Counties made easy

Preparation M

Last week I took my guitar to Soho. Not that anyone asked me to play, but I do prefer it if they don’t. I have played guitar with varying degrees of success for almost twenty years now, but I rarely play in public. Lately, in fact, I rarely play at all.

I went to Soho because I had arranged to meet M. I had rushed from work to the train platform with the guitar strapped across one shoulder - still livid from hauling a gun bag across Liverpool the weekend before, but that shoulder knows how to hunch and the other one has never acquired the knack - climbed on to the train and bought my ticket from the conductor as soon as she appeared.

I love these early August evenings, they’re like sneak previews of the next world.

There are two connections on the way to London and the first one was over an hour late. I found something to lean on there in the platform and watched people in jackets and shirtsleeves work their pagers and cellphones. Not to sound pious - I had mine, of course, and was even tapping away at it to tell M that I’d been delayed, but wary of battery life, I kept it stuck in my pocket most of the time and drummed out rhythms on my thighs while trying not to let my eyes rest on a well-groomed sort in a black jacket with the sort of saturnine countenance that fairly frails the heart-strings, while naturally contriving to steal enough glances for to daydream on the journey home later that night.

There’s a peculiar sense of, well, not community, but spiritedness of some sort that occasionally visits people sharing a train carriage. Such it was at Maidenhead where we were told that the previous hour or so delay was to be blamed on ‘trespassers on the tracks’. Just like a congregation settling in their seats after a hymn, this muted wake of sound rippled through the assembled, the sound of seventy-eighty people all saying ‘tch’ at the same time. You get the distinct and immediate sense in a moment like that that each and every one of ‘em would happily sign a warrant for the driver to full speed ahead and the hell with the consequences, and start imagining what else they’d sign away to get to work on time, or to get home from work on time. I sat back and looked out the window at the passing suburbs to set my mind at ease.

We don’t really do the concept of suburbs justice in England, we haven’t got the space for it. Foreigners often take our popular culture to be defined by its limits, cramped to the point of being impacted. They like it, of course, for the most part, Fawlty Towers and that, like receiving visits from a funny uncle whose paranoia never quite amounts to frothing at the lips, or any other course of action an uncomfortable expenditure of effort away from a wounded slouch, for that matter. A scale model of an English town would make it clear. "Imagine living in a road this far across. Imagine driving to work every day." The model village at Beaconsfield might do it. There should be a replica in the grounds of every foreign embassy to lend the appropriate perspective.

So I watched as green fields gave way to brown roofs and grey pebbledash, as that bright blue sky paled to a softer hue, telephone cable and power lines spanning the view, and thought, what a glorious view, from anywhere in England, you just have to look directly up. Blinkers might be helpful. A lad took the seat next to me, bleached bristles of a no. 1 crop, basketball vest and shorts, gym bag in his lap, skin where visible that exact Gold Blend hue that seems to come from a wardrobe mostly comprising sportswear. Blinkers. Yes, might be helpful.

The last time I saw M had been a little over a week before. One of those long sensual summer afternoons where the air starts to soften in the heat and settles comfortably against you like an old friend. We sat out on the grass counting the bugs. There were things like viridian oblongs and crimson hexagons with mandibles and pinions that I swore I’d never seen before in my life. It is another way that time is stealing away from me, from where I’ve been all this time: there are new bugs now. Upgrades have been made. It’s the kind of experience that makes you grateful to see a ladybird. Not that you shouldn’t be, anyhow.

I found myself hauling upward through the murk at Piccadilly Circus at around a quarter past eight. It was swarmed with glittering crowds as only Piccadilly Circus ever is. You get a different kind of swarm in Oxford Street, or Leicester Square. Those are hordes; governed by common minds, common instincts, recognisable. Piccadilly is different. These are swarms; if they can be said to have minds, purposes, they are pre-mammalian, insectile. Not to say, again, that that is worse. I rather prefer it. And a few well-chosen paces put you beyond the fug of it, in the end of Soho the tourists rarely traipse, curtained storefronts and bored touts, DANCING LADIES and HOT SALT BEEF strobing out in pink-purple neon, stage doors and roads cobbled in old grey muscle.

Again I thought that I could be at home here if I wasn’t so fat, or underdressed, or tired, and kept on, not altogether certain I was where I was supposed to be. It’s an unthreatening place, certainly: the windows might be boarded with haunted sigils of commodified sex as if warding off truthful daylight, but the desperation, such as it is, is comfortably abstract. Everyone here is made for the course of the production, if not strictly made for life. They are the real actors. They can leave at any time.

