Saturday 16 February 2008

Chinese Medicine

I’m looking at a bookshelf and all the books are white. No, wait a minute, they’re not books at all, but hanks of tissue, hankies, very white, upright and densely compressed at the end of the bookshop shelf. No, wait a minute. Not a bookshop, a chemist’s shop. Is it the chemist's shop from No Country for Old Men ? Hard to tell from this perspective. I look outside, across the street, one I recognize from way back, from home, the main street of the market town in which I was born, busy, full of midday bustle.

A façade of shop fronts, and above the façade two or three Victorian stories. And above these another level, stepped back a little, a floor of more modern flats, each with a door and windows and, so it seems, a small forecourt. Hard to tell from this perspective. Five or six figures stand up there in front of the flats, men mostly, one woman. Rough looking, the men are bearded, dressed in denim and leather, the woman has a Mohawk. Cider drinkers. One of them jumps.