Carry The News

I grew up listening to Mott the Hoople in a district that had once prospered from wool.  It had been around a while. A thousand years before a scribe dutifully entered Ermelai in the Domesday Book with its eight villagers their three ploughs and their six acres of meadow.  The air of my youth was not so sweet. It carried the dust from the slums that were being demolished. And maybe a few white fibres still drifted on the breeze. The mesothelioma cancer cluster was well established, a legacy of the asbestos mattress and boiler lining factory. The tower blocks went up and Alan Bennett had headed down to London. The electricity was out across the city. Years later I went for a wander and took some photographs. The broken petrol pump was in a deserted forecourt. I was chilled to the bone and didn’t hang around long.