Post Script

If you’re in a hole, stop digging. Like all the best advice it’s very hard to take on board. Compulsively, I went on adding a word here, deleting one there, getting nowhere fast.

Through my window, the still tender and unsullied leaves on the trees shivered in the chill unseasonal wind. And down the road was that abandoned car with a wad of soggy parking tickets stuck under the windscreen wiper and the little striped tiger left on top of the dashboard, button eyes raised hopelessly to the world. I had to go the long way round to the shops to avoid them.

Why did I feel such pity for inanimate objects? Maybe that’s what I should try to write about next time and dig myself another hole.

With a superhuman effort, I finally stopped and stood up, cold and stiff. Time in any case to get down to the shops, the long way round.

Bread, soup, fish fingers.