Le vieux renard...

Sometimes I feel like I'm living in a film where there isn't a plot and the next scene is simply going to happen regardless of the story. The director has left the building, the camera has been left to roll, and the actors never even bothered to learn their lines.

Not that I can talk, I haven't learnt my lines either and I'm finding it increasingly hard to stick to the plot. Not that I'm losing it (the plot that is)... well, at least not in a big way or any more than usual, it's just that I find myself staring into the mirror each morning and wondering if I turned it around would I be behind it or would there be just the red oxide backing. And then I wonder if I were to turn it back to face me would I see the silver behind the glass staring back and nothing else? And then I wonder... am I really here at all? And to make things (the plot) even more intriguing - one of my shoes feels empty sometimes.

Of course this should not be taken literally as really happening; but then it should not be taken as not really literally happening either. No, let's call all of this a work of fiction shall we? The plot to a short film noire screened at Cannes to an almost empty cinema. It didn't win any prizes and was soon forgotten.

Like yesterday and the fox... Roll them...

He shambled around the corner, a bag of bones… limping? Maybe. Stiff for sure, almost tripping over his paws stumbling and confused. For just a moment I saw a dog, a dingo? No, it had to be a fox. But foxes are red aren’t they? And aren’t they creatures of the night? Not this one. This one was grizzled, almost grey, his brush no brush at all, more stick, a sparse few hairs randomly sticking away from it. Too dazed to be sly, desperate and out and about in 10am daylight and not knowing why, what, or even where - by the way he absently looked around him.

He stood not five feet off regarding me with rheumy eyes and I looked back in much the same way. Empathising, sympathising; he and I the same - out of place, a little lost… off balance with the world.

Then off down the alley he went, called by something in the distance of his mind or perhaps just needing to move on. It doesn’t do to stay in the same place too long, so limping through the rubble he was gone, an alley away and I walked on.

An old Alzheimic fox; leaving me with thoughts of cubs and Reynard and mystery beasts appearing on the moors without explanation for a moment or two before slipping back to whenever.

An old grey fox… perhaps I imagined him.

Cut.