Chippy Dinner

About

...it’s the taste of memory. A Proustian madeleine.

It was a bungled mishmash of sweaty forehead and greasy lips. Sixty pence worth of solace; sitting in the dirt behind the galvanized picket fence, fingering chips from a polystyrene cone.

Vinegar playing nuisance with my nostrils.

For a while I gambled with the idea of crossing the train tracks, jumping the banks of the River Leen and entering ‘a whole new world’. Never caring, never burdened with apprehension. It’s Pure Imagination, the elemental wonders of stomping new turf, new ground, new newness. The emblem of youth, the fecal shoe chauffeur.

Expressing my inexpressible memory will always be hollow. ‘It is idle to fault a net for having holes, my encyclopedia notes.’

‘... I’m a spiteful man.’ I have bad skin. I like to gamble. I’m inescapably exhausted. I live in fear of the unknown, of the corridor, the corner from which I may not return. Chips no longer taste the same.

I’m stuck in a torrent of futures. Everything is speculative; everything is chance – I’m not sure I do like to gamble – not like this.

But I want more time. I met a friend at the park and we rode a swan shaped pedalo, floating together through a deluge of little ripples. The silence broken by the crusty grind of the rusting metal shaft, as I become a seasick sailor.

Bobbing along with my lifebuoy.