From Frome my satnav took me unerringly to my next stopover. What kind of a one horse town was this? Instead of the wrong Marks and Spencer car park, Buddies USA greeted me... but lo, then I turned the corner and could see the whole landscape dwarfed by a huge multiplex. I had ARRR.IVEED.
This was gold city. The man on the desk was overwhelmed with excitement to tell me abuot the number of eateries and the short cut:
"Through that gap in the grass, over the barrier and mind the drop, then along until you come to a sort of path. Follow it along by the green fence - away from the Multiplex and then you’ll be on a service road.”
So, I did and I was.
My mind breezed back to my earlier ramblings through the old Bookshop in Frome. A chance encounter with someone who I chatted to about the banana Yellow Corvette. I was living time backwards. I could only think of Tom Waits blowing a hole in the hood of a yellow corvette, The lady dobbing in some books proudly announced that Joan Didion had bought a banana yellow one for herself as a treat after Slouching towards Bethlehem. Here’s Julian Wasser’s smokin’ capture.
I liked what Joan had to say too. “I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment.”
So… Julian's other frame, for Richard…
Andrea described my little trip as some sort of experiment. It’s always the things that people say right at the end that are the little gifts. We talked about the boy species and the girl species. I think I worked it out. We were force fed Charles Bukowski to Andrea’s Louisa M.
Considor though, the last Little Women had a Budget of $40 million, so maybe it’s right to end with a wedding? Charles made a few drinkin’ bucks too.
Meanwhile, that multiplex was so large that it had its own gravitational effect. Inside there were grappling ropes to steady the many flailing pre-teens. I asked the man on the popcorn what films were showing and he drip fed them to me. Kung-Fu Panda, Godzilla vs Kong, Ghostbusters on Ice, Monkey Man…the list went on. I went bleurch,
After much discussion of the lack of light sabres in Dune, we settled for Civil War, slightly about the forthcoming attraction of Trump vs sanity.
Civil War (USA Release 2) was actually a road movie with very loud gunshots. The popcorn man knew what he was doing because the popcorning people behind me added the realistic pitter patter of falling masonry to every battle scene. And their buckets lasted all the way to the White House.
This afternoon I’m entering phase 2 of the ‘experiment’.
