Ventian Snares Over Bridgwater

The rain is everywhere, filling eyes and throats; the kids soaked to the skin and invoking Mayan sun sprites over and over again at the top of their laryngitic voices ( We're expecting the Social Services to come scrambling at any moment; they would if anyone could see anything through the rain). We're miles from home (3 and rising with every drop), water pouring over the hedgerows, spewing tiny deltas from the drainage ditches; my wife injured and hobbling like a Dickens character...

The Loki family on a Sunday walk through the weather.

Venetian snares - Dollmaker begins with jazzy drum n bass shuffles:

It's less than 4 miles to Durleigh reservoir but it seems longer and there's no place to eat for another neat 2 mile radius. A miscalculation that might cost us all dear. We press on, walking is what we do now, how we fight against time. The sun has been out for three hours now and it's too much to hope that it'll last.

We head homewards, across country; bypassing Bridgwater town via vacant fairgrounds (site of many bad tidings, local fist-fucks, hair-brains) and across an ancient cattle burial ground - the cows looking dolefully at the canal boats, the horses show their teeth at the abandoned glue factory.

We're following some imaginary ley line, heading homer. The country and the town are so near here, mixing and matching their decorative stylings so that messages of lust scraped into the barks of trees are echoed by the grafitti on the other side of the canal. One sign I remember amongst all the phone numbers and blow-job promises: Who Nows??

The track slowly starts building with some Young Gods guitar, the zig-zagging of scratched strings, electro snaps, crackles and pops...
The rain comes at the moment it's too late to turn back, too late to dive into a pub to call a taxi. The rain knows this.

There's still 3 miles or more to go; we're trapped in a phonebox slowly filling with water. Somehow a Monsoon has come ourway, sweeping over the Hamp estate (by 11pm scores of eight year olds will be lighting their torches, burning their cars, making bazookas out of drain-pipes and French mini-rockets). A line from Nick Cave's The Carny appears: "the rain it hammered down, the rain it hammered down..."

We decide we have to run for it. Soon we'll be drowned anyway: the women and children first.

Soon the song asscends into a headlong Mokum-gabba thrash
No one can see anything; we're running blind, me pushing my daughter in the push-chair, sending minor Tsunamis across the road, my son stripped to a sodden t-shirt, racing ahead, my wife caught in the middle of some awful muscular dystrophy. We pass farm after farm after farm; dogs barking at unseen terrors, carts propped and unsteady, men scrambling for staffs and pails...

the gabba pulses trail off into static clouds and beat embers; a thin trail of smoke and answer machine messages.

1/4 mile to go and the sun comes out; twin rainbows uncurl, both the children blink and smile like they've just stumbled from a nuclear shelter...
Venetian Snares - dollmaker