The guitar was beginning to feel every ounce of its thirty years of age. I shifted it into my left hand. Hungrily I stepped at last into Old Compton Street, crossed to the pavement outside Balan’s, looked around me. In all directions it thrived. Bars didn’t so much spill out onto the pavement as exhale. As circulatory systems go, I’ve seen worse.

I had walked most of the length of the street before I realised that I was holding my breath. M had sent a message ahead to say that he would be at least half an hour late. Not far from here, he had been obliged to stay on at work while my train was delayed, and had now been asked to provide timesheets for the last three weeks, which he was industriously fabricating now, and he was very sorry.

I didn’t want to eat alone, and I didn’t want a drink, couldn’t have one anyway: when all this fiasco was over I had to drive from the train station back to my place. So I found a post to lean against at the foot of the street where it divides into two, and stood for what felt like a very long time. Twice the same person wandered hopefully my way, in a Hi-Viz jacket, no shirt, and asked if I wanted a licensed cab. At least, that’s what I think he said. By the third time of enquiry his skin had turned green, his eyes were bioluminescent, and I was beginning to feel upset. Yes, I could have said, yes I do. This is all a bit immediate and lively for my liking, do you have a place in mind that’s a little more stifling and dejected?

So it was good, in all sorts of ways, when M appeared dressed as though he’d spent the evening playing squash with a werewolf, animated by a earnest sort of apology that I had to closely control myself not to punish. My stomach gnawed at me like a cheap suit. Oh shit, M said, you’re pissed off. I’m alright, I said, trying not to sound too mechanical, wanting not to, and failing. I believe the word is 'grating'.

— Let’s have something to eat, M said. At least let me buy you dinner.

By now it was a quarter past nine. I was thinking of the journey home from here, which would take at least two hours. I danced around the point in as gainly a fashion as I could manage before getting impatient, I realised, with myself, and said Fine, let’s find somewhere.

Somewhere was the café on the ground floor of the Curzon. I took a bottle of mineral water, a sandwich and, underestimating the sandwich, a sausage roll. We ate slowly, talking. On our last meeting I had been obliged to tell M the troubling story of my furthest education, finding then that I couldn’t tell it terribly well, finding myself stumbling to recall details and specifics. (I had established from this that my long-cherished plans to turn the experience into some kind of a memoir that would rightfully come to dominate the misery-memoir market while earning grudging respect from the literary establishment and, in due course, earning me bewilderingly rewards for all the acute suffering involved had, in fact, been rightly shelved for the foreseeable future.) M was troubled by my countenance, which the exchange of my guitar and his money had not greatly elated, and asked a few guarded questions which I don’t recall with sufficient clarity to relate to you.

— All I can say is that I’m still here, I said, that it hasn’t done for me yet.

I drank the water. Cool, clear water, in a tall glass with ice and lemon besides, perfect enough an image to be used in an advert for the stuff. I’d meant to ask for sparkling at the counter, but was distracted when her colleague, bending down, had risen back up and soundly smacked the back of her head into an opened something-or-other. Counters in any sort of coffee shop make me feel bad as I have an unfortunate tendency to fall in immediate and unstintingly painful love with the people who work behind them, so I’ll always get someone else to order for me if I can manage it, and answer without looking up if I’ve forgotten to mention whether I want the regular or the grande. “The one in a cup.” I’m a terrible creature.

M was musing that it’d be a lot of fun to live with a terrible creature like me. He has housemate trouble, that much I knew, but I hadn’t realised it was that bad. It was touching. I thought of the stack of pots on the stove at home waiting to have poaching-froth and burned oil scrubbed out of them for the last two nights, and kept my thoughts to myself. To tell you the truth, I had steadily warmed.

— An X-Box would be fun, I said. Or something like that. To play games together.

— Yes, he said with relief, and described other possibilities that I can’t remember.

Both of us knowing there was little chance of it happening. Before long we were talking about leaving London, as always, again. Both of us knowing that the future opens out beyond the North Circular into a great darkening sea. Neither of us, I should stress, particularly unhappy.

In the street outside, M wanted cigarettes and I needed to catch my train, the first place to buy them being a So-and-so’s Food & Wine across three lanes of taxis, buses and 4WDs. When we put our arms around each other to say goodbye I made a grab at him and held him tight. It had darkened above, where the buildings gave way. I wished him a safe flight.

