Skip to main content

Sixty Six and Sixty Seven

I missed a few months somehow (I blame late-stage PhD write up), so here are two to catch up. One is from relatively recently and the other is from some point midway through the last decade.



'On a large complex train, arranged like an Ikea store. There is, as always, nowhere to sit, but I had to catch this train. There was no other option. I move from carriage to carriage, vaguely aware of someone guiding my hand through the morass of dark green first class seats I am forbidden to sit in, and elongated Moroccan-style benches replete with sprawl-ing idiots. I eventually come across the red carriage, a sort of standard class area, but covered in beds with red duvets. There are people under the sheets but I am unable to see them. They wriggle around and make noise. By the exit, which I walk through, there is one bed with a corpse in it. What I assume is the final carriage contains a food shop like Ikea; it is only when looking out of the window that I realise I am actually in the station and the train is leaving. All my stuff is there.'



'In the room at The Rookery in St. Ives. Outside is all darkness and turmoil, inside a single light is on. We are told to wait. An end-of-the-world style situation. Somehow me and Chris have survived (I didn't even know he was here). Finally, after a Beckettesque wait, an elderly couple enter the room with bags of shopping. The end of the world is over; people can now shop again'

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Sixty Eight

In some sort of wasteland, possibly Malton from urbandead but in reality. The buildings and general lay out of the space appears to be a grid system, dark green, crisscrossing and bisecting the land; it resembles a giant board game. The sky is muted orange, and I have a feeling there is something lurking in the increasing shadows that dusk has introduced. Someone who I am with shows me around their flat. From the window I see abandoned car parks, and in the distance lakes and mountains, though this view is partially obscured by smoke rising from refineries that seem to encircle the town. The light is falling away. No-one is on the street when I am taken to the next house. The view from the window is the other house. Each subsequent place I am shown around offers a view of the preceding property. I am caught in a loop of property viewing, with some unknown menace responsible for the trap I find myself in.

Forty Five

Last night: 'Something wakes me, and I look out the window to see our garden has been territorialized by an unknown neighbour. A sign is on the lawn saying 'Until June/July 2011' (I am not confused by this). There are dog toys spread about the place and a large looking dog who moves around in his sleep as I inspect the garden. Later, inside, I hear the neighbours and their kid discussion technological purchases. I instantly loathe them. I am up at the front room window when a car pulls up and a number of people jump out and run in to the houses opposite. This is quickly followed by a number of police cars and an armed response unit which attacks a door and promptly falls through in to the cellar of one of the buildings. The flashing lights of the cars are an unusual red and purple. There is a lot of shouting and the sound of small arms fire in the distance. Zoe, woken by the commotion, comes to the window. 'What is going on?' she asks. 'They're looking for m...

Sixty Nine

'The undercroft of a castle or cathedral. A female friend – blonde, round face, but unrecognizable on waking – is telling me about an amazing man, a prophet no less, who is going to lead her/us to some unspecified promised land. I am obviously sceptical. The undercroft is arranged with a series of desks, as in a Victorian class room (all tightly packed, high, scarred wood). Everyone is wearing a white gown. The class begins, and the students and my friend are subjected to a baffling array of visuals and noises projected across the entirety of the room. Somewhere in the darkness a man is laughing. I move slowly through the flashing lights to the source of the laughter to find Chris Morris, his hair long and curly, is in fact doing all of this as an elaborate joke. I try to explain this to everyone by I am drowned out by the ‘art work’; I run out of the undercroft, aware now that the practical joke was obviously at my expense.'