Decay (working title)

To crawl through the hole in a corrugated iron fence. To crawl through into a different world where most people didn't tread. To wander into no mans land. A door had silently closed behind me, though it could only have only have been the wind.

These were the kind of places that I liked to work in.

These places had atmosphere. They had history, not just in the careful beauty of the brickwork, or the elegance of the beams and uprights, but everywhere. The brass plate bolted to the concrete, to level or calibrate, the clinging remnant of a long vanished machine. The peeling paint and tiled floors. Lockers that displayed only what treasure the pikeys had overlooked. Of annexes with office cubicles, strewn with the mouldy papers and plans spilling from the sorry desk that never left. Painted on the wall, lost hopes of a team winning the cup. The broken windows and pigeon shit. Now I was here, the clapping flap proceeding the coo of birds that perhaps expected the park breadcrumbs where they roost. Here and there, the signs still told you not to smoke. These places had an emptiness that you could not fathom.

I wished I had my camera.

Where the rusting rib cages of warehouses and workshops rose high into the grey skies, amidst the vague drizzle. The floors covered with decaying plasterboard and broken glass, or simply the dark grey greasy grit that seems to accumulate everywhere. Elsewhere, there were cables hanging from the brown decaying steelwork, and underneath the absence of roofing, a small lake of water had gathered to produce a thin quagmire of fines. Some patches had green algae and moss, in others rushes. As if surrounded by all this, some stubborn nature would not let go. In summer, the Buddleia would be strewn with butterflies, besides this wasteland. It would be hard to call it an oasis.

Was this what the future looked like?

It had made the geologist laugh, a thousand years was nothing to him. The eye blink before the made ground proceeded the natural. Perhaps this was why he was feign to care?

This next building looked curiously like a school I went to. Though the peeled paint from the walls and ceilings littered the floor. Half painted brickwork, half plaster. In one doorway, you could see the smashed remnants of hand basins and toilet bowls. The torn pipework leaving only rough holes in the wall to trace its path from. A cistern tank lay broken and discarded to the floor, the down pipe still intact, because plastic had no scrap value.

At the end of the corridor, there was a high roofed building, reminiscent of a gymnasium in all it's emptiness. On one wall, electrical junction boxes and switchboards lay open. Along another side, the floor was damp and slightly green from the broken skylights. My boots left footprints. There were bolts protruding from the concrete at the corners of vague rectangles that betrayed the positions of missing machine bases. On the far wall, there were wooden shelves. They looked like miniature church pews in their form and colour, but were filled with slotted alcoves all labelled in inches. Underneath there were boards with hooks and nails, atop the outlines of departed tools. It looked like a crime scene, an execution at the ironmongers.

There were two sets of double doors here. Through the wired glass windows, I could see a covered courtyard, two iron gas cylinders upright against the far wall. The doors were locked. Another one to the side was not. It was a stairwell.

At the bottom of the stairwell, the wall was covered with an enormous fungal bloom. It spread across the wall like contorted ripples. The curious ridges were brown to the crest and then ochre underneath. Toward the centre, the metal housing of a lightswitch still partially visible. Not quite swamped by the waves of fungus. It didn't seem healthy to be next to this, I had an urge to hold my breath for sake of the spores. Back towards the stairwell. Happy that they were concrete after I had kicked them. Happy they were likely to take my weight, I ascended. At the top of the stairs, I met a deserted office.

It was a mess of lockers, their doors flung open, the floor strewn with detritus, papers, and small cardboard trays. The contents of these trays missing, too many to have been simply discarded. There was an office chair in amongst these things and what looked curiously like a video tape. On the shelves along the wall next to a desk, there was a cumbersome old IBM PC. Some of the cardboard trays were not empty, one contained a number of metal files. In another tray, bags of tungsten carbide ball bearings, labelled with measurements still written mostly in inches On one label a date read 27/11/81. Had this really been untouched for a quarter of a century?

In another of the cupboards, I found a wooden box. Slightly grubby and reminiscent of then articles my Granddad used to keep his draughtsmans instruments in. The pens, pencils, springbow compasses and other facets of his work. It had been a long time since I had seen such a thing. It looked almost identical, with it's brass hinges and clasps (the clasps were as flimsy as I remembered them), though nothing grand or special. Perhaps this was the reason that few of these things remained. Was there a name written in biro on the corner? The letters didn't make sense.

Trace your steps back, traverse to the other end of a site, to make your way back out.

Two lights above a door lintel. The green cover smashed, the red intact. It looked like a studio, but the details engraved on the accompanying plate marked the lights as a facet of an electrical transformer. A transformer that had long since gone, gone with the machines it supplied power to.

