Friday the thirteenth

I’ve spent the day trying to forget all I’ve learned in the last twenty years, purely as a means of survival, but you can’t unlearn the truths of justice, respect and humanity.  It doesn’t work like that.  So instead you go mad.

I’m sitting in a garden centre cafe, because I had to stop driving around the ring-road and the outskirts of town with no thought but to get away, listening to a radio play, classical music, anything but rhapsodic reporting and faux humility.

I’m surrounded by ladies, late middle age or elderly, buttering scones, stirring their lattes and twittering like a petshopfull of excited budgies.  They’re strangely energised.  The cliché Christmas songs are all but lost amongst the din.  Something momentous has happened.

I try to read one of the books I carry around, but a sleepless night, the strain of coaxing my mother’s day to life and one or two consoling drinks play havoc with concentration.

Outside, the Christmas trees are all too big and overpriced.  I return to the car.  It’s dusk, mid-afternoon, damp and cold.  The old folks are swinging their cars into slots like over-testosteroned adolescents.  The by-pass is backing up.  Another Friday afternoon.  Friday the thirteenth.