LONDON BREW

LONDON BREW AT THE BARBICAN, LONDON – 19/11/23

The new frying pan is made of a strange material. Some sort of space age plastic and a type of rubber that I want to call “vulcanised” though I have no idea what vulcanised rubber is, or if it’s even a thing at all, and I wonder when the world became so hard to understand, and I conclude that there was no single moment, it just happened gradually.

Happened gradually

At the soft play centre earlier there was a boy called A_____. He seemed like a nice kid but he whinged a lot. He started crying. It was loud, too loud to ignore. “Are you all right, A_____?” called the boy’s mother. “He’s faking it,” R____ called back. 

R____ forgot his water bottle. Oh well, I think in a Brooklyn accent, he ain’t gonna die of thirst, is he. People don’t just die of thirst these days.

The kids are all right, I thought, still in the accent, it’s the adults that are the problem.

Sometimes, these days, I think in a bad Brooklyn accent. 

I looked up at the tree, stark against the ashen-faced sky, and there was a magpie sitting on one of the branches, and I thought that if I had a camera with me I might have taken a photograph of the magpie and the tree and then maybe everything would have been all right. So I went and fetched my camera but when I got back the magpie flew off and sat somewhere else. Oh well, I thought, and took photos of the magpie and the tree separately. And there’s still a chance that everything will be all right.

The magpie

The tree