Jimmy stops under the stars for meat and wine.

Strolling off a cultured path on the North Norfolk coast, I clutch at gathered sticks. It’s near dark and one the most pleasant days of my life. I get on a can of beer and a string of sausages and lay down barefooted and wild-haired, my bag under my good old head and my ankles crossed. I stand at intervals, looking up at the splendorous night sky and contemplate the expiration of clouds as we roll together over a wood fire, churned and heated, singing, spitting in the red hot stones. It’s a local beach, mogulled by the feet of virgins and lost boys. Virginal and lost for now but not forever. They intend to feign sleep; half naked bodies entwined while the flames lick their hips. To fool each other they must first fool themselves and this deception is underway by the look in their eyes.

The beach reflects the outer channel and this night I wade in the water and catch another sausage with absurdly hot sauce and then wine and stars, stars pretending to be glorious and unique, when deep down they feel only brotherhood and same.  

I get to work on the wine and push it far down the beasts’ neck and drive myself away to avoided favorites such as mint-choc-chip ice cream, away on a drink and a smoke.

On my taste buds at eleven pm the sigh of the sea out there (somewhere near Holland) asks about my life and about the little mute tramp by my side and about being quite mad and cooking sausages over coals. I relax back to near mental health and a thin old universe of de-pixilated stars finds reflection so exhausting and unsociable, that it climbs into the belly of the North sea for a proper decent cuddle.
Digging down into the two tasty ones we head into a cross-legged discussion. We agree that since before the leftover part of our fortune came,  they all looked surprised to see us, even with only a few miles elapsed. Virgins and shop-keepers and publicans and birds and fish and even the early flames of the nightly fire, all gasp with surprise as we present and position.

The mute tramp establishes himself about my thoughts at this point and bites them off at the end. At the other end of the beginning-less evening, he lays down facing me. I pitch him sausages and tip him wine with his head on the honest sands and his own miserably small body picked out by starry pixels humming wondrously in the sky. He lays as still as a terd and says even less. We chomp, slug, chomp and blow the hubbly while all living creatures stop like mice to inhale our divinity. The wine eases down the rich bites of hot meat, sizzling on the tongue like many human-beings singing with feigned hope before they die. We sit and listen to ourselves and blow smoke over the water as the air gets exulted in one of the warmer and foggier nights since embarkation. 
On the matter of warm nights and the valleys of the coast, both the little mute and I have made unsuccessful attempts to hold the seas and cliff tops in our hands. Yet we still get up and swig wine and pace back and forth and flinch when the sand in our blankets dance about our chests like proposing electric fingers.

 Pretty soon we head of the beach at a siding up ahead. The mute and I figure that tearing up yesterdays regrets is the way to live. To drink wine and masticate and keep the rest to a minimum. The night has become bored of our chatter and finally it creeps off as nonchalantly as it crept in. At the pinnacle of deliberation we ask a question to the sun whilst it's still weak and emerging. What does it know of 'The Soup'? But before we dare listen to an answer, the electric fingers of sand remind us about the future dust that our bones will surely make, and we run, run, run, singing, spitting, running back home the long way round. Back home where lonely virgins strive for diamonds and all while the silly gems glisten about their feet unnoticed. We will run free in the soft eastern sands for them, with a sausage and the question and a bottle of dark hot wine.

not The End

Jimmy begins his journey by leaving the flat.

I leave my flat under the assumed weight of the middle-class citizen, and now whipping off the disguise, I am set for an itinerary which is perfectly adapted to the fashioning of epic days. Jailors of spirit becoming a vague respectable presence and the kind of ghosts that the fetus of intellect does well to ignore.

  I have consigned my assumptions to the north sea and formed a partnership with a little silent tramp. He wears a spotty scarf and a bowler hat square to his small frame. He smiles his little smile and mostly stays on my left side. We sprint intermittently and without warning or preparation, the packs grinding and unthreading on our backs, our lungs making good torture for our minds. In the many pubs we drink in along the way, I feel more like a junk-laden sculptor than a tramping frontiersman. But the little mute with his big boots and confident head wear - for these parts- is every bit the adventuring hobo.