I was on the train back home an hour or so later, with the capital crossed and the lights of north London passing me by. The harboured thoughts of leisure and sensuality were forgotten, only two or three hundred brain-cells still lighting up at all.

I had been steadily gathering discarded newspapers since the early evening, toting them around in a polythene Waitrose carry-bag. One Sudoku puzzle I’d completed already, but I had another two papers with me, one of which had four. I was very careful. Before the train left Paddington I had copied down the sequence of stops into the margin of my paper, and checked it each time we came to a halt, peering out into the sodium murk. I have taken this train many times, but I also knew how tired I was. The saturnine man of the early evening was very far from my thoughts, where he belonged.

Sudoku is a curious game. Watching someone confronted with one of these devious little boxes is endlessly interesting, if you get the chance. There are many who discard a puzzle as soon as they discover they have made a mistake, at that horrible moment where one goes to enter a final ‘2’ in confident strokes only to realise that a ‘2’ is already present and, by dint of having been printed there, entirely accounted for. Suddenly, everything has not worked out exactly as planned. “Oh well, so much for that. It’s too much trouble.”

Perhaps I am egregiously old-fashioned, but this, to my mind, is not playing the game; it's just following the rules. It is rather easier than unpicking stitches from knitting to find the original fault in a Sudoku puzzle, and still not so difficult to fix the original error.

Mostly. Of course, not all mistakes are easily rectified, knitting notwithstanding. I had some sort of a moral in mind when I began to write this, for instance, except I’m damned if I can remember where I put the thing.

Useful vocab

Useful vocab

Lancelot

THE BEARS OF THE OLDER COUSINS

Had he been born some five years earlier, some ten years before – had he been born in the decade prior to his own, his parents would have bought him a different teddy-bear and his whole life’s values would have been otherwise placed. Our obsessive temporal organisation of the world shunts history into tidy epochs like lead soldiers into toy boxes; gives decades fixed sentiments like the personalities behind the faces of blown-vinyl dolls. This is Judith she is caring; these are the nineteen-nineties they are caring also. It leads often to one self-defined generation reacting in opposition to the one before it; and he knew from the pillowcases of his elder cousins that his position in the world was more fulfilling, was more of substance than their own. For there, in these half-familiar bedrooms that had awakened to the moon landings or – though muffled – had quaked to a neighbour’s first discovery of Judas Priest, sat bears in pelts of purple and electric blue. Sat bears with glass eyes of vibrant orange. Sat bears with limbs that were not jointed, but presented outwardly as if for crucifixion. They bore little to the naturalist representation of the grizzly; they bore little, indeed, to the artful representation of the teddy-bear. The bears of the older cousins, a species apart from his own, were mindful of the furthest reaches of imagination. They were produced by brains that assumed spectacle; whether in landing on the moon or in the stuffing of kapok into stitched, plush templates. They were vibrant, but they were cheap. They were often, as it turned out, extremely flammable.

LANCELOT IS A FAWN BEAR. HE IS 43cm TALL

His bear, was not like this. Lancelot stood at forty-three centimetres, a height he was comfortable in assuming, born when he was, and unaware of any other measuring system that may have been used before his time. His fur was synthetic, but was a skilled approximation of mohair. He was not electric blue. Lancelot was a beige bear – or fawn – he would learn to say. ‘Lancelot,’ he would say, ‘is a fawn bear. He is forty-three centimetres tall.’ Lancelot’s limbs turned on axles at the joints. His head also turned. Lancelot’s eyes were chocolaty brown, with large, dark, penetrating pupils set in his wide, open face. His muzzle was a pale cream, the pads of his hands and feet a soft, buttery velvet. He had large ears much like the boy’s grandfather’s; and he wore a sky-blue tank-top that his mother had made as her only experiment on the electric knitting machine. Around his neck was tied a purple ribbon, once flat and silky, but which curled with wear into a thick, stringish loop.

Put short, he was the best kind of bear.

Not all bears were so well produced as Lancelot at this time. The concerns of the age lay traceable in the dull button eyes and poorly stitched expressions of his contemporaries; in the commercialisation of their form, and the notion that they must do things. But a trend was visible in each, a conservative reaction to the gaudy emptiness of his forebears. Lancelot was a bear of tradition, a bear of security; or so he appeared.

