There was a quietening, he asked me gently

“What do you want from life?”

“I don’t know” I professed, “A bit of peace…”

“What do you want from life?”

“Cars, women and cash” he fired back without a pause as he giggled away.

I step off the train into a zombie apocalypse.  Every moving object is a staggering mess.  The streets are covered in half eaten rubbish.  One guy drops his trousers to advance on another, they scream with menacing bloodshot eyes, desperate souls face to face with death.  I’ve only walked a mile and I feel sick to be back in this place as the bitterness riles rotten in my head I lean right, to the side of the curb a piece of paper.  I lean in, then down, I grab it and pick it up still surprised, opening it up to a snap and I believe it- a £20 note scooped from the gutter.. lovely.. where there’s mayhem there’s money to be made.

I dive past the undead into the ale shop for some chemical camouflage.  Then I wonder…  What’s really eating me?  The nightwalkers or the nightmares.

A 5 course meal. Champagne, white, red then more champagne to finish before beer for the dance floor.

“I can’t believe you’re still standing”

he tells me, but I’m doing a little more than that. I’ve written an algebraic equation on the corner of a picture frame and I’m teamed up with another photographer to try and frame the dog as a master mathematician. 4:30am and it’s time for me to leave this magical place just before onion soup course 6 arrives. I wake up the next day with the sunshine and a panoramic view of the Loire for breakfast.

Nostalgia, why do we remember things this way?  Is this a battle with our own mortality, that we were young and it was better, that we do not forget and in forcing this form a new memory that matters less and less with how things were.  This way, we create a hindrance to knowing and being by thinking that this present is inferior when the truth is that this present is all there is.  There never was and there never will be a different time because what was, is the same present you feel now.  There is only now because what we thought was, wasn’t.

Remember that.

I’m watching Gasland again- great documentary.  I haven’t seen it for a long time.  I’m watching it again and I’m thinking to myself,

“Well what did you expect to happen people?  That these large corporations would come and drill for gas under your property and it wouldn’t affect your water supply?  Doesn’t the phrase ‘too good to be true’ mean anything to you when you get a letter through your door offering you $100,000?”

Then I think about where we are now and the fact that our UK government has given the full green light to fracking.

You know, people sign petitions and make complaints and things like that.  And people get ignored and walked all over and things like that.

Fracking in the UK will be an environmental disaster the scale of which we have never seen within our borders in such a localised and dramatic form.  I would hope, I really would, that these kinds of issues wouldn’t be something people in Britain had to worry about.  But I think as I get older I believe less and less in the myth of what it means to be British and a little more that this country would rather replace it’s nuclear weapons than feed its people.  Then I start to comprehend how naive I have been when watching documentaries about third world countries in which people are starving, but their silos are full of bombs while I think to myself,

“Madness, madness- that humans have to live in such a country”

When we walk we walk with shoes, shoes that have been made from the resources on this planet.  When we walk in the city they stay clean, when we walk in the country they get dirty and they remind us of where they came from- that we must be responsible and look after the things we have because they won’t last forever and neither will we.  But the movers and the shakers don’t live in the country.

When somebody says it better than you ever could?  Share it:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/21/boston-marathon-bombs-us-gun-law

The most interesting piece I’ve read all year:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2013/apr/15/jeremy-grantham-population-china-climate
then
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2013/apr/16/jeremy-grantham-food-oil-capitalism