Unicycle Emptiness

I blame the recession and the baby. Well, mostly the baby. I loathe the term ‘mummy blogger’ and pointless baby orientated witterings but to be fair, he does exist and a combination of childcare fees and a one year old who emits ear piercing shrieks when forced to stay still for upwards of a second means perambulations around real ale pubs, musings on the generosity of pizza toppings and well, just general fun are currently curtailed.  I have gone nowhere interesting or done anything interesting for a considerable period of time apart from look at the internet, walk zombie eyed around the utilitarian racks of Wilkinsons, pick toast up off the floor and mindlessly eat kettle chips.

I miss writing the blog, I miss writing but my muse has currently deserted me-everything is familiar, pleasantly so but familiar nonetheless and I can not describe it in interesting terms to the badly punctuating spammers who converge like hungry hyenas on Word Press thinking that a year old post on Morecambe needs a comment advertising Xbox cheats.

A new Sainsbury’s has replaced the old one in Lancaster. Will that do you? I have not stepped through misty wilderness looking for ancient Celtic standing stones but it was a bastard trying to find out where the reduced shelves have gone. And even if they still exist. There. A cliff-hanger to keep my readers. And I am glad there is still some mystery in my life.

Walking over the hill and seeing Lancaster Castle with its flag flying, always cheers me up because what is more picturesque than seeing the sanitised reconstructed reboostered portal to misery-where more people were sentenced to he hung than at the Old Bailey, where the trapdoor to death is cooed at in six pound guided tours and where people, real alive people, sons and daughters, wives and children shook and trembled, their legs giving way before being toppled to their long miserable deaths-sometimes for stealing food to keep their families alive.

Yes, I do love Lancaster Castle. Really. I feel guilty for loving the historic misty-eyed wolves howling at midnight version of the past and being bored of the present where even despite the Conservatives, no one in this country is currently entombed in a black sulphurous cell awaiting their time to be murdered by the state. Nowadays is more a form of prolonged psychological torture in the form of Workfare and Kafkaesque paper forms of eternity and when you realise that in your house there does not exist a black pen for the Form Reading Machine to read and the Form Reading Machine spits black flames at your lilac glitter pen found in a drawer and thus you have to reclaim and you try to phone up to explain but there are no people anywhere to speak to anywhere and you think of standing stones and the mysteries and enchantment there used to be. But at least you have your teeth.

It is cold and every weekend is the same. Yesterday we went to Carnforth Station and had coffee and cake in the refreshment rooms, a paen to the past where an elderly man plays piano and spiky old peoples’ writing in the visitors book reminisce and rhapsodise about a place that only exists because of a made up film, Brief Encounters where the characters in the film go back to their lonely short unhappy lives because society dictates that is how things should be.

I wish they had had excellent sex passion fuelled sex and run away together but that would have only resulted in a different tedium without the thought of ‘what might have been’.

In a small room for children there is a slightly grubby Thomas The Tank Engine Tent which my baby refuses to go in and on the window ledge is an even grubbier Tigger the Tiger, a battle worn much loved children’s teddy, forgotten and unclaimed in this interchange of trains and destinations. Somewhere, a child wants his Tigger.

So (she says in a sparkly hairdresser voice) have you been anywhere nice? Show me you are not a spammer only looking at this blog in an ill-fated desperate attempt to advertise wedding dresses or brides. Tell me about where you have been-and I will shoot bitter envious shoots of green if you go on about Tuscany or somewhere as I have no passport or money. Make the uninteresting, interesting. Because it is for a stranger.  I want to know about Tenby, Kidderminster, anywhere else but here. Standing stones would be good but I love this country because history abounds everywhere. My blackest mood can be lifted by walking along a miserable arterial road blackened by pollution, encrusted with Lambert and Butler packets and seeing an excellent graffitied image of an owl, a dark anonymous building, huddled behind the endless procession of lorries but which has the insignia of ‘1829’ above the door. Imagine the story behind that house! Imagine who carved that insignia, their life, their death, what and who used to traverse in front of that bowed sunken hulk and what was there before.

History is fascinating. The future is terrifying. I will sit here and think of the past because despite the lack of dentists, the dying in childbirth, the babies buried for want of a piece of bread, the harsh gritty reality of it all is softened by time-my baby lacks no food despite the fact I consider myself poor but my eyes soften at a house where probably a woman died in childbirth. Why? Because the Other is always more preferable.

Tell me about your Other. The mundane is only mundane if it is known.

Please?

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