Shell

I picked up a breath of something during the day. I've forgotten now, or rather, it's been taken by the cold. Its absence clings to my skin, ghost-kiss, hollowed-out shell space of some yearning, some nostalgia. What was it I tasted? No - nothing - surely there would be something left...  but no, it's gone.

I looked around the office at work. The knowledge of Christmas coming lending everything the feel of a time - or place - remembered. Here I was, the year 2048, 76 years old, remembering the place where I worked when I was 40. Old fashioned hairstyle, old fashioned present time. 

Think about a photograph I've never seen. Summer of love 1969, hippies and kaftans (I have no idea what kaftans are). Season of festivals fade, and they're all slightly out of focus, and this photograph is taken at the end of summer, and there is a dark smudge of woodland behind them, like some coming autumn.

I wonder what happened to them, these imagined people three years before I was born?

First Winter Days

The wind has taken the last of autumn, and the city feels plunged beneath a sea. The air feels serious - we don't take in the lighthearted breaths of summer now - and there is a sobriety to the air, a monochrome brooding that sharpens oxygen, makes knives of the walk to work.
Walking back home, and the night feels magnificent, a huge thing that has opened itself up; a myriad of previously locked rooms and wings unfolding themselves from previous narrow corridors. The stars are hidden behind clouds, but I imagine they taste of all the iced-over pools of January childhoods.
It felt like, this first evening of what feels like winter, coming home. There is a relief in the plunging temperature, the rumours of snow, the far-off streets as unreachable now as gods or last nights dreams.

A Shared Birthday 90 Years Apart

Tales from Bridge 39 is three years old today. I'm not sure whether that feels like a long time or a short time. I've been keeping it for longer than I lived at Worcester, longer than most houses I've lived in, most jobs. I thought at one time it was certain that I would only stop Bridge 39 when I died, or that I would consciously end it, write finish I'm done (or perhaps something more portentous in Latin) at the end of the last post but now I'm not too sure, It nearly finished last year, and for no other reason except that it just almost faded away...
My grandfather had a mug that was written on it Old teachers never die, they just fade away. Or something similar. Doesn't make much sense when I think about it. He was a latin teacher and a headmaster at some school somewhere in the Midlands. He was born on this day in 1919, according to Facebook. 93 years ago (he died 30 years ago when I was 10). I never realized till today that him and this blog shared a birthday, 90 years apart.
He would have known a good latin phrase if I ever decided to finish Tales from Bridge 39.