Coconut

And the cat has never come back.

I was standing at Waterloo station looking up at blinkering blackboards reading the times for the next train to Reading, in my hands I had a tub of fresh coconut cubes all the way from Ghana. Ghana. Anything is possible these days, me in London foraging on tiny coconut cubes cut from the flesh of a Ghanaian fruit only a few days ago judging by the sell-by date.

Anything is possible

Or,

Everything is possible,

These days.

Maybe that’s the problem. I don’t see anywhere in the papers that some things are not possible, it’s all this fuck here for this cheap now, you know, photoshopped thighs and massacred civilisations. We’re ready to nail the future. We’re curing cancer. We’re refining the pursuit for love. It’s all a bit easy and blasé, who wouldn’t be with all this abundance and lost time we’re having to spend. Youth is a big deal. If you’re young you're alright because you don’t have to think about the boring things in life, like the daily in-out of an office where you share nothing in common with the people but the place. The paying off of bills and sharing a carload of children with other parents’ children because that’s what you’re supposed to do. Growing old isn’t a problem in itself, the problem is the link between old and boredom. When you can’t grab the bull by the horns because you’re wiser and seen it all before -it’s sort of - considered weak and unimaginative these days. We love the entrepreneur. He is the new superhero. The corporate equivalent of the DJ.

I wrote:

Summer was long and boring. I didn’t manage to do the things I wanted to do, and I should have visited the grandparents before they died. That I regret.

I thought:

That would be a good opening line! That sounds like a meaty yet readable novel.

I cringe:

I have no story.

But later, I write:

Worries get nobody anywhere

Heartbreak gets somebody everywhere

And I was satisfied. The days are getting longer but the nights are getting shorter; the zenith of youth is reached and now only the pull back to earth will revive our lost hopes.