Local Date

3 October 2024

Local Time

12:30

Location

Finsbury Square, London

Country or Territory

United Kingdom

Name

Sasha Engelmann

Satellite

NOAA-18

Radio Callsign

M6IOR

Archive ID

ow658

It is a relatively warm and mild day in London, and people pour out into the streets at lunchtime as I set up for the satellite pass. Yet I am thinking about the wind and it's relationship, provocation (?) or resonance with memory. Writing from the depths of February in Dungeness, Derek Jarman is listening to the wind, observing: "Fragments of memory eddy past and are lost in the dark". The wind is blowing "high in the tower blocks and steeples, down along the river, invading houses and mansions..." He continues: "But the wind does not stop for my thoughts. It whips across the flooded gravel pits drumming up waves on their waters that glint hard and metallic in the night, over the shingle, rustling the dead gorse and skeletal bugloss, running in rivulets through the parched grass - while I sit here in the dark holding a candle that throws my divided shadow across the room and gathers my thoughts to the flame like moths. I have not moved for many hours. Years, a lifetime, eddy past: one, two, three: into the early hours, the clock chimes. The wind is singing now".

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