110-A

For the long-time sufferers on this blog, something different, a bit more personal ("oh no", I hear you say, "we couldn't take the impersonal crap and now he offloads us with this!").

Phone call in mid-afternoon, just after the suicide hour. The Colonel's got his army of men ready, can I make it through the searing heat back to my old home, 110-A.

The house itself is falling to pieces; the walls are crumbling in many places and the paint rubs off in your hand like chalk powder. Most of the lights are broken or missing, loose wires dangling down like the spilled guts of a rabbit. The grass is scorched brown, rustles like the hairs of a brush. Only the thistle-like flowers show any sense of life in their sparkiness. Oranges, reds, crimsons. How to survive in the wilderness. Other, smaller flowers seemed to have 'frozen' in the heat, petrified, and are now an eerie cobalt-blue fist of stone. A few sparrows hop and dance, as if this was a graveyard.

Up, high above, eleven crows look down ominously, the very picture of death. The window frames have mostly rusted away and some of the windows have been smashed. Ants, with an inner sense of the final days, move in in their thousands. In the driveway petals, pink and white, have fallen to the ground and lie around in neat heaps, mixing with the fresh green leaves that have also fallen. Looks like that type of crap potpourri stuff that women are very fond of. Two leaflets for 'Supreme Pizza, Home Delivery' have made their way inside as well. By the main gate a crippled dog walks past us gingerly (Don't know why, but nearly all the dogs in Canal View are cripples).

The main gate creaks like a ship and the windowpanes in the doors inside seem to have misted up at the edges. In the lounge a cockroach lies on its back, its legs already eaten away..the husk of a being. Oh well, if you're going to get screwed, lie back and think of England.

The electrician is keen and pleasant. But the carpenter,..now there's a different breed for you. One quick look and he walks out, perspiring profusely. Dark skinned, thick-skinned.He sits on the lawn, as if he's overwhelmed by the scale of the task in front of him. He looks tired, beaten down by a hard life, what life's had in store for him...like a fisherman who's seen too many people die...either that, or he's just got a case of righteous contempt-and who could blame him-for someone with a house this size. Talal phones in-between: K.Clark's Civilisation has been downloaded. Well, that's a relief.

I visit each room, now hollow, dilapidated-but once full of life and chatter- and try to recall something noteworthy. My last memory in my own room: good friends gathered before I left for my Ph.D. How many years ago was that now? A house without mirrors isn't really a house. The Dougal, her room overflowing with books, now bare, as if the Taleban had raided. The back lawn, still in decent shape, but the lemon tree sadly missing.

This house barely survives, but survive it does. Like so much else here on the black sun, it has silently forgotten about redemption, and itself has been forgotten in the passing of many moons and suns.