The Dreams of Children

She was younger than me, by about a year or so. Corkscrew hair, funny, sharp and dangerous. We'd all get the bus to and from school, cramming about 400 kids into about 8 buses from outside the school gates. Got to get on the first bus!

The queue was always carnage: Bags, elbows, knees and heads - nothing was off limits. Got to get on the bus first!

Traveling via the Station and things could only get worse. Off one bus onto another. Got to get on the next  bus!

To be honest I can't even remember why I bothered to rush home. Nothing to do or eat when I got there, except play music - loud!

I suspect it was just about getting on the same bus as the girl with the corkscrew hair.

Lockdown - Day #25

The flags on the pier are cowering from the horizon, bullied by the eternal sea fret. Marine Parade (an interloper in the Grand scheme of things), smothered by the worn rubber of a million tyres. The Corporation buses grinding full-on Leyland chug, from the Point to the Head and all stops in between.

A Deux Chevaux stutters and shudders from East Dean to Churchdale Road. It takes a boy and a girl to drive AND change gear. The cassette player chews the latest release by St Pancras Records.

"Hegemony, hegemony...

You are the fairest creature

You are the fairest creature that ever I have seen,

And it's all for Monopoly

On all those pretty sexibles/sensibles,

That rot and raise a nation the capacity for change

An honest day's pay for an honest day's work

You can't change human nature

Don't bite the hand that feeds you…"

Lockdown - Day #18

It isn’t all sunshine, murder and Christmas on this walk. Now that the green to the right has disappeared, the taste of Creamline Toffees starts to invade the pallet. The prom is strewn with “toffee wrappers and this mornings papers”… 

Young spirits hold hands and try to ignore the feral lust that washes over them like waves. In the distance, satisfaction, recrimination, isolation and ultimately reconciliation melt into the horizon. She looks at him through a deep fringe and he looks at her through the silence.

The low rumble of the corporation cream and blue number 3 single decker merges with gull skaw from behind the retreating Redoubt. The sounds of teenage years push in and out… A telecaster skank step, a Rickenbacker hum. 

Dreamtime...

Tangerine dusk, slipping into the old bus depot
with only one journey on my mind...