I can’t write sonnets so I’ll write a story instead.

Not about anything useful, not anything that will topple governments or stop people throwing garbage out their car windows.

I’ll write about my bike. Not the giant green one I had when I was eight or nine and had to choose between sitting or pedaling, but the yellow one I had after that when I was eleven or twelve, old enough to ride alone across the canal into the countryside to find streams and tadpoles and pretend I was Henry David Thoreau before I even knew who he was.

I’ll write about Mackintosh toffee and sponge toffee and favourite chocolate bars (Crispy Crunch) and cereal (Cheerios) and how I’d prefer corn chips to sweets any day and Bugles on my fingertips, pretending they were nails.

I’ll write about how anything eaten in a tree tastes ten times better than at a table and about the Bundt cake my mother made every Saturday with swirls of Nestlé’s chocolate milk powder mixed into the batter.

And stolen peaches and reading for hours in long cool grass and freedom.

Picnic dinners thrown together on a Tuesday night when my mum came home from working at Towers and my dad came home from the factory. I’ll write about a thin blanket spread on a sandy beach, swimming with dad while mum laid out melmac plates, a bowl of potato salad, a few slices of meat, a thermos of KoolAid, another of coffee.

I’ll write it all for some young child, young enough not to find it too dull, young enough to want to go in search of tadpoles…

If any still exist.

♦

The World is Too Much With Us