Shepherdess Walk

 I headed out at around 3am, up the hill to Angel, intending to follow the canal east, but distant bellowing and rythmic, pointless pounding on a bus shelter sent me down a street I hadn't seen before.

  

It was a couple of blocks before I realised where I was. I hadn't seen the City Road Basin from this end before, if you can call the middle an end.

 

 I first started taking nightwalks in my late teens, leaving parties for an hour or two to test my nerve. And I'm reminded of that when I walk around Primrose Hill, but here I was suddenly reminded of other streets.

 

 In the year between school and university I had travelled to America, finishing up in Toronto. It was a mess. I didn't always have a room for the night. One night I'd sleep under a bandstand, another night a graveyard, places I thought I'd be left alone.

 

  And one night I just stayed up in a place that gave me free donuts because I made the waitress feel safe. Why was I reminded of Toronto now? Possibly because of the architecture. Possibly because I was hungry.

 The 24 hour drive-thru was only serving people in cars, for "health and saftety reasons" – I put that in inverted commas only because I suspect it's a euphemism rather than a lie.

 

 I mean, I suspect people who approach a drive-thru at 3am in a car might well be safer than someone approaching on foot. Actually, I'm not sure I do suspect that, but I could see they might seem safer. I regretted even asking, and remembered back to when I used to get free donuts.

 

  Did taking photographs make me seem more or less of a threat? I mean, in general. I would have thought less. If I was at home now, I thought, watching television, the only place I'd be thinking about would be the space in front of the television. I should keep going for walks.

  I bought a "New York Deli" bloomer and a Creme Egg from Texaco next door. Already remembering Toronto, I immediately recognised the smell of the coffee machine from 1994 – or whatever the coffee machine was smelling of. Twenty-five cents got you a pecan pie back then. Twenty-four cents got you nothing.

 

 The freedom to fail is a hell of a privilege, of course, the identity of "loser" only adoptable by those in no danger of being destroyed by their losses. Things seemed quieter by the time I returned to the canal.

 On the walk back, I filmed a small creature in the road. A minute into filming, I realised it had probably wanted to get past, and felt guilty for blocking its path. 

 

 I hoped it would approach.

 

Hungry Hungry Harpies

  

 

 "Gods, Men, and Monsters"... I'm still thinking about that title.

 Of all the monstered women of Greek Mythology the most referenced is probably the harpy. There are no drawings of harpies in my old Greek Mythology notebook however, so here instead is Raoul Servais's Harpya, a cracking interpretation, funny in a way that makes it hard to see how one could faithfully depict the myth of a lady with the body of a large bird who repeatedly steals food without being funny. Her gender here is a default rather than a dig though, and her modestly civilized Phineas an identifiably unsustainable sap. Originally recommended by David Cairns here, I came across it again looking through the same unposted, old drafts from 2015 in which I'd found my David Icke notes. The draft began: "I was thinking about monsters," - so, not as new an activity as I thought then - "and who to make the baddies. Binge-watching Buffy and thinking about how, growing up, the monsters don't actually appear to go away..." then there's some stuff about the House of Lords. No idea. Let's just watch the cartoon. They don't give out Palme D'Ors to any old rubbish, you know.

 

 

 (Having never drawn a harpy at school, my first attempt at depicting one must have been at University, sellotaping bamboo canes to my sister's fingers for a film of The Tempest that she'd come down to help with only to end up being cast as Ariel. She was excellent, and looked nothing the Harpy above. Tom Lyall's Caliban on the other hand...)

 

EXCITING SPACE ADVENTURE 2

"Oh, Zif, I'm so glad we decided to go fishing in the Plains of Madness."
"Hm?"
"Were you distracted just then by Zork's catch?"
"No. Hm? No... Just... Just wondering who's boat that is - Hey, is that a tent?"


Later that day:

"Honestly, Janik-Sue, how can we still be hungry? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha."

(With thanks to Shusei Nagaoka and, as ever, 70's sci-fi art.)