things move around

are sanguine. My father couldnt get through flooded roads to his optician’s appointment, he’s concerned about his potatoes. But apart from that… “We’re not worried,” my mum says. “We are insured.” They are safe on the high ground of the prudent and cautious.

Although of modest means, my parents have always saved, planned, strived to forestall disaster. If the floods are Britain’s Hurricane Katrina and Yorkshire our ignored

- Obverse of a clipping from the letters page of a British newspaper.

This morning, on my way to work, I noticed that more people than usual were carrying floral bouquets. I went in the direction from which the bouquets came, and lo I saw an array of bouquets on the sidewalk, outside a newly-opened supermarket, with excited office-workers clustering about like hornets. I thrust some people aside, grabbed a heavy bouquet from the dwindling pile, and bore it home in triumph. But what if, I wondered, the bouquets had not been meant for giving away, but simply on display, when one transgressive passer-by had taken one brazenly, and been aped by another, and then others had come, honest people like me who assumed the bouquets were going free, and within minutes, in a sudden craze, every bouquet had been liberated? The thought gave me a frisson, that I might have unknowingly looted my bouquet.

Light rain fell this morning as I walked to work. It was too light to justify an umbrella, but heavy enough to make me damp. I mean it was a very light rain. I would look a fool with an umbrella; I would be cracking a nut with a steam-hammer. And yet it was not so light as to be non-dampening; it was a fly I could not ignore. So I compromised: I used my umbrella half way, and went bare-headed the other half.

On the BBC website, I read the headline “India train runs over 11 pilgrims”. I read this and for some reason it strikes me as a deliberate act - god damned India train! always running over pilgrims!

And another thing, the read / read thing. We need to establish a past form which is different from the present. Fuck it, “red” will do. Let it start here. You red it here first.

Additional: I couldn’t care less about the pilgrims. They should have bloody well stayed at home and not been so daft. Or at least not pilgrimmaged on the fucking train tracks!

Pilgrims = wankers.

Streets lit with amber,
deciduous musk,
rustling of silhouettes.

In Stanley Park:
wet lumber
festooned with spiders’ webs.

September: sea-mists,
sunset a gust of amethyst,
the zinc-taste of oysters. Wistfulness

in the departure of freighters,
in their dolorous timbre.