Trigger Warning

Today I intended to begin to write.
Stories are waiting like distant thunderstorms
grumbling and flickering on the grey horizon
and there are emails and introductions
and a book, a whole damn book
about a country and a journey and belief
I’m here to write.
I made a chair.
I opened a cardboard box with a blade
(I assembled the blade)
removed the parts, carried them, carefully, up the stairs.
‘Functional seating for today’s workplace’
I pressed five casters into the base,
learned that they press in with a most satisfying pop.
Attached the armrests with the screws,
puzzling over the left and the right of it,
the screws not being what they should be
as described in the instructions. And then the base
beneath the seat,
which attached with six 40 mm screws (that were
puzzlingly six 45 mm screws).
Then the headpiece to the chairback,
the chairback to the seat, which is where the problems start
as the middle screw on either side declines
to penetrate and thread.
This all takes time. Orson Welles is Harry Lime
on the old radio as I assemble my chair. Orson meets a dame
and a crooked fortune-teller, and a fat man,
and a New York gang boss in exile,
and has slept with the dame, solved the mystery,
read the script
and pocketed the money
before I have assembled my chair.
Making a book is a little like making a chair.
Perhaps it ought to come with warnings,
like the chair instructions.
A folded piece of paper slipped into each copy,
warning us:
‘Only for one person at a time.’
‘Do not use as a stool or a stepladder.’
‘Failure to follow these warnings can result in serious injury.’
One day I will write another book, and when I’m done
I will climb it,
like a stool or a stepladder,
or a high old wooden ladder propped against the side of a plum tree,
in the autumn,
and I will be gone.
But for now I shall follow these warnings,
and finish making the chair.

A Lunar Labyrinth

We were walking up a gentle hill on a summer’s evening. It was gone eight thirty, but it still felt like midafternoon. The sky was blue. The sun was low on the horizon, and it splashed the clouds with gold and salmon and purple-grey.

‘So how did it end?’ I asked my guide.

‘It never ends,’ he said.

‘But you said it’s gone,’ I said. ‘The maze.’

I had found the lunar labyrinth mentioned online, a small footnote on a website that told you what was interesting and noteworthy wherever you were in the world. Unusual local attractions: the tackier and more man-made the better. I do not know why I am drawn to them: stoneless henges made of cars or of yellow school buses, polystyrene models of enormous blocks of cheese, unconvincing dinosaurs made of flaking powdery concrete and all the rest.

I need them, and they give me an excuse to stop driving, wherever I am, and actually to talk to people. I have been invited into people’s houses and into their lives because I wholeheartedly appreciated the zoos they made from engine parts, the houses they had built from tin cans, stone blocks and then covered with aluminium foil, the historical pageants made from shop-window dummies, the paint on their faces flaking off. And those people, the ones who made the roadside attractions, they would accept me for what I am.

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