The Whistler

There he go there again up the alleyway with him baleful whistle. Listen. He whistle and whistle whomever he goes. Top of his voice, top of his whistle. He make me sick he do. Up that alleyway day and night in all hours whatever the weather whistling like that. He make me sick. I should tell him to shut his mouth. Open the front door when he come down the alleyway and stick my head round and tell him oi you fucking shut it you fucking noisy shit stop that whistling you whistling cunt!

You should see him. Have you seen him that whistler when he come down here past the alleyway? A lanky shower. Streak of piss. He got all them retards on his head. Not retards. Dreadlocks. On his head. And he whiter than I am. Dreadlocks. Whistling with his stupid dreadlocks. I should kick his stupid whistling head all over the place. Like a stupid whistling football. I should stamp down on his whistling head and smash his lips. I should cut his lips and break the teeth in his stupid mouth. I should crash his head along and scrape it on the walls of the alleyway. I should pull his pants down I would.

He in his fucking bedroom at all hours. In bed in the afternoon, lying there in his bed whistling and blaring music. Have you walked down my street? It’s a different street to what it was before, what it is now. Down the hill it’s gone all the way. Them students and all over the street with their curtains closed. All closed. The street looks like it’s a curtains closed street. Curtains closed and old bikes and stuff and posters. The cheeky fucking. I don’t like it you know. They don’t even live round here none of them. Them students that don’t live round here most of the time. They just, they just not here in the holidays and all that thing. Whistling motherfuckers I call them. Fucking motherfucking whistler noisy cunts.

He was there outside the other day last week looking in my window. I was closing the curtains when I looked at him out the window and he was staring right into my eye. And he kept looking right in my eye. He kept looking and he was whistling. I said and shouted at him you whistling motherfucker leave me alone what you looking at, don’t look at me like that you whistling bastard! He just stood there the motherfucker whistling and all that and carrying on. And looking at me until I closed the curtains. Then he weren’t there any more and I couldn’t see him anyway. But I could hear him anyway still out there, whistling away. Whistling down my alleyway.

The City Goes

What hearts but brave hearts form Ghosts for the city?

What water – stagnant, deep – sits at the bottom of tunnels through the heart of the city?
There are wonders and brights rising up through the city at night. In the daytime, these wonders never cease. The city lifts them and holds them until such time, such time.
For apparent reasons - notwithstanding the rain, the dirt, the clogs - the brights and wonders are now brighter, more wonderful, than they have ever been.
There are blue skies and the expanse of very big skies. No rain.
There are crystal days that shimmer and blind.
Nothing to be afraid of, nothing of the night.
No rain of the night.

But the Spirits.
The Ghosts.

Who walk the earth. Who reach out and brush. Who shout loud to a whisper. Flimsy, their flight paths. Fleeting, their night gowns.

The Ghosts and Spirits, not even they believe in themselves. They who fill the air, circle the air, who are the air. These Ghosts and Spirits who are wonders, who are bright despite the night, who wait beneath big skies and blue skies. Who think of themselves as they do not think of themselves. Who enslave themselves to the city.

Restless, draining, the fevered range of the city. It clasps. It moves forward and shimmers, makes a play for backwards. But always forward. And the city grieves for the Ghosts and Spirits, for the feel of the night rain on its restless forehead. Big skies above the city, the blue skies too.

The city troughs and rises. Like a breath of certainty. The city moves and shudders, imperceptible movings beneath the city feet, trip-trapping on the pavements above. The city is a marker for the countryside, a spoiler that dares. It is a glad tiding on the face of restless stuff. It longs for life, reaches out to life and takes life as it gathers.

With the Ghosts and Spirits there is never the time. They hang in hallways and fill the kitchens. They dance in empty bedrooms and make themselves comfortable between the sheets. Listen, the Ghosts and Spirits are here. They are the menace of whisper, the voices on shoulders. The Ghosts and Spirits reach out to touch and too often find themselves grasping at empty. They are in the sheets, between the covers, flat on pillowcases, linings to our dreams. They are playful and dangerous, soft and hard. The Ghosts and Spirits are mostly as they please.

