Hanging In A Jar

Coming home is like drifting off through a film or living through a coma punctuated by an intermittent consciousness. What you see is familiar but things are slightly out of place. Some characters are gone, others reaching the end of their arc. Every so often you fall back asleep. Your life continues. It feels like nothing's changed, though your own lives have been many and your face and manner would confuse those who encounter you too.  The doorbell rings and there's Brenda, hair set and ruddy cheeked, with a wrapped box of After Eights and a bottle of gin. Shall we have some now, together? Frank next door is in his garden working on his model railway. His wife Viv is whispering the village gossip to mum over the top of the garden fence, her white hair and glasses just about visible if you stand on your tiptoes.  The settings change: in the movie, the school gym is no longer festooned with streamers but now empty and abandoned, light streaming through a broken window. In life...

Venice: Nights of Madonna blue, the tail end of a shawl moving away into the darkness, a certain nothing. I think of the water's edge - how the dense fog felt like the end of time but was the beginning: the caigo an embrace.   I will miss the witches' brooms, the metallic clunk of the binmen, the warm glow melting like honey from morning shop windows onto the dark, cold Autumn calli. The old man who sings as he pedals through San Tomà, the alsatian in his 5pm booties, Giorgio on the steps of the church at San Lio: a plastic bucket on his head. The incredulity of the 7am ombre, the vampiric kiss of the cocal, the tiny skeletons running through Halloween darkness of Campo Santa Margherita, whooping with joy. "Singing" the songs of Curva Sud as if dubbed by a toddler, but Ascolani only have olives. Remembering a shroud of fog concealing delinquents on the water. The swifts darting and dancing against the bright blue sky, the cormorants crucified as the sun sets over the ...