Skyberries and Voidmelons or Voidberries and Skymelons

Although I was quite exhausted, I decided it was necessary to take Marios on a tour of Southampton, and probably bored him by pointing out the sights that were relevant to my life once. "I used to live here in the flooded basement amongst the stairs to nowhere!", "I used to rent foreign films from here, when it was Videotheque!", "This used to be the Lizard Lounge!", etc. The night before we had ended up at the Dungeon, which featured in my life a lot when I was a student in Southampton. On the Sunday, we wandered around the Avenue, and then Bedford Place (Marios was interested in the strange looking courthouse, and we walked through Little Mongers), and then through the parks, and around the town centre. To stop ourselves getting too cold, we popped into the various shopping centres (Marlands, West Quay, Bargate and East Street). The Bargate had some art in a shop which we went to look at, with t-shirts such as "If you cannot be a poet, be the poem", but the Titanic exhibition was closed. We wandered through the Bargate itself and then onto East Street. The East Street shopping centre is surprisingly still open, when I had imagined it would be closed down by now, as most of the shops are long since gone. We took advantage of the special feature in the shopping centre though - the bit of pipe in the middle. I climbed through it, as if it were part of an adventure playground. An elderly man spoke to us on our way out of the shopping centre, and commented on the emptiness. "Was there a plague here?" he asked.

The town centre currently has a German Christmas market on, so we had a look at that, and then after a while, concluded we were too tired and too cold, so unfortunately didn't make it for lunch with Nick & co, and instead just headed home. We walked through the little bit of park next to the station and stared at the new Ikea in the distance, and the bits of crumbling walls in that park, and also at the glorious brutalist Wyndham Court.

I actually forgot about Southampton for a few years, but visiting it again at the weekend made me realise that these days it feels more like home than most other places I have lived in. I suppose because I lived there for 9 years. It is not the prettiest city I have ever lived in, but there are excellent people there, and interesting little features of the town if you look hard enough, and well, I realise now that I miss it.

I want to read Militant Modernism by Owen Hatherley, since he talks about Southampton, including one place I lived for a year:
"The place in question was a 'cottage estate'; one of those built on the outskirts of the cities by councils in the 30s in woolly, vaguely vernacular fashion, with real homes featuring gardens and pitched roofs. Every road was named after a different flower, from carnations to lobelias, in true garden-suburb style. This didn't stop it from being one of the more impoverished, violent and desolate places in Southampton, feared most of all by the students of the nearby University."

I'm in Kent now and am tempted to play amongst the hay bales.
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I watched Before Sunset again recently and am thinking about the scene where Céline says, "Now that we've met again, we can change our memory of that December 16th. It no longer has that sad ending of us never seeing each other again. Right?" and Jesse replies, "Yeah, you’re right. I guess a memory is never finished. As long as you're alive..."

I suppose that's how I'm trying to think at the moment, about Southampton, that my memories of it aren't finished.
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I received the Open House London guide for September 15th and 16th and am trying to decide what to see. Is anyone else intending to go?

Stumbling on the edges of the mapped world, I walked purposefully in the middle of roads, craving knowledge of the streets, with a GPS in my hand. Chanting road names like a mantra and scribbling rogue roads onto paper, I attempted to help with the OpenStreetMap project during the weekend of the Southampton Mapping Party.

I found there was plenty to discover, the maps becoming fluid and growing in a way that seemed almost organic, like the world is new again and no-one knows where they are or where they were. Sometimes I was asked if I was lost and I never knew how to answer that.

Sometimes I noticed road names that were damaged - one only had the letter 'D' left on a sign, as if the residents/vandals of that area had renamed the street themselves. Sometimes there were traces of former road names or perhaps just mistakes, and that reminded me of Reports of Certain Events in London by China Miéville. The story includes reports of sightings of viae ferae (feral streets), such as Varmin Way, that appear for a while in different towns, as if they were just visiting, before they vanish again. Perhaps some of the streets that I noted have disappeared already.

In the forest, there are tiny islands, each made of only one tree. They appear to be floating through the rivers, but their roots twist and cling tightly to the riverbed. Leafless branches sway in time with the ripples in the water and my hair begins to swirl across my face as I try to peer at their reflections.

gevurah and I imagine ghost trains trundling along the dismantled railway that we begin to walk the route of near to Slap Bottom and towards Sway. I sip rhubarb wine and wonder where my destination would be, if I was on that train.
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Sunday, ephoscus and I visit an exhibition that "explores what it means to be human in today’s world", at the Bargate Gallery. We tiptoe around encyclopædias covered in white dust and projected video speckles and then stare at photos of Bournemouth beach that look like an alien landscape,

At Mayflower Park, we dangle our feet towards the seaweed, while watching the water twinkle at us, as if glitter has been daubed across it. Southampton's elusive "beach" is also in view: the tiny metre of sand, where a fisherman stands, and even that seems somehow magical in the bright sunshine.