Wivenhoe one.

Hellooo and welcome to the first of a new load of blogs coming from pretty little Wivenhoe. I haven’t managed to get hold of a road map yet – I’m working on it* – but for this small introduction piece I don’t really need one. I only walked down ONE road. I’m lazy but you love it.

Oh, I nearly forgot to mention. This is an evolution of a series I started bored before uni in which I attempted to walk every street in Letchworth. Haven't finished that one yet but we'll see how this one goes. FIND IT HERE

*Finding one. I’d love to be able to keep you updated on my walking through drawing what would be a pretty awesome medieval map but I don’t exactly have the necessary skill set to do so

All ready to go. Notice correct sock to day alignment

The starting point: my house. Watsham Place, Wivenhoe, UK. Observe the lovely road sign that can withstand being bumped by my friend Johno in his car. He's a terrible sober driver. 

The view as you step out of my house and the direction in which I will be walking this afternoon

To the left, to the left. More on this later.

To the right - and a window to Mark's room

Onward, then, and a lovely picture of next door to me: the fire station. Handy if we're ever ablaze. Crossing the road, and we see a pub and the road to uni in front of us. Funnily enough, we're pretty much the first house in the suburb that is Wivenhoe, so about equal distance between uni and town. I have never set foot in this pub. It is named The Flag and one of the first things I heard about my house once friends had popped round to say hello was a rumour that it is a racist pub. To the other side, we can see One Stop and some other shops: an empty one that used to sell flowers or mirrors or something, Hair Technique (where I get my barnet done), Henley's the award-winning chippie and Boots. We're going in this direction. Henley's never really impressed me beyond its signed pictures of celebrities on the wall (Jonathan Ross, Chris Tarrant, Frank Bruno TWICE, Jasper Carrot et al) but recently it's tasted a lot nicer and I've found myself won over by its large portions at a relatively cheap price. I've never realised just how conveniently located our house is.

Faster than calling 999

Racist pub -> expensive corner shop that I shouldn't use in the stead of regular weekly shops but I still do

FISH AND CHIPS HERE 

Turning left at Boots, we get to the only road I'll be walking along today. But first, an apparently dangerous bollard:

Hazardous

... and we arrive on a fine row of bungalows that seem, well, charming. The gardens are all well kept & I begin to suspect that a blog stretched out from a single road won't be quite as boring as first expected. The houses look like this:

Judging by the camper: excellent residents.

If you're new to this series, it's at this point that I begin to bitch about people's gardens and windows. Here are two houses that seem to be named after places in The Lord of the Rings and a house that feels the need to display both '15' and 'FIFTEEN' in case the postman is an idiot. Which is unlikely, because they live close to me and the guy who delivers my post is really very nice. I apologise for the unclear pictures: that's the zoom. This is my first photo-taking walk and I haven't quite built up the courage to get close to people when taking pics of their house yet.

And onward. One guy is very slowly building up a garden chess set. He's stuck on one of four rooks. Much more excitingly, I found a garden with disgusting furnishings: a tree-look bird table with a stone squirrel on it and a stone snake to scare away bloggers who go for walks with their phone cameras. Nutter.

The second might actually be a little bit funny if I'd had the gall to hang around long enough to grab a decent picture. To make do, I have enlarged it for your delectation. But now it just looks massively disproportionally important to this blog. I HAVE FEW STRAWS TO CLUTCH

Nothing else really interesting on this road. A massive tree root, two colourful garages and a dude working on his car. How dull. 

MASSIVE. I told you!

...and we return home. Let's go round the corner from my house, towards our garage. Walking past the two other houses on our little terrace, I can see that the third has bin bags outside, an open electricity box and what looks like white spray paint on the door, downstairs AND upstairs windows (only the ones facing the same way as the door). Although this is where a lot of the football team live, and they do have a rivalry with hockey, I don't think they've been attacked or anything. It's probably snow spray that they haven't bothered cleaning off, right?

House number 3) - vandalism or bad fake snow still there in February?

Fuck da feds, I'm going this way (I didn't go that way)

Left at the end then, and towards my back garden. As the turning (it sounds long. It's actually about fifteen paces) approaches, I realise that I've never actually gone beyond it and decide to continue straight, to see the house behind mine. It turns out there's three. And they're really nice. One day, if I've done alright in life, I hope to be living somewhere like I do now. I seem to have forgotten to take any pictures of two of the three, maybe because one house didn't have net curtains and I'd feel bad scouting for thieves. This one has a big telly, a small fountain in the back garden and a basketball hoop on the side. Another is almost farm-housey, maybe owning the fields that are next to mine. 

