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Living for the sunshine, woah-oh
I’m living for the summer
only dogs and megaphones could break this up now.
hard by Barbican underground station, on Aldersgate Street, in the borough of Finsbury—isn’t
Keith Jarrett’s improvised piano recital from Osaka, November 8, 1976, one of the Sun Bear concerts;
horses, lions, tigers—but
anglepoise.
an inner strength that had allowed her to conquer her alcoholism, or at any rate, enabled her to continue the daily struggle.
all the bright avenues
Funny way to meet your grandson, already seven years old.
Medals weren’t won in the sunshine. Backs were stabbed in the dark.
You lived your life day by day, the O.B. thought, but days were mere splinters of time, no useful measure. The sudden events that blind us with their light had roots in the slowly-turning decades.
The best of us are thieves and scoundrels,”
old spies grew forgetful, and among the things they forgot was remembering what not to say.
Topmost was Bleak House,
“nice cup of tea,” the universal panacea.
We all make mistakes, River. Made a couple myself, and some have hurt other people. They’re the ones you shouldn’t get over. The ones you’re meant to learn from.
Nurofen.
while initiative was frequently applauded, getting caught exercising it was not.
kagoule-clad
sparrowfart.”
When you lived on Spook Street you wrapped up tight: watched every word, guarded every secret.
Beyond Spook Street it was all joe country—even here, with the friendly French landscape pelting past at a hundred miles an hour, he was in joe country, and there was no telling what came next.
This was what joe country looked like.
wonderwall.
Walking back the cat,
“We have two fixed points.”
“Intended victim. Source of plot.”
“Triangulation requires three points.”
What ties the old man to France? That’ll be our third reference point.
Le Ciel Bleu, Angevin.
gallimaufry
you didn’t have to know how to strip an engine to drive a car,
There would be a local paper, or a local centre of gossip—a church, a bar—where he might discover a name; a piece of thread to tug on.
“I’m hardly James Bond.”
Most dead things look smaller,
glass animals.
Reith lectures.”
as we get older, we need to return to our beginnings.
I want to see more of the world than the space between these two bridges.”
Like with my own father, he says how he feels about things, and that is how the things become.
When emerging from the underworld, he vaguely recalled, it was best not to look over your shoulder; you could lose everything you thought you’d recovered.
geese didn’t walk on your grave. You could step on all the cracks you wanted, and your mother’s back remained her own concern.
twelve-year-olds who were the hardest articles their schools had ever seen snapped like peppermint sticks on its streets.
When someone dropped a tray in a crowded restaurant, you looked every which way except towards the noise, hunting down the action it was meant to distract you from.
Nowadays the local citizenry’s stories were recorded by closed-circuit TV, which had less time for sentimental endings.
The key to tailing someone was knowing where they’d end up:
the two-second grace that follows unexpected violence,
All political lives end in failure,
a mummy’s tomb of long-dead fragrances: cigarettes and whisky, and bus station waiting rooms, and damp desperate mornings, and death.
