Jem Rolls

It's in one ear and out the other, taking your knowledge, memory, personality and zest with it.

Outside is life, teeming, local, as streets and squares and markets and bars and cafes.

But we are ghettoised, out of the locals' hair, to give them a chance of normal life.

We are a universal blandness, a one-race blandness.

born of airports have submitted ourselves to this sausage machine pushing slack flesh from space after

this thing from Surrey, yet mere more of this crinoline-charactered, all-nations slurry amidst the glazed eyes of this many-headed, mushy National Hydra, straggled, limp, lame, lumpen and lax, this Deadpool of the minds of many, reduced to their lowest common dumb nominator, and moving slow-flight through chamber after chamber after chamber after chamber, because there is no conceivable urgency

No anywhere needing now to go, and over the hours the spirit has slowly, surrenderedly, succumbed to numb-dumbly, waiting for nil, naught, nothing.

Now, simultaneously, aware and unaware, life is elsewhere, there, anywhere, but why am I here?

Because I came.

Whose fault is this?

Mine or mine?

This is eternity, getting further away.

This is time, prostrate and swollen, expanding helplessly, inflated to valuelessness.

This is every stage of a long old age felt in a few eternal minutes.

This is like lining up purely in order to get into another line-up.

Which sounds the quintessential English trait.

It makes TV snooker seem like a good idea.

It's not good.

It's not fine.

It's not dandy.