The city has the sound of rumble. The distant whirr of a lorry, a knife in an alleyway, the rustle of empty crisp packets circling the streets. The city is a groan, unheard for the most part until you close your eyes. The click of combination safes, the caravan doings in suburban front drives, a million pelican crossings. In McDonalds, like poetry, a young girl sucks milkshake thick through a straw. Like poetry, she later hails a taxi in rhyme. When she closes her eyes at night she listens to the city throb, hears the sound of dog. The city never wakes her.

While the city entertains, the Ghosts and Spirits scrape loose chippings from the pavements. They are terra firma for a short while only, bereft at their loss but also magical with freedom. Insects are warm inside them.

The Ghosts and Spirits are sparks, sprites who tickle the ears of passers-by, whisperers who whistle sweet incantations whenever warm rain sprinkles the coldest of faces. During the night the Ghosts and Spirits seem cool to the touch. But once felt their warmth is never forgotten. Only the dead are unmoved.

The Ghosts and Spirits are a club of fascination, a gathering of lucklorn souls. They are the city as they feel the city. Through gutters and alleyways they bend at corners, refusing the terror of straight lines. In nature they move, slowly losing themselves in the city, traces from every ledge and shop sign, dusted.

The Ghosts and Spirits are a unity of desperation. In life they were not as they now remember. They are different to their own memories, sometimes fluttering through life and sometimes dragging themselves with leaden feet of heavy. In death – although death is denied – the Ghosts and Spirits are only comfortable with those right beside them. To move away, to venture through the air, to reach out to big skies, is as bold a statement as they are likely to make.

The Ghosts and Spirits are timid in the city. Boo is enough for them. Pop guns are too much of a wounded heart.

Movement Motion

I am an Isaac Newton. I have a rage for this page. I look at its columns, its arrangements, and I see something more than mere sentences and paragraphs. I see the grasp of history and the lie of coming attractions.

I am first and foremost a stylist. I play with the elements and label them according to my fancy. What was AB01 today is CF09 tomorrow. I have a pocketful of names and I’m quicker than the eye. Where I hide, you cannot see me. Where I take the stars, they’ll never see me.

I am a lofty denier. Come to me with your calculations, your wrought figures, and I will chalk them down to fancies. Arrest me with your singular visions and pertinent insights, and I will point out the errors of your ways. I trifle shortly with few men. Make sure you are at the front of the queue.

I am gayness and pearls, the lost art of Cumberland. I am a Lincolnshire who moved a few miles across the country. My pigeons flew before me, my geese chewed up the ground, my pigs laid out the land. On the days when I am tired I am far too tired to move. Cleaning ladies laugh at me. I am the butt of their cleaning brooms.

I am the lady in red, the turn of the screw. The moon, when it pulls the seas, pulls me too. The waves, when they wave at the sea, they wave at me too. In night, especially, I am clad in my night-shirt. Candles are snuffed by me. Cheese is nibbled by me. I am a dark hallway walk and a fumble for the handrail.

I am a terracotta lift and the sound of a fall. I let go of feathers before I tackle the coal. In my rooms, during late afternoons, I can hear the touch of the clock. As the wind whistles its pendulum, as the wash forces it to go. I touch it with my cleanest hand. I reassure its wood and soothe its precious vinyl.

I am an Isaac Newton in furs and in pain. I am a hospital porterly and a beep on the screen. I walk the longest corridors and snap the cleanest sheets. The air, it falters near me. I am death and the dying, the fall from the moon. I am the great last gasp of planetary stars and precious open eyes by the light of the moon. In silver I am glow boy, a sprinkling of universe dust.

A Splash of Twirl

The red river, west of Deskall, winding and wending its meandering path from source to stream, offers up bounties of teeming life and boundless activity in the form of fish, fauna, bubbles, scabies, pond scrape, algae, detritus, flotsam, jetsam and mermaids. It is the latter, blessed as they are with that enticing combination of scales, skin and great lengths of human hair, who provide us with the biggest talking points, to wit and thus: “Hey, look, there’s one of them mermaids I was telling you about! Who’s a liar now then eh? Look, there’s another one! Two mermaids!”

The red river, both downstream and upstream, delivers to the wide expanse of the undulating sea a mass collection of all kinds of pebbles, rocks, shells, grit, sand, clay marlins, rubble and boulders. It delivers this mass cheerily, stopping for a chat or two with the sea as they ruminate over the weather and the likely rise of temperatures and levels. It is the latter, fraught as it is with the potential destruction of all things known to fish and fowl, that causes the greatest consternation on the part of the sea and the river. They have a desire to be remembered as life-givers rather than life-destroyers. Because what, after all, is more symbolic and purty than the rush of the cool clear of the cool, cool water?

