THE PUGILIST IS NOW AT REST

Bird, plaster, ghost, story.

2023

My contribution to the group show The Magpie's Nest, at the Summix Building, Bath Spa University. 

I used to visit a friend in Brighton from my flat in Tulsa Hill. I would drive a silver Ford Fiesta, GOE437V and we would go and get drunk in the Lanes. One time we stopped to visit his girlfriend in Waterstones and I bought a book about birds. We went to the pub and my friend became increasingly obsessed with the phonetic descriptions of the bird calls. At one point in the early evening he saw someone he knew enter the toilets and followed him in there and kicked down the door of the cubicle to demonstrate the sound a Flammulated Owl makes (or some bird, I don't know, I was under the table). Later on I excused myself, went back to my friends flat and fell asleep on the sofa. My friend returned and found I had locked him out so he threw a breeze block through the window in the front door. Then there were loads of people in the flat, weeping. I drove back the next day, swerving any mention of who was going to pay for the new window. My car was untaxed and my land lady arranged to have it crushed without telling me. I had a lot of stuff in the boot, that I would have kept hold of. This meant I couldn't get down to Brighton any more, which was probably a good thing. The title of this piece was from a collection of Thom Gunn's poems that my friend was very obsessed with.