Trouble in Mind

Trouble in mind, babe, I'm blue,
but I won't be blue always
Yes, the sun gonna shine,
in my back door someday

I'm goin' down, down to the river,
I'm gonna take my rockin' chair
Lord, if the blues overtake me,
I'm gonna rock on away from here

'Cause I'm trouble in mind, you know that I'm blue,
but I won't be blue always
Yes, the sun gonna shine,
in my back door someday

Big Bill Broonsey

At the end of this week it will be the half term break. This will be a week long, and for me, unpaid. But, I'm going to Ireland for six days in which I will seek commiseration with the down-trodden Irish. On Saturday, the day I leave it will have been seven months since my arrival to England. I can't really think of a statement in which to sum up this time, so I won't even try.

By Friday it will complete a seven week long half-term in which I have felt like teaching has drained the life out of me, rather than providing any kind of backbone of meaning. Including the Christmas break which I spent working in the pub in London and the half term prior that I was doing supply work and starting my job, it feels like I have barely had a moment to breathe since early November- all with an inadequate amount of sunshine hours. The last musical gig I attended was early December, the last trip to the theatre was about three weeks before that.



This last weekend I was in London, my first time back in six weeks. As well as catching up with friends and shopping, I went to the London Transport Museum and thought a little bit about The Underground and other things. I brought back to St Leonards a few CDs bought over the summer. One was from the Rise and Shine Blues Festival I went to in London in August. I got to see Vali 'Sir Blues' Racilla play- a Romanian blues guitarist- and it was delightful to listen to him again.



Being indentured to an education system I am losing faith in does have a flip side- it provides a healthy weekly wage and I'm clinging to the idea that it might lead somewhere. As Shakespeare said, "The miserable have no other medicine, but only hope". So bear with, this blog will cheer up soon.

A Picture- Part One

In a cunningly devised plan I had to get back into blogging I decided to choose photos I had taken and then write a little bit about each one. This plan was going great as I set out to the internet cafe and paid for plenty of time to write this blog. It was then that I remembered that I had left behind the USB stick with all my photos on.

With a determination to push on I found someone else's (far better) picture of what I wanted to talk about. So here is the image:



This is a picture of the Barbican Highwalk. I found the highwalks by accident, when I walking back to Moorgate tube station from the London Museum and I really like them. They are a series of walkways (highwalks) that lie about 5 metres above ground and they are the first interesting thing I have found that I wasn't pre-informed about in a guide or by a local.

I was able to walk the kilometre from the museum to the tube without even having to cross a road or give way to anything, or go around a building. The walks simply go through the office and apartment blocks, and a yellow line shows you the way to the tube station. In the centre of one block of apartments was an amazing garden (the picture of which I hope will be in a later post).

From this height above the ground it is a great place to see the surrounding architecture. If you look in this photo you can even see a remaining part of the wall of London- from the Roman times. When I first came through I didn't have my camera, it was raining and I was hungry, so I didn't stop. But I came back the next day and stopped for a while. It seems hard to image how a mash of buildings covering hundreds of years can go together, but somehow they do. The masses of water below add to the mytic of it all, and it felt like I had discovered soemthing hidden, but wonderful. Like a secret garden.