The red river, whether green, blue or part of a dream, carries itself with dignity as it shrugs off the fact that it carries all manner of rubbish and things in the form of all kinds of old boots, horses’ heads, bicycle wheels, shopping trolleys, drinks cans, water bottles, plastic bags, inner tubes, nappies, condoms, sanitary towels, tampons, bin liners, crisp packets, sweet wrappers and plastic beer glasses. It dismisses the fact of its pandering to rubbish and mess, choosing instead to live with the dignity of cutting a dash through towns and cities as a symbol for the very best of the towns and the cities by way of duck races, swan gatherings, lazy floatings and Mayoral processions. To boot: “Ladies and Gentlemen it gives me the greatest pleasure to formally declare this part of the river as a sanctuary haven escape piece for those people behind me, in those new apartments right there, who had the wherewithal to be able to afford one of those flash new apartments that have been built on the site of the old houses that once housed families and children who had every right to live smack bang in the city centre without it costing them a fucking fortune. And I say to you ladies and gentlemen that as soon as all of our towns and cities are turned over to what used to be known as yuppie filth then so much the better for the local economy, even if that means the certain death and destruction of all previous forms of community and the general sense of well-being of what it feels like to belong for ordinary people. To this latter group, these so-called salts of the earth, these working-class heroes, I say fuck you tramps, fuck you proper and good!”

The red river is a splash of twirl on the faceless, endless landscape of the never-ending Norfolk landscape as it hoves into view somewhere in the middle and coils its snaky path eastways towards the coast and right beyond and right into the sea. The blank canvas of countryside is lifted in spirit by the red river as it offers up a full range of wild and exciting touches, all designed to dot the vacant heart of the grey pastorality of nothing. To thus: succour for trees, plants and green growth of all manner and kind, as a cut into mud and clay, offering divergence and pattern, a haven for insect and animal life featuring a host variety of riverbank and beyond types: mayflies, dragonflies, waterboatmen, voles, otters, shrews, alligators, flies, beavers, fish, butterflies, moths, crawlies, dippers, herons, ducks, moorhens, coots, waders, gadflies, curlicues, kingfishers, marlins, neurotics, daisydukes, pelicans, flippers, seals, organisms, water lions, halfmasts and coals. This mass of life and teeming activity sometimes threatens to break the banks and overflow the region with a flood of fantasia that would, while destroying the landscape, at least offer us something to look at as we make our quick yet dreary trudge through the Norfolk countryside in order to get back to our towns, cities and coasts as soon as is humanly possible. This as articulated by the Unknown Traveller, whose cassette tape imbued monument states ever so clearly: “I were proceeding in an easterly direction by train and car when I happened to glance from the window and spy from the window this heart-sinking stab of nothingness, this vast expanse of potentially wild and interesting countryside that had been tamed and turned by a whole host of fat farmers into absolutely fuck all. God, it were depressing. So I stopped looking out of the window and instead concentrated on my book, a novel about life in the city, in the hope of quicker passing the time so I could get back to my home in the city all the more quicker and fast. To the rail operators and the people who look after the motorways, I say they should provide forms of entertainment that can be viewed from train and car windows in the form of films and adverts and maybe even just interesting patterns and paintings. Anything, that is, that would quicker and better pass the time and divert our eyes from the spectacle of what those stupid fat farmers, those self-appointed and erroneously titled guardians of the countryside, have done to our countryside and country. Hurrah for that little red river!”

The Yellow Frost Wades In

The Yellow Frost. Time-travelling superhero. In town to promote his newish book. Out last year but withdrawn and remaindered due to low sales. Out again this year with a bigger marketing thrust based around the soon-to-be-released biopic: ‘The Thawing of The Yellow Frost: His Long Voyage Through History’.

A question and answer session with The Yellow Frost and the children of Form 2B, Muttley Held Primary School, Raffles, Duncan.

Q. Are you a fat?
YF: No. I’m a thin. Look.

Q. Do you squeeze pooh from your bum or ice from your bum?
YF: Pooh. Just like everybody else.

Q: Does your momma und poppa despise you yes?
YF: You German kid?
Q. Ja. Yes.
YF: Get the fuck out of my classroom.
Q. Ist not your classroom no?
YF: You’re right kid. Someone get this Kraut motherfucker out of… yeah, that's great, thanks.
Q. Schwein! I get you for this! Schwein!

