Two moulded plastic chairs, one grey, one a sort of institution pinky orange, stood in front of Hilda’s spring; another lay on its side at a distance away, under a tree. The grey one was covered with flies. The chairs were that low budget, stacking sort: curved, with metal legs, and a cut out section at the base of the back which is, I suppose, designed to make lifting and stacking easier but which my young self, at primary school, believed to be a vent to let the farts out.
There was something oddly touching (more…)
‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’… I find myself thinking that a lot, these days. How fortunate I am, then, to have a job which acts as an antidote to despair and fear. I write thing 33 in celebration of the joys of being a person-centred counsellor.
‘… and then you’d think aha! something interesting is going to happen and then someone would mention Derrida and it would all be over…’
… Only this was the whirligig of space, not time. And boy, he must have been holding a serious grudge against me. His revenges were a surprise. And they went on a really long time.
You know when you’re driving along in the rain—the kind that your wipers can’t really cope with, and they go into a sort of frantic ineffectual fastwipe which is slightly silly, somehow, in the way that a powerwalk is—and you see walkers trudging along the verge, heads bowed, sheathed almost entirely in rustling nylon, their huge packs, also nylon-sheathed, rearing behind them like a doom they can’t shake; and you think casually, in passing, ‘Poor bastards’? Well. On day three of the pilgrimage, those poor bastards were us.