He was only imitation mohair, after all.

THE BABY AND THE BEAR

What a responsibility a bear is given when they are presented to a child. In that moment as they are unwrapped from their paper, they are at once enthroned as lifelong companion, confidant, confessor. The child, barely old enough for memory, will later never know of this moment, there will not be a time before the bear. It will seem as if they were born together. The baby and the bear: like the mixed-up twin children of Dorian Gray. One set to grow and develop in beauty; the other to remain stunted but prematurely go bald. They are bedfellows, they are brothers; and yet in those early years the bear in his deep unfathomable stare has more knowledge of the world than the boy ever can hope for. He is invested with the character developed by the parents’ understanding of how things are. They tell the boy what Lancelot is like. They build for him a self-image that the boy might look up to; take aspects of Winnie the Pooh, of Badger from Wind in the Willows, things that fit those penetrating brown eyes, and stitched pursed mouth. Lancelot emerges as complex as any character from a realist novel.

Of all things, he is inscrutable. He is sensible. He is indignant. Lancelot is a noble bear. He is proud. He is the best sort of bear, and the boy looks up to him.

THE STOICAL BEAR

In the shifting uncertainties of his youth; the foul moods and tempers of the adult world, the rages and tears of the grown-ups he encounters; Lancelot’s steady gaze is a welcome comfort to the boy. Before the television’s onslaught of dangers beyond – the Zeebrugge ferry disaster, the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle, the unintelligible punctuation of the IRA’s many bombs – the boy clings to Lancelot’s quiet stoicism for support. He tells the bear everything. He lays beside it every night, and unfolds his many concerns into its empty, velvet paws. The bear understands what he tells it, and he listens with the considered concentration that adults rarely show. The constancy of this bear constructs for him a benchmark for his fellow man. He tells Lancelot:

‘I love you.’

Yet as much as the bear is a partner, the bear and the boy are as one. They are inseparable. At times, in their opinions, it is hard to tell which is bear and which is boy. He builds upon his parents’ depiction of his companion’s character; he shapes him with his own understandings of what is what.

‘I love you, Lancelot. I love you.’

These are words that he only uses for the bear, but he means them with his entire mind. The boy is not soft. He is not soft, as the bear is soft. His head is not filled with stuffing. He knows that the bear is not alive, and any projection he makes upon it is only an extension of his self. There may have been a time when he believed his parents’ stories that his toys came awake when he was asleep, but the boy did not hold that thought that for long. He knows that the bear is merely an object. Yet knowing this does not diminish the power of that inscrutable stare.

The constancy sticks fast. The bear is, and remains, a fixed mark against his changing self. As he creeps longer down the bed, his twin remains seated at the pillow, indignantly refusing to join in the growing game. As his opinions and interests shift, the bear looks on judgementally, reminding him of what he always is.

How the boy changes. He lengthens into a man. He discovers books that he knows the bear will disapprove of, and for the first time he begins to keep secrets from Lancelot. He sometimes turns his bear to face the wall and discovers new things his body is capable of.

SEPARATION

These are the nineteen nineties, also. At some point, the boy and the bear become separated. It is a Saturday afternoon and while a Sara Lee Black Forest gateau defrosts on the worktop above the fridge, and the football results creep monotone through the cork-lined hall, the boy is at work tidying his room. Dinner will be ready in five minutes, and isn’t he a little old to be sleeping with his toys? Maybe he would prefer the bed to himself; give him more room. It is put to him like that and the words do not leave much scope for discussion.

Lancelot is put away in a cupboard above the wardrobe, and though he knows it foolish, he seats the bear and apologises to him – apologises perhaps that his childhood had to ever end, apologises maybe that it went on far too long. Apologises that so much feeling was placed upon the bear for it to come to only this. He shuts the door and hopes he has enough air to breathe.

The following years are a distant rumble inside the cupboard. Were the bear to hear, he would hardly notice when the boy goes away searching for answers, out out, into the following decade.

DISCUSS THE INTERPLAY OF SENTIMENTALITY AND REALISM IN COVENTRY PATMORE’S POETIC DEPICTIONS OF CHILDHOOD

‘What I think is underappreciated –’ he once would say, ‘what I think is underappreciated –’ he found himself saying one night after too much whisky, laying on some other man’s bed, ‘what I think is underappreciated is the strength of those bonds and affections that we develop with inanimate objects in our formative years.’