Q: Why don’t you like Germans?
YF: Come on kid, who the hell likes Germans? Jeez.

Q. Do you eat normal food?
YF: Yes.

Q. Why are you yellow?
YF: I’m not. It’s just my costume that’s yellow.

Q. Who ate all the pies?
YF: Looks like you did kid.

Q. How many fingers am I holding up?
YF: Three. No, four. No, three.

Q. How many roads must a man walk down?
YF: Good question kid. That’d be three.

Q: You like spicy sausage ya, und mustard?
YF: Hey, the Nazi kid's back. Someone get… thanks.

Q. Are you a bummer?
YF: What’s a bummer?

Q. Do you shave your head or are you bald?
YF: Bald? What the fuck? Listen kid, that’s all my own hair up there!

Q. Can you travel through time?
YF: Did you see the film kid?
Q: Yes.
YF: What was I doing all through the film?
Q. Fighting?
YF: What’s the film called?
Q: It’s called “The Thawing of The Yellow Frost: His Long Voyage Through History.”
YF: Right. So what was I doing? Apart from fighting.
Q. Acting?
YF: Acting? What the... Jesus. Apart from the fighting and the acting!
Q. Flying?
YF: For fuck’s sake kid, I was travelling through time!
Q. Oh yes.
YF: So you have your answer.
Q. What answer?
YF: You know, can you travel through time!?
Q. No, I can’t. Can you?

Monster Face

Get lost, Monster Face. Coming round here with your pitiful monster face. Why don’t you go over there instead? To the Monster Face Symposium, where:

Over a period of three days, Monster Faces of all nationalities, ilks and bents, will come together in order to not only take part in moderated debate and discussion but also to mingle with like-minded horrors, free from the brickbatted penny arcadism of the outside world. Monster-Faced delegates, adorned with badges, sashes and other identifying thingies, will be at the centre of a wider national and international push to get Monster-Faceism back on the agenda. In that sense, the Symposium will be a deeply political affair. However, the organisers have gone to great lengths to ensure that, at the same time, it will all be delivered in a light-hearted fashion – as demonstrated by the amount of frivolous entertainment and nonsense that will also be on offer.

Such as:

Monster Face Painting.
Your chance to see how fabulous you’d look if only you didn’t possess such a hideous monster face. Real human colours painted by real human people. Smile in sadness and wet yourself in wonder!

Raging Full On.
Press your monster face against the rusted iron bars of a makeshift gaol window while waving your fists at the flaming torch-carrying peasants outside. Unmissable fun for all the family!

The Bride Stripped Bare.
Who’s that in there, dressed all in white, as virginal as the newly fallen snow? Why, it’s the Burgomeister’s daughter! What are you waiting for? Jump out on her, watch her swoon from fright and then touch her up a bit while gazing lovingly at her gorgeous, non-monstrous face!

Monster Mash-Up.
That werewolf’s been calling you names again. And he reckons he’d be able to do you in a fight, any time. You’re not going to stand for that, surely? Go on, mash him up. Mash him up good!

Mary the Monster’s Friend.
Misunderstood? Sensitive? Book not like the cover? That’s you! So why not show the world your ‘human side’ by playing a variety of stupid games with ten-year-old Mary Pigtails? Skipping. Hide and seek. Helicopters. Daisy chains. Floating boats. All these great games and more. Guaranteed to prove to everyone that there’s much more to you than simply a murderous gathering of pointless, hairy rage.

Careless Talk

The three Tree Talkers stepped out into the road and immediately regretted doing so when a lorry the size of a bus ploughed into them, ripping apart their sawdust spines.

Sawdust spines because they’d spent far too long in the company of trees. Talking to them. And that.

Before they became Tree Talkers, these now-spineless individuals were busybody figurines within the short-lived EnviroMental movement. It was there that they developed the controversial Mudhutism theory that has since been embraced by an impressive array of prominent green thinkers - such as Davis Darkle from the Flat Earth Society, Betty Tinker from the UK Amish Federation and that George Monbiot from the Bottom of The Garden Group. Despite their success and influence, however, these future Tree Talkers were forced to leave EnviroMental after details of their increasingly eccentric private lives were splashed all over the tabloids. Like weed killer. Or toxic piss.

