A fig tree in a car park. It's August. The tree is low but with thick far reaching branches. There's a feeling when you go towards the trunk of being enveloped, protected, held. There are ripe figs falling on the floor, being squashed by cars and feet and also just the heat causes them to collapse. A pungent smell, chewed green and fermentation. Stacked against the trunk are cardboard boxes full of empty crimson red votive candles.
The longest pier in the UK, it takes 10 minutes to walk down to the end. Turn left and walk along next to a wooden clad wall, many names are scratched into this wood. Noah, Micah, Joe, Clive, Jessica. It's a really foggy day. The fog is thick and the tide is out. Wet sand. Bleak. Past the wooden clad wall is a small tower, a narrow path leads around the tower and you can stand here and look out to the sea. It seems here that it's just you and the sea. The sun is shining so bright but the fog still hangs heavy. A foghorn is sounding periodically from the pier. A ship which is invisible to us through the fog is sending back the signal. On the way back down the pier there's a wooden ramp leading into the sea. The tide is coming in now. It's slowly washing over more and more of the ramp. A big crowd of small sea birds, sit on the ramp.
A person in France buys battery chickens that would otherwise be killed because they are at the end of their laying life, he take them to the small wood where he lives, and they roam around, pecking and having mud baths, living their best life, he doesn't lock them up at night and so usually within a few days they are eaten by foxes.
I was sitting on a bench talking with a friend in Hampstead London, opposite a row of victorian terrace houses, I ask him if he has been reading the news and he tells me he hasn't for months, I start automatically updating him and I realise the ivy growing up one of the houses opposite is also growing in through the window and deep into the bedroom at the top of the house.
Happy New Year