Sunday 24 January 2021

31 Postcodes - Poem 24


 


Closing in


This is a friend’s flat.

No, really her brother’s.

One part of a hall.

Fragment of a past.


The vast wooden shutters

can make it a tomb

in the wrong hands,

body clock switched off.


I fall off the world

for days at a time;

a windowless bath,

post lies on the mat.


Loud shoes above

are never welcome.

The soft phone rings

to wake me up.


RF 2021

Video/audio for this one here.


I moved again in autumn 1993 (I was 26). This was another ending-relationship move and, if I remember rightly, quite a quick one. We parted company for lots of reasons but we are on good messaging terms these days (and he’s reading this series, even helping me out with details here and there). As with everyone who lived at any of these places with me, we remember such different details (and frankly in some cases it’s miraculous that we remember as much as we do, all things considered).
 
This time it was a friend I knew from the magazine who had somewhere (a family flat) that I could move to. This place was not far from the last house, just up the road in Chapel Allerton, and it was part of a pretty grand building (a ‘hall’) that had been divided into umpteen flats. You can see the side of the building in the google photo but I was in a ground floor flat that you entered via a door at the back. It was a one-bedroom cavern – big wooden shutters for the windows, high ceilings – and it still had all my friend’s furnishings (many rugs, a futon bed) and quite a few of her possessions (many, many books – I think she was living in London at this point). All I really moved in with was a few clothes (I’ve never been big on clothes) and a lot of vinyl dance records. I kept the shutters closed far too often but I was working more and more in nightclubs (DJing – see last post) so my working hours were night and my sleep was day.

I wasn’t home a lot when I lived here but I was based here for a couple of years (I think). I spent one Xmas here on my own (the one year I thought “no, I don’t want to go to family, and I’m fine, Xmas means nothing to me, I’ll just watch TV”). It was grim and I’m not sure I even lasted till teatime (as in ‘did I go and call on someone?’ Possibly). These were still the days when your landline phone (and post) were your main means of communication (how ancient does that seem now that we are positively swimming, or drowning, in apps and platforms and streaming?).

These are the years that get really confusing in terms of timeline (I blame the nightlife, lots of places to be, lots of people coming and going) but I know that at some point I moved into my DJ partner’s house which was fairly nearby (I think I lived there more than once but I will write about life at that postcode tomorrow). I have a date written down somewhere that says I left this big beshuttered flat after two years (in 1995) so that’s where we will say goodbye to it. Till next time. 

This poem is part of the annual Fun A Day Dundee project where participants try to do something creative every day for the month of January. You don't have to be in Dundee to take part and there are other Fun A Day projects around the world. People post as much of their work online as they want to (largely on Instagram but it can be elsewhere too). This year I am posting a whole poem a day (one poem for each of the 31 addresses I have lived at, covering the period 1967-2021). Videos/photos of the poems show the places remembered in the poems but were mostly taken from recent Google Street View. The videos are on my Instagram, maybe elsewhere too. Use the hashtag #fadd2021 on social media to see other people's online contributions.

No comments: