One of my favourite Orwellian canteens. It no longer exists.
Six months since I last wrote. I haven’t travelled since Lisbon in September. I must make time for both. Time and head space, but they go together really. I have a new job, that will be a good opportunity to re-evaluate time. Not the metaphysical concept, I don’t think I have anything new to say about that, but how to make use of time, and divide between work and personal time. It is similar to the previous job, just at a different theatre, with different people. Very turbulence, which I think is what I enjoy. Everything was getting to be the same. Better pay too, thanks to Bectu and Sundays. For the first time ever, I can make financial plans from an optimistic perspective, with a reasonable conviction that they are achievable, and in a few years will enable some changes; part time working, setting up a business studying, writing, travelling, photography. Quite unusually I actually want to share my work more widely, get feedback and critique. I want the river film work to end now. I keep on pushing on at it but it has revealed all it can now. I could just stop, withdraw from social media presence. Re-create myself in a year or two.
I feel strangely comfortable here. There was a woman earlier who reminded me of Kate Williams in the ITV remake of Birds Of A Feather. Sensible, blunt, wearing a beige-red raincoat and headscarf. With the light fading from where I’m sitting now everyone is silhouetted. Mostly older people, with one or two token young men at any given moment. Plenty of lone people, plenty of conversation too. I’ve just overheard that this gin palace coaching inn may be closing soon. I shouldn’t really be especially bothered, but the Orwell chain is shrinking, every few months another tranche of outlets are up for sale. Word from the headscarf ladies is that a hipster gastropub group has bought it. Maybe Antic, they would suit the neighbourhood, although they lived on debt and were closing outlets too. I miss the Technical in Leyton, I felt bohemian and vibrant, engaged. I suppose I was involved in creative things then, which made me feel positive. I mixed with creative people, with opinions, anger, hormones. We talked a lot of rubbish and thought we knew everything but it was a fun time. I doubt I’d be able to re-capture that fake Paris 1968 feeling again. I’m too old and sensible now. I should reconnect to creative people though. Writers, walkers, thinkers, talkers. I’ve declared myself not an artist though. I don’t relate to the establishment art world, don’t fit in with it. Don’t want to talk about it. I wonder whether travel writing could be a serious option for me, if/when time and funding allow. You have to really talk to the locals to understand places, to be able to tell their stories. Now I’ve said that I feel like Michael Portillo in his pink blazers though.
My mind is awake now. I don’t want to go home yet but will have to soon. It is twilight outside and I have a camera with me. The city at night is a theme of video work that I haven’t yet started. Perhaps it is ill-formed. Edward Hopper inspired. You see, I can be knowledgeable about art from outside the establishment. I could cut raw footage into eg 5 second parts, but not layer them over each other. What then? Or why? It always feels like a backdrop to something else which isn’t there. Patrick Keiller style voice narrative maybe, but about what? I manage to put thoughts into words in written form, I don’t know if they belong on moving image though. The headlights of buses are casting coloured shadows in the frosted glass windows. I can’t point the camera in here though, too many people, too intrusive. It could be an opening sequence to something, couldn’t it? I don’t know what. A man is singing randomly at a woman now though, that isn’t the done thing. I’d better go.
Andrew Stevenson 