elephant and castle tube station, london, at the height of the blitz.
This is a somewhat lazy post, drawn as it is from a comment left earlier over on the excellent Eighty Thousand Times The Word "Fuck":
"I don’t know. There’s been a lot of people sniffing and sneezing in the lifts here of late. The sniffing could be a symptom of withdrawal, certainly; the sneezing either down to a high pollen count or the more alarming manifestation of swine flu.
I worry that we will all die in here. Like rats outside the demarcation zone. We just had a power cut this morning which saw some of us suspended in limbo for over an hour, and the stairwell too dank and rank to even consider negotiating.
An old cinema nearby caught fire over the weekend. They are currently in the process of demolishing it, and the air wafting up to my open window on the 22nd floor is cloudy with brick dust and rust."
Well. The power supply has been resumed since then, thankfully. The cinema has had its guts ripped out as I hammer, one fingered, at the keyboard. And I have just purchased a wine box from our local supermarket and retired back indoors to escape the unusually oppressive heat.Life, then, is tolerable. My son and stepson have a school project underway on the second world war - the big one, as old farts are wont to emphasize - and I can't help but feel that the art deco picture house out there, disintegrating by the minute, adequately conveys the flavour of the Blitz.
It is a pity our camera appears to have given up the ghost.
Anyhow. Enough. Thank you one and all for your comments yesterday. Your feedback - positive or otherwise - is always most welcome; nobody likes playing to an empty house.
▼ I ROY & THE JUMPERS: HOT BOMB from "Hot Bomb" 45 (Trojan) 1972 (Jamaica)