Last Bus to Cleveleys

I'm sure you'll eventually forget the afternoon you regret in the Crystal Peaks Marks and Spencers cafe. Where surly beige pensioners with nothing to do sit helplessly head to head. Left behind between mountains of tea-things by long-dead mothers and fathers. Ill-defined whispery scribbles, they look right through each other as they desperately seek someone to blame. For the late arrival of their toasted tea-cakes. And many, many other things.

Well, there was this tv drama I seen one time. Didn't star Gregory Peck. All I remember is a poor old lady in a see-through plastic rain hat and a blue-rinse pacamac pulled tightly over a white Fair Isle cardy. She struggles against the wind and rain, clutching grimly onto her husband's hand. Only an impression of him, I'm afraid. Breathless, bald and a neat white moustache. They're struggling together along a deserted northern promenade. Looking desperately for the classic sea-front deco double-entry Ladies and Gentlemen's lavatory. They find it. He goes in. She waits. He doesn't come out.

Don't let me die alone in a Cleveleys Gentlemen's lavatory. Die alone. The words sound like a drowned bell. But surely, we've been down this road before. How do I avoid going through all these things twice? You can't, old man, of course you can't.

In my Beginning is my End

Bleary blue eyes on the radio. He looks longingly across Oxford Road at rows of hospital windows blind to the Dark Angel's urgent, anonymous sex with one of the nurses they met last night. Not long now before the shattering witness of Lucifer's fall to earth, the extinguishing of his light, the failure of his god-like virility. 

Constricted, creakingly new, his boyish energy already waning, and utterly unable to anchor the moon, he can only look helplessly on as the student union sails away, grows smaller, and falls off the edge of the world. Heartbroken tears in their warm plastic beers. Two fallen angels share a desperate Saturday night bench. 

At the wintery top of a cold northern town. He crashed into the glass so hard, so explosively, that it was hard to tell which of the razor sharp shards hurtling into space were slices of the shattered glass itself, which of them were torn screaming, horribly bloody from his smooth marble body, and which were torn from his purehard, quillwhite, softfeather wings. 

First Betrayal

"Do you remember reading Keats and Yeats to our little Sixth Form group? Our excited girlish faces all lit up. Lost in wonder before your heavenward-yearning eyes, your suffering saintly smile. Spellbound by your pure bell-like voice", She bravely and brightly confides.

"I didn't know him, it wasn't me, I wasn't there", he sneers behind his bitter glass. Already palely fading, shrinking to a shame-filled shadow. Belittled. Crippled. By the pain and confusion of the brutal Gormenghastly beatings. He slurs down beneath the table. Which begins to grow incredibly tall. To rise up black and huge.

Poor blind mouse skitters away into a dark corner. Bends low, fumbles his wooden cross, loses his foothold, and falls into the swirling inky blackness of the pit.

Haunted by Other Lives

Haunted by other lives. Suffocated. By their heavy bodies pressing too close to mine. Can't sleep. For their banging around. Powerless to heal their wounds, to satisfy their demands; to save them. 

Why won't they leave me alone and live their own lives? Why won't they leave me alone, so I can live mine?  

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Why am I so sad? Asks the Bergen-Belsen tour guide. Business is booming, he mumbles through the pistol in his mouth.

However many lost weekends I endured, hunched in dark bars at pains to drown my sorrows, they just kept bobbing back up. My sorrows have good lungs.

Ticking in the street. Everyone running wildly in every direction. Won't somebody please come and defuse me.

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'When I talk to Sebastian, I feel really special.' 

She is flesh and blood. She is all that matters. We are standing together and sharing one, unique, unrepeatable moment. 

The management killer on the other hand is never wholly present. She is only conscious of the event from an external position. She always has her eye on the prize. Every warm human relationship transforms into the cold strategic means for the preservation of the company and the achievement of her own selfish ends.

She sacrifices the richness and depth, the precious otherness of each moment, to save herself. She plays to win. She is cold, hard metal. She is the machine. No warm heart glows red and pulses in the grey ashes of her chest.

Gentle Jesus says, suffer the little children to come unto me. 

Be here now. 

Why try to live a life that isn't real?

