night 3
Night 3: Sunday 20th November 2022. Hilary and Dan / E
17.15 and I ‘ve come early to the roof. I ‘ve been hunting for my 1999 four seasons sleeping bag with a volcanic orange interior to go with the trip I took to the seismic landscape of Iceland and I can’t find it anywhere. I ‘ve come up here with a budget one from The Range bought when we were ‘forced to camp’ one summer. I do have a beautiful bright purple and pink welsh wool blanket to add weight and colour. Everyone says it’s too itchy. And it is ordinarily but out here I just like the weight of it. I could drop off to sleep right now. As soon as darkness comes and if it’s dry enough the dusky pink and cream standard lamps are unveiled and on and all is illuminated.
The stage is set.
This afternoon the crowdfunder has been rising. We’re now at 15% - £7868.
Slight drizzle is now coming down so I ‘’ll need to put this laptop away – or try out the new fancy set up of plastic tarp on central string. Keeping an eye on the sky in case I should turn off lights. It’s a small improvement. Sunday night. School tomorrow and the excited countdown to Christmas has begun. The plan – to meet the target, to know that solar installs are secured for Jan, to record a Christmas number 1 with the school (more on that soon!) and get the strategy to sell the Big Bang 2 van on track. The tiredness is quite intense. Almost delectable if I could just give in to it and not feel bad about abandoning everyone – maybe there is time for a snooze whilst I’m ‘on duty’ here.
The various flight paths above weave a complex web of invisible motion tracks – aeroplanes, helicopters and birds at varying altitudes , their sounds reverberating across the now clear skies. Apart from the sodium haze the sky is clear and the stars are bright. After reading previous night’s records Neala (author of ArtPolitik: Social anarchist aesthetics in an age of fragmentation’) messages to say be nice to the crow, they’ll remember ..try unsalted peanuts. I will. For now I say hello to the sky as a familiar caw comes out of the darkness. A family emerges from the neighbours two doors down. I ‘m a figure under lamplight with a note pad as I try to draw out the kind of signs and banners we should be putting on the front of the house without ruining the magic of this surprise rooftop vista. The children notice me and I sense an audience. I can’t resist looking up from the page - we wave to each other and their Dad say ‘sweet dreams.’ They don’t ask what I ‘m doing up there and I don’t offer the information. Their car engine starts with a cough and as they leave a child asks’ is that a real person up there.’ I share the video Dan made of us the previous sodden night with Richard E Grant - he presses ‘like’ but that’s it. A comment from Leah says perhaps the quote from ‘Withnail’ and I that we were looking for would be ‘we’ve come on holiday by mistake!’ This is oddly a combination of endurance test and weird holiday were only the bare minimum of routine is adhered to – just enough to function. The leaves are really falling. Paul – the street cleaner / philosopher King has his work cut out. Trains pass. The air is thick with visible water droplets coating everything in moisture. Moths visit the lights. It’s all very calm but inside chaos is ensuing and arguments and sadness mean Dan is replaced on the roof by E. She gets the good sleeping bag. She brings up Reeses peanut cups in her pockets and munches them looking for constellation and discussing horoscopes.
I wake up on the hour all night for some reason. The sky is white with cloud cover but no rain. My phone screen illuminates the welsh blanket doing well to stay relatively dry - repelling water in big globules that I attempt to channel to the edges of the bed. I check in on the crowdfunder and we’re at over £12,000! That’s 25% - a quarter of the way there. It’s been a good maths test question for the children – if we have £10,000 in 2 nights and keep building at the same rate how many more nights will it take to reach our target? 8? Both a short and extremely long time when measured in damp patches and lack of sleep. Dan wakes us up with a treat of a bagel and cup of tea and we secure the bed. Today I will get the signs – whatever they are – made. The photographer from the Observer may be coming and there is work to do. The dogs greet me with excitement but also groans. They are confused and fed up with this situation. Dog 1 has slept at our feet every night of our lives together, whether at home or away, in house or van, and now she watches us alight the ladder from the windows and cannot join. The risk is too great – the cats and creatures prowling this elevated world too much of a temptation.
