Car Crash

How precious everything is. How fragile, and yet how resilient the workings of nature. How delicately tuned. It’s Boxing Day and I’m sitting in my dad’s bungalow in Essex on a magnificent sun-stretched morning. My head still hurts a little. The inside of my skull is a padded cell, and the contrast between the sky and my brain isn’t lost on me. Out there it’s clear and crisp. In here it’s a world of slow drifting mist. A place one drives with dipped headlights.

As I sit in the back room, gazing onto a sierra of pointed roofs and television aerials. I see it’s taking me far longer than usual to write this. But at least I am writing. At least the words are still there. I hug them like the white lines in the middle of a rural road. Too bad I didn’t hug those lines a little tighter a couple of month’s ago.