Micro-Management

We wander round the custard factory, broken by its own destruction, matching those decayed walls with our own decayed minds. It feels like one of those blank Saturdays, at some time after lunch and before the football results, the time when it does not matter of it rains or doesn’t rain because we feel the same regardless. Not like those late Summer Thursday evenings when any rain changes the mood in seconds. Those are the days when we sit in the doorway, something of our bodies just out in the trickle that makes it to the ground under the porch by way of being diagonal. Or if it stays dry, the humidity and late sun turn the world into something different again, a mix of painting and subtle smells from the gardens here. We could be in Bali or some South Pacific Atoll, clothed in the smell of exotic plants, meeting the glow of sunset with blank minds, untroubled by thoughts of boiling sea or man-made disaster.

But here, we are in the same time, seeing the end of something, a building for a thousand people; just to keep them out of the rain took industry and ingenuity, made human’s exploits seem worth it. And all for this end! Of course for this construction to fade back into the ground will take years. We will never see the final swallowing of brick and concrete by knotty, ugly scrub. We will be taken that way long before the last discarded box has broken down to dust. It is the way of things.