Past mounds of fly tipped rubbish from who knows where. Some mostly tyres and car parts, rusting oil cans and the charred lump of what used to be a car battery. Others with broken fridges, their foam spilling out, and what looked like the entire contents of a kitchen piled in heap. Nearby I saw three toilet bowls clustered together, one even with the seat intact. Littered here and there, the spiral remnants and sliced up sheathing from armoured cable.

There had been squatters here, sitting on old milk crates covered with a carpet tile in the semi darkness from dirty windows. So much footwear, odd shoes and a pair of wellington boots. On the wall, a coat and hat still hung up in the anticipation that they had never been left behind. Maybe they hadn't? The floor was a mess. Slithers of cable sheathing discarded here and there. Piles of stuff that looked like old clothes, or rucksacks, but somehow unrecognisable. Scatterings and discrete collections of single serving sugar packets and a bag of greasy fish and chip papers. On a bench, there was a curious table setting, a new and cheerful looking mug, odd cutlery and napkins neatly spaced above a tray. It looked expectant of a meal. By the doorway, a collection of site notices. One exclaiming that men were working overhead had been placed on top of another milk crate. On this makeshift table, there was a videotape titled “understanding depression”. Its good intentions of no use in this place.

There were some buildings to the rear of the site, with roofs relatively intact, with only the ceiling tiles that hung in such a way as to betray their intentions. To join their colleagues already gathered on the floor. For these and other places here, I'd wished again for the foresight to bring my lid, a site hat inherited from my parents garage. Inside one room, there were rows of old tyres. Car tyres, tractor tyres and lorry tyres.

There were piles of crushed brick and concrete accumulated in several of the doorways. One of the rooms in the block looked like the floor had been purposely cleared. It seemed curious, because half the wall was missing. Elsewhere, who ever had taken the trouble to begin bricking up the doorway had also seemingly taken to sweeping the veneer of glass and detritus into neat piles underneath the decaying corrugated iron roof. Though none of it made perfect sense, or even reasonable sense. There was asbestos lagging scattered across the threshold here. The white strands were long enough to have been an old mans hair. Just outside, the first strands still wet from the drizzle. Rendered benign for now. The other clumps undercover, next to the sections of pipework that they used to cling to. To be given a wide berth. Not to be disturbed.

There was a weighbridge by the chained up gates and a windowless office enclosed with cinder blocks. Not just one chain, but three, and the gaps in the gate covered by a mish-mash of iron grill and wooden planks. Not far away, there was a rusting tanker lorry, with flat tyres and missing windscreen. The cab was tipped forward as if a despairing mechanic had simply given up and left. Close by, a storage tank hung above its bund, with hose and filler nozzle dangling toward the floor. It was nearly full, the rainwater brown and a rusty sludge collected at the bottom. I had to wonder about the strange tracks that ran around the perimeter of the site, and the curious abundance of spent shotgun cartridges.

Of what had gone before, I couldn't say, though would have liked to. Another harbinger of change, with rigs and machines at my command. The vanguard of what the developers marketed as a 'new future'. If the walls were against the wall, what would they say? What anecdotes of scenes and lives gone before might they nervously recount? To list who did what, that we began to undo? Would they plead for these things, or spit at the bucket?

“I saw all this and have survived so much, and now you have come for me?”

It would be awkward faced with this, more awkward than the usual objections of bored busy bodies...

We were somewhere...

We were somewhere,

That much was true, although we couldn’t exactly say… Only the speed cameras knew, they knew exactly where we were.

It had been the kind of journey where you could have been driving round with a dead hooker in the trunk, or a shotgun wrapped in old carpet. This time however, it was a box of lead piping for colonel mustard in the drawing room. He’d had me driving all day, and we really hadn’t thought this through at all. And we knew it.

I had feeling that the lesbians were involved. They had been behind the teaspoon racket all along. It had been them!

And all of a sudden, the road was filled with twats. Flashing their lights and taking their hands off the wheel.

I muttered something, but it wasn’t my own words.

“We can’t stop here, this is twat country”



Apologies to the late Hunter S. Thompson.

The Girl Behind The Photograph

Where exactly it had come from, I couldn't be sure. A framed monochrome picture of a Hawker Hunter, donated to me at the zenith of childhood interest. Though, what benefactor I could no longer say. Had it been the enthusiastic, but unfortunately named, Uncle Dick? A man from a time when this kind of thing was still acceptable, a man who'd spent a short time, green faced, in the front of a Handley Page Type O.

It had been a long time ago.

If you could think past the hiatus of teenage conformism, where such precious things were rejected for sake of beer and immature women. Past university aswell...

Though actually, maybe not that far.

