Sunday 29 March 2009

Fall Forward

The best sight in the world is blue sky through the bottom of a pint glass. The clocks went forward last night and today we went adventuring. We drank beside the canal and watched the barges pass, smoking rollies and sharing packets of dry-roasted in the optimistic sun. Soon it will be time for night cricket, tea-dresses and the Eurovision. When Eurovision comes, the Best Girl and I will dress as drag queens and I will serve pink gin from porcelain teapots. First stop though is the Grand National. My money is on War of Attrition.

The police came round again last night. The children had been systematically destroying the abandoned van over the road. I had heard them at it, and if I were a more upstanding member of society I would have called the police myself, but seeing as how I break several laws just sitting still, I thought it unwise. Poor, stoned Snout opened the door and bamboozled the pretty, blonde, twelve-year-old constable with a detailed history of the vans he has seen on this road and on other roads in the past. The Lover of Horses, Brother Mine and I hid in the W.C. Snout said enough to make her go away but not enough to get the children in trouble. We are more afraid of the children than we are of the law. Later some men came in a lorry, took the van to pieces and carried it away. No sign of the cat with the human face, but no doubt it wasn’t far away.

Now I am here, garlic-fingered in other people’s clothes, lying on my belly with my bare feet in the air like a teenage girl writing in her secret diary. I am the kind of person who would read your diary if I found it. I am the kind of person who, left alone in your house, would heft your mattress and rummage through your knicker drawer until I found your diary. I love secrets, especially other people’s, and I sit upon my clutch of them henlike, overprotective and broody for more.

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