According to the stories in the press, these three had very quickly grown from tireless campaigners into self-satisfied, backward-looking, right-wing lunatics with an unhealthy interest in the same kind of dreamy, agrarian, mythological pastoral bullshit that was peddled by the Nazis. The Enlightenment? The Industrial Revolution? Better Lives For Poor People? Stick them up your arse, mate – is what they said. From there it was but a mere hop and step to Baby Politics and the attendant penchant for talking to trees.

And from talking to trees, from becoming bona fide Tree Talkers, it was an even shorter step into the road. Look out! shouted a council-sponsored sapling. But too late, too late.

Off Camera #1

Stepping into Curzon Street, from the left, I reimagined years gone by as a black and white photograph, sepia even, with me in the foreground, a trolleybus in the background making its slow rattle up St Ann’s Well Road, torn in the top left hand corner and badly creased at the bottom right - the actual photograph, that is. There’s me, school cap, satchel, blazer – I had a satchel then – waving and smiling, short trousers, a hint of sadness just behind the eyes. Plump, nicely plump, not fat, nondescript knees. Off frame, just out of reach, the touch from my mother’s hand, her fingers just in shot, obscuring the view of a tall brick chimney. Red brick, you can almost feel the glow. The pavement, lifted slightly by the outlying cobbled stones, the dust on the endless, crooked pavement, the kerb weathered down, far too close to the street and far too close to the people who walk there.

Here missus, some firewood for you! as it crashed down in the back yard, the dismantled debris from the old Player’s factory that blocked the sun from the back window where I’d sit and count the rain. We’ve got a gas fire! she shouted, my mother, we don’t need your wood you cheeky gets!

Short Back and Sides

The hair cutting pastimes are not limited to the lovesick alone. It has been reported that even those possessed of the stoniest hearts can indulge, for a fee, in the art of shearing. Their hair, like anyone else’s hair, can just as easily fall to the floor.

Outside certain houses and premises you will see a large white pole. Its whiteness tarnished by a thick stripe of red. Diagonally tarnished by a thick stripe of red. It goes up sometimes. It goes down. Within these poled houses of repute you will find the soft emporium of touch and go, of warm water and the hum of heating driers. Hum, they go, hum.

In these fast booths of emporium and wetness, you will find yourself seated in a chair wondering how on earth you got there and what on earth miracles could be performed to make any kind of difference. A whole new look? With those few strands? Don’t make them laugh.

You idly stare, at those persons over there, as they idly pass the time talking with reason, singing in rhyme. You cannot fail to notice that their conversation is much better than yours. The air thick with laughter, surprise, the erotically-charged promise of tip. But you, your other backward self staring back at you, are a mute display of how you’ll wish you still looked in half an hour’s time.

At bottom, as you turn to look to the floor, that collection of dust mites, human hair and scalpy flakes is gathered up to make nests for the poor birds and mice who nestle in the skirting boards and hide in the eaves. At night, when the white pole has shut off its redness, there is an endless woodland creek of activity as species of all stripes and size make it their business to peck and fuss to get this emporium into ship shape and high street fashion. By morning it is a complex variety of twinkling corners, polished steel, sharpened shears and shiny surprise. In the mirror it is all that and more.

Which is where you are now, gazing softly at your overall lumpiness, at your endless disappointments. From behind, at last, appears the out-of-focus shape of Jonesy the Barber. The Blob Barber, as they call him round here. You can see, if you look ever so closely, the ripple of his vast and cutting shape. Crack, goes his towel, crack.

He pushes you gently, with an imperceptible finger, deep down into your chair. What be what you want and what can I do? as his grin traces the contours of your remaining wisps. And where once you had rehearsed a grand tale of deception, of shedding the years with the pounds, of ensuring you would no longer be you, you instead mutter vaguely, waving your arm as you rise up for air. Down, he says, I want you back down there.

So snip he goes. And trim. And after a while, after he’s snipped and trimmed and shaved and raved, you realise that you don’t look any different. Still lumpy. Still a disgrace. But now with shorter hair.

Mr Villainy

There’s Mister Villainy, up there, look, scaling the Empire State Building. I wonder what villainy he’s up to now, the villain!