And some time around then, the glass in the frame had been broken. As if by some other luck, the photograph had not been lacerated by the radiating shards. Through that, rather than follow me into the abyss, it stayed in the same wardrobe and gathered dust.

Was it a decade later? From thoughts of shipping and long term storage, the action to replace the frame.

The masking tape had left a slightly sticky brown residue, but the brass plates and pins, still held the backing in place. Fifty years of service, to be undone.

On the back, as if to confirm the authenticity, to validate the paintbrush retouching you could see. On the back, a stamp, the words “Armstrong Siddeley” still visible at the top. Written in place below, a pencil reference number, and the date: 14^th September 1953. Some rooting around confirmed the situation. PW202, the third prototype, powered by an Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire, built in Coventry.

This was history you were holding by the edges. From a time when my Dad was still a baby.

There's a level for the unexpected in all of this. That between a photograph, and some backing. That you might find something unexpected.

A child, a little girl in shades of grey. Sat on a stool, like the one I'd sat on at my grandparents house. Grasping the legs of it, not really smiling. A big white bow in her curled blond hair. Ballerinas shoes. There was a pencil border drawn around the photograph, broken only for an illegible signature. The name was underlined with a quick flick of the wrist. For what purpose I could not say...

There was more illegible pencil writing on the back. And an ink stamp, of a specialist in child portraiture, with a studio in Leamington Spa.

How old she was I could not say. Her attire made it difficult to place. She might be dead by now.

Or maybe dead already... Dead for a long time...

Somewhere, you had to concede that the girl clutching the stool, had parents. This much must be true, or the situation might have severe religious implications.

My surviving family have no idea who she is. A mystery. There is no date on the photograph. A young girl eclipsed by a prototype of an early jet fighter. What follows is conjecture, the truth lost in the mists of time.

Was this girl killed in the blitz? Killed at the same time when my other grandparent had burned his arms fighting the fires sparked by the countless incendiary bombs? Killed by this, snatched away from a family who never came to terms with this event. From a father who had to cover the photograph up with a Hawker Hunter?

There could be a thousand explanations here, and no one could say if any were the truth.

Reposessed

They evicted my neighbour while I was away.

Some faceless men came and changed the locks. Their inhumanity multiplied only by the photocopied notice which they'd posted onto the door. Stuck there using the same tape as they'd sealed the postbox, emblazoned with the words "do not use".

Where she and her child had gone, I could not say. No longer just across the way. Now she was gone it was impossible to say where.

When her electricity bill had been excessive, she'd asked me if it was right. Which it was when I showed her the meter reading. Such was the price of keeping a baby warm. The same one that ate her mothers cigarette butts from the ashtray. Sometimes she'd even knock on the door to ask for some sugar. All entirely benign and there wasn't much going on.

Had it been the money? I don't think so. That with all the state dole outs for single mothers, it seemed implausible for her not to keep up with her rent.

Though for the first time in ages, the fire door had been closed. Not wedged open for the buggy.

The 'For Sale' sign gave it away in the end. It had been the landlord all along.

No Returns

"We're not getting any of the flush back, can we stop?" the driller had asked.

The water was washing away the marl bands in the Sherwood Sandstone and running away through the fractures. It was meant to be coming back up to the surface, all thick and muddy with pulverised rock. If it didn't do this, there was good reason to stop. It was called no returns.

That Sherwood Sandstone, again.

I knew it had been inevitable.

That with all those far flung places it was only a matter of time until I ended up there. Though it wasn't like I had imagined. No school job for extra classrooms. No looking over your shoulder. No couple of trial pits for soakaways. No awkward silence and foreboding. No shell and auger on the edge of a playing field, and no metallic clang of the drop hammer. Ringing out like a church tower at midnight. And on the back of your site lid, no crudely drawn image of an extinct crustacean. No fitting talisman.

Instead, I'd looked at the job sheet, and then stared at the map...

The land of Galligu. Just over the river. That on your way there you'd become a ghost. A shadow, an echo from another time. Though it didn't seem right or fair, but it never had done.

Just don't anthropomorphise...

To think that I'd had a drilling crew drub around in a gravel path for an hour and a half. An hour and a half looking for additions to the two stone beads I'd found. We only ever found four, and that was by no means enough to have them strung together. So an attractive archaeologist could be the first to wear them after untold years. I remembered the girl. That unlike most, she'd been a lot of places that you wanted to be. Except that barbecue. In that, I made grave mistake.

Was it that damned locust tree? The one overhanging the sunken patio. The false acacia is never to be trusted.

It had all seemed rather civilised. But then it always does to begin with...

