The Ned Wood Archive

The sparrow sings dawn chorus for someone else to hear

I’m lying in my bed in my room in the Palace of Marchmont. It’s a ground floor room at the front of the flat, so I get all of the noises off the street, but it isn’t street noise that I’m having to listen to. It’s early in the morning and it’s raining, but I’m not listening to the gentle sound of rain patting my window. I’m listening to a giant hairy woolly mammoth empty its bladder into the flooded trough on the small patch of earth that constitutes our front garden. It’s still early in the morning. I’m still laying on the bed not able to sleep. I’m still listening to the torrent flowing down over the falls at Niagara, Iguaçu, and Llanberis. Above me, above MacPherson in 1FL, above Lawson in 2FL, and above the students in third floor left, high up where the stone of the Palace of Marchmont reaches the sky, the guttering is broken, and all of the becks and burns and streams and rivulets forming on the roofs of the Palace unite into one gigantic flow which cascades down past the students, past Lawson, past MacPherson, and, bouncing off the string course – the decorative line of protruding stones above my window, creates a racket that is forcing me to pay attention. It sounds like the old wifey that scrubs the stairs is throwing buckets of water recklessly and randomly against my wall and into the burgeoning puddle that was our front lawn, although it would appear that the old wifey has lost her rhythm so there is no regularity to the splashes and no hope of my being rocked to sleep.

Still it rains, the rain washing away nothing, just ponding up in the lake that was once our front garden. I lie awake and think about the day ahead, but only end up worrying about the walk up to King’s Buildings. My uncontrollable brain focusses on two broken paving slabs on the way. If you put all of your weight on either of them, they’re liable to rock over and drop you into a 2 inch deep puddle causing your shoe to fill up and which means you’ll spend the rest of the day with a soggy squelching sock. And the question bothering my little brain is whether I can remember exactly where those broken slabs are.

Still it rains, the rain washing away nothing except a few layers of soot, smoke, dust, and dirt from the wall above my window creating a red sandstone coloured gash long and thin wounding the side of the Palace of Marchmont. Outside it is still dark, the only light a yellow-orange halo around the occasional streetlight, the glow being reflected in the frequent puddles on the street and the occasional clean window opposite. Gems of golden citrine, beryl, and topaz flash down past the haloed lights and collect in the frequent pools of midlothian springwater amassing on the tarmac. The only soul up and about is the milkie with his horse and cart reluctantly and randomly delivering pints of milk to the villagers of Marchmont. Some of the villagers. Never us. The newsagent over the way is not yet open, old Mingies, the bloke that runs it, is late and there’s a pile of papers on his doorstep soaking up the rainwater but failing to mop up any of the water in the puddles. There’ll be folk in Marchmont having to take the Herald not the Scotsman today.

Still it rains, the rain washing nothing away but the dreams of last night’s oft-interrupted sleep. Old MacPherson with his Fyfe Robertson beard and tweed jacket gets up out of a sense of duty and gets ready for work. Not-so-old Lawson with his beer belly and 30-a-day habit gets up out of necessity and gets ready for work. The young students on 3FL – who knows what they do. If they’ve got any work, no-one’s ever seen them do it. Not-so-young Ned Wood – me – I get ready, sharing a similar sense of duty to the family above my head. I pull my mackintosh raincoat tight across my chest, venture out of the front door, and dance over the puddles and cracked paving slabs south towards another day at King’s Buildings. The sun isn’t getting up today. It has no sense of duty and no necessity. It’s going to call in sick.