Is that Mister Villainy? Are you sure?

Yes, look – he’s carrying his flag.

What does it say on his flag?

It says: Mr Villainy.

Damn him!

Indeed.

Super Carson

Super Carson was a flying billy. He flew up in the sky and down from the sky. He had a fortress hideout place in the Gobi desert. And a sea station in the sea.

Super Carson was a Lemuel Gulliver in a world full of Lilliputians. He stomped high and mighty wherever he trod. Have at you down there! he would cry, as he jabbed the little folk with his Super Carson Sword.

Super Carson was a haphazardist when it came to keeping the peace and standing up for justice. Sometimes he was on the side of good. Sometimes he was on the side of evil. It all depended on which way the wind was blowing.

Super Carson took most of his responsibilities very seriously indeed. In the mornings, for instance, before the day had even begun, he flew to all the newsagents in the land and doodled on the front of the newspapers. Just to cheer everybody up.

Do You George?

There’s the bottle there George. Help yourself, help yourself. You see George, I asked you down here tonight because there are a few things I need to talk to you about. I hope you don’t mind, what with it being so late and all. I said to your mother that we should have called you down earlier but she said you wouldn’t mind. I hope that’s so George, I really do. The thing is, I suppose I could keep what I’m about to say to myself. I suppose I could. I could just sit here and let it all pass me by and pass over my head and try not to let it worry me. I could try to get on with my life and let things carry on as they are. But the problem with that, George, is that it does worry me. I can’t help it. I’m a worrier. It’s just the way I am. My father was the same, your grandfather. He was terrible for that. Couldn’t let anything go, wouldn’t leave anything alone. It killed him in the end. Not literally you understand. But, you know, it all added up, it all went into the, whatsit, the heart attack pot. Who knows, it might do the same for me, all this worrying. But I can’t worry about that now. We’ve got things to talk about now. I’ll deal with the other – excuse my language – shit later. Much later. In the meantime, as you know, it’s here and now. So we should deal with the here and now. Wouldn’t you say so George? Wouldn’t you agree? That’s right. That’s correct. I knew you’d understand. Your mother George, she said you’d be pissed at me about this, but I said you wouldn’t be. That’s because your mother, she doesn’t understand men George. She understands women, sure. She understands women real well. But when it comes to men George, she’s all at sea. Lost. Doesn’t know how to, you know, relate to them. No empathy you see. Not that I’m knocking your mother George. No way. Not at all. She’s a damn fine woman your mother George. A damn fine woman. The best in fact. The very best. So I don’t want you to think I was disrespecting your mother George. Not at all. I was just saying that when it comes to men she’s not so quick on the uptake, if you know what I mean. Anyway, that’s all by the by. Irrelevant. Because it’s just you and me now George, just you and me. And now it’s just you and me I’ve got to tell you that there are a few things I want to say. Big things. Don’t look so worried George. There’s no need to look worried. It’s just talk, that’s all. Just words. You sit there and listen and I’ll talk. There’s nothing scary about that is there George? You can do that. Words can’t hurt you George. Not words. Sticks and stones maybe. Bullets and rocks, sure. But not words George. All you have to do with words is listen. Just listen, that’s all. So here it comes George. Are you ready? Okay. You sure? Yes? Okay, here goes. The thing is, George, your mother and me, we’ve been thinking. About lots of things. But mainly about you. And the thing is George, we’ve decided that we don’t really like you. I know that sounds harsh George, and maybe a little crazy, but it’s true. You wouldn’t want us to lie to you George, would you? It’s just that we’ve been struggling with this for a while now George. Wondering what to say, how to deal with it. Wondering just what kind of people we are, that we could think like that. You know, really turning it round in our heads. I tell you George, we were really on the edge there for a while, really cutting ourselves up. But it’s okay now. Because we’ve come to the conclusion that it’s just one of those things. Nobody’s fault - just one of those things. I mean, we tried George, we really did. You know, all those trips to the park, the ice-creams, the toy cars, the picnics. You know, we did try. But in the end there was nothing there. Not really. We’d see the other parents, at the park, at the nursery, and we could see what was going on with them. There’s no mystery there. They like their kids George. They love them. They’re happy to be with them, to spend time with them. Most of all, they’re happy to be parents. It’s the best thing they’ve ever done, having kids. And that’s the problem for us George. You see, having you was the worst thing we’ve ever done. So we think it’s probably best if we just, you know, parted company. No hard feelings. I mean, you never know George, in time we could all be friends. Maybe. Aw George, really, there’s no point in crying. Come on George, you’re a big boy now. You’ll be going to school soon. In a year or two. Do you want all those other kids to know what a big crybaby you are George? I’m sure you don’t want that. Do you George?

