I got led very astray last night. I agreed to go out for a drink - ONE drink - because Kirsty was down for two days. We’d already all been out for lunch, but at six the five of us traipsed across the road to the King and Queen and requisitioned a table outside in the cold.

Outside seemed like a good idea at the time. I don’t know why.

Anyhow, that one drink doubled two two, which doubled to four, which doubled to a whole night sitting out on the pavement until closing time, by which point none of us was particularly feeling the cold. Or walking straight.

What did we talk about all that time? I have no idea. I remember a lot of hugging - particularly at the tube station, and then a long ride home and an even longer walk because I decided to take the ’scenic’ route at some crazy time after midnight (crazy for a work night, at least) purely because there was a full moon and an empty sky, and the fog was rolling in across the flood plane.

So I woke up this morning with a horrible ache. Two. One in my head, and the other in my legs. The gym trip on Monday night finally popped up and bit me, probably on account of having sat around for so long in the cold, skipped dinner, drunk too much and then walked home and fallen onto the bed in some strange configuration.

All that meant that my car was still at the station from last night, so walking in this morning was doubly nasty. It was worth it for last night, though. Also cool was taking a slight diversion on the way in this morning.

Every time I walk in, I cut across the floodplain and and then through the smashed up car park behind the records office which, stupidly, has been built right on the banks of a river that floods every winter and then filled with unique, irreplaceable documents tracing the history of the country.

Anyhow, at the back of this car park is a bizarre structure that was presumably once a building the size of a football pitch, but which has since lost its roof, so it is now just an unbroken wall running around a patch of overgrown scrub ground, now full of brambles, rubbish and tatty little hills. What is interesting about it, though, is the way that the wall - both inside and out - has been adopted by the local graffiti artists as a kind of unofficial gallery.

They blank out whole sections of it using white Dulux paint, and then create some remarkable pieces of art, most of which you can’t see unless you actually slip through a gap in the wall into the inside of the remaining structure.

I didn’t have time to look around it all, but I did take some pictures of the bits closest to the front. A repeat visit is called for, so I can explore the rest.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 1st, 2004 at 8:41 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.