Left at the tree for mine. Straight ahead on the left is what we'll term the farmer's house and at the end is the nice big house

The back of my terrace

Totally a bit farmy, right?

'Cross Fare'? This is the inside of the farmhouse gate

Let's turn around. Might as well show you my garden whilst we're here for a nice round trip. Disclaimer: we're students. Don't judge us too much. The left of these three garages is ours, and we have a door to it in our garden. More than that sucker middle house can say! In this we keep my beer brewing kit that it's currently too cold to use and we let Dom, a really nice man who lives round the corner and works at uni security, keep his 'classic car' in the winter. I haven't got anything bad to say about the guy, I sometimes see him at 3am drunk coming out of a club and have a nice chat with him. His car, though, isn't so much classic as old. But I'm no connoisseur.

This is my room & my shadow. I live downstairs next to the kitchen/living room and have a French window (well, in this case, patio door, not French windows (boo)) which is useful if I'm hiding from people but need the toilet. I can sneak round/go in the garden. HYGIENE SUX

A dead pot plant that was here when we arrived. In it I have left my herbs that died from not being watered when I was home for Christmas

Graham, our metal tortoise, next to the smoker's patch and a broken one of my pasta bowls. The old coffee jar I put out so Rich had somewhere to put his butts is kind of full, as you can see, but that's no excuse for him not to pick them all up. This annoys me.

Our slowly growing traffic cone collection. The one on the left is kind of lime green but you can't really tell any more. Bad photo and it's rather weathered

That's me done for my first walk in Wivenhoe. I hope you like this sort of thing, because you're likely to be getting a lot of it in the coming months. Or not. Subsequent posts will be about the same length, but much more brief coverage of a much longer walk so should be more entertaining. Pop back soon please.

Before then, you might want to give my friend Forest's new blog a try. He's just starting up, so be nice to him. At the time of posting, he's not actually published anything but word is that the first is scheduled for posting in twenty minutes' time.

Have a nice week!

J

Writing - poetry #2

Afternoon all, hope you're well. You may remember this post, a month ago, in which I shared an upbeat little ditty about two of the world's oldest professions. Today, something a little more dark.

___

Sonnet no.1

Burn each and every member of the flock
Before the black bird swoops and takes his prey

(The most easy of these: those numbed by shock,

The rest blinded or taken in affray).

But he swoops, he dives, he eats my insides

And blood drips as we crow, his beak a key

That opens me. Again, I watch him glide

I’d rather drift, a pyre out at sea.

It seems smoking him out has no effect

So now it is my chest where he resides –

Jailed by ribs, they can take all his pecks

With his tongue I have no need to comply.

Now after so long abusing my pen

All of my words shall become mine again.

___

List #5 - I promise Emma is cool with this and in fact asked me to put this up SO NAH

I took this from a vaguely project-y writing exercise I've just started: my own, generally unpublicised, version of Richard Herring's excellent Warming Up.  It wasn't written well, given I wrote it at about 2am. Nor is it really written for anyone but me to read, but effort to rewrite - so at the moment it's an odd cross between, like, Robert Louis Stevenson and Charlie Brooker... But obviously that doesn't apply to the frankly rubbish list which is 100% tired Laing puerility:

At Chappers' party, Emma had a story. Emma had Shiv's story. Juicy gossip attracts Gemma Inglis and myself as if moths to artificial light, yet Emma would not budge. Eventually, we extracted some small pleasure by spreading the TOTALLY TRUE rumour that Emma bloodthirsty Brooking and Shivan shitting Handa have been known to, on occasion, become involved with pleasures of the anal variety; an absolute fact the sordid pair somehow derive pleasure from. From now on, I am to greet and refer to Emma only as thus:

- dirty bottom; or
- sticky passage ; or
- spunk seat ; or
- cheeked botty ; or
- soiled buttock ; or
- perved pads ; or
- ejaculate ass ; or
- dodgy derriere

And I hope she learns the hole of her lesson.

Walking #5

I cannot be bothered to go and find all of my old pictures from this, nor remember about all the walking I did. Will one story do for all of the extra walking I've done?

