Jeb Loy Nichols flips another record on the deck, in amongst sparrows and dancing women and unpeopled hills.

The Devil Gives Me Everything Except What I Need
Willie West
Timmion Records

The simpler and therefore better effect is always obtained by means of temperate and wise restraint.  Wrote Gertrude Jekyll.

I take the car out for its weekly drive into town.  There is, on turning the key, much popping and sputtering before the car settles into a gentle rumble.  I cruise up hills and over the river, alongside the canal.  Betwixt hedgerows.  The heater coughs out a thin mist of warmth.  I pass through Llanllugan and through Manafon.  Through Pant Y Ffridd and through Berriew.  In Tregynon I pass a bus stop and slow to a crawl, watching a woman of uncertain years, let’s say in her early sixties, with grey hair wild around her, performing some kind of solo dance.  On closer inspection there are headphones hidden in the hair and a phone in one hand.  The woman steps back and pivots, does a hip swivel and turns.  I want to stop and dance with her.  I want to know what she’s listening to.  I want to introduce her to my friends.  I want to take the bus with her, to wherever she’s going, to spend the day by her side, looking out the window.   I want to spend my life with her.  

I try not to listen to the radio.  I prefer silence.  But I’m weak and dull minded so occasionally I turn it on and listen to the news.  It’s never good.  People are mean hearted and short sighted and they all want money and power.  It’s a mess out there and it’s not getting better.  I turn it off, roll down the window and let the wind get at me.  

When I get home I do what I often do; I flip a random record on the deck and wait to see what it is.  Today it’s Willie West giving a lecture on Need versus Want.  It’s a lecture we could all do with listening to.  Willie knows what he’s talking about.  He’s been there and he’s lived to tell the tale.  The world is full of shiny bangles that mean us no good; we’ve populated the planet with sugar coated nonsense.  Funny old weak willed fools that we are.

After Willie has his say I pick up a book by Tennessee Williams.  Tennessee tells it like it is.  He’s sweet and sad and always in love with some new strange thing.  From his book Eight Mortal Ladies Possessed, I read: Revolution begins with putting on bright colours.

There are days when all I do is sit around and watch the starlings gather in dark clusters.  For weeks great swarms careen above the fields.  How is it that they can do what they do?  That each bird follows at the wing of every other bird?  That they move at such speeds but never collide.  An exhibition of grace, form, coordination, reflex, touch.  I watch them, saying not a word.  The whole of me absorbed.  Emitting tiny sprays of air.  I gasp.

I think about Willie West and Tennessee Williams and my old car and the dancing woman in Tregynon; I’m mostly pleased to be here amongst the strange rattlings of my life.  And yes, it might be true what Willie says: The devil gives me everything except what I need.  But I don’t think the Devil is such a bad old guy, he’s just tired and confused and worn down like the rest of us.  A mischief maker.  A friend, no doubt, of Tennessee Williams.  I’ll take what the devil gives and thank him for it; then I’ll mix it with the sparrows and the dancing women and the unpeopled hills.  How can I ask for more than that?

If you have a spare minute, cast your eye over this new thing I’m involved with.