I Will Not Never Ever Eat A Tomato

Random winter here today! The wind brings rain with snow in tow like a rope on a string on cotton, to save the trapped and wrecked. We bring them across the white-watered gap like precious cargo swung out over the dockside into the ships that take it around the world. Here is that delicious, carefree music they always use to back up some nice image of the 50s, deep in the cold war with the largest threat of death and end of the world around. Housewives’' Choice or Mrs Dales diary, maybe. Want to go back then do you? Special time and tide over the edge of the dock cities and the cargo-carrying classes. I was here in 1986, nearly twenty years in this image of industry and deprivation. We used to sit in the back of Taxis or on the bus, talking of what we knew and what we liked and it was good, with the night ahead of us, drinking tea and talking of foxes and physics and electronics and music. And so much music has gone by since then, and we all live in different cities across the world. Only I am still here and tomorrow I will be in the back of a bus with a book and no one to talk to. So much has gone on the road into town. We used to pass the Foot Hospital and the grapes (or maybe they were the same place) and The Throstle's nest and now they are all gone, just almost-empty shops. The roads are all gone as well, broken up and remade for houses, driving the robbers away and into the electronic world, the world of fraud and easy money with no victims. You cannot talk in any bar these days; they are all too loud, like the roar of engineering in our factory. You could walk onto the shop floor and be lost in a world of tippety-tappety jazz rhythms from the machines there, plugging in those million components a day, making prog-rock out of machinery. And then the radio above us, telling us that Roy Orbison was dead and so many years ago that was. And drinking tea and talking in the canteen, that square, flat, windowless, plastic room, lines with machines for tea and food. And on each table, a paper, usually The Mirror or The Sun, but of course that went with Hillsborough. One of us was there and I waited anxiously for him to come home and he said not a word to me; just went up to his room and said nothing about it ever though it was the only time I saw him cry and just thinking about it makes me sad and angry like all this still does. They lie to us still and pretend we are stupid, and my aunt tries to calm me down even from her radical point-of-view, but I live where the machines rock and the world is just music. We just come to dance and dancing is all that matters in the world. Children and starvation and murder were nothing to the news then; nothing made me sad. Now with kids, it is difficult to see any suffering. I couldn’t take high-office and that means killing someone sometime. How would I sleep?

The accordion plays in the distance, an old picture of love in a French street, and who cares that it’s all been done before. I would sit under my hat, pretending to be asleep, with the tiny glass of something for lunch next to the paper and the empty plate. Out of summer comes the gentle breezes over the whole continent, the sad unreality of this world inside the computers and the tables of who knows what. You just cannot believe any of the conspiracy theories any more because no one has the intelligence. The clever people are all liberal academics with no ambition for world domination, and the ones who would have us regulated into non-existence and not clever enough to implement anything to do so. It is all style over content, cliché over real-life. This image of me in the French Street is nothing more than an attempt at style. No Logo maybe! How about a tiny British village? They’re all choked up with cars these days. And the beat box bangs in my ear and I am waiting for some sign to end, my ending phrase but the randomness of this just keeps on going.