24.09.2010

Here’s a snow globe I keep right at the back on my collection, on the top shelf, in the deep shadows at the back near the shifting darkness. It's quite old, a little battered, worn and scarred - a bit like me really.

Dependent on how you see things it’s either empty, apart from the tiny white flakes of falling snow, or the empty space is waiting to be filled with something. Either way, you’d think that there wasn’t much to look at, but you’d be wrong.

Sometimes I take it down, shaking the snow into a storm, and gaze deep into its centre – a crystal ball, a scrying glass - deep into its centre looking for past times, hoping for a glimpse of the future.

Sometimes when the snow eddies and swirls I think I see shapes forming; a house, a running child, a palm tree, a bicycle. Once I saw a face that I recognised, but it made me so sad that I had to shake it away. On a couple of occasions I’ve seen things I didn’t recognise until years later when they eventually turned up in the real world.

Silly really - it’s only an empty snow globe, bought from the window of an old junk shop when I was a teenager on a laughter-filled rainy afternoon in Oxford. The shopkeeper couldn’t tell us why it was empty. He’d bought it as part of a house clearance - just another piece of junk to be sold on. It didn’t have any maker’s marks, there was no box. He wrapped it in a few pages from a copy of the Oxford Times, stuffed it in a small brown paper bag, and let us take it with us for fifty pence. We walked hand in hand, back up the alley and onto Alfred Street just as the sun came through the clouds. We smiled, happy with our new find and the certainty of a perfect future together.

Today, Friday 24^th September 2010, seemed like a good day to tell you about my empty globe. Today a huge piece of my past disappeared into memory, changing everything for ever, and as for the future – well, I’m trying to look beyond the falling snow, but it isn’t easy.

Tonight, when I get home after our final ‘do’, I’ll take down my empty globe, shake the snow into a storm, and gaze deep into its centre.

What will I see?

Good luck to all my friends from the Manchester Studio.