Swindon After a Dream

1

The dream I was having continued, just for a few moments, after I woke up. I had been appearing at some kind of literary festival which was more like a large popular music festival in its scale. I was about to give a talk, or had just given a talk, on Roberto Bolaño and the influence of his adopted hometown: Blanes, on the Costa Brava.

People were filing out of a large, roofless tent in which a stage had been set up. I climbed down off the stage and met Holly Partridge, the daughter of Andy Partridge, singer and guitarist in XTC. I went with Holly to a kind of makeshift pub in a building that was like a barn but had large windows. It was too well-lit from the outside to comply with our idea of a barn. I ordered drinks from a small Indian man at the bar while Holly stayed outside where she entertained herself by playing with two small girls who had a beach ball.

The drinks were a long time in coming - the barrel had run dry, perhaps - so I waited in a window seat from where I could see Holly. I gestured for her to come in and join me. She waved and smiled and carried on playing with the children. At some point she had changed her clothes. Now she was wearing something red and blue that made her look like a waitress at a roller disco, but without the skates. I am not entirely sure when the dream ended.


2

Swindon does not exist. Or rather it has not existed until now, when I invented it. If you are from Swindon you will instantly recognise this to be true. If you are not from Swindon and you meet someone who is he or she will be a character that I have invented, or written down. Swindon is the construct of the mind of an author or authors, much like everywhere else. At certain points in history Andy Partridge has been one of the authors to have invented Swindon.


3

At some point close to the end of the dream a song entered my head. The song is called Seagulls Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her and was written by Andy Partridge for XTC's 1984 album The Big Express.

In the song the narrator is standing on the edge of a void. By the time of the song's conclusion he has neither jumped or retreated from the edge. Maybe he has thrown a couple of cursory stones into the unknown. The song is a snapshot of a moment in which nothing really happens, although the implication is that plenty could happen. It is a postcard of a rainy english seaside summer.

It is the negative of Roberto Bolaño's Costa Brava home.

Bolaño wrote about exile, and his final exile was from the void, an exile to a sunny Spanish seaside town. (It is easy and pointless to make comparisons between two writers or artists who probably have (or had) no knowledge of each other's work. What is the value of this? There is none. It is worthless. It is worthless to say that neither man learned to drive. That they have short-sightedness in common.)

Andy Partridge has invented a world in which Swindon is a centre point. An axis mundi must break the earth in two places. Partridge's axis breaks the earth in his invented Swindon, but the opposing pole surfaces in a void characterised by uncertainty. A post-apocalyptic beach with hallucinatory seagulls and an unobtainable girl. In Seagulls Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her he has escaped from Swindon but not from the abyss.