LAST MAP

CURRENT MAP

So I figured I could get a section of this done walking to Baldock for a couple of tennis matches I had organised, and another (big) section done on a different route back.  Turns out I was a bit late so took a shortcut - partially already walked - on the way there, which I justified to myself with the thought of going over an entire estate on my way back, just en-route.  Midway through the second I realised I was so shattered that I couldn't feasibly walk home in good time, let alone get to explore Letchworth a bit, so didn't bother in the end.  I did get a little bit done, though.

Some assorted pictures I found from walking from ages ago:

  My friend Tom does a photo of the day. This was the 365th one. 

Stopped off in a pub in Hitchin. This guy blew mah miiind

My brother posing with a cowpat 

 

On the Isle of Wight, but fuck it: I looked down. A face stared right back up at me.  Granted you can't really see the face that much but I figured the story was vaguely worth it when this post looked a bit sparse.

Right, that's your lot.  Wednesday walking's back with a bemused smile and a newly undisguised apathetic outlook on the world, baby

Bands Good Enough for Me to Pay to Advertise Them

I really like music. Like, loads, yeah?  When I first joined Blogger, I followed several people without really reading their stuff as a way into the community.  As it turns out, the vast majority of Blogger seems to be fashion blogs; something I have little to no interest in.  However, amongst a load of floral print dresses, a segment of leftie politics and a few recipes dotted around the place I found one post,  on Hipster Musings, about T-shirts.  I really enjoyed it, and here's my cheap imitation (the closest thing you'll ever get to a fashion post from me):

  I really really like Wild Beasts.  I like this shirt because I like Wild Beasts and I think it's quite cool - but it doesn't really mean anything, special or otherwise, to me.  Should it?  I wear it to gigs a lot, I think.  There's two slightly annoying things about it - the bit that says Wild Beasts is really small and usually folds over, as well as it being oddly long yet snug It's just an odd shape and I have no idea why.  This was on offer online - so I OBVIOUSLY SNAPPED it up. My favourite Wild Beasts album is Smother, but song-wise it has to be All the King's Men which is an absolutely cunting tune.

                                                                

I bought this at a market in a French castle several years ago, just after I passed my massive RHCP stage. I'm not sure I really like them that much any more, but it's a nice piece of bed-wear nonetheless.  I think it's a girl's fit, but I'm not sure.  Favourite chilis song is probably Otherside, but I've always had an unexplained soft spot for Fortune Faded. 

                                                                 

Look See Proof were, for quite a while, THE cool local indie band.  They headlined, I think, or at least played at, my first local gig; for a while they looked like they might actually make it; their farewell show was the pinnacle of an era of my life.  All that said, I didn't own this shirt then.  Sometime about two years ago mum came home bearing this as a gift.  She'd found it in a charity shop, which seemed pretty apt given my quick transition from change from club night indie wanker wannabee to charity shop jumpers, books and vinyl loser.  Their best song was Casualty but Discussions and Local Hero were stonkin', too - my favourite was always this one which began with an S which I can't quite recall. EDIT: found it!

When they split up, they released a free internet EP which I can promise you is still amazing.  Ever now and again I find it on an old computer and overplay it for a month before promptly forgetting about it again.

(I'm listening to them now. NOSTALGIA. Only bands from that time of my life I still really like are Guildean Gang, Spiked and Model Horror.  I'm well over Rosalita.)

                                                               

     

This is a relatively recent purchase - The October Game are one of those bands that don't play 'my kind' of music, but are fairly incredible live and good enough that I like them nevertheless.  Think they're a bit of a music geek's band.  It's too small, but I bought that size because trying it on I had another shirt underneath and the creepy guitarist selling it was giving me a funny look.  Found out when I got home it had gaffa tape from display still attached to it and oil stains at the bottom :( Still, it's an alright shirt, and they're a good band. Just listen to this and see how fantastically cool this is!  People like Zoe from ladybirdlikes will proper love that second link.

                                                                

I don't really like New Found Glory, to be honest, but I got this shirt with the only money I spent on a free day out for a friend's birthday (I can never thank Esther McNeil and her lovely mum enough) which was an evening in Leicester to see Paramore play (supported by NFG, Kids in Glass Houses and another band I've forgotten the name of. Conditions?) at the De Montfort hall. Great night, and this shirt looked really cool. I still wear it pretty often - the print's just 'New Found Glory' written loads of times in loads of different styles, by the way.

