River Marden

In my River series I'm back to my most local river today. This is the River Marden only a short distance from my cottage, and less than a mile from the town centre but already the landscape has changed dramatically. At the top of the picture on the left you can see the houses on Curzon Park. It was here in Wansdyke Drive that Tori Amos filmed her video for the song Jackie's Strength, because of its resemble to an American street.

The line of trees below the houses show where the Calne branch of the Wilts and Berks Canal used to be, running parallel to the Marden out of Calne, and in the foreground on the river is the weir at Keevils.

The light was already failing when I took this walk and in only three weeks time British Summer Time will come to an end, the clocks will go back an hour, and the early evening will be plunged into darkness. I'm rather dreading this as it will throw any semblance of a routine or habituation out of the window as far as taking blips go. It will be my first Blip winter.

Lozarhythm Of The Day:
Tori Amos - Jackie's Strength (recorded 1997)
Tori Amos converted Curzon Park into American suburbia with the addition of some American vehicles for this single, taken from From The Choirgirl Hotel. The video has Tori Amos as a bride on her wedding day, in a taxi cab, and was directed by James Brown.
"Jackie's Strength is really... I was asked to get married, right? And I was quite nervous because I never thought I'd get married before. It just wasn't something that I was gonna do. Even though I believe in monogamy, just having the church and state condone my union wasn't important to me. And in fact, I really didn't want that. So, when he asked me, it brought up, obviously, a lot of things. And I started going back in my little movie in my head, different moments of my life. And I remember my mother telling me that the day Kennedy died, John F. Kennedy, that she put me down, she had to lay me down because her heart started to slow down and she couldn't breathe. And um, all she thought of was Jackie and the strength that it would take Jackie to lead the nation.. which she did. And I really knew that I was gonna need some kind of strength because I'm made up of like two personalities. There's one side of me that could very easily have ended up at the 7-Eleven sitting outside drinking a Slurpee in my wedding dress and just missing the whole thing. And then there's the other one that did make it to the church. So, this song is about the one that drank the Slurpee. She's still out there somewhere." - Tori Amos talking to Steven Daly in Rolling Stone  (Issue #789; June 25, 1998).