Strange Muse

This time last year was bad. It started with our cat acting weird. More weird than normal anyway. She was twitchy and kept charging in and out of her catflap. More often than she normally does anyway. It turned out that she had fleas. Obvious once we realised. While we had been absent mindedly wondering what had gotten into her, the fleas had taken the opportunity to establish quite an empire in our house. It wasn't long before we were all twitchy and charging in and out of the back door.

I was in a bad state of mind anyway. I took a short drive to clear my head. That didn't work so I made it a longer drive to Great Yarmouth. At least I was away from the fleas for a while. As I arrived on the outskirts of Yarmouth the traffic was awful. "No matter!" I thought. "I know the area well enough to find my way through these side roads."

Twenty minutes later, as I went past an Asda somewhere for the third time, I had to concede to myself that I didn't know these roads as well as I'd thought. Eventually I found my way to the seafront at Caister-on-Sea, parked up and went for a walk along the beach.

The rippled reflections of distant lights distinguished the inky black water from the impenetrable grey sky. The white noise of the waves crashing against the sand was a more emphatic reminder of the vicinity of the North Sea. I recorded the sounds on my phone. Some of the blackness seeped into me as I stood watching and listening. The sea beckoned me.

"I hear your fears and worries," she said. "It would only take a few steps for me to envelope you. Let me wash it all away."

I was tempted. But the call of home was ultimately stronger. Besides, if I had done that what would have been the point of making those recordings?

Back home my regime of daily hoovering and mopping wasn't yielding results. The itching was unbearable. It was time to go nuclear. I picked up the most toxic looking spray that I could find in Pets@Home, tied a bandana round my head and squinted to read the instructions.

I'm sure it said that you should treat all surfaces and close all windows and doors for at least half an hour before ventilating and hoovering thoroughly. Having just double checked, it says nothing of the sort. Perhaps it was on the web site. Anyway, for whatever reason, that's what I did. I locked up the house and went for a walk while the fumes exacted my hideous revenge.

It felt like the nearby woods were a suitable place to clear my lungs. It had been a dry year and now that the foliage had died back a bit I found that I could make my way down to a tributary of the River Tud (itself a tibutary of the Wensum). The trickling of water and the fresh air were a welcome respite from our infestation despite the incessant roar of the nearby A47. I recorded the sounds for a while before returning to the house.

It took a few more days for the spray to do it's work but after a while we realised that we weren't hopping around any more. During that time, I had made a couple of fragments of a tune. One was tranquil, the other more insistent. My thoughts returned to the stream and the jounrey that the water would take before arriving at Caister. I called the tune Wensum and bracketed it with the samples that I had recorded at the stream and the beach.

Listening to Wensum now brings back some bad memories but also reminds me that the seeds of hope can sometimes be wrapped in despair.

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I like to try and shine a spotlight on an undersung artist in each blog entry. The imagination and the range of musical influences that inform Found Object's music make for an energetic and compelling brew as exmplified by his track 'Resurrection Man'.