A scene from the station platform which drawings not from it

​

Sometimes you had to wait around the train station all night, a packet of nuts in one hand, a menu for Yummy Ho Chinese takeaway, Stamford street, in the other. If only to get a little bit peace (sic).

Some say peace is easy, if only you’ll fill in this this form, stand on one leg, get a bike with massive tyres, change tooth brush for this one instead.

‘But you might still get a puncture.’

Well, yes. I suppose you might. 

‘Then what?’

The man put the packet of nuts down on the station platform and leafed through the menu.  

He was not a very detailed man, and his shoulder went up when he gestured obscenely at the lines man, when he did this. He was smoking a tab at the back of my diary 2024.

But he wasn’t doing this then, which is inconvenient, as I’m not talking about him then but on the train station platform now, which is not now exactly (I’m in the toilets at work? Better not be). He was waiting for his train. 

‘They come like falling rain,’ a mechanical voice said over the tannoy. 

The man noticed this but he picked up his nuts and pretended he didn’t.

‘I’m not hungry, anyway,’ he said and wandered off onto the night.

(Applause.) 

When his train came, I drew a bloke on the next page who was balding blatantly, and he didn’t comb it over to conceal it cos my dad doesn’t like that on account of growing up with Bobby Charlton doing it when he was a kid and it looked daft after a while - especially when running.


The man shook his head. He was tired. His shirts were all from Marks & Spencer and he regularly forgot the recycling.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Acrylic Tony

Image
​ Meet Acrylic Tony. I painted him in the garage Victoria calls the shed. I put the acrylic paper pad on the step ladder and I got to work on him.  Tony is from Jarra. He drinks his tea, he smokes his tabs. He inquires of the latest purchase, ‘Ow much?!’  You may have seen him around the urban landscape, observing and taking pictures to flick on his tablet and check against the old maps.  This tunnel must have gone from here to here. But why was this bit here? That is Tonyio. As I said, you may have seen him around. But you might not have, cos ‘I haven’t even crossed the doors, Mark’ is occasionally something he says to me.  This picture of him is likely from the summer. In the summer he sits on his seat in the front garden, and prunes and trains his box, He has a cracking rose bush that goes right up and around the door. He tans at a remarkable pace. 
Read more

Intention

I have been writing things and I have started painting things. I appear also to have started laying some boogie things.  Which, I think means that I am writing, painting and playing music, and that I am going to send them to the screen. Mainly I have been writing for years, but that has took donkeys, resulting in one release in ages called 'A Walk to New Earswick'. More of an expedition really. As previously stated, it took donkeys. But I will be sending another one to the screen. This is called 'The Boyes and The Boogie'. And I have actually started painting, so, if I can bring myself to put my email back on my phone, I will be taking pictures of them and sending them here. Finally, the boogie. I am writing some things down in a notebook and will record them in some way with Sam, because it is good to boogie rough, and because there must be laughter add the peculiar parts, and so on...
Read more

Henry

Image
​ This is Henry. I painted him in the garage that Victoria calls a shed. I put the acrylic paper pad upon the step ladder and set to work. Henry is a chap I read a lot of on trains and buses when I was pretending to be a wild and roving chap like I had read about in the books and magazines when I was 24. Some of it was about shagging and quite embarrassing to read on public transport, but the bits that were about acceptance, becoming and being an artist were right up my rhododendrons.  I’ve tried reading him now, mainly the bits I underlined in the books that survived all the back and forths on public transport, and some of it is appealing and some not so much - similar to how it was then. But it was the idea of him and the approach that was most appealing. The licence to just call yourself an artist or writer or whatever, and make your books and paintings and songs, and to hell with anyone else. This was Henry Miller to me, which, as previously stated, is a little embarrassing wha...
Read more