Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
128 | denis beckett<br />
to keep it. fair enough. Years later, apropos of nothing I could<br />
understand, he suddenly gave it to me. He did me more of a<br />
favour than he realised. I framed it and hung it on my wall, and<br />
on glum days when invoices were high and I asked myself why I<br />
was doing what I was doing, richard’s carlton gave an answer.<br />
However, avoiding apocalypse ceased to be the target. I got<br />
more ambitious. One could avoid apocalypse and still live in<br />
turmoil. Once upon a time I took turmoil for granted, and<br />
thought the task was to keep turmoil to sub-apocalyptic levels.<br />
This was a target that people might identify with, but the<br />
longer we lived in sub-apocalyptic turmoil the more I admired<br />
Kris Kristofferson’s “I’ve enjoyed about as much of this as I can<br />
stand”, and the quest moved a notch up: it was not for less<br />
turmoil. It was for no turmoil.<br />
By the mid eighties I’d look charily at every pavement dustbin<br />
I walked past. Most urban citizens did the same because the things<br />
frequently exploded. Then the council cut them down. Men<br />
in dustcoats with wirecutters stomped the pavements clipping<br />
each bin off its lamppost and tossing it in to a city engineer’s<br />
truck. Here was symbolic decline for you. an anti-litter campaign<br />
was on the go, featuring an ostrich speaking in pidgin. “Zappit<br />
in the Zibi can” said the ostrich, towering from billboards. Only<br />
there weren’t any Zibi cans. Binless city. The bomb merchants<br />
transferred their attentions to shopping centres. Then we got<br />
new bins. The old ones had been round and metal, with a hole<br />
at the top as God intended so you could drop in your Bar One<br />
wrapper without collecting the last guy’s fish-oil on your sleeve.<br />
The new ones were rectangular with a lip designed to foil passing<br />
bomb-droppers. You had to push stuff in, which lots of people<br />
didn’t do; they let it fall in mounds of litter below the litterbin.<br />
The inadequacy of politics was making my country not only<br />
neurotic but scruffy as well.<br />
every family had a dozen almosts. Deirdre was parked near<br />
the Magistrate’s court, delayed for an appointment. Two bombs<br />
went off when she should have been walking past. When the<br />
police let her collect her car a day later, the mirror fell off as she
Change language