Snow Breeding

I’m snowbound….

Not that it makes much difference; I’m too scared to leave the house anyway.

Society has broken down, regardless of the snow.  Some cosmic Someone has draped a cold white veil over this town in a half-baked attempt at trying to exercise control over its wayward residents, but it has just encouraged them.  My neighbour asked for my help yesterday with a suitcase.  She’s going to exotic climes and is hoping that the aeroplane is still going to be able to take off.  I’m sorry, but I have landed in an aeroplane in Helsinki and there didn’t seem to be too many problems … apart from the unnatural prospect of 200 people sitting on a metal flying carpet.  It’s ironic that man has learned the secret of flight and still struggles with iced water.  And, incidentally, Helsinki is the place to go in Winter – not South Africa.  I suspect that it’s the same kind of person who likes only one season all year round that only listens to Chris Moyles and eats in Nando’s.  They, as Howard Devoto put it, ‘live a straight, straight line’.  Anyway, that’s not the point!

So I took to the streets.  Someone had etched a swastika in the snow on my car.  In a way I’m glad.  This town has finally learned to be open about its political leanings.  It’s a start.  Two girls, talking non-U then hurled a snowball casually at a car that was struggling to drive in a straight line, and then at me. They missed, but I took great pleasure in proffering up a large v-shaped gesture on my way back past them.  Yes, I swear at teenage girls now.

Then, back home again, whilst wrestling with some cleaning work, I unearthed my beautiful old Moog synthesizer, it resides under my bed in relative safety.  It is a relic of a finer age; a precious thing; an apex of the meeting point between science and art – and the dust wrapper had slipped so the machine was covered in dust.  Dust is as fascinating as snow.  It’s the revenge of tiny particles which believe in strength in numbers.  A particle of dust; a snowflake – they teem up with thousands of others and synthesizers go dumb and runways close down.  The fragility of the universe.  Looking at my poor Moog, I was reminded of Man Ray photograph Dust Breeding which depicts one of Duchamp’s works befuddled with dust: if you leave it long enough, the stuff forms very natural and very ephemeral miniature lunar landscapes.  So I cleaned it thoroughly in case it copulated and had babies.  I believe Quentin Crisp never vacuumed his New York home; the whole place must have been unearthly.  What a fine balance it is between cleanliness and civilisation.  For Hastie, however, it must always be civilisation, although I do bathe daily.  I gave up my housework and fixed myself a Martini.  It is Christmas after all.