 At one town along the snake paths of the North Norfolk coast, we witness the undoing of a community. Young men in fits of shallow laughter, blat about the delicate rural roadways and glare with subconscious homo-empathy in their eyes. They revere the superficial and wear the reverence on their feet and hands and heads and mouths. Famous people, all sad and gaunt for their lack of vision, consult the young men through natty devises in mutually unwitting ways. Even more tear-worthy is the calculated denial - by better educated famous people - of the boundless depth to the visions of the young.

 More youth about on the seaside high street and pub car-parks... Self-promoted young women squander their sensual allotments amid blaring claxons of soulless TV, music without melody and empty magazines; all promising inclusion and entrance into the fame-lottery at least. These girls are clamoring for womanhood, seemingly unable to halt and sit and realise the softness of their skin and how it can teach tenderness to men.

 Apart from the raging crowds the tramp and I take photographs of us alone on the North Norfolk beaches, smiling and listening to the world. Agreeing that the sea is not so enigmatic after all. These photos are now hung in a cottage hallway for purely economic reasons and depict us two as entranced by this craggy stretch of coast. Its enduring sweet-shops and dignified railways, resplendent ales, enthusiastic social calendars and stubborn sideburns on the ruddy cheeks of old men.

 Between crowded boulders and scrub offset by the vigorous long steps. Far off crumbling sea-groins can be seen extending from cliffs-edge to water like overworked arteries. An epidemic of yellow-petaled scrub, sways to the sound of shanty and kisses the sea mist and looks prehistoric.

 A special pleasure in seeing uncommon users strap off their packs halfway down the steps and contemplate failure, is almost sure to give us both short frissons, but rugged men as we are, we climb to them, carry them down all bleary and sick, down into the beasts cave as if attending to something there that pleases him. He is built like an old tree and has a pot-belly. Teflon-tough grass grows out, there are gashes down his eyes and cheeks. He was a beautiful child when he first came to this coastal town. The trouble - he tells us - is that he lost his looks by dint of a tinkers spell; Cast in a fit of spite whilst he play with his twin brother on the edge of the hard surfaces. And more hurtsome than that, his twin slipped in and was lost to the sea and the beast remains tragically cautious of the waves and their popping foams and displaced shingle. Yet, Into the soup is where he is desperate to be. Alone with his twin and their one mind.

 Once the users are delivered and attentive, we see a vision in the smoky morning mist. At least a hundred fisherman attend to the presumption of a beasts appetite, never to forget him and his terrible ways, they invent shanties and stories to that effect. Because of his beastness, they presume he wants prey. So they throw him fish and hope the fish flap enough to allay his predatory instinct. Really, the beast is just a mournful brother. He tries to convey this to the users and fisherman, he asks them truly, pleads for their help in finding his dear lost twin. He points to the horizon and the boats and then he wails, but his tongue is too wild and they all scream at his grassy belly and molten eyes, and then the fisherman continue to frantically fetch him more fish and the users scatter into the night, all mystified and disturbed and packless.

 Up the cliffs to a pub the two of us go. Our packs hitched up and molded, the tramps bowler hat straightened and proud. We ponder elucidation over the first beer, but It's no good that we tell these young people around us of the beast and his melancholy; how they should run to the beach and advise their fisherman fathers to cast their nets for a beastly twin with half a mind. Search, rescue and reunify the brothers. Break the tinkers spell and with it the dawn on this North Norfolk town. Alas, the young do not see us or hear us anymore. We have blinded them or allowed them to be blinded. We have blocked their ears or failed to prevent the blockage.

 After half a skin-full we plod off up the coast to the next town or village. We hope for more sweet-shops and railways, resplendent ales, busy squares and stubborn sideburns on faces with time to chat. I ask the little tramp:

'How long before that beast is driven mad by his inability to parley for his brothers soul?.. And how long until he tires of flapping fish?'

The little tramp smiles his little smile and we walk on.                                           

not The End