There'd been a mother there with her young lad. A small boy running around unyieldingly, constantly exclaiming about his 'rocket boots'. It was endearing in a way, although his mother was unamused. After a while, she'd turned to him and announced in such a disparaging, matter of fact way.

"Oh don't be stupid John, you're talking nonsense."

It wasn't long before some friends turned up from the pub. All of them. En masse. Back from being beaten by Portugal. Although some individuals were clearly all for having the post mortem of English football right there and then. Strangely confused when I'd announced how happy I was now that the madness had ended for another year.

One of her friends had been notable. Perhaps the youngest of all people there. He'd been notable for several reasons, not least the opening announcement that one of his eyes was made of glass. More so that he was one of those people who choose to experiment in case innocuous household items would elicit strange narcotic effects. Pushing the boundaries of drug use. Had one of his friends really overdosed? You could never be sure.

I should have enquired further. How did he justify leaving his job in order to spontaneously write a book? Exactly what kind of book? That and other questions lost amidst his cries of "not the good eye". How could she have mistaken the wrong one?

There was another couple there. The epitome of all that was wrong in the world, because they were perfect for each other. And while she'd busied around disposable barbecues, he'd talked at me. At first it had been a barrage of questions, the smarmy smiling interrogator. Once it became clear that I'd been overwhelmed, you'd hear the tales of her pole dancing lessons and the ungainly age difference that had obviously caused them,

She seemed shallow, and had shovelled half cooked food at me, insisting. The only trouble being that I really wasn't very hungry at all.

It had been so noisy.

Far more noisy than I might have considered civilised at such an hour. Not least for the idiot couple that had arrived with their inbred King Charles spaniel. The one unimaginatively named 'Charlie'. Charlie had proceeded to spend much of the evening barking at a cat located well out of his reach. While the cat sat on the windowsill, unperturbed.

Did the pair realise that their interaction with their treasured pet was counteracting all those expensive obedience lessons they'd twittered on about for a good part of the evening? Slowly undoing the training, because the reinforcement of a real button wasn't there. And they say that dogs grow to be like their owners.

Noisy, not least for all the loud drunken talking outside in the garden, while a church bell tolled midnight. There would have been sense in going inside, not least for the noise. Outside it was cold, and with me not being entirely fortified with alcohol and unacclimatised, I felt that cold. I'd forgotten how cold it was that far north.

She was the only person I knew at that barbecue. The only person amidst a gaggle of people who'd known each other for years. Each one with their own opinions and prejudices. At least one with his own personal agenda, which I appeared to be placed in direct opposition to. Could I get a word in?

At one point in the evening, while the people still there were dwindling away, she'd disappeared. There was a question when she came back with two dark grey pieces of stone. The edges like obsidian. That in some archaeological reserve in Syria, she'd found these curious things. Curious, and out of stratigraphy. That despite a ban on taking things off site, they'd found their way into her pocket.

And I did know what they were. Both tektites. The relics of meteorite strikes in the middle of a desert.

She'd gave me one of those tektites. I sent it back to her because I didn't want to keep it.

I'd have left if I had the chance. That night, with it's bright full moon. Save for the risk of the breathalyser. Or the next morning, when the bright rising sun shone into the sitting room and onto the sofa where I lay. Save for there being no chance to slip away, because the remaining friends were asleep in the front room.

And when you logged the core from Wallsall, you'd find a trilobite and think of her. Think of her running away in her sleep, because the trilobites were chasing her.

There was something left from that time. The relict of an assumption that it wouldn't matter. Forgotten in haste. You'd be back here again and it wouldn't matter. A live set of some singer she liked. Years later, it was still there. Written out in ones and zeros. I'd tried to forget and still thought about it for a long time.

So I walked through the town. Past the dune bedding in the road cutting, that looked exactly the same as in Kidderminster. Past the obelisk across the road from some overpriced restaurant

The purple door was still there. I'd been panicked by the letterbox until I saw it at the bottom of the door. Half expecting to see her staring through the window at me. Which might have been highly awkward and very hard to explain.

So I'd posted the disc through that letterbox, after the trilobites fossilised arse. Then I went back to my van and with no good reason to be in this place, I drove away. Drove away with a hope, that just like drilling through the marl bands of the Sherwood Sandstone, there'll be no returns.

All this happening now, it doesn't begin here.

The last place had looked like a barn. Where bearded men gathered for sake of real ales and low hanging beams. Vintage junk cluttered onto shelves and gathering dust just out of your reach. If there'd been a choice I would have stayed and wasted my time there. It was quiet, civilised and entirely tedious.

I'd known all this the second that the event had been mentioned. Turning up three hours late had been my botched attempt at not turning up at all. Had I been put off by the creeping danger of sly questions while you were drunk? Or was it the scarlet harlot, with her unsuspecting boyfriend hanging on her arm?

