Olive green fabric. Your typical army-issue tent; world over: Sleeps between twelve and twenty or a hundred or a sultan-general. It's very hot and 1992 years after... whatever. A girl lays her sleeping bag down and arranges her temporary domestic mini-space, with her ruck-sack marking the place of a bedside table. Luckily for me, I'm the only other person in the tent at the time and so it is to me she addresses her request. Shorter than I am (unusual in a boy: passably normal in a girl) she has a beautifully formed face in that I mean everything falls together happily, normally, basically, with a chocolate bob of hair on top and large, dark, Turkish eyes. She is saying: 'Do you have... [oh! for the imploring gaze, my lovely!] cream for the [she furrows her brow whilst examining her English words in her head]... She points at her fore-arm. '... do you have cream for... the animals?' I smile back, in love, and shrug in despair. She never talks to me again. Very little English, see, and she's embarassed, her friend explains, a few days later. She huddles against tall Turkish blokes for comfort and I cuddle against my inner imagination. After all the slight glances and the heart-lock she was, after all, only looking for insect repellant. Mosquitos bite their loves in abundance. Maybe the same mozzy bit us both... It's rather daft because I fall in love an awful lot, so it's a bit cheap. I rarely act upon my desires and, when I do, it has an 100% disaster rate. I'm either deluded or unlucky in the fundamental sense combined with laziness and arrogance in the practical sense. And fear: the trauma: 'be scared of the world, boy, for it ain't going your way!' So, 2002 in the hinterlands of a city railway station; innards painted black in, say, sympathy with locomotive soot and the night: standard rock venue: you know what I mean: it's called 'The Venue'. A chanteuse announces 'This is a song... about trains and animals' and proceeds to sing, a la Francoise'ardeee a song of which I didn't get sufficient vocabularic parts to formulate a linguistic jist. However, I fancy I understood its emotional tenor. As verse built up to an 'OK Coral' denoument of first chorus, the Daniel Lanois-style guitarist (from Belgium rather than from Canada) atmospheric'd-up via delays, samples etc. a thundering rhythm in order to support Francoize Breut perform her shift of breath from ennunciation to modulation of air in a piano harmonica. Startling stuff. Is that feminine bulge in her skin-tight-lycra-black sheer voluptuousness or is there a child inside? 'Where are you, my wedding man, why did you disappear?' she sings for an encore. At some point, one almost expected an up-beat number: something dancy; a burst of pogo-punk. Perhaps even a grin. She wasn't miserable either, though... she was one of those French perfections.. a woman: solid; pensive; stylish; vocal... the kind of person who makes a mockery of 'empowerment' why? She BREATHES substance and, in my chaste imagination (for I shall be chaste in this regard) I am her troubador tonight. I had limited cash and hell: If I'd had more I'd have bought the T-shirt, but I did buy her first album to which, at 01:52am, I am currently listening. Since the concert I overheard dot com conversations and cosmopolitain conversations at a whisky cocktail bar in the bowels of a posh hotel and then, on the train home, without a player, I fingered through the sleeve notes, which have the most beautiful illustrations and I could almost begin to translate some of the lyrics... [by the way, Ken, 'colere' means means 'anger' not 'colour' as you suggested or 'collar' as I did...so 'Ou, ou est-elle passe, ou est ma colere, ma colere?' I suppose* means 'Where, where does my anger go, my ANGER?' On, on, the grounds I'm going to sow, when my distractions are done am I to loose, loose? Suddenly I have nothing and, nothing comes from nothing? Anyways, I'm not angry tonight and if she was, she didn't show it, but she sung the song. We're all normal at times. The album I bought was her debut. The new one is Vingt a Trent Mille Jours. If you're interested, try http://www.francoizebreut.com I've said my bit for tonight. By the time I copy it to the web I'll be done enough. And sometimes things crash. The spirit of Icarus resides. Gordon *my last posting to this list I'm sure was inaccurate about I.Allende being the Argentinian ex-premiere's daughter, as she is from Chile... Katje or Arturo will no doubt know, though at least the former wouldn't deign to read this anyway :) _______________________________________________________________________ Never pay another Internet phone bill! 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