the neighbour with the window display of st georges flags and a ‘vote restore’ sign has put a swing in his front garden for the neighbouring refugee kids
Dad went into the ward with my Guided by Voices tee. Our very own jack flying over the cuckoo's nest. A bankruptcy and divorce led him to a car and a hose pipe, but it was the wrong kind of fuel, he said. I had bought that shirt with cash made from carving off bits of hash from my ounce - wandering through the surreal nighttime dusts of a summer festival with a teenage mind chewing acid. You have a singing voice like Don McLean said Mike, high on smack as I cut him off some pot. Dad liked how it looked to be wearing the shirt in the asylum. The knowingness. Mad enough to be kept in, but sane enough to think he was in control of staying.
there is a small stone bridge between two towns that has a two man toll booth 5p to pass two old guys sit side by side - one with a liverpool fc cap, love on the knuckles and status quo in the soul - his colleague is made of gravel and fingers fixed in a heavy crane claw we wonder how much they make - fists of 5 pence pieces - £100 a day? £500 a week? we joke that they blow the £500 each weekend on booze, drugs and women and then monday morning arrives they meet at the toll box each at their own door the river black with a milky mist head and it starts again with a single 5 pence piece dropped in to a strip club paper cup
S designed houses - housing estates in fact. He liked the principles of Le Corbusier and built shopping centres and tower blocks out of raw concrete. It wasn’t long before his buildings lay sick and abandoned and he became obsessed with dereliction. He lost hours in empty rooms with broken windows. He didn’t believe in the paranormal but he felt the life and death of a place at the same time. Standing in the shopping centre he’d designed many years ago, he could feel the energy of the hundreds of lives that passed through and felt their absence like an emptiness in himself. S became a grandfather and he entered his third life of playgrounds. His first had been as a child jumping off swings onto concrete. His second was as a dad terrified his sons would do the same. His third was as a grandad and he knew this would be the last spoonful of this meal. He admired the climbing frame. This tiny metal temple gate in flood water, snow and the dust of summer. And so S spent the remainder o...
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