Lechlade

How could the seasons have changed so rapidly?

I looked at the lady who had been sitting by herself until I came into the room. Would she know the answer? Likely she would not even understand the question.

The sense of territory was hers, although I probably knew the room better. It had once been a tea room for tourists, now a simple gathering-place that the owner offered as part of an open house policy.

As you well know, people have been more and more flinging their front doors wide, in an unstoppable movement of actually trusting each other. It all stemmed from the earlier years when there was that upsurge of geopolitical changes. With the frontiers being uprooted by the onrush of currency unions, mutual democracies and mass nirvanas, so, too, had individuals opened their arms to each other, not in an attempt to retrieve some remnant of sexuality that had been eschewed and rightfully forgotten, but more to prove to Reality that people were generally together - and that at the end of the day it was not going to get its own cruel way.

There was no need for cafes or shops with such a philosophy. In fact, the lady, sitting at the next table had just been handed a good old-fashioned dinner of braising steak and three vedge, to be followed by treacle sponge and custard.

I smiled.

February was a warm month.

She smiled back.

The golden shimmering girders of the sun shafted through the Rose Window between us, making it difficult to discern fully her face in the shifting patterns and colours of light. The shadow speckles of snow flickering across her made me wonder how I could ever forget such a vision of impending nostalgia.

A woman and a boy came into the room. He was evidently not at school because a visit to the dentist had been promised ... and, by the look of it, fulfilled. He took much delight in tentatively chewing an Eccles cake which he had taken from under the dust cover on the owner’s sideboard. The woman said she had not eaten an Eccles cake since she was a child herself and had forgotten how nice they were.

Finishing my stay, I wished all of them a good day and a better one tomorrow. There was no bill to pay, but I left my ghostly presence as a kind of gratuity.

I wondered how many second childhoods I would undergo before reaching the optimum.

(published 'Opossum Holler Tarot' 1990)