Thanks to Lily Briscoe



Who is thinking of that tip-tap sound that toe-caps make? I hate that sound. It makes me think of stuffy rooms and over-dressing, of over-confidence and arrogance. Never stop around for that will you. Hypothetical questions abound in this arena. Can they see me watching them and analysing? My thoughts might be their thoughts, poetic aspersions as to what they are thinking behind those common, familial eyes. Like cuckoos in the rough trees of this night. I imagine this wood we walk through when none of us are here, silent I think in my interpretation of the old philosophical question because of course the sounds are only sounds when they hit the grey stuff up here behind my own inherited ghosts and empties that will be some time. The rest of the time they are just movements of air in an empty space.

First is Victoria, green haired in these unrevolutionary times, trying to be different and yet attached to some distant past like she will fall off thew world should she let go of her precious records and strange time-stretch that stops her leaving the last decade she felt comfortable in. I can't even work out if she was even born in this decade and did the other things or maybe I just can't be bothered to make that simple addition for after all it it nothing beyond the simple maths of the Kindergarten.

Time passes, sometime with a war in it, a brief explosion of something more horrific that we have ever known, unfilmable because all those who died before, in those wars of horse and arrow and cannon, did so just as terribly but somehow in a place separate from the world - they leave with banners and with flags and either come back with same or just as memory in a piece of paper or maybe never. I hear dreams and folk tales of men gone off to war 700 years ago and just vanished into the tight alleyways of those dusty cities. And each one is a cause and effect made different in the way of this world, a complete reverse of history, of a leaching out if the many worlds. Her Grandfather loses a leg to one of his own guns, a repeater exploding in his trench. It only scrapes him but infection gets him and now back there in memory, she sees him limping heavily on the same prosthetic they gave him back home before shocking him into some sort of sanity. He was no officer though I see this family as from that background. He loved his men and his commanding officer loved him. And now his peace belongs to Victoria, loving him a peaceful man in a peaceful family who loves her despite the green hair and the strange outlook as he sees it.

He left under banners with all his mates and they saw glory in the acres of mud that gradually took over there world as they slowly came to it, on trains and boats and more trains and slow marches to sit down with tea until the time came to either sleep or die. This is war in a muddy garden, pointless and pained, slow and irrelevant against the quick sweep of troops that came later. All they did was create a 20-year-long lull until the horrors of what my grandfathers called "The last lot". And it was the last we hope depite the trenched that still exist around this world. It seems to no longer to matter to us as long as it doesn't happen here. We cannot foil all of our enemies because we created them and they remain in our head until we die at their hands or ours. Maybe we are still in a lull she thinks --- or I think for maybe her thoughts are mine and she is who I wished to be all those years ago, silent while they watched their precious and trashy television and I sat back, bored and yawning until they would talk again, excited about blues or jazz or maybe the drugs they said they took but which I never saw. Sister of the blessed is Lily, jazzy and beautiful, from this age without war and suffering. Even, unwaged, she lives happily and without needs other than envy and laughter. Yes - Sister of the blessed she is.