The PM Shows Us Around

Last month Prime Minister Koizumi moved into his new Official Residence: a small apartment overlooking Yokimi Park.

---- Prime Minister, you have moved into your new Official Residence.

Yes.

---- Do you enjoy it?

I enjoy some things about it. I don’t enjoy other things about it. Mostly, however, I enjoy it very much.

---- Your wife lives with you here. Does she also enjoy it?

My wife is a yellow bird soaring above the sea of night. She is happy to be here and will remain so for as long as I am happy to be here.

---- Where is she now?

She is a dappled sunset sinking into the edge of the earth.

---- When you are not working, Prime Minister, how do you like to relax?

I like to listen to music. Music like the sunshine. Music like a ray gun. Music like a baby’s belly. Music like an unexpected push into a winter lake. I also like to collect toy guns.

---- Toy guns?

Yes.

---- Why do you collect toy guns?

Yes, that’s right. I do collect them. They help me to breathe properly when I pretend to shoot them. Pow.

---- Do you entertain guests here at all?

I entertain guests, yes. I show them my toy guns and we listen to music. Angel music mostly.

---- Angel music?

Like the stars. It is fine, clear celestial music. Especially good for when I’m relaxing in the bath. It helps to soothe and it helps to get me clean.

---- Do you spend a lot of time in the bath?

As long as is necessary. Sometimes ten minutes. Sometimes fifteen minutes. Sometimes twenty minutes. Sometimes twenty-five minutes. I never go up to 30 minutes. That would be an indulgence that neither myself nor my country – our country - could afford.

---- So even while you are here, relaxing in your new home, you are always thinking about your responsibilities, always working?

Yes. You see, I am a buzzing fly. A white butterfly. A flap of a wing at the very beginning of history. I make moves that will influence generations for generations to come. Society, you see, is a brick wall. And I am the man to break through it. Or, rather, fly over it.

---- I was told that the furniture here is all hand-crafted.

Yes.

---- And very expensive.

Yes. Very expensive. I am the Prime Minister. I have certain standards. It wouldn’t be the done thing – as our British friends say – for me to live as an ordinary citizen. I have to maintain. I have to uphold.

---- So you are a step up from the ordinary citizens?

Of course.

---- But you are chosen by them, the ordinary citizens. You are their servant. Correct or not correct?

Not correct. In contrast to your erroneous statement it is those ordinary citizens who serve me. As the Emperor I feel it is my duty – my responsibility – to have a certain amount of regality. For the benefit of my people.

---- You are not the Emperor, Prime Minister.

No, I am not the Emperor. But I try to behave like the Emperor.

---- Can you not just behave like the Prime Minister?

No. I cannot.

The Low Boat Builder

The low boat builder, through the fog of his desires, searched gently for his potential lover, Carlos, the high boat builder of yonder shore and then. The low built builder, by name of Sparky, pledged his troth somehow, and somehow hoped that it would ripple the fog and touch Carlos, his highness of high boat builder and love.

Carlos, high boat builder of one score and ten, cast down a look over the fog and asked his imagination to imagine what delights and details were hiding in the thickness, in the form of the lower orders, in the low lying fog. His imagination, prickly from misuse, retorted something about a dive into the fog: Dive down my high and mighty master, dive down dare if you so dare! Accepting the dare, Carlos, his anchor as apparel, dived forth port side into the guess of open arms, the anticipation of safety and a catch in wide open, open arms.

Into the fog, the fog
Into the mist and kissed

Sparky, low boat builder by trade and treacle, tasted, for the first time, the sweet salt of certain success. Carlos, high and mighty but now flat from descent, took in the essence of his low boat builder. They clasped and how. A fair side from port side, from side-to-side and tried.

Below deck, the muffled creak of the rise towards sunset and the drift towards rock. Carlos and Sparky, our boat builders of practice and pen, sway in silence to the contours of breeze. Up she rises, and down once again. Through open portholes they ---

Our sad captains tethered to their bunks, as quicker the rise, the blur of the sky. The rigging, the yard arm, the plank out to sea

The bounce of the waves, the undulating sea.

