Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: streetlife

  • all police are souls

    all police are souls

    Entering the park at dusk we passed four very drunk men with maybe three full sets of teeth between them, squatting round a fire in a little glade of trees. Their enjoyment was loud and coarse and strong. We broke into the open and trudged up a slight hill, overtaken by a swoop of bicyclists. They were a family: mum, dad, teenage sister, and falling behind came the 9-year-old girl in her pink down jacket who wailed, Mamma, das geht nicht! (Mamma, this isn’t working). From the other side of the path came unexpected encouragement. A grizzled woman crouching over a joint called out in her throaty, smoky voice, “Du schafft es! Du kannst das!” You’ll make it! You can do it! The little girl put on a burst of speed, possibly out of terror or surprise, and the woman roared after her, “Yes! Yes! You’re doing it! You’re doing it! You’ve done it! YOU MADE IT!” It was such a beautiful, generous, Berliner thing to have witnessed. God love ‘er. With her scars and tattoos and her All Police Are Arseholes jacket.

    H2O HoL browsing piano player

  • tufty

    tufty

    Under the trees I saw two people riding side by side, holding hands between the bicycles. Not far away a duck plunged earnestly beak-first into the water, its tufted tail and downy bum held upright by the twin prongs of its feet on the scummy surface.

    H2O HoL ducklings

  • rodney the radish

    rodney the radish

    I found a radish! Just sitting in the middle of the road all by itself. It looked a little bruised and chipped. Poor little radish.

    H2O HoL pinecone caspar

  • by the nape

    by the nape

    A man just jogged down the stairs holding his bicycle, by the nape of its seat, with one hand. In his other hand casually he carried a satchel spilling books. Its wheels are spinning helplessly: in the fluttering pit of my stomach I know the feeling.

    H2O HoL grey bicycle

  • Clive James

    Perception is a funny thing. I’m feeling, though cheerful enough, somewhat tired & old, chubby & worn. Men are looking at me. One of them twisted his head to look back and came close to walking himself into a pole.

    Another time I was feeling all fresh & funky, I had on this beautiful green print sundress, I scampered early out of the Adelaide Writers Week crowd and began lolloping up the hill. I was laughing with shame, having just inadvertently told Clive James I thought his poetry was quite good, “especially lately.” Argh. As I passed a group of people sitting on the low wall a young man raised his head and sang out, “Ew! You’re old. Get away from me! I hate old people.”

    That was fifteen years ago. Today it’s all smiles & waves. Is it the dungarees? The grubby sandshoes? The sunshine? The moon? Billy Bragg puts it neatly, mortality: “Like a pale moon in a sunny sky/death gazes down as I pass by/to remind me that I’m but my father’s son.”

     

  • the splay

    the splay

    People in coffee shops who wipe down their table with the paper napkin and push their splayed chairs back in. People at bus stops who engross three seats for their handbags and parcels when elderly women are standing. I’d rather give a shit than be one.

    H2O HoL copenhagen ladybird

  • siren caul

    siren caul

    Stopped for an orange juice at a stall where the man squeezes oranges one at a time, by hand, for one euro per glass. Chivalrously he added a straw to mine, not to my male companion’s, though I have not worn nor owned a lipstick since 1996. While we were drinking our juices a string of police vans streaked past, sirens blaring. Instinctively both of us put up our hands over our ears. I squinched my eyes shut too, as if that would help. We were standing on a traffic island in a crossroads that’s surrounded on all sides by cafes and pizza and kebab shops. When I opened my eyes people all round the square had their hands over their ears in unison.

    Once I was on a full plane carrying some 90 school children from an outback Queensland town who were travelling to Sydney. When the plane left the ground many of them gave an audible gasp. Seconds later the whole plane was laughing. Inadvertently to share a genuine gesture with dozens of strangers: it’s like accidental dancing.

    H2O HoL berlin 'easy' posters

  • watching over you

    watching over you

    I saw a boy cross the road with his little sister. At the curb he made her stop and made her take his hand. I guess she was three; I guess he was four. He looked both ways. A car approaching slowly from two intersections north made him wait, and hold her back. His caution and sense of responsibility glimmered on him like sunlight. They waited and waited. The little girl sagged her head and dreamed, her brother stood alert and concentrating fiercely. The car went past, he lifted his foot, a second car poked its nose around from a side street. He waited again. I stood as casually as possible a few paces away, three times the size of the little steward, not wanting to injure his pride by letting him know I was waiting for them to be safe. I imagined the parent who had sent them on this errand perhaps watching from an upper window too. The corner shop stood up three stone steps on the opposite corner, its plastic flystrips beckoning. At last when the street was empty and still it was safe, according to the big brother’s judgement; they set out.

     

  • strapped down

    strapped down

    On the above-ground train we are travelling through the treetops. Everybody’s head is framed in green. My companion takes a photo, covertly: the flash makes everyone look up. Now I realize that the acetate smell I had noticed is from an open pot of scarlet polish which the groomed boyfriend to my right holds open, absently, for his girlfriend to paint her nails as he browses facebook on his phone. “It just looks so sweet,” my friend tells them. Everybody begins to laugh. The older lady to his left turns to her neighbour and asks her something. Four men with opened beers are standing at the free end of the carriage talking, as though they were in a treetop bar. In the opposite corner a flicker of movement catches my eye. The very very handsome man in his twenties who had taken up his black notebook as we all piled in and sat down is sketching the dog whose head rests on my knee; his eyes flare back and forth, back and forth, gathering information and strapping it down.

    H2O HoL stables

  • exact same clothes

    Landsakes, do I feel cute. I helped someone out with some really boring writing work and feel all neighbourly & useful. We decided to celebrate with a beer. I had opened my two storage boxes (for posting back to Australia) and after months of wearing the exact same clothes ~ same jeans, same orange jumper, same ratty old Tom Waits~as~Jesus t-shirt ~ had dug out my ugg boots: ugg boots! And also a pair of huge dungarees: dungarees! So me and Tom Waits and the dungarees and ugg boots set off for the beer shop. Berlin is twilit. The streets are damp and swishy. Two guys were arguing at an Indian restaurant trestle and the end of their table said, in thick black marker pen, I love you. I loaded up four pockets with beers and came back with my friend’s dog whom he had dressed in honour of my new old clothes in a natty neckerchief. We were the wild West. Which is tame in this town. This looping, roaring, sprawling, sunbathing, dog-loving six-storey city.