At Home In Derby

Today, I awoke from the two-seater with a bent back and shrunken lungs. Breakfast would have to be bought, and followed by caffeine. ('i' before 'e', except in 'caffeine'.)

Recently, the chill autumn air has been accentuated by a breeze blowing down from the arctic. It's a nice kind of cold. The kind that needs days of darkness and lights in the sky. We're planning a trip to Iceland in April.

My love of Iceland began with a documentary about northern most Manitoba. That sealed the idea of 'wilderness' into my brain as something to be experienced. I still feel that. At about the same time, aged seventeen (and in the early hours of the morning, on channel 4), I saw a troupe of dancers dressed as angels dancing in slow motion to the most beautiful music I thought I'd ever heard. That was the video to 'Svefn-g-englar' as part of a 4music fifteen minute expo of Sigur Ros. Ever since, I've been seeking out and collecting Icelandic music.

It feels good to know that you will soon experience something you've been preparing yourself for for eight years.

Derby is my home. I feel attached to it, not by sentiment (although that plays a natural part) so much as by something historically umbilical. I'll go into that another time, or not at all. Or maybe I'll just say that it's in that small pocket of time...like in If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things' , the city takes a breath, and on more than one occasion I have found myself awake and breathing with it. Conversely, the concept of home occupies that same part of my brain as the one of wilderness, so when Sigur Ros announced that their feature length film would be called 'Heima' (meaning 'at home') and be about their homeland Iceland someone somewhere threw a stone, and two birds fell from the sky.


Like today, I'm feeling frail and walking through the brittle October weekday afternoon streets and I am in more ways than one at home.
And on the big LCD screen Sigur Ros are playing at the Electric Proms.
And the bleak bare market square echoes strings and falsetto notes.
And I breathe in.
And I breathe out.
Then I buy breakfast.