This, said Sparky as he doodled an anchor on his lover’s high arm, is what keeps me from thinking. I press and go sometimes, press and go. And, recurred Sparky, his vision now hot to the theme, I am as lost in the fog as I ever was. Except now you are here with me. Together we are lost in the fog.

But morningtide soon rose and with it the sun. Ah, yawned the sun in greatness, as he stretched mighty across the grey now green land that stretched for all the eye to see. What, asked the sun, is that greyness here, that patch of cover I spy below me? More to the point, he sunned and warmer to his theme, who or what lies shrouded within? Something nautical I would hazard to guess.

Of a sort, as it transpired and as we well know. There was indeed something nautical lurking within the grey, the fog below. Our two beloved boat builders, one high, one low.

Charlie Grace

There I stood, bushed and whacked, all flattened out like Charlie Grace. That is, Charlie Grace the hedgehog. Not Charlie Grace the surgeon who lived across the street.

The comparison was, of course, apt. Although I stood, I was sorely flattened. Pressed flat like a sheet of paper and made to stand in the wind. I stood, yes, but not firm. The shortest, gentlest gust was enough to topple me. Or send me floating on my way.

Charlie Grace was the hedgehog I owned from the age of five to the age of sixteen. Do hedgehogs live that long? Mine did. Charlie Grace was my constant companion through thick and thin, through the good times and the bad. The moment I was laughed at by girls, he was there. The time I was bullied to within an inch of my life, he was there. When my mother died, choking on that bee, he was there. When my father died, by his own hand and the gas oven, Charlie Grace was there. But also for the good times, as few as they were. He was my prickly companion through all that my young life had to throw at me. My best friend, dear old Charlie Grace.

But one day. As I was out picking wild berries and forcing my hand up my girlfriend’s dress, Charlie Grace crawled out of his cage and made his way to the main road not ten yards from our garden gate. The cars that whizzed past, so ferocious in their desire to get somewhere. They were an embarrassment and a mortal, deadly sin. As Charlie Grace agreed. Which is why he stepped out, without a seeming care in the world, into that road in order to teach those cars a lesson. Ah, foolish, naïve, dear Charlie Grace. How was he to know that those cars had drivers? How was he to know that he wasn’t the only hedgehog on this scorched earth? How was he to know that his flattened, self-sacrificed death would have no effect whatsoever? Flat, that’s all he became. And flatter and harder as the weeks passed and the sun shone and those tyres pressed him down. Poor old Charlie Grace.

But as to me and my similarity contest to my former prickly pet. My name is The Firefly. I have genuine powers too. Bitten by a radioactive firefly. Right on the nose. I thought he was shining a bit too brightly as he buzzed his way towards me. Do fireflies buzz? This one did. It bit me or stung me and almost instantaneously I was transformed into something much more than merely human.

Guess at my powers. Go on, guess. And no, I haven’t got a big luminous arse. But my powers do involve light. And the manipulation of light. Okay, I control light. All light. Including sunlight. The power it gives me, you wouldn’t believe. The world we are in today is a different world entirely from the one you previously knew. I control all light. Imagine what that means. In brief, the world and everything in it is mine.

Or was mine. It seems that I have met my match. A do-gooder type called The Flat Iron who, you guessed it, flattens his enemies. And that’s exactly what he did to me. And somehow, by flattening me, he squeezed out all my powers and has claimed them for his own. The difference between him and me, of course, is that he is not a super-villain. He is a super-hero. A very noble super-hero at that. So I think it’s a fairly safe bet that he will return the world to the way it once was. Mind you, power corrupts. So there’s absolutely no telling what will happen next. It could go this way, or it could go that way. The field is wide open. The stakes have yet to be nailed. It’s a fair wind that blows against the possibilities of permutation. Your guess is as good as mine.

So anyway, here I am, rippling in the breeze and, you know, I can honestly say that I’m not at all bothered that it’s over. I had my fun. I had my fair share of ruling the world. Riches? I had them all. Women? I had them all. Not a bad life really, now that I think about it. I should wish The Flat Iron luck.

Good luck then Flat Iron! Good luck my friend! Goodbye dear old Charlie Grace, goodbye my sweet flat boy!