Monday 12 August 2013

The Difference Alarms

A bit of prose. Tut!


The difference alarms

Cough cough cough goes the diesely grunt and grind,
A lowly way to ride along the coast of our stony inheritance but so satisfying in its wooden carriaged, uniformed and peak-capped, pink ticket stamped day.
Colourful posters that demonstrate that we are still somehow fighting a war supposedly won decades ago.

Before we were properly connected.

Elsewhere, in another place I knew, a copper kettle is all that fires and fumes, boiling water and leaves. Pounced upon and polluted with milk, and sweet crumbs.

"Have you got the time, please", I asked and the reply given scratched my head.
"No, nobody has anymore", spoke quietly the gentleman, ready to enlighten me.

I didn't understand, I just needed a practical response. Reflection on the past wasn't my game, in those days.
No, in my mind, all the rain macs and umbrellas and weepy countenances, the metal lighters, ties and habitual smoking of cigarettes whose names sounded royal and historic, amounted to a previous world.
Yeah, now I know that it co-existed with mine, tracksuits, breakdancing and top of the pops nestled up to action man, the Dandy and Beano and meticulously drawn stories of Australian units in the jungle.

This must be how everyone feels - no one is a generation.
Time is surely not so simple. Bridging, ebbing and flowing, its effluence impossible to track, allowing each of us to only catch the odd, glinting reflection of the sun on its surface.

It's from those pieces that we think we know the world.

But those pensioners, they were defined by what happened in their time and lest we forget.

Schools of red poppies and rememberance services more frequent than the calendar allows. Oh, and God and Jesus were there too but somehow transformed into British army generals.
Very different from the other, the primary school, 'where have all the flowers gone', love and 'give peace a chance', flared trouser version.

And now of course, its life has begun to extinguish. A dead history, marked by assembled and crappily reassembled documentaries, watched by perverted cravers of explosive, blood and secret evils/evil secrets.

Now our wars are lived by other people. People whose broadband connections are unreliable. People we would care about if we could relate to them from our isolated, weather-beaten mound.
Foreigners are liked when they are nice to you and preferably providing some kind of service....when they admit their position and are submissive - a long, long tradition in the Anglo-Saxon myth.

Now I wish they had all listened to the old man, the one who had the lowdown on what it's like to suffer and scream and lose over and over again, then to be told that you have won and it's time to go back home.

I have the feeling that with his comfortable accent and fair skin, his words may have slipped right through the
difference alarms of those who do not compute that he is me and I am her and we are they and you too.

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