There were other good reasons not to attend.

Maybe even that I'd vowed to never set foot inside a part of the Luminar leisure group again. Though technically, I wasn't going back on this. Luminar leisure had gone bust. What had filled this resulting vacuum was far from tasteful.

I was driven into that other place by popular opinion, I felt like one of the herd. The careful alcohol balancing act must have saved me from the full deshielded horror. Although the bouncers were polite and well behaved, largely because the police were stood across the street. Once inside, the truth was all too obvious. You had to shout over what ever noise was emanating from the speaker system.

The drinks had a strange taste to them. The kind of taste you get when you water down coca cola.

I'd never really understood why this messy cacophony constituted 'fun' as most people understood it. Nor that it might be listed as something they were interested in, like it was a legitimate part of culture. But judging from the attire of the people attending, it was because they were stupid or had very bad taste.

Sometime around midnight, he unceremoniously left her and went home to sleep. It seemed a bit uncouth to just leave her there and didn't make sense at first. Then when it did make sense you'd wish you hadn't thought about it.

She was naive.

That should have been the worst of it.

But when the prognosis is naivety, the classical experience is that this is rarely the case. That long and drawn out struggle. Save for the unspoken belief that nothing was ever wrong, until the last dying moments when reality shoves it's way into scene, dragging that ghastly truth behind it.

Underground Echoes

This should have been a dream, in finding my way back through this place.

Along the same steel rails, in the same carriages, the same red jacketed staff and the same upholstery on the same occupied seats. It should have been a different time, but it didn't feel like it. Past the towering plant and gaping quarries of the Rugby cement works, past trees and back gardens. The sun shining though the clouds that rose so high into the sky behind the green fields. Until the buildings choked out the trees and smothered the ground.

Just one long fluid motion and these softly spoken voices. Glazed eyes reflecting an infinity in the window glass. Speaking again, in soothing tones. Look after your personal belongings. Apologies about the seats. Shortly be arriving at Euston.

And in that instant, the world condenses around you. You sit bolt upright. Eyes wide open, the sweat beaded on your brow.

The suit and tie might mask you, another faceless individual scurrying around, but you still feel exposed. With all the glass and steel, there are no shadows to hide in. Nowhere to run, with a thousand barriers to go through, and people milling about like cattle, talking in gibberish. Does a needle in a haystack turn up only when you'd prefer it not to? Another kind of trepidation this time. Not of mosaic tiling, or fluorescent glow. Something deeper than closing doors, and more unsettling than rucksacks full of explosives.

By the tube map there was a blind beggar who knew my name, but wouldn't take my silver, warning that it lead only to sorrow. I told him that was why I was offering it to him.

I walked down the escalator. I can hear the stuttering hum ahead of me, growing louder. The ground is shaking. Along the black line, avoiding Green park, and Baker Street, you can escape at Charing Cross. The world stood still every time the doors opened, but nothing happened.

And it seems foolish now. Like stone arches and vaulted ceilings or half forgotten memories of pissing in a field.

Darkness Falls

The path was less steep here, and the scree and weathered rock had given way to a mulch of leaf litter. It was a relief, although probably as treacherous to the unwary. The air was thick with mist, silently soaking anything the sweat hadn't yet got to. The rocks had been slippy and unreassuring to walk on. The surface in places weathered into a mass of loose fragments, leaving you clutching on all fours.

Farther up here, the vegetation had taken over again, with all the shades of dewy green. Strangely withered looking trees growing out of fractures in the black rock faces, from out between the thick cladding of moss that clung to the bottom of them. The collection of plants, with their strange shapes and curious leaves. Beside the familiar stands of Fallopia, their white flowers atop the stems, the leaves shot holed and half eaten. The vegetation was dense along the path, giving way only to more outcrops of black rock. Their tops vanishing into the mist.

There was a ruined temple at the end of this path. One stone column toppled down the steps to the entrance. The lintel broken thereabouts. The roof partially missing from the fire that had taken hold, the front portion collapsed. Leaving only stone uprights to loft blackened timber trusses with vines hanging from them. Behind the mess and puddles on the flagstoned floor, the giant bronze statue was still there. Surrounded by invasive plants, and covered in moss and algae. As if nature had rallied in its defence, but all too late.

It was still up there, shrouded in mist, waiting to be reclaimed.

But before you reached there, you'd arrive at a plateaux. An almost hidden valley on the side of the mountain where the path had doglegged between two outcrops. On the one side, water spilled haphazardly from out of a fissure in the rock face, the green algae spreading beneath it. Between the soaking plants, and by some fate that had overlooked it all that time ago, you'd see a shrine.

