The MRS and I would have probably spent today walking and talking, definitely drinking heavily, a backhanded celebration of another year alive. We would have likely considered the ridiculousnesses of this world, a place we always felt owed us so much yet had delivered so little, far from the daydreams of our infancy. From the insipid and incestous industries that our trades have a hard time succeeding in, doors appearing locked, always left to our own devilish devices, to the proudly pompous re-thinking of all the philosophies that came before us, all the while caressing each other’s careless spirits. By the middle of this day, full of pretension and fired orange by a blind kind of arrogance – the type only true poets could ever claim as their own – we’d have agreed our fates and been overwhelmed by a sense of destiny and rightness in all that had ever happened along the way. Come the evening, I have little doubt, we would have reduced to the state of dumb mumbling buffoons, and felt beautiful for it – sniggering idiots, useless, priceless – found children / lost men – pointless ideas trapped in a bizarre theatrical parallel that only hours before had caused such steep anxieties to bubble between us, but now, prompts only laughter and an occasional dry slap of wild abandonment to come shake us from our stupor. Sadly, that cannot be the case today. There is no second best to that kind of connection, that ability to waste away a day without due care or any knowingful consequence. One can only now imagine.

I wrote this song, Blood In, Blood Out, a few days ago and recorded it soon after, late at night, or perhaps early in the morning, drunk and sentimental, blue and lightly inspired. No effort was made to make a performance of it, and so you’ll notice badly fingered chords and unsure vocals throughout, very human mistakes that The MRS and I would have held in its favour, the type of torn edges that perhaps would have formed much of our celebration on this day. I have provided a short film to accompany the song. Hastily edited, similar to how it was originally shot – unplanned and of true amateur standing – it details the last weeks and final days of our residency at that curious place along The Dirty Mile, just by the River Medway, in the summer of 2009 … The Unawarehouse. This is for him, my good brother, The MRS.