An Orchestral Depth

Terrible inventions are these circular things

Absolute inevitable bliss

Paramount in certain kinds of enlightenment

If half-remembered venom persists

Something in the way that I turned my head

Rattled all the love to my neck

There it sat for days in anonymity;

Now it has a note to be expressed

That’s when all the colour turned an orchestral depth

Even magnolia flourished

Morning made a hole in the sky

Of a deep mauve gradient

Doors upon the landing were quietly shut

Pianos dropped in dissonance to their deaths

Roads and gardens bathed in a street-yellow light

Dawn laid out a hymn sheet and took a deep breath

[Spoken Word Sample: Jonathan Meades]

But the actual fabric of the places where I learnt about the fabric of faces has remained uncannily consistent. Stasis is still an option, and it's the one that this part of England has chosen. The world of my childhood hasn't vanished; it's a ghost that has no struggle to be seen behind the coarse facades that have been superimposed down the years. Behind the trees that it's now a crime to chop down, because trees have rights. Vistas don't. Many views that I recall have been lost to arboreal correctness. Beneath, too, the dismal hatches that squat on edge-lands that were dismal, but exciting, too. My midget former self is all too visible. I behave like him. I amble for the sake of ambling, at snail pace. I, too, regard suburban avenues and riverbanks, back streets and woods, as the best free show on Earth