Full

Well, the office blind is rattling away in the wind in counterpoint to the rhythm of my fingers as they bring you this report. The rattle is hardly surprising in this turret thrust up into the jet stream, combined with the cracked window that not only lets an icy blast through but emits a perfect B flat as it whistles. At first I thought it may have been an effect of the slipstream created by the speed with which I type, until I managed to divert an optic nerve and a brain cell to consider the matter properly.

Research is an important component of what we do here at Turn Up. I regard it as fuel. One suspends reality with the deepest of breaths and enters a twilit realm peopled by laughing, leering faces, clattering noise and unremitting ribaldry, as if the world was steam-driven and operated by half-human circus performers, tinkers and pickpockets. It is a world of wooden floors, leathery beer, and endless echo. Worlds of nether knowledge become apparent, freshly-minted truths briefly shine like the creation of micro-universes. Wits are necessary in a slippery environment in which they are liable to go clattering off on any one of the many tangents that slant across the view.

Sometimes, of course, it is the tangent that holds the revelation. Borough Market on a Friday, a bustling, hustling, barrage of humanity. The Victorian ironwork of the railway viaducts, riveted pillars, encloses the melange of stalls. Brickwork, reflecting hundreds of years of passing trade of every sort, stands solid. Far older dust blows about our feet, in the very air we breathe.

Suddenly, across the market, we catch sight of a possibility. We’re off! Pelting after shadows down cobbled alleyways, echoes fading behind us. Up East; the swaying carriages, all thrown into normality by the lights, but glimpses through to the next car as the train wends the bends. Plunging into an avalanche, I can only go with the indivertible currents of the day, until, exhausted, I make my only real mistake; a chicken tikka pastie. Sometimes we should be protected from ourselves. Low on Mr Rennie’s elixir of balm, it is an error I would come to regret.

Tirelessly we experienced the flavours of the day. I’m not certain at the end of it whether one could say that there is anything that can be catalogued, but there remains a layer of accumulated essence for the mulling.

Such is my report.