Back and Forward

Birdsong rushes in through the open windows. The weekend has been and gone. A new day has started.

One would think being back where you went to school is a bit of a regression. Intimate knowledge of a wall you used to hide behind to smoke cigarettes at lunch break, or the school gates that you passed through a decade ago daily would be somehow a reminder of things you left behind. But in fact, they are memorabilia now, like nuggets of memory to fold-up and place into your left breast-side pocket to be patted down every now and then. For reassurance and nostalgia. I was that. Now I’m this.

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Books on philosophy – the names of modern political theorists adorn my wall – a book shelf absolutely teeming with all the knowledge and know-how that I don’t possess. The dormant army sit there offering up a quiet challenge to be better. Get smarter. Come on, read me if you can. I can’t imagine anything more enticing to return home to and it fills me with gladness that I’m going to be able to live in this house that’s a home.

We get milk delivered to our doorstep in clear glass bottles.

The window of my room faces east, so sunlight pours in whenever I can manage to open the curtains like I did this morning. Big yellow trees are splodges on my sightline, a townhouse garden extends forwards in to thickets, I see some allotment patches, one small misted-up greenhouse and a shiny spider’s web that glints once or twice before it disappears. Nothing is dramatic nor apparent and it’s bliss waking up to the niceness of this.

A few marauding cats get shooed off the grass and the leaves blaze leaving a trail of summer behind before falling in to autumn.