The wind chimes were silent in the misty calm, but the air smelled strongly of incense. Just silence and tranquillity. The lintel showed the Kanji, but underneath it was a painted wooden tourist sign that translated it badly.

"Shrine to the Goddess."

Outside, resting on what looked like four wooden railway sleepers was a large shallow bowl. It's outside had the light green patina of bronze, the inside scorched amidst a mound of snowy grey ash. The mist had cleared a little, hereabouts. This was what he'd come back here for. Searching his pocket for a strange golden coin, still disbelieving that a square hole in the centre was even plausible, let alone functional. On finding one, he threw it towards the centre of the bowl. Being too eager, he missed. It glanced off the edge and the bowl rang with a dull clang.

On the threshold, two eyes silently watched. Watched the fumbling for a second coin. Watched until some basal instinct caused him to look up in order to see.

At the top of the steps, a short man, shaven headed and clad in yellow robes. A long string of beads about his neck. As their eyes met, he reverently drew his hands together and bowed from the waist.

This man hadn't made a sound, and when he'd looked away toward the second coin he'd found, and looked back... In that instant, the top of the steps were empty again. The mist creeping in front of them. Staring for a second, skewy eyed, he threw the coin into the bowl. Such was the force, the swing of his arm, it threw up a curtain of ash where it struck...

In that instant, the flames leapt up from the embers beneath. It raised a smile. This was what he had come to see.

Uncomfortable silence

I longed for uncomfortable silence, the time where my mind could stop to think.

For two long weeks this had been denied me. Denied because the questions never stopped. During the day, there was a job to do. You couldn't deny that, or the questions of your underlings. So you put up with it, and pretended to be busy when you weren't, or found him something to do.

At half five, the real nightmare began. Your starter for ten in this deranged version of University Challenge:

"What's for dinner?"

An entire night of questions. The good and bad and foolish and curious and annoying and unending tide of incessant, but rarely inspired questions. From the moment you left site, all through the cooking to the moment that you fled upstairs to sleep. The questions never ceased.

Sometime this week, he might ask his millionth question. Just maybe. There will be no prizes.

That Kerouac quality

I'd jokingly said that the last hotel had lacked the Kerouac quality that I was after. It was also a bit pricey for my boss' liking. So I'd booked into somewhere cheaper the last time. I'd arrived on a Tuesday.

The area could have given it away, although I hadn't liked to look of the place. It was easy enough to find from the road. A new building, though the awnings on all the windows had made it far from what I was expecting. Feeling dubious, I'd parked the van up around the back. I'd had to go through the front entrance to get in. A spiral staircase led up from ground level. On the way up to the bar their were framed montages of photographs hung on the wall. All of drunken people. I'm sure that Kerouac was probably in there somewhere.

The bar went silent. It seemed to be full of sportswear clad locals with very short hair. I could see the untidy cluttered look of a bar that had been in use all day, because I'd known those kinds of places. Except they'd never had children in.

Everyone seemed to be looking at me, but I didn't feel inclined to check.

I nervously made my way over to the bar in an attempt to check in. The woman behind the bar was old, and looked gaunt and worn. The kind of look you might get from smoking a billion cigarettes. She'd grinned profusely when I enquired about the room booking. When she replied, her soft tones had an unnatural eagerness to them. The kind of eagerness I was in no hurry to place. Her name was Mary, and she was going to cook me breakfast. She'd take me to see the owner.

Through a door by the bar, it was clear that the stairwell was in the early stages of decoration. Although the first floor had been quite plush, in some vaguely university esque way. There were huge pictures of poppies on the magnolia walls.

The door said Room 4. This was very clear because a young lad was busily sticking the lettering in place. Les was having problems with the internet. He told me about this at great length while he tried to fix the flickering light in my room. I'd been halfway to checking in for a good half an hour. Stood there in a rather awkward way, while he talked of how he hadn't got round to fixing the light. His hairy pot belly hung over his jeans as he stood on the chair, straining upwards to fit the new tube. It was reasonably disgusting amidst the curiously new look of the room. It had used to be offices upstairs...

Later, once calm had set in. I discovered that toilet paper had been another thing Les had forgotten about.

All this happening now, it doesn't begin here.

I was sat at the far end of the bar while two gentlemen talked to each other not far along. I'd rested my rucksack on the stool I was sitting on. Nursing my bag on my knee with a flask in front of me that looked out of place next to the pumps. The barmaid didn't know what she was doing, and kept apologising intermittently.

She did eventually find the ledger that had all the room bookings in. Somewhere amongst the administrative disarray. I'd been sat there so long that my bar prop companions began to ask me questions, though I was thankfully saved from having to give them any real answers.

