Love Me Tinder

Painted gold with wet leaves, the streets of Bristol look like runways to enchanted lands, and my weekly walk to the Llandoger Trow takes on an air of unreality as the rains and dark nights of November unclutters the city of its people. I pass no-one as I reach the river, and see no life in the pubs and restaurants in the centre.  I half-glimpse hurried figures in doorways and distant avenues, like hunted spies in haunted spaces. Taxis roam the dark lonely streets, looking for fares.  Ghostly double-deckers pass by the empty bus stops. Nobody is here.  Everybody is home, in the warm, with Netflix and uncertainty about what we’ve all become now in this Brexit-Trump cold new world.

Follow the yellow brick road.

Mad Dreams

Naomi tells me that she is often murdered in her dreams, like a doomed femme fatale from some long-forgotten film noir B movie. Freud says that dreams are weird and twisted wish fulfilment fantasies, but I’ve seen enough David Lynch films to know that dreams are just meaningless scenes of dwarfs dancing and talking backwards.  I reassure Naomi that dreams don’t mean anything, and then as the conversation shifts onto our shared anxiety about the US Presidential Election I also reassure her that there is just no way Trump can win the White House.  Then the world goes mad and suddenly everything is wrong, and I too now dream of being murdered.  By Freud and his dancing dwarves.

".dne lliw dlrow eht dna tnediserP eb lliw pmurT .mees yeht tahw ton era slwo ehT"