1.9

I smile at the day but the whims come and blow it away. Sharp shock tactics with no-nonsense charisma.

A think-tank apocalypse.

Angst riddled aunties with their tie-dye hair dos and uncles that couldn't care less. It was a jolly old caravan of holiday folk that ambled to the sea side, to lonely coastal towns in perpetual decline.

Twopenny slots, washed up coffee shops, salt brushed piers, wailing ghost trains and grimy pedalos that float on green water next to the flat brown sea. 

Mussel shells, crab claws and fish bones scrape the shoreline and in a rock pool bobs an empty can of Fanta next to a wooden fork that comes stuck in chips.

There's nothing like it.

There’s nothing like childhood dreams. 

They peek through the gaps of thought, filling the spaces of despondency, stuck in a meeting or in the commuter race that I trawl through each day like the tide coming back and forth, sometimes a bloody moon would cause industrial action, sometimes a signalling problem.

Is there any small change please? But anyway I stride and bide my time then slip to the sea side.

Sometimes memories pierce through time like a needle.

D533BPY

It was the number of the first car I had, a turquoise Austin Maestro, not a good car but a happy car.

I drove up out of the valley and through the country lanes to Halllington on a warm August morning in 1996. 

I was going to work for the metal sculptor Will Pym on the farmhouse he shared with his wife, Claudia and their six month old baby, Ambrose. 

The outer barns of the farm looked over a gentle sloping field speckled with mole hills towards the nearest and only neighbour, a good bellowing hello away. The barn had been converted into a workshop where the radio mingled with the sound of grinding metal and the smell of heavy duty rust killer. 

I was paid a couple of pounds an hour to daub paint all over some twisted lengths of metal welded around disconnected words, steel butterflies and beetles that would eventually form part of a community park gate somewhere in the distance, somewhere in Newcastle or Gateshead, at some point in the future, the near or distant future.

I closed my eyes and was there just for a second.

Then I was back in the car, my Austin Maestro D533 BPY, chugging through the country lanes. I passed the First World War memorial that stood in the middle of nowhere covered in lichen and last year’s plastic poppies.

It was for a village that no longer exists and had a long list of names that no longer exist.

The names of the dead, the long dead, and the never dead.