Sauce gribiche, a random wind, Johnny Marr and moonlanding wallpaper

Abundance: Wednesday 10 April 2024

You can tell a lot about a tin can from the noise it makes as it tracks down the road at 2.27AM.

It’s no longer a cylinder - I’m sure of it: it has dents, perhaps squished towards two dimensions for recycling - otherwise the wind, Storm Whatever, would’ve picked it up by now. Instead, it stitches its rattling stop-start way slowly down the hill towards the nice man at No.1.

Do I risk being pulled brightly awake time and again by its intermittent tune, or lift myself out of bed and into the gale?

I nod off.

I am 8.

I’m as happy as can be, lying to attention, sheets and blankets tucked in as tight as Mum can do them. Apart from turning my head left and right, I can’t move. Cold sheets slowly warming to a perfect cocoon. 

I am just about ok to have the landing light off, but in winter I like the curtains open: if a UFO spins its flashing path towards Donkey Hill, I don’t want to miss it.

The moon is high and fat; blue and grey clouds draw slowly across it. My wallpaper repeats the same moon in cartoon miniature, astronauts stepping from their craft to its cratered landscape; it is brought to flickering life by the streetlight casting its brilliance through the tall tree by the road.

The wind is up. An empty can races towards the churchyard, a metal bin lid giving unconvincing chase. Below my bedroom, an overgrown branch scratches against the front room window. Headlights gallop thick shadows across my wall and over my head. I slip back into sleep.

The tin can steel band strikes up again, and I’m hauled from the bottom of the well, awake.

A random can, one of a gazillion made in a factory, filled in a factory, finding its random way to being opened in a kitchen in my road, placed in the top of a recycling bin, so that Storm Whatever can pick it out from the ill-closed lid. What are the chances.

I really ought to get up and sort it, as tonight will be a late one. Impossibly 41 years after I first saw him in The Smiths, I am going to see Johnny Marr¹ with my daughter, she impossibly the same age I was when I saw him/them all those years ago. Just two years after that first time, impossibly only 23, Marr’s tin can had completed most of its holy journey - changing popular music forever - despite whatever brilliance he followed it with. What do you do with that, aged 23²? Turn up, create, show that you are still a charming man in whatever form that takes, and make everyone very happy³.

‘I would go out tonight, but I haven’t got a stitch to wear…’ Yeah, sod getting up and into this wind.

The clink of glass in the dark. The milk float’s stopping outside. Not long until I have to get up for school, but not quite yet. He’s whistling again - who whistles at night? Maybe he’s giving ghosts or burglars notice he’s coming. I can hear his shoes clicking on the path that runs from the road; the path that brings good news and bad to us and Kay next door. His whistle turns echoey and muffled as the path becomes a covered alley. At the back, a pair of gates, set at an angle to each other: the left one takes you into Kay’s back garden, the right one into ours. Here a small crate by the backdoor: I can hear him replace the empties with fresh bottles. I hope the blue tits don’t peck through the foil, eager, as I am, for the cream. I need it for my Weetabix.

5.13AM. Awake again: a bottle clanks against the road. I’m ravenous for Weetabix, cream and brown sugar. I remember there’s sauce gribiche in the fridge. It’s a close second and just enough of an incentive. Time to get up and put that can and bottle in the bin.