Contained within the ledger, there was no booking with my name against any room. Though I hadn't organised the accommodation. I'd been too busy standing in holes looking for slickensides in the clay.

The job had been sprung on me, and the first I'd known about had been a phone call about stopping overnight. When I knew who was accompanying me, I'd blurted out my only awkward concern about not getting a twin room. I couldn't imagine the journey being either amusing or stimulating.

The barmaid had looked amused, although the room had been booked in Anne Marie's name, not the companies, and it was a double room.

A double room? A plausible error amidst the chaos? I'm not sure that this could be adequately explained away that easily. I knew she'd made the arrangements, because she'd phoned to tell me. How going all this way away from the site was justified by the immediate proximity of the bar and restaurant. The familiarity of somewhere she stayed at before, above the unforgiving whims of the intervening stretch of the M6.

There was this unsettling possibility that this had all happened on purpose. How awkward would it become to try and remain on her list. Would this happen again?

Had some plan been derailed due to the indecisions of consulting engineers? How fifty trial pits had shrunk to fifteen. Akin to some phonetic trickery that I recalled from a time when I'd looked out from the other side of the bar. That once this was the case, Anne Marie had been taken off this job. I could manage by myself. She would get to stay in the office.

And so, perhaps I was spared. Spared something, that was for sure. And as if to add further to the mess, the offending room had been given to some other guests.

The alternative room was small and shabby. It reminded me of Avonmouth, with the dilapidated and worn thin look of the fittings. That and an ingrained distrust of anywhere that had a wood effect downpipe in the bathroom.

And when Oxfam phone for the money, I'm going to tell them everything.

In my search for birthday gifts, I'd managed to wander to the edge of town. All the way back up towards the bed and breakfast in fact. The kind of thing someone who didn't know his way around might do. Albeit that and feel vague embarrassment for having to turn on my heel for no apparent reason when I got to the end of the road. There weren't any suitable shops up here anyway.

I'd found myself against the flow of shoppers on the way back, and had ended up walking down the middle of the pedestrianised street. This was when I'd seen her. A distraction just a little too long to allow my evasive manoeuvre of looking at the floor to work.

"I can see you looking at the floor"

I wasn't even looking when she spoke. Staring at permeable pavement. The clipboard and the bib she was wearing not even visible.

You see, this was where the usual avoidance tactics fell down. That on occasion you'd be flummoxed by something and have little choice but to hand over your details. Though I could still count the number of times when this had happened. The Afro woman with the French accent that had stunned my brain into utter inactivity. That and marching into the bank to cancel a direct debit because I'd only spoken to another young lady because I'd also hoped to get her details.

She had blue eyes. Her face was edged with long black hair, though her skin was fair and slightly freckled. I'd looked for the name badge, but none were visible. Just a lot of glass beads. There was a grounded look about her, a down to earth air. The kind of thing that that bohemian hippies and charity collectors seem to have in abundance.

I don't think she was having much success. The cities were hardest for this she'd said, because people just walked past you. Were there the same problems here, in this tiny place? Somehow only acquiring city status on the back of a cathedral. She'd gone from place to place doing this, and never had much of an idea where she would be minibussed to next.

Nevertheless, I'd been blunt. I wasn't going to give away any money. Though she didn't have to convince me to get my details.

When my location was mentioned, she'd announced that she was from Northampton. Northampton with the Express Lifts tower that you can see for miles. I'd done jobs there. So I'd asked her whereabouts. Not Northampton, but the nearby cess pool of Corby. I'd done jobs there too, and she hardly seemed like the kind of person who could spring forth from that place.

She loved my accent or so she'd said, a statement that seemed equally implausible to me as where she hailed from.

Did I want to send my details forth as part of a petition against twiddling your political thumbs for global warming? Possibly, but I'm still sceptical that anything will happen. Whatever the politicians say, their only true care is their political career.

Of course, I'm meant to be clued in. If only I'd spent even more time reading those textbooks. Ask me about climate change and I might have something to say. All the things that climate change can throw in your direction. That we might have been better off dealing with this fifty years ago. That it might in fact be too late to do much to stop climate change. On the plus side, we might be doing ourselves a favour.

I don't think she knew about Milankovich. The other side of the coin. The very prospect that this warming might be counteracting the potential for another one of those annoying ice ages. Her face had been lit up with some of the topics, she'd been happily smiling and nodding at what I'd been saying.

Those bits about Earth and it's wonky orbit seemed to make her shrink away. Had I just dismantled an illusion? Was the entire prospect of global warming now not so certain as it had been when she'd signed up. Possibly not the right time to ask for someones number.