                                                                 

Bought this years ago but still love it. I don't wear it very often - I don't really like wearing black shirts, not sure why - but the band (Spiked, obviously) only get better and, excitingly, two thirds of them are proper besties of mine.  The other third apparently used to go to the pub with Yannis from Foals all the time, but *clutches, grabs a straw* he's probably a dick and I <3 Sian and Lauren so fuck them! What is it about assonance that you always have to put monosyllabic names first?  Anyway, yes, had for years, bit small now, love it, amazing family at the heart of the properly brilliant band.  Best song is reeeeeallly difficult, I like their new EP 'Machines Please' too much to choose, really, but out of songs I can link you to I'm going to pick Good with Dollar.  If you don't like pretty heavy stuff (and I don't, really, it's just Spiked and Hold Your Horse Is) Casio Kid remixed their song What's This? which is ace too. 

                                                                

I've seen Fiction once.  They're not actually that good - they're not bad at all, just quite, not that, good - but the combination of really liking their shirt, really enjoying Klaxons (who they were supporting), and Klaxons having 'meh' shirts made me get this as a memento.  I'm not sure why I like it so much, I just really love the design... it's an owl, man! Trouble with wearing it underneath a white shirt (as you do at school etc) is the orange eyes look a little bit like a tea stain and you get a lot of remarks.  I wear this all the time.  Best song... not sure.  I think there's a car advert on at the moment which uses one of theirs, so that's ruined their cool, but they're toured with Klaxons, Warpaint, and soon Metronomy, so that's not too bad at all - there's a song called Phyllis which you can get for free which is pretty good... Ooh, just googled them, this is a song called Parakeets. It is good. 

(that was a lie. I had not listened to it when I linked.  However, I have heard 1:17 of it now, seems alright)

                                                              

Big big love for the Hives shirt! Bought this at Wireless, during a Pulp song, because they were so good.  I think that they are second only to Blur in my 'best live bands' list they were just that good. £20, which is twice what you should pay for any good band tee, and I still didn't have the sense to not take this wonderful white shirt to Reading this year.  IT IS STILL MUDDY.  I don't regret a penny of that twenty, though.  Great band, great shirt which gets me occasional high fives from strangers.  As I tweeted last night, they're very much a listen to LOADS for half a year then forget about for 18 months before a prompt rediscovery and half-year LOVE (repeat) kind of band, great for angry teens, frustrated fathers and nostalgic nannies alike.  It's a fairly obvious choice but this is probably their best song, although this or this would be my favourite.  For the second 'this' link, skip to 6 mins in and watch the PERFECTLY timed guitar drop over and over again and marvel, like I did, for days.

  Stax are a record label, not a band, I know, but I like Northern Soul and I got these and the Kinks shirt whilst Andrew got The Beat's Stand Down Margaret and The Who's My Generation tees.  They're pretty darn coooooooooooool, no? No, thought not :(

KINKS SHIRT WHICH DAD GOT OFF DAVE DAVIES FROM THE KINKS WHO HE USED TO LIVE NEXT DOOR TO DEFINITELY DESERVES CAPITALS. IT'S TOO SMALL AND I'VE HAD TO PASS IT ON TO THIS LOSER BUT STILL OH MY WORD A PROPER OLD KINKS SHIRT

Well I seem to have drifted into chatting about music, not fashion there, but to be honest thank God for that! The layering shirts over one another thing didn't look as funny as I thought it might :( 

I apologise for the big gaps between blogs now but I've been enjoying real life a lot recently and now I'm back want to ease myself back into the swing of things.  To be honest, I do harbour a bit of an ambition to be all that I'm not on Twitter - occasionally brilliant, and that's it, rather than quite good or okay a lot of the time.

Next week I'm going to attempt a return of my walking blog, maybe talk about my 'goals' list which I carried on updating whilst I was away, and hopefully do a vlog! It's nothing interesting, just, like, a guided tour of my room, but I thought it'd be interesting to compare with another when I move into Colchester for uni - also, Laura's meant to be doing one too, so that'll be a laugh I guess. See you then x

(did you notice? New glasses! I am really happy with them)

Who I really want a shirt of: Blur.  The Beautiful South.  Metronomy.  Gaga (tho' I bet she has no nice ones).  Libertines.  Bombay Bike Club (who do amazing jumpers too).  A good Pulp one.  The Smiths.  Los Camp! (more than the one I have ordered).  Foals.  Gorillaz.  Laura Marling, the Beach Boys, Biffy Clyro.  Copy Haho.  The Clash, the Cribs, Flight of the Conchords.

You?