Poverty

Two photos from just outside the bus station. Vagrants and hopefuls gather round here.

The Summerhouse - An Annie Story

So, I said

Yes, said Annie

I was standing there looking at the shop windows, thinking how sorrowful they were. I remembered a conversation with Annie. With Annie, everything had a certain brisk likeliness. She didn’t care whatsoever what anyone else thought either, except so far as it entertained her.

I was thinking about this time we’d been in the woods at the back of her parents’ house. The woods were ash and beech. We used to go there to smoke cigarettes when we were 16.

I wonder if her parents knew about the smoking? They were liberals and reasonably wise, and I think they did know, but thought it a minor sin, not worth creating bad feeling over. That was a good thing about Annie’s house, you felt that you were in the world of adult choices.

There was a rotting summer house. You could sit there in when it rained, hidden from the house by laurel bushes. One evening I’d taken some whisky there and sat listening to the wind softly hushing in the trees and it grew darker I’d felt this romantic frisson, which I had chosen not to act on. I still wonder if Annie had felt a frisson too? I know I chose not to act on it because I was young and knew it and knew that I wasn’t ready for that sort of thing, but, idiotically I am unable not to regret it.

On reflection, I think Annie had probably known what I was feeling, being able to sense things like that, but she didn’t think of me in that way. She thought of me more like a brother.

I remembered being with Annie in the creaky summerhouse with the smell of damp timber and having conversations like that.

In the bus station

This fellow reminded me of a character from a Scorcese film.

However, he is probably totally innocuous: a junior accountant, an administrator for a glazing firm or a manager for a car hire company.

The Smoking Man- An Annie story.

*

   I’m at the bus station an hour early waiting for Annie in the little restaurant. There’s a guy there, sitting, smoking. That’s all he’s doing- smoking very slowly, puff puff puff, puff. The cigarette is held quite daintily between his index and middle fingers at their ends (I wonder how it occurred to him that that was the easiest way to hold a cigarette? Surely there is less chance of it being crushed if you hold it in a v, like Churchill and his cigar?). He holds the smoke in for along time. His lungs must be big or his throat long or both, because it seems forever before the smoke comes out, first in a long jet of smoke, like the smoke form a steam train.. Then after a while, it drifts out in a soft cloud. It lingers there. The face of the guy isn’t sad but somehow I imagine that it ought to be. I wish I weren’t like that, thinking people should be sad for no reason at all. It’s so still in the restaurant that the smoke hands around lingering before it disperses too. I guess it’s what he likes doing most. He’s got some beer in a bottle there, but he’s not sipping. Annie won’t be here for an hour but I couldn’t think of anything better to do than wait in the bus station. I thought that maybe if I went to the bus station I’d be closer to her.

*

Man Smoking 2

Man Smoking

A series from the bus station. Would these images be stronger in black and white? Sometimes black and white can become rather relentless, and it often seems a lazy way to designate a photo as "art", without adding any other specific qualities to it.

Bus station

This place is full of Steinbeckian characters. It's a brutalist building, very generously proportioned, but it manages to sustain the seediness that seems everywhere to characterise bus stations.