He rubs the back of his hand across the man’s belly, and stares back at the dark moon through the skylight.

‘Don’t you think it’s weird,’ he says, ‘how parents give their children objects through which to explore ideas of interpersonal love? Dolls, bears, they’re the taxidermy of human emotion – that’s what they are. Just think about how long a child must spend with a favourite toy; going to sleep with it every night, staring into its eyes, expressing love and care for it. Which is all well and good, but it bears little resemblance for what human relationships really are. Children bestow identities upon their toys, yet that’s not how it works with people, is it? Those feelings of warmth and affection that are created in the relationship with the toy – that’s the learning that the child has for what they will seek out in their life. I mean that, I really do. I just think it’s natural that if we’ve felt a strong and intense love as a child, we will attempt to seek it out again in adulthood – but the basis for that love, the love felt between a child and a toy, it’s a flawed model – do you see what I’m saying?’

He ran his hand back and forth across the firm, soft flesh of the naked man’s stomach.

‘It’s like– as a kid,’ he said, ‘I mean, for most of my childhood this was, I had this bear. Absolutely gorgeous fawn teddy-bear called Lancelot. I’d go to bed with him every night, and my affection for him was no more or less than it was for my parents. In some ways, perhaps – in some ways, perhaps I’d even say it was stronger. The feelings I had from Lancelot were consistent. He was always there. And I think that now as an adult I’m looking for that again; I’m seeking out in guys the same steady, intense affection that that bear gave me. It’s so messed up! I’m looking for another Lancelot. Only that doesn’t allow any room for the man to have any personality of his own. I’m not looking for a real person at all. I’m looking for an inanimate boyfriend who will love me unrelentingly and upon whom I can place all my preconceptions of what a lover should be. Does that make sense? Does that sound totally mad to you?”

Only the man does not reply. He has been asleep for the last two hours.

THE SAME OBJECTS ARE BEFORE US

He was still seated as he had been in 1992. Little had altered. Bears do not move. He noticed that some of the colour had fallen away inside one of the dark chocolate eyes, a small fleck of clear glass now swam in the heavy brown pool. He took the bear out, and from the pit of his stomach the same emotions revealed themselves. They stirred themselves up and ran warm down to his fingers and his feet.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. The words were involuntary. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. That’s what he said, to the bear he said, ‘I’m sorry.’

Little had altered, but the changes were there. He noted the bear’s skin now sagged slightly, seemed softer than it was. The bright, cream muzzle hard turned a tired grey. He tried to mark the differences, but realised his memory of the bear spanned across many years. Though the bear had seemed never to alter to him, it was plain that as he was becoming a man, Lancelot had also been changing, balding, growing worn. He tried to compare the object in his hands to the memory of the bear, but which point of memory was he supposed to occupy?

He held the bear tight and told him he would never leave him again.

PATTERNS

The bear will sleep beside him in the small, unheated basement flat not far from Gloucester Road tube. He will tuck the animal – that once, in its forty-three centimetres seemed almost life-size – beneath his arm and hold him tight whenever he goes to sleep. He will be astonished by the comfort that this small bundle of cloth is still able to give him when the entire world grows dark outside the rusty barred window.

Some nights he will stare back into the dark, round eyes, and the familiarity of the form seems to grip him as if nothing is different, and the innocence of those early thoughts of love still burned in his mind with the force that had conditioned him to them. Some nights everything is perfect.

And other nights, all he can feel is how much has changed. The bear is pressed against his ever-sharpening ribs, or is seated on the dirty bedside table guarding over the small stack of coins that must support him to the end of the month. He feels the changes in the bear itself, feels how the padding has broken down in the once stiff limbs to reveal the circular discs that connect them to the torso.

Most nights he awakens to find the circulation in his arm stopped from where the bear has pressed hard against his prominent bone. The bear begins to lose the familiar smell of his childhood. It absorbs the scraps of meals he cooks on the other side of the room. It acquires the musk of mildew that creeps up the basement walls. The bear sits through all this, indignant to the fate that has befallen him.

‘I’m sorry, Lancelot,’ he says, ‘I’m sorry that it has come to this.’

Beneath the duvet that has lost its cover, and has never been washed, he digs his fingers around the intersecting discs that allow the bear’s arms to pivot, exploring the mechanism of the toy. He wonders what they are made from, what keeps them in place. He is fully aware that though it is possible to turn the bear’s head a full 360°, he has never once in his life attempted it, for fear that the animal might somehow be killed.

