a field student of fishy fingered tales

Field Study's Man in E17 returned to the dream-space of the River Ching, a stretch of which marks the northern most reach of the parliamentary constituency boundary of Walthamstow. Overhung with the dense riverside foliage of summer, the space was eerily crepuscular. Your noctambulist stepped, as if tentatively, into the water, ahead of him the twin tunnels through which he would venture to test his 'skills' as a sleep swimmer. A reconnaissance had alerted the field student to the presence of life in the river - something resembling a lamprey. Prostrating himself to enter the left tunnel, he stole a breath of reassurance, the tunnel is but a short distance, then immersed himself in the chilling threshold of Walthamstow, and Chingford and Woodford Green constituencies. Immediately his finger tips tingled, all most a tickling sensation which rapidly spread around him and intensified as it did. In the paradoxically solid darkness of the liquid subterranean threshold the field student spun around overwhelmed by the tickling force of a mysterious myriad shoal. Hysterical laughter splashed and echoed from within the tunnel spooking crows form the nearby tree tops. Around and around the field student gulped, gasped, guffawed and squealed feeling himself become increasingly liquid, at one with the water and it's flow. The Stygian darkness faded to a more mortal pallor as the field student quietly emerged from the tunnel though would you have recognized this dream swimmer from this chimerical realm? His body deflated akin to an all in one body suit snagging and slipping over and around the slime covered bricks and other detritus of the river's course. To add to the horror of this vision, there was the ghastly attachment of countless sucking worm like fish - lampreys? Who knows? For as the the 'primal Dawn spread on the eastern sky her fingers of pink light,' so these aqueous wriggling fingers detached and retreated to the sanctuary of the right hand tunnel. Dawn's fingertips caressed the sores left by innumerable mouths which had ravaged Field Study's body politic. All the holes were healed but for one which the river flowed into filling the once deflated cadavre and soon the field student was a semblance of himself - and then further revived and reconstituted by the dawn chorus. As he gazed downstream, it was the left bank of the Ching which seemed to sing a rousing chorus, a socialist clarion call, England Arise! With this rousing, Field Study's man in E17 squelched his way home through meadows blest with rain.

Elsewhere the field student has trekked through, across and around a vast text, a complicated patchwork of local heritage 'debatery' via the Archipelago of Truth and Hansard; here and there.

Needing some rigorous scholarly research to inform and guide his quest for living art, Field Study's Man in E17 (and E11 temporarily) attended Roger Huddles account of the contrastingly plodding settled life yet radical praxis of Ambrose Barker - nowhere but here

What of the concept of surplus value and the dignity of labour, the connotations of kitsch and artistic folly? To explore this, Field Study's Man in e17 cycled with great haste (to dodge the siren psycho calls of The Marshman Chronicles) across Hackney Marshes and down the Lea, arriving at the construction site for Folly for a Flyover . FSMiE17 freely drilled a number of bricks of which he lost count.

 Saturday 11th June 2011.

Kissed by intense light at the handles of the pillar drills of wisdom (or folly?), Field Study's Man returned home to help guide Waltham Forest Arts Club members through the coming days of art, alive in the meadows of Shangri La, which is E17.