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Quietly leaving over bedtime rooftops, Mary Poppins bids adieu to bankers, cooks, suffragettes and other children. Melancholy angel folds her wings, forlornly bows and whispers: "Where's my cheery, tiggerish chimneysweep? Where's my Dick Van Dijk?"

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Losing his grip, he finds himself slipping away. Daily, vaguely, seemingly endlessly waving goodbye. Drifting off. Crumpled, beige and balding under the Telegraph by the cricket pavillion. Left-behind ancient alien satellite, inert tumbling hulk finally exiting earth's orbit.

Bows his head, pays his last respects. From the edge of the funeral crowd watches his children allgrownupnow, and no longer needing him. As the world falls away, he stands beneath cold, polished winter trees, looks up and absently puzzles Kandinsky leaves on hectic wires. Walks away unseen, shuffles off in shapeless slacks. Pauses briefly. Turns to see atop the snowy hill little mittened hands waving goodbye from the steps of the closed-up summerhouse.

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The rise and rise of the misanthropic simpletons. A new generation of management killers. Hear the tiny, tinny cymbals of the clockwork metal monkeys, as they perform their machine functions to the letter and insist that everyone does the same.

Teacher, I think I have a coherence problem.

Hmm. I'll examine your text. Yes, I can certainly see some sentence and paragraph connection issues. Here are the links to some cohesion activities. Do two of the activities everyday morning and evening for four weeks, then come back and see me. You can make an appointment with the receptionist on your way out.
Thank you, Teacher. Good-bye.
Good-bye. See you in four weeks. Next.

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Arriving at the end of the high school party, he hears the last strangled notes of an exhausted party blower across the streamer-strewn dance floor and watches the last few slack-mouthed theyshoothorsesdon'tthey couples stumbling cheek to drool-smeared cheek over pale yellow boards. Witness the wake of the seventies and the pyrotechnic blossoming of ten thousand bravenewworlds (and every one the same): a national rational-cage curriculum cheerled by wad-waving Loadsamoneys; and everybody's happy nowadays. 

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In the grey magical wind that swirls around the ancient statues and monuments, with the old woman's unspoken help, I find each separate wooden piece among the small gold coins, receipts and bus tickets in my coat pocket, and we reassemble the city on a small wooden board.

As I turn it on finger ends and hold it up for the beautiful, golden-haired, raggedy vagabond thief to see, we all gaze open-mouthed in wonder.

"When you put them close together like this, they look like ancient apartment blocks. It's not like, Wow - the Parthenon, or something - a gleaming, solitary, timeless artefact. It's more like twilight post-apocalyptic Gotham, like a native American adobe tenement."

And on an upper floor, having followed the ragged carnival crowd around the winding wooden stair, that arranges itself before us - open-mouthed - we find a perfectly clean, synchronized row of fresh-faced, beaming, sparkley-eyed Audrey Hepburn nuns in black cloaks and stiff-pointed white-sail veils, a row of poised, legs-crossed fifties sophisticates perched on bar stools, lifting gleaming - ping, clean - starlight champagne glasses.

Captured by a sepia, ragged pirate on the lower floor, you arrive with a stiff black cardboard box ...

New Right Revisions

Revised 1984. Winston pulls himself together and tries harder to fit in.

Revised Jude the Obscure. Jude abandons his books, marries Arabella, has loads of kids, and happily bashes blocks of stone all day.

Revised Educating Rita. Rita sticks to hairdressing, joins in the pub singing, has loads of kids, works hard and gets her own shop.

Revised Harvey. Elwood takes the serum, sues Dr Chumley, sections Veta-Louise, and impatiently pushes past the man who works the mechanical gate.

Revised Time Machine. The traveller carelessly watches Weena drown. Shrugs and wanders off. Leaves the Morlocks and Eloi to their uneven dinnertime routines.

Revised Kes. Mr Farthing is always looking at his watch. In the playground he sides with MacDowell and shoves Billy down the coke pile. Billy can't wait to go darnt pit.

Revised Concept of Homelessness. Homeless people read Walden, celebrate the great outdoors, camp out under the stars. Love the fresh air and the camaraderie.