The sun again but the world will never

 Unlike almost exactly twenty-seven years previously, there wasn't a cloud in the sky when I clicked publish on my previous post with a still-weirdly-minstrel-adjacent white kid glove – (or is it a butler's hand? Is the cursor meant to be my servant's hand rather than an extension of my own? And should I still be using yellow-handed emojis even though everyone else seems now to have switched to their own flesh tone, just because yellow's the colour of the emoji's faces and I'd always assumed the hands belonged to the same guy? Did Harvey Ball ever stop to think what a storm of care he was seeding when he invented the smiley?

 

It looks like he might. Close brackets) – and so when I did indeed leave the laptop and race off to Brixton for the solar rematch, there was no filter this time to shield our glimpses. I use the first person plural because it felt so obviously communal, as it had in '99. And Iceland was still there, and Boots. And I realised as I revisited that intersection of Electric Avenue and Brixton Road where Fin and Jeremy had filmed each other at the last darkening, that this is also where I had Gabbie meet Martin in Time Spanner in 2016. Here's the trip to that spot as I try to desmear my phone.

 

 

 The sun had moved of course, it does that, and was now directly at the end of the road at almost eye level. At the end of every road facing west in fact, and the bus stop opposite Brighton Terrace at the stroke of seven gave you a dangerously uninterrupted view. I shielded my face with the phone, but the eclipse would only show up on my screen as a green crescent glare (see the thumbnail below). Those without special glasses also tried our luck with a reflection in the window of H&M. I wonder if the guy inside knew what we were doing, why so many of us were just standing there, staring into his shop, our backs to an event that wouldn't happen again for another sixty-four years. As I said, really the event was us looking at it though, so that's what I've cut together below.

 In other news, it is midnight in Highbury and finally raining.

 

Floaters and Flashes

 That's last night. This is not a sponsored post but if you're wondering, the PIKOY Galaxy Projector Light is available on ebay for about thirty quid, and I definitely recommend it. You can change the colours, and it also does stars but they're immutably green. I assume white light's too messed up for a laser. This was today:

 

 I found a new park overlooking the Lea Valley, and it being Summer and me being someone attempting to live in the present, I lay down in the grass. Looking up at bare blue, my view was interrupted by more wavering forms: previously unnoticed cobwebbby gunk "floaters". The NHS website says they're only cause for concern if you've not seen them before. When I sat up and they didn't go away, I briefly made plans for going blind. Very briefly. I mean, something something talking books, that was the extent of it. Because then I wondered, what if they weren't new, what of they were one of the reasons I'd felt so much no this year, one of the bags over my head, in my way in my head? There's a blank wall in front of me now, I'll stare at that. 

 Okay, it seems they've gone.

Emu's World

 

 

 Having paid my respects to the category-defying works of Fred Spencer, I feel I should probably also share some weird, personal, self-produced music videos that are actually ept. Jazz Emu's visual album Ego Death (below) came to my attention last year when the video for Fun Kitai Furai Dei (above) appeared on a bill of comedy shorts at the Ritzy to a hot crowd of universally dropped jaws. When real-name Archie Hendersen's full album showed up on youtube in March, its brilliance lifted me out of a particularly lightless attenion-deficit - I had just moved to a spacious flat near Arsenal and decided to keep the walls bare, a stowaway in my new captital P place, my brain two-thirds phone. That threat of playing statues hasn't entirely vanished, the feeling of wanting to tell myself to just go on ahead and I'll catch me later. But Ego Death still gets me moving.