One Desolate Hour

Mortified, I can look around and notice the way busy people lead busy lives around me.

My own un-busy life would pale in comparison, were I the competitive type.

Only I’m not.

I’m content to succeed in my own lazy way. That is not to succeed at all.

My ambitions are my own.

I have an hour to kill before picking up my photos, one hour Tesco’s minilab 4by6 prints.

Each one a small remnant of happy – or at least drunken – times.

I’m not even hungry. A full meal sits before me, to help me waste the hour honourably, in my consumer stance, perched over a purchase on a Formica topped table.

There’s no feeling like buying what you don’t want.

Occasionally I stop to force something into my mouth, something unwanted, barely able to swallow.

I paid money for somewhere to sit. A place warm, literature and somewhat safe.

The socialites secret is that he only knows people that know a lot of people.

He scavenges the company of others, the friends and associates of the naturally friendly, for himself.

 

I don’t remember most of the ‘happy’ moments recorded on that film.

I sit in grand anticipation of experiencing them again. Holding them in my hands, I’m in such a sentimental mood.

I’d like to think this mood is unusual for me, although these days I’m beginning to realise – more and more – this is almost defiantly not the case.

We live in a world, this modern world, where being remotely artistic is a sin.

Everything is so architectured,

So regulated.

Nothing simply flies from the drawing board, It sees several hundred sketches, working drawings, models, prototypes and redesigns.

Everything is too close to perfection to actually rouse any feeling.

Modern life is clinical,

Is what that brick wall in Brighton should say.

 

It’s creeping towards new years.

My good friend describes such events as ‘the obligation to have fun’. I can see his point.

I do not think there is one person on this planet who has seen through a celebration safely without misery, even our artificial happiness-inducers cause misery after consumption.

Another thing I hate about modernity, how it has turned everything into an excuse to get paralytic, and get laid, and get lonely, all at once.

Not that I doubt that has always been the case for us.

I can see the lab from where I am.

But still my anxiousness for receiving them rings heartily in my ears, and aches in my chest.

I always long desperately for what I cannot have,

And disregard what sits in my palm.

 

‘My galley charged with forgetfulness through sharp seas in winter nights doth pass’,

 

The frosted glass that petitions each table from the next distracts my view,

But it does work to separate me from what I would otherwise have to work hard to ignore.

And work hard is something I’m glad to be saved from.

So thank Tesco’s for saving the small remaining fraction of my sanity.

 

I am not, however, saved from all.

A man behind me sits in waiting for his shopping w

ife, he stares at my back.

He clatters his tea cup and saucer together.

He rustles the pages of his already read 15 times paper. (Daily Express)

He grunts in frustration.

When he stands, collected by a straw haired, pearl knit jumper wearing mouse-like wife I notice he walks with a cane.

Very, very slowly.

IN fact not so much walks, as shuffles.

It’s only seventeen minutes til photo time.

The range of other customers surrounding me have changed three times since I got here.

Eventhe staff have changed shifts.

 

‘A rain of tears, a cloud of dark distain’,

 

Oh Jesus.

I just saw the guy walk intro the photolab,

The same one I spoke to last time.

Long, dark, curly hair, a beard, bright blue eyes – and a true as East Anglia accent.

I cant go back.

It’s not so much that I spoke rudely, but that I spoke bluntly,

And in a tiresome accent.

 

Well I was tired, but tiresome is different.

 

I’ll have to go back tomorrow, when he’s not there,

An hour,

 

One Desolate Hour,

Wasted.