procession. I look out into the distance at a shimmer that fades but never ceases. It just keeps coming. She looks as well. Finally she brushes me through. In the park a man is doing body moves with the children and throwing out hand-fulls of sweets which many eyes watch searing through the sky, then pounce on. A large woman tries to get them too but the kids are on them before she has even bent over. She straightens up again quickly. There's a basin where children run, holding on to the rim so that very suddenly you are face to face with one of them. Then letting go and falling down, turning and running on to the bumps and mounds in the centre they become smaller.

A small boy with a barrel chest, shorts and stick out hair keeps low to the surface feeling out the smoothness with his hands, clambering up a bit, slipping down, falling on to his bottom, turning on to all fours, jumping up, then propelling onwards again until the next slope or curve slows him and positioned now onto one of the small mounds in the centre, he is jumping up and down, working up a rhythm with his whole body raised and lowered in tandem so that a jolt seems to rivet through his frame each time his feet slam into the concrete. When he runs back through to the steep part of the slope a mature woman with blonde hair, a salmon pink ruffled skirt and a white blouse bandaged around her breasts, moves unevenly to the top of the rim and hoists the boy up with his outstretched arms. At the top he jumps up and down once again and then rolls back down on his bottom with his hands to either side of him, and his feet scrambling, slowing him. Another child rolls his trycicle to the rim and when it rolls back down towards him he sits down on it. A skinny girl, older than the others, does cart-wheels back and forwards continuously up on the rim near a group of adults.
The music from the parade is making the park throb. People lie out on every patch of available space. The smells of chicken cooking are everywhere. I eat a piece of cake. The air is full of smoke and as the sun lowers, light cuts through these wafts of haze between the trees, revealing a limb, a hand, a gesture, a breathing stomach a chair-leg or dis-used  polystyrene container. A man buys corn where it is being cooked on a large grill. It is put for him into a brown paper bag which he pulls half-way down immediatly as he is walking away so that his mouth can make contact with the sweet burnt corn.

Old people line the edges of the park facing outwards to the gay paraphenelia of the parade. They have deckchairs, easy chairs, stools and hard-backed chairs. Some carry umbrellas and most have elabrate sun-shades attached to their hats. Some of the women wear multi-floral headscarves which hold in place wrap-around glasses. A young black man who is very skinny and wears a neatly pressed checked shirt tucked into his belted jeans and who has on his face heavy rimmed black glasses calls down to some people from the top of the slope next to the concrete basin where the kids are still running and jumping. A thin tall elegant black woman and a fair haired man with blue track suit bottoms and a T.shirt with foreign wording on it make it up the slope holding hands and stand a little distance apart from the other man, with arms around each other.
I go down to the street again where the parade is on-going. There is a man across the road in an immaculate white suite standing by the sporting club. With all the commotion in the street -the comings and goings of trucks, sound-systems and winged men and the red head-dresses of dancing women- I am transfixed by this apparition shimmering in the distance. He is so completely still.  In the park again I watch the police using a very specific hand-gesture with an open palm which looks more like an invitation but is used by them almost like a flipper to direct and/or inhibit the flow of people. A young officer with reddened cheeks and his helmet crushed down too far over his narrow head is trying to execute this gesture effectively. He keeps stopping and adjusting an earpiece. As it happens, perhaps because the command keeps changing so regularly, the special flipper gesture floats a certain section through and all of a sudden, almost randomly inhibits the entry of this person or that, who simply flow around the edges of his flipper hand or wait a moment until the order reverses in on itself and helplessly he lets the built up surge flow through.  He looks hastily from right to left at his co-workers who are busy becoming gates and levies all of their own. Then suddenly a rigid panel up ahead is formed with layer upon layer of uniformed bodies that seal off the top of the road as the truck rolls to a halt and again the procession is jolted out of any continuous motion- compartmentalised into short "takes". One man in a puffer jacket rheels against the obstruction he faces. He reverses into a backflow through the crowd which he bombards his way through. Time passes and a back-log builds up behind the truck, of people on people. The police now begin to seperate out again streaming out from the centre line like a knot unravelling. The engine of the truck engages.

Across the park by the side of the canal there are black metal steps that spiral up to the level above where the road just past the junction spans across the water. These stairways are blocked off from ground level with a large wooden board tied to either end of the bannisters and resting on the grass. Up above on the bridge a policeman has his back to the black metal gates. People are entering and leavng the park through a tiny slit in the greenery. I pass through as well and stand watching people trailing off along a narrow path in single file next to the water on which some boats are also moving.

Walking back down a side street far from the parade I stop outside a pub for a guinness. There is a woman sitting by the side of the road with her head  in her hands. She stays like that and does not change her position all the time I am there. Her hair is over her face. As I pass her later on I see a transparent tube coming out from a square blue hip bag by her side and feeding across her chest into her mouth.