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The Crab Walks
“Clouted Cream of Devon. The thickened, conspissated, or curdled cream, common in all our Farm-houses, is of Egyptian origin…” p.108,
Sylva Antiqua Iscana,Numismatica, Quintiam Furgina
by W. T. P. Shortt,Exeter: 1837.“The trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hisshistory happened overseas…”
The Satanic Verses
, SalmanRushdie, London & New York: Viking Penguin, 1988.We’re walking down the edge of the Teign... the signs saythis is the Templer Walk, but I'm not convinced this isanything... have we lost the track? We're just on the river  bed and we’re lucky it’s low tide. Anjali's with me - she'san Indian-born actress - she's just come from touring NewYork with the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of 
Midnight's Children
and I’m dragging her along thisdamp, slippery river bed, pointing out where I think theBishop's Palace is on the other side. Underfoot its veryslippery and a bit soft... and the rocks are covered in dark green seaweed... there's a dead crab here and there... andanother... and another.... there's lots of them. I hadn'tnoticed them at first, they're green shore crabs... gooddisguise in the weed, but once we see one we can’t helpseeing them, shell after shell – like when you learn a newword and then you see it everywhere - and the crabs allseem to have been eaten very efficiently by something,
 
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hollowed out from the back so the shells areleft…perfect… untouched except for a little hole behind thelegs. I say to Anjali that it must have been the herringgulls...I thought those herring gulls were going to hollow me out.In Hitchcock’s
The Birds
there's a shot from right up withthe gulls and they're looking down on the burning gasstation. It’s an image I’ve had for my own displacedviewpoint on these explorings, but this time I felt the gullswere looking down on me like they looked down on thatgas station... the land stretched like a screen and them upthere in that layer, kind of skin, kind of shell… thearchaeologicalisation of site-specificity and dérive turnedon its head (put on its feet), the layers now in the sky. Notebook: “It is not that the ‘content’ of the Koran isdirectly disputed; rather by revealing other enunciatory positions and possibilities within the framework of Koranicreading, Rushdie performs the subversion of its authenticitythrough the act of cultural translation – he relocates theKoran’s intentionality by repeating and reinscribing it inthe locale of the novel of postwar cultural migrations anddiasporas.” (p226, Homi Bhabha, The Location Of Culture,London: Routledge, 1994) Can this be applied to my SouthDevon perform/walk work? By relocating the ‘Englishseaside’ into Hindu/Indian storytelling? (not to challengeits ‘content’ but to relocate it.. & thus relativise it.)”It all started when I disturbed some nesting gulls at the topof the old steps, just by the Old Quay docks in Teignmouth,
 
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next to Number 1 Warehouse. I had to shelter in doorwaysand against walls and gravestones as my paranoia circledoverhead, or perched itself on gutters and gargoyles. I madefor the unusual shape of St James the Less, hugging thewalls of the houses.“1268 – 1968 Pride In the Past, Praise For the Present,Faith in The Future.” 1968 was the year that theTeignmouth Electron sailed out past the Ness. Thisoctagonal shaped church is one of only two in England – why would they change it from the shape of the cross?Peter nearly locked me in. Peter is a kindly man, a member of the congregation who lives in a pink cottage next to theeight-sided church. He shows me the rose tree he has planted where his wife’s ashes are scattered. In the centralaisle he pulls back the carpet to expose the shape left wherea single tree trunk once stood supporting the roof. He oncetried to turn off a glowing Moses. Above the ghostshape of the tree stump is the great rising lantern over the nave, 16windows, through which George Lake of Bitton Street believed his soul would escape to heaven; which worriedhim – what if he went out the wrong window? Wherewould you go?I was walking from Dawlish Warren to Paignton. I waslooking for something; connections back through time andacross space, because this coast is where I would oncecome for holidays. I set out to walk back to find thoseexperiences, when my Nan and Pop would take me out of school for a couple of days and bring me down here to stayoff-season in a Guest House on the front at Paignton - I
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