online: 6 april 2005
modified: 5, 6 april 2005

2 april 2005 searching by chance


18:21 At the boat pond - now being made more 'alive' (for fish and water birds?) by the planting of a reed bed which is fenced off while it grows.

As soon as i sat here a comorant* (or a shag?) surfaced and then dived again...

...and now it's gone...

...and then a large fish (perhaps a metre long and say 30 centimetres wide) broke the surface and immediately disappeared. Could it have been a pike?

This is a cultivated or gardened part of the heath to which i seldom come. I came here by chance process, going to a randomly determined point in an area where i might like to live (if i have to leave the place where i'm living now).

The chance process took me to a point within 50 metres of a large house on a hill with a for sale notice for a flat with 3 bedrooms and roof terrace with view (probably of the heath and of central London). The flat is too big for me, and surely too expensive, but i would certainly like to live there - within 10 mins walk of the heath and in sight of the city...

This is the way i like to go house hunting - trusting in chance (within an area chosen intuitively). I was not surprised to find a flat for sale near to a point selected randomly.**



*The cormorant is a large sea bird often seen here - it is said to eat its own weight in fish each day - about 4 kilos.

**I've been using such chance processes ever since I read John Cage's book A year from Monday, in the eary 1970s. He gives precise descriptions of the way he designed his chance processes. The book was published by Marion Boyars, London 1968.




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