it's raining. it's May Day morning (or rather, very shortly it will be). i don't remember the past two years so many ordinary people making such a night of it - the High is strewn with flyers for the Dreem Team at The Cavern or something.

i'm pretty sure that last year i wasn't in town for this day. i remember vividly in the first year the attempt to stay up via alcohol, fighting on the lawn, allowing ourselves half an hour to sleep and waking up at eight, having missed everything. then spending the day still drunk in and out of taxis and houses in pursuit of a ladybird-shaped eggtimer and an estate agent "near Laura Ashley and some bushes".

so i've still never done anything pertaining to the celebration. and i feel like i should. i just came off of the Tube and the sky towards Thornhill was almost the colour of heather, which i'm sure is to do with streetlamps and phosphorous but made me yearn from something real and old and deep. even John Berger does May Day.
aside from that, i could do with any blessing i could get. some ritual to release the good that i'm sure is somewhere and struggling to help me. i remember picking apart a poem with Caroline by Gjertrud Schnackenberg (with whom she was not taken with as i, still flush with discovery, really was). it hinged on the word carnation/incarnation. anyway, Caroline went into a sort of - i don't know, a sort of sermon, perhaps - about 'sacrament'. "I remember that" she said "from school. I remember that we were told it is the outward sign of inward grace". she turned her outstretched right hand so that her palm faced me.

it was a bit like a wing and also part of a conjuring trick.
so sacrament - in search of this union (communion?) i could go and splash myself with the dew of a hawthorn tree; or should i greet the sun? climb onto the roof, like in the last track on 'A sky of honey'?

Clara Snailpetal wrote (as ever) beautifully about this period and, I remember, wrote an entry about May Day. I wish I could still read whaqt she wrote then. though Laura remarked on my improvement regarding comparison and envy and self-abasement recently. Finals has left me no mental room for any of that. this evening i think is just a relapse of that whimsy, which feels like nothing so much as nostalgia for something that i've never done.

as ever, i have been meaning to write here for ages. not going home but staying here over Easter vacation to revise has given me little perspective and little sense of the months passing; another reason why today is a surprise. i have an entry still laid out, with the desire to cry and screaming and blood and birthdays and whisky and a Gaudy and pressure and depression and self-failings and prayings and some other things, in some other order.

but - as i say of my revision, determination and sense of meaning - maybe tomorrow.