A Slow Morning

And so the morning croaks into life around Husborne Crawley. A dull, gray, dull-gray kind of morning that causes one to reach instinctively - as one remembers the words we learnt at that creaking, croaking, God-instilling school, shining white with the haze of fluorescent light as we poured out, into the  knees-scabbing playground where the asphalt burnt and the tennis balls stung as they flew - orange-shaped yet lemon-coloured - across a wormwood sky - causes one to reach, I say, for the word-forms if not the thought-forms of that thought-worm of our memories and text-books, Mr Thomas. Mine's a whisky, thanks, but I'll wait till the sun's over the yard-arm.

As the sickly, trickly, gray-treacle trickle of light smears across, heavy with the mist mizzling across the Vale and showing, like a grudging householder revealing the Calvados decanter, the dangerous beauties of the Amazon warehouse, the other side of that hard, slow, concrete river of traffic where commuters, computer-bound, half-dream, half-drive in a half-paid-for car, the ghostly figures of Fenris Wolf, Herne the Hunter and - lest we fall into cliche - the Third Marquis of Tavistock - merge into the drawn-out, dreadful, death-full dregs of night. Beaker people stream out across the grass, tasting the morning air - those that smoke, croak, and hope for the morning Woodbine before the Pouring-out of Beakers. They are never satisfied, and never quick enough - and will stand, ashless, restless and cashless, through those acheing minutes of holiness till the silent benediction is loudly pronounced, the last oxymoron explained, the ringing, singing, tree-lined avenue of trees fills once again with egg-bound, bacon-found, toast-hoping Beaker Folk - and they can gasp, grasping, at a gasper before their repast.

Wish the days would start get longer. Can't keep this stuff up. It's murder on the soul.