"Our pain we leave behind us, and our fortunes come in threes."
Yesterday I said goodbye to gizmometer at Birmingham Airport after ten days together. It hurt, and I miss them, but I don't want to write about that. Have some scattershot memories instead:
The trip was bookended by frosty dawns. Monday morning, the sky was stratified. T was sitting with their back to the horizon, so I told them the colours of the rising sun, apricot, rose and peach-fire trapped here and there in suburban windows. We stayed in a one-room apartment on Bennetts Hill, which frankly wasn't so great; the shower-water came at you in a vicious diagonal and the handle on the toilet kept dropping off; but it was opposite my local pub. Which unsurprisingly became our local. :P I'd go down to the street late at night, watch the staff of the Briar Rose tidying up, listen to gulls mewing overhead. (Up in the flat, even into the early hours, we got used to the glassy clink of bar staff dropping bottles into a recycling skip.)
I took T to BMAG and the Barber Institute. BMAG was something of a hit. We both loved John Armstrong's painting Lapping Waters: it's small - a ribbed stone sphere balanced on three claws above a raging sea, executed in lovingly-precise dabs of russet and glaucous green. We both found things to love in an exhibition on Birmingham in its people; predictably, the pressed flowers taken from WWII Brummie bombsites won me over. T liked the architect's model of the Centenary Square that never was built, which has been an obsession of mine for a few years. There was a long print of a seventies skyline done almost Yellow Submarine-style: huge feet emerging from a jumble of rooves and spires. T drooled over the buckled gold and garnet panels of the Anglo-Saxon Staffordshire Hoard; they're more a craftsperson than me. Up on the top floor was another Brummie exhibition, and here we found something that became the visit's running gag. Bisset's Museum was the first to open in the city, on New Street in 1811. They didn't really understand fossils back then, so an ammonite would have a serpent's head carved on it and became captioned Snake Turned To Stone By A Saint. Likewise a sea urchin became a fairy loaf; a trilobite stone giving birth to an animal. (I bought my own trilobite later in the week. It's two inches long, a caramel-silt colour, pleasingly concave and ribbed to hold. Less a capsule of deep-past than our time together.)
T uses a wheelchair, and disabled access at the Barber is complicated, but the security staff are charming. We had to use a intercom system that was pure spy-fi, even down to the electronic squawk, went through a series of bunkers - they felt more like school corridors to me. I'd forgotten they had a Magritte there.
We brought each other gifts: Garner's Owl Service, another book on owls foreworded by BSP's guitarist Noble, and a mesh top for T. They gave me sovay's Ghost Signs*, velvet leggings, a shawl of white cobweb lace they'd knitted themself, and went home wearing my red-and-black hoodie. We wrote side-by-side: T poems, I line-edits on The Men Cast By Shadows (now with an editor). I wish I could have shown them my canals - the towpaths aren't kind to a wheelchair - but I think T liked my city. (I often talk about her as my wife, not totally in jest.) They met John H and fade_2_black and got on well; I introduced them to halloumi and Hobgoblin beer and I grossly overestimated the amount of chipshop battered cod they could eat.
There must be a hundred other things I could write about this, but they won't come to mind right now. I'll close with a picture of two lovely dorks:
*Other books acquired on the trip: China Mieville's This Census-Taker, which I like a great deal but wanted to be longer; Marcel Ayme's collection The Man Who Walked Through Walls; Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker.
The trip was bookended by frosty dawns. Monday morning, the sky was stratified. T was sitting with their back to the horizon, so I told them the colours of the rising sun, apricot, rose and peach-fire trapped here and there in suburban windows. We stayed in a one-room apartment on Bennetts Hill, which frankly wasn't so great; the shower-water came at you in a vicious diagonal and the handle on the toilet kept dropping off; but it was opposite my local pub. Which unsurprisingly became our local. :P I'd go down to the street late at night, watch the staff of the Briar Rose tidying up, listen to gulls mewing overhead. (Up in the flat, even into the early hours, we got used to the glassy clink of bar staff dropping bottles into a recycling skip.)
I took T to BMAG and the Barber Institute. BMAG was something of a hit. We both loved John Armstrong's painting Lapping Waters: it's small - a ribbed stone sphere balanced on three claws above a raging sea, executed in lovingly-precise dabs of russet and glaucous green. We both found things to love in an exhibition on Birmingham in its people; predictably, the pressed flowers taken from WWII Brummie bombsites won me over. T liked the architect's model of the Centenary Square that never was built, which has been an obsession of mine for a few years. There was a long print of a seventies skyline done almost Yellow Submarine-style: huge feet emerging from a jumble of rooves and spires. T drooled over the buckled gold and garnet panels of the Anglo-Saxon Staffordshire Hoard; they're more a craftsperson than me. Up on the top floor was another Brummie exhibition, and here we found something that became the visit's running gag. Bisset's Museum was the first to open in the city, on New Street in 1811. They didn't really understand fossils back then, so an ammonite would have a serpent's head carved on it and became captioned Snake Turned To Stone By A Saint. Likewise a sea urchin became a fairy loaf; a trilobite stone giving birth to an animal. (I bought my own trilobite later in the week. It's two inches long, a caramel-silt colour, pleasingly concave and ribbed to hold. Less a capsule of deep-past than our time together.)
T uses a wheelchair, and disabled access at the Barber is complicated, but the security staff are charming. We had to use a intercom system that was pure spy-fi, even down to the electronic squawk, went through a series of bunkers - they felt more like school corridors to me. I'd forgotten they had a Magritte there.
We brought each other gifts: Garner's Owl Service, another book on owls foreworded by BSP's guitarist Noble, and a mesh top for T. They gave me sovay's Ghost Signs*, velvet leggings, a shawl of white cobweb lace they'd knitted themself, and went home wearing my red-and-black hoodie. We wrote side-by-side: T poems, I line-edits on The Men Cast By Shadows (now with an editor). I wish I could have shown them my canals - the towpaths aren't kind to a wheelchair - but I think T liked my city. (I often talk about her as my wife, not totally in jest.) They met John H and fade_2_black and got on well; I introduced them to halloumi and Hobgoblin beer and I grossly overestimated the amount of chipshop battered cod they could eat.
There must be a hundred other things I could write about this, but they won't come to mind right now. I'll close with a picture of two lovely dorks:
*Other books acquired on the trip: China Mieville's This Census-Taker, which I like a great deal but wanted to be longer; Marcel Ayme's collection The Man Who Walked Through Walls; Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker.