Get Out or Die Trying.

Crossed........

The guy in the late-night supermarket looks like the guy who helps his mum in the newsagents back in the village; it’s not him of course, he’s even taller and his beard a little rougher. 

But his eyes smile in the same way.

I last saw the guy in the village yesterday morning at the end of the market; he was smiling too having just given his mum a bunch of roses for Mother’s Day.

She was smiling more than either of them.

The beer the guy in the late-night supermarket sells me turns out to taste less than i had hoped for so i leave it on the table for my daughter’s friend who has just arrived from the capital; my daughter is nearing the end of a month’s abstinence so she won’t be drinking any.

I have slipped off to the bedroom to write this down before i forget it and i notice the note stuck alongside the keyboard telling me that the password for the Wi-Fi in the office i had visited earlier is « Welcome! »

The office is one of those new start-ups that do something technical with data and computers and employ a lot of people much younger than me who, although surrounded by table football tables, open space and water pistols, look just as imprisoned by desks and paperwork as any office fifty years ago.

Get out or die trying is scribbled, in English, on the door of the lift.

It wasn’t me.

NOT formerly published in The Archives.