Nick is dead. We found the corpse lately in the afternoon of Saturday, November 23rd 1996. Stiff, cold, the eyes open wide on the balcony of a female member of the APB, in the Bologna East End. We don't know what caused his death. Nick was one of the hamsters lovingly bred by Luther Blissett. His father was Leon, a fat and clumsy hamster, and yet Nick was frail and delicate. This animal had acquired a position within the Luther Blissett Project: he appears on the frontcover of A Ruota Libera, i.e. the fake Hakim Bey book hacked out by Blissett in the springtime 1996. He looked proud and happy posing in his wheel for the photograph. Now that book is a memento.
The funeral took place on the first night of snowfall, at 12.00 pm on Monday, November 25th. The funeral parlor was the former Grafton 9 bookstore in via Paradiso 3, in a room "beirutized" by the imminent removal. [Further psychogeographical details: 9 Grafton St. was the residence of Karl Marx in London; despite the "heavenly" toponymy, the old bookstore was cold, damp and uncomfortable; the new seat, which is already open, is in the middle of the university district, Piazza Aldrovandi 1/a].
On a table was the coffin, a plexyglass box which had contained a shoe-brush. A transparent coffin like that of Snowhite. Our beloved mouse was lying under bedclothes made of soft paper. He seemed to be sleeping, though nobody managed to close his eyes! At the end of the meeting, a car party headed for the place of the burial, that is the beautiful row of cherry-trees near Villa Scandellara, East End, between the freeway and the suburban railroad, a few hundreds of metres away from the only skyscraper in Bologna (22 floors) and a hypermarket named "Il Pianeta" [The Planet].
In the winter 1995-96, some theatrical companies including the Luther Blissett Situationautic Theatre had squatted a former primary school right in that area. Although the City had built it just twenty years before, the building was unsafe and shaky, thus the cops cleared and demolished it. During the summer Villa Scandellara is the seat of a small festival of local rock'n'roll bands.
The APB, accompanied by a founder member of the Associazione Psicogeografica MedioPolesana (APMP), got to the site at midnight. Under a stillicidal rain, we dug the grave under one of the cherry-trees. We were about to take photographs of the event, but the comrade in charge realized that the battery of the flash was flat. The APMP member volunteered to illuminate the scene by the headlights of his car. He went forward with the upper beams on, and didn't see the ditch before the trees. The front wheels sank in the ditch. At that very moment it started snowing. It wasn't possible to get out of the ditch in reverse gear. No other car had a hitch. We decided to PUSH the car forward and make it trespass the great divide. The operation was successful and we could go on with the ceremony. Eventually we chanted a cathartic OHM.
It was fucking cold, but our health was not impaired. We had suffered much more during the LPA-APB trip into the Avebury stone circle, January 1996, England.