Sleep like the Old Men I One Day Hope to Join

(walking into fog)
I thought there would be silence, intimations of movements in white, but the birds sang as normal... No, I can't remember if they did or not. There was nothing different, just that the horizon disappeared into nothing. When I left the Mews it was sunny, but those white skies that had descended - they hung over town, a pall of an appalled and rebellious season, faulty anti-summer weaponry - it made everything seem like the jungle.

(the stairwell)
The cool sigh of the stairs? Not any more - the area outside the lifts is hospital-hot - a tropical zone that feels like malaria or typhoid - some illness picked up from the above jungle. This place used to taste of quiet and sleep and a few angles away from it all. I can't help but imagine a mattress here. Oh, hello. Some Meditterenean hell-hole prison. The tiled floor. Leaves on the floor. A tiny window that lets in all the bright light. Someone forgot to lock the door.

(the pavilion gardens)
Sleep with the old men and their cups of tea, and through the warm hardly-there-drizzle, watch those people sat on the grass. Me? I could lean back here and sleep. let go of the day and the phone calls, spend my hours out here like an old man I one day hope to be. Sleep and dream, and wake when it gets dark and the air is like vodka, and the cries of the drunks replace the seagulls.