Loveseat in the time of CoronaWalking the lanes the middle of last night, one ear sucking up
Dire Straights, the other hearing my heels clocking the pavement like the Walkin’ Dude in Stephen King’s primer, I felt strangely calm, like I’ve been expecting this all my life. The fact that I put bin bags over the seats of my car before handing it over to have its MOT the other day just shows that I was prepared.
As I went by Anthony Burgess’s old semi-domi (it’s also on my
Hastings to the Sea tour), I considered all things dystopia: the pensioners in the nursing home I had also passed being hooked into the matrix to power Netflix servers; toilet paper doused in cheap kerosene and lobbed at armed policemen; even my recently diagnosed intestinal malrotation, which if I’m lucky will confuse the fuck out the little lipid coated fuckers.
When I arrived at the level crossing the arms went down and a ghost train flew by, filled with panic buyers sentenced to Hastings, now a concentration camp straight out of
Children of Men. The engineer was
Mark Carnage, dressed to the nines in his birthday suit, freshly retired from his job at the Bank of England making money worthless and now forever condemned to shuttle back and forth between hell and perdition. The station car park was empty as the BBC Director-General’s soul.
On the way back home I spied a turbo trainer through a first floor window. If there’s a better definition of purgatory, I have yet to know of it.
Bad to the Bone shuffled into my ears,
Death goaded me to scratch previously innocent itches on my nose, and I smiled. Grist for the mill.
