There and back again...

I’d always ask him where he was going.

“There and back again.” He’d usually reply in that obviously cryptic way he had.

These days it’s me that’s the ‘there and back’, I travel a lot, there and back mostly. I don’t mind, I enjoy the motion. There and back is fine, it’s the in-between that’s harder. As I said I enjoy the motion, every time there’s something new, different - things always happen on the 'there and back' - if you keep your eyes open and look. Not a story, nothing as grand as that - more of a list.

So here's today’s list.

There…

Mist three feet over the fields, a cows head poking through. Four swans, high overhead, silent to me, a steady swup, swup, swup outside I guess. A small clump of snowdrops (only four or five blooms) poking through the stubby grass in the central reservation. Backed up traffic. A tattooed white arm reaches down from a van to pass a black man a cigarette - obviously strangers as the van drives off, obviously an act of kindness. A mouse eating a squashed tangerine just out from the gutter, I swerve and miss…I think. My catkins, first of the year! A red heart balloon tangled high in the blackthorn hedge. Lost? Escaped? Set free? Discarded? ‘Reality’ it says on the side of the lorry (‘used to be a friend of mine’ I mumble). A covey of partridge startled from behind a hedge, flying too low. Was it six or seven? Seven – like habits. A white carrier bag caught up in the swell of the traffic haunts the night-time cars like a ghost. ONE-ZERO-SEVEN. Wow a space rocket! The hotel from a fifties ‘B’ movie descends lighting the horizon with its glow. A final murder of flapping black crows flies to roost, last light, bad omen, ill luck. And finally… that hole in the sky – oh, I wish I could escape into it

… and back again....
Home... until the next time.