There’s little pocket of Georgian and Victorian buildings hiding a few meters from the end of the motorway as you arrive in Portsmouth. 393 Old Commercial Road (the south end of Mile End Terrace) was the birthplace of Charles Dickens. Also nearby is All Saints Church next to the very busy roundabout and the former Market Tavern, remodelled as accommodation for the ferry port just to the west.
#42 Guns ‘n’ Roses – Appetite For Destruction
Before: Big hair, big noise, big hits
Like being forced to take too much coke and then licked and then drooled on with Coca-Cola and then having cheap bourbon poured in your ears and up your nose and being left out to dry in some west coast hell. Sung by Cartman from South Park. A few moments of relief in some of the intros before the insane zipping up and unzipping continues. I suspect the best thing is the drumming. The rest is – what? – empty energy.
After: 80s horrorshow
Counting down the Top 50 over at Best Ever Albums. They’ve taken 6,600 greatest album charts and compiled them into an overall chart.
Heavily bombed in the Second World War (and by a Zeppelin in the First) not so many Victorian or older buildings remain in this area of southern Landport. The photos below cover the University Quarter, Guildhall Walk and Square, Commercial Road (South) and West towards HMS Nelson. Mainly Victorian, the listed buildings are pubs, a former cinema, a theatre, assurance offices, banks, military and religious. Seemingly politics (Guildhall), finance (Prudential and Pearl), religion (the RC Cathedral and St Agathas), education (Park Building) and the military (Wardroom) compete for dominance of scale here. (Note that Park Building, behind the Guildhall, was covered in scaffolding today, so I used pictures I’d taken previously.)
29
It can be so damn awkward having a body. Aches, pains, tightness, nausea. To sense each and every without judgement seems to be the key. They are just as they are but the brain modifies. To practice when not looking after oneself must be so much of a nightmare – once the intelligence of the body takes over its going to get things right out of you there and then. Headaches are going to rage and… Well luckily all that is in my past and my system is pretty clean. I learnt that in my 20s, to make it easier. I can make it easier still, I know. Make the moves today, now, that make the next moves easier.
30
I wondered when the grief would come, locked down tight as it is. And when it did it was not over someone dead but over people still living, grateful, so grateful for their role in my life and sad that they mightn’t be around so much longer. Before: massive ache in the eye sockets almost up under the eyebrows. Nausea. Neck and shoulder tension. Lips. Jaws. And a following of the breath so closely as never before. I think it’s the very is-ness of the breath that allows for the is-ness of grief.
Falling Awake 