When walking around Grasmere recently I happened upon a strange and interesting branch that held a strange and interesting creature. I did not see it fly away. I did not see it go to school. But still, I felt, that I should stay and stand there like a fool.
Conclusive didact, tell us what to think. Don’t leave us in the poet’s apple basket choosing our maggots. I don’t trust the next guy, I don’t leave the office until late. It can all go wrong in someone else’s hands. Pick me up, tie my shoes and show me where to go.
It’s a strange old day so far.
It’s prime-time tv and hyper-hit chatsworth, Jonny Come-Lately, leaps into his chair, waving a hand and adjusting his trademark glasses. We appreciate the casual glance around the live studio audience, a response to rapture that comes across as spontaneous every night. The glasses are touched once more, like a sigh, and the noise abates. There will be a few jokes, a brief revelation from his private life but the seconds are counted, handed out to the viewers before Jonny turns to a new camera, more intimate than before and one less willing to share his affections with the clapping gabbots. A single blink is all that is needed to adjust the tone to reverence. our next guest is someone serious. someone with a story to tell. Could everyone give a polite welcome to someone they have never heard of?
It takes a minute, costed in advertising and more shots of Jonny than is usual at this time but then it comes. Out of the nothing to sell, no agenda to push. This man has no sell-out dates planned, no hopes of big money prizes. He doesn’t want to be here but this is for the public good and everyone has a novel inside them whether they like it or not. Jonny does his job well and pulls it out, page by page. A childhood, once normal, is polished into a jewel. He didn’t know it at the time but sitting third row from the back is pure nostalgia, something to be shared. That punishment for stealing, for talking, whatever – it’s hard to remember quite what exactly – well that happened to us all in our outsized/too small clothes. We’ve been there, we identify, we’d read this man’s story because we wrote it ourselves. Right through to, and can you believe this, the day he married the woman he’s been friends with for years.
It’s news out of nowhere. A celebrity from the soul. Now if only he spoke without prompting, if only he smiled without nerves.
In a word, RADA (if that were a word rather than an acronym). Overblown, derivative and disappointing. Time enough to hope for better things in the future though.
Bird flu
Then
Died
The End
One missing link found and another removed from the tenuous chain of ‘intelligent design’. This one was a toughie to find so way to go God for hiding it so well.
Oh fuck. Laughter is supposed to be good for you.
How depressing.
Tomorrow is a theory, plotted onto squares and given a number. Whether it will work, how it will end, are intangible as the end of time, the visualisation of nothing, a moment without you.
You get the letter every Sunday, after tea or just before the guests leave and then it’s eight, ten hours of waiting, nervously (of course) for the train to come in; waiting for the one or two oddballs who actually have business in this neck of the woods to disembark, papers in hand.
Close your eyes and it still doesn’t change. Read a book and everything hangs around the periphery, waiting like an assistant with your wife on the phone.
So this is it. Twenty minutes spent drinking coffee after the journey. Twenty minutes and a book that held my interest, would hold it still if I could only step away from things.
I have to decide whether it is rude to photograph people who sit nearby and focus only on each other, heads close and hands held to maintain the distance. It would make a quiet image reflecting the drinks but how do you ask? How to point the camera without changing the scene, shifting the air?
I could steal their words instead.
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