Just as I was about to go, she announced that "She'd almost forgot". Pulling a bookmark from a blue canvas bag and handing it to me. I could see her name badge now. So I said goodbye to Kayleigh from Corby.

I would be lying if I said that there wasn't an inkling of guilt in all this. So when Oxfam phone me to ask for my money, I'm going to tell them everything except my bank details.

Bag for Life?

So, in true blogging tradition I am going to resort to exposing a bunch of charlatans. The charlatans in question? None other than the ubiquitous TESCO.

Now, they keep plugging their 'bags for life'. End the scourge of disposable bags (save the planet and save us money). Why exactly disposable plastic bags have risen to the top of the list of heinous environmental crimes, I'm not sure. Surely there are more important things to worry about. In any case...

I would be the first to admit that in the whole sustainability view, it's largely better that we all reuse a shopping bag. Like my Mum did when I was young. Rather than having those flimsy disposal ones. They don't last as good, and as my own Mother tells me "You can recycle them by using them as bin bags"! Yes, 'recycle' them by putting them in landfill, but nevermind.

I'd like to point out at this stage that it's not immediately sustainable to have ceramic mugs. That this ceramic mug I'm holding with all this hot tea in it was "only environmentally friendly until it's 46th use". Kilns are hard to heat up you see. It uses a lot of energy. You might as well have disposable plastic cups until then. I'm just glad I drink a lot of tea. Boiling only a barely full kettle I might add...

With this in mind, how exactly is your bag for life sustainable when the handles rip off (no pun intended) after it's fourth use? It's not like I filled it up with Tesco Value bar bell weights is it?

This didn't seem much use, so I tried to get a replacement for my defective bag. The response at the customer service desk: "Oh, we don't exchange those."

I was bemused, and offered that they keep the faulty bag instead. The service desk person quickly replied "I'll throw it away then"

How can you justify a bag for life being a "bag for life" if you won't exchange it? How can you justify a bag for life being a "bag for life" if it breaks after the fourth use. I might as well have just used one of your shitty plastic bags. Have I died unexpectedly, without my knowing, I might feel satisfied. Otherwise I might think that you've ripped me off.

Bag for life? This isn't sustainable. This is bollocks.

All this happening now, it doesn't begin here.

"She'd said that he knew how to speak German. Though quite how you could learn German from watching blue movies was a little vague. It raised impossible questions as to how articulate German porn had apparently become"

Anne Marie had managed to enthral Mr Jones from her arrival, though I was never clear as to who had initiated what. In any case, it had become apparent afterwards that in all likelihood he'd only gone where everyone else had been before. Though it took a while before it was clear that Miss Marie was not going to be content with settling for those departing the company.

Idle gossip had become a sober debate. There were many questions to ask about how well timed such infidelities actually were. Hadn't he just bought a house with a long term girlfriend? Furthermore, who exactly was this German speaking boyfriend of hers? There was something wrong about it. The reckless abandon as morality retreated from where ever it had ended up.

James had left, and it was quiet. A distant tranquillity punctuated badly by occasional conversation. What had gone on in the other room of that scouse travelodge? Did the opinions of Wolverhampton drillers have any bearing on your own? What was the motive for this behaviour? Was this happening again? Surely not...

I wasn't going to mention anything. I was going to concentrate on driving the Transit. It wasn't my business anyway. Phil had mentioned it, and I hadn't been surprised that someone else had noticed. Though why he was doing it defied reason itself. A wife and a young child. What had he been thinking? What had she been thinking? Was anyone thinking at all? Had morality had been retreating faster than the eastern front?

So I'd stopped away from the socials, because they might have been too much. Birthday celebrations with your nearest and dearest welcome. When the drinks came out, there was that unsettling possibility that you wouldn't keep your mouth shut. Judging from previous experience, this was more likely at anything related to work.

From what I heard afterwards, it sounded like I'd done the right thing.

I'd guessed what was coming next. William had even gone as far to hint at it on his own accord. Back in the van, I'd already made my point to Phil. That she wouldn't get me. Not least for her unpalatable combination of excessive make up, self professed dirtiness and a latex allergy. The last two sounded like an accident waiting to happen.

What had Anne been doing at the natural history museum anyway? Looking at rocks didn't seem particularly in character. Especially for someone who'd admitted turning down a log cabin holiday in the Scottish wilderness. Wholly because of the absence of her favourite television programmes.

All this happening now, it doesn't begin here. Those casual offers to cut my hair and fill my teeth were the last things I would have been expecting. Would she offer to scrub my toilet if it came up in passing conversation? Fundamentally, would you trust her to do any of those things?