When men come to the bed-sit, he places Lancelot in the small cupboard under the sink. He sits him upright with the bottles of Domestos and the small yellow bags of mouse poison. In part he does not want the men to see this much of him, does not want to reveal his whole life invested in the bear. He is for them an image of what they are seeking; they do not come to know the real man so he is careful not to offer it. More than that, he does not want the bear to see what it is he does with them. He stows the money the men give him in the cupboard with the bear.

There is often just enough.

Kedges (1964)

Knock Knock

Franky and Jimmy

Where once you saw waxwings

“I know a secret,” the old man says.

“What?” you ask, “what?”

“I know,” the old man says, “where Father Christmas keeps his sleigh –”

“Where!”

“– in the Summer.”

“Where? Where does he keep it?”

“An elf told me,” the old man says, and he gives you a knowing nod.

“Where does he keep it? Where does Father Christmas keep his sleigh?”

“I could take you,” he says, “if you were good.”

“Please can we? Please can we go?”

Cabbage is boiling in the kitchen. A fog of dinnertime has flushed the glass behind the geraniums. You can’t be long; it will be ready soon.

“If we’re quick, we can get back before anyone knows we’ve gone.”

Walking beside him through the quiet suburban streets, where colonies of lawnmowers protect their queen, it seems unlikely that the old man would know. It must be a trick, a stage prop from a show. A beautiful troika, copied in intricate detail to give the appearance of the magical vessel whilst on film. You suppose that one of the old man’s friends at the auction house has spotted it and told him where it was. In your head, Leroy Anderson accompanies every step.

“Are we going to the auction house?” you ask.

“Shh,” he tells you, “it’s a secret. We can’t have everyone knowing where it’s kept.”

You’re going to the auction house. This is the way you always go. Perhaps someone has brought a sleigh there to be sold, a sleigh like Father Christmas’s. It could raise a lot of money could that; you don’t suppose these things turn up that often.

Though you do not believe in Father Christmas, you don’t tell the old man this fact. It is something you have long known, that adults enjoy the conspiratorial protection of believing in children’s innocence. Telling him now – asking him, “So, what really is this sleigh?” – would destroy his safety. He would be forced to recognise the pretence that had been going on for years. You had always known; he had not.

“We can’t stay long,” he says, “your dinner will be ready soon.”

The auction house, low and pebble-dashed, sits amongst the industrial sheds around the sweet factory. Burnt sugar smogs the few thwarted rowan trees where once you saw waxwings, but today there are none.

You are not going to the auction house, but instead he leads you down a long, narrow path between two of the adjacent sheds.

“He has to hide it very well,” he says, “no one would find it here.”

You are stepping over cardboard and discarded polythene sheeting. The old man has to push a metal trolley to one side. Leroy’s jingle has become somewhat forced, a reluctant death-rattle as your shoes scrape through the gravel yard behind the building.

“And here it is!” he announces.

And here it is. Even in your most pragmatic reasoning, the sleigh was not this. This is not a sleigh. You stand there and nod. This is what you have come to see; this is what the old man was excited about.

“And he comes to collect it every December, to fill it with toys!”

You nod. Of course he does.

It is made from the same material as your wardrobe at home, only the damp from the yard has seeped into it here; the plastic veneer has buckled revealing the grey, fuzzy chipboard within. It is a large, square box – much like a skip; indeed, it is currently being used as a skip – and on the side is painted the image of a sleigh, packed with toys and a sign: BARGAINS! CURTAIN RAILS! DISCOUNT!

You nod.

“Yes,” you say, “here it is.”

The old man grins at you.

“Aren’t you getting in?”

You look at him, and then at the sleigh, and you cautiously walk towards it, peering down at the contents. It is packed, not with sacks of toys, but with black bin-liners. There is a broken whisky bottle. Some guttering. Moss.

“Go on,” the old man says, “get in and play.”

So you step over the lowest part of the side, and you stand there facing the front, and you stare out. You try to imagine the thing flying over the rooftops of the town – small glittering lights beneath as you have seen in films – but all there is to look at, is the metal shutter to the grey industrial shed, where someone has spray-painted a giant penis.

“Come on,” the old man says, “we haven’t got long. Why don’t you play?”

You look at him, and acceptingly nod, and you pull on your imagined reins with a savagery that could choke a reindeer.

“Why won’t you play?”