"for the birds" - the juliana hatfield three

"if had wings, i’d try to fly. but they don’t make it harder to die. you can take it up to the sky, but no-one ever stays that high."


i absolutely adore beome what you are. i love juliana's voice on it, i love the guitar sounds and overall feel, and its full of songs i have to battle myself hard not to rip off when im writing. i cant believe it was released half my life ago when it still sounds so fresh to my ears - albeit that it is very much in and of the time. i hold my hands up to being a grunge casualty, so my opinion is far from biased, but so many fantastic albums were made around that time - yet this is song is from one of the standouts.


it was stupidly blustery, with trees shaking to such an extent that all kinds of things were falling out of trees onto the ground. no nests, obviously, because of the time of year, and actually mostly stick and twigs and things but i also saw several trees shaking themselves free of rubbish that had been caught in their branches like a dog emerging from a filthy pond. its been a day for looking up because you never know what flying objects you may have to avoid. i dont think i look up often enough.

"goodbye yellow brick road" - elton john

"when are you gonna come down? when are you going to land?"

i love south london. theres a part of me that worries that that might be a shameful thing to admit, but to me there has never been a question mark over it as a place to live. i carry its accent on my voice and its fingerprint in my brain. if only there were more tube stations it would be perfect. no, actually thats rubbish - its actually a bit crap, though i am convinced that pretty much everywhere else is at least as crap. its a homely sort of crap. you forgive its many flaws because it seems to hold you comfortingly and apologetically in its figurative embrace. i'm not trying to come over all "under the bridge" but lets face it, its better than la.

but despite this affinity, when it came to moving back to the smoke after those years of living away from it there was more than a flutter of trepidation. maybe this was because moving away had symbolised a break for freedom - freedom from parental control, freedom from becoming a local stereotype, freedom from all the haunting memories of the negativity of high school experience. like the baby pterodactyl in those mawkish "land before time" movies or the sheep in the monty python sketch, maybe i hadn't been flying so much as falling, plummeting with my eyes shut to convince myself that the wind rushing past my ears was the result of glorious forward momentum, destined to crash land back where i started while the face of gravity mocks me for failing to avoid my destiny of failure.

or maybe theres a sort of success in finally being able to admit:
i love south london