Killing Time
He looked at his watch. An hour to go. It could be worse than eternity if he actually stared at the hands moving. So, the question was how to kill time, to give the impression of it passing quicker. Almost on an impulse, he prodded the two fingers of one hand into his eye sockets … a little overhard for comfort, as it happened, for they slipped too easily into the ill-guarded confines of the brain’s soft underbelly. Sledgefingers to crack a nut... The watch ticked on, unconcerned
Published 'Cloth Ears' 1990
BUDGET DAY
If I were to write clearly enough I wouldn’t need to type it out at all. Still, it would look more official in print, as opposed to my spiderwriting of a leftward bias. It’s strange how apparent nonsense can take on a tone of credibility and respectability when in the guise of neat printed uniform characters on parade. It seems to flow better, even mean better. Take the word ‘budget’ as an example. As I write it down in my typically colloquial manuscript, dressed to the nines in smart shoulder-high quotation marks, although it is, I somehow visualise a scrawny bird in a cage which is, after all, better than a scratched hand in a bush, when it comes to matters financial. But now I’ve managed to type it out, it takes on all the aura and demeanour of an official government statement on economic housekeeping rather than a childish exercise in cutting corners off postage stamps which, in essence, it surely is.
It’s strange, I repeat, how arrant nonsense assumes the rank of meaningful authority, when the words move in the strict rhythm of the typewriter’s choreography rather than the outlandish wobbling and weaving of my ill-tutored pen which, if the truth be known, is probably drunk on ink.
The spoken word is another story, as the Chancellor of the Exchequer drones on, taking gulps at the tumblerful of seeming water. I suppose it’ll look OK in Hansard.
Published 'Eavesdropper' 1989
