Walk softly and carry a big roll of carpet

If I had not walked,

I would not have heard the grasshoppers and crickets, whirring away in the grass despite this hopelessly grey summer.


If I had not walked,

I would not have gone into the shop and found the best cheap padlock I could find.


If I had not walked,

I would not have picked up the roll of carpet and walked it home, much to the amusement of those I encountered.


If I had not walked,

I would have ridden my bicycle, but since the idiot that stole it has not returned it, and the police have not gotten around to looking at the report,

I could not ride my bicycle.


That bicycle is gone. Hope has a limited time offer. Despair's sale is over.

Forgetting is one of the most useful by-products of an un-inhibited emotional reaction series including depression. Depression should never be stopped or dragged out with stupid things like Prozac. Depression should be processed to its own comfortable conclusion.

That bike is gone. So are you, so you keep reminding me.

Forget, forget, forgotten.

Postscript

If I had not walked, I would not have a sore foot.

If I could forget, then I would have no wishful thoughts. Then at last, I could be just like these loveless, soulless people? If I cannot beat them, should I join them? If I cannot join them, should I not leave them?

They who cannot love, are they not machines? Should they be ridden like bicycles, until they are worn down, or should they be loved until they learn how to love?

When you remind me that we must move on, that angers me.
How much harder it is to move on when there is not even a decent bicycle to move with.
How hard it is to move without a bicycle.
All those people who refuse to move without their cars, or a bus, or a train, or a taxi, or even a horse. How lazy they are.
To move on, with only your two feet, is something that homo sapiens var. industrialis has lost the ability to do, and I am unsure that I can still do it.

Once, I too had a car, and sat in a glass workhouse, not a greenhouse,
being watered, nurtured, fertilized,
without ever having to use my own two feet.

The cars are gone, now the bike is gone, but I still have my two feet.

God help me when they are gone, for the people in London
whom to me have always seemed the bravest,
are the elderly infirm
who struggle on foot through the uncaring and pushy
who struggle on foot to cross the road against the traffic
who struggle on foot to drag their shopping.
And never does someone else of their own age,
or indeed of any age,
driving past in their car,
stop and offer them a lift.


For this is how London has been ever since the Eighties, and even now, even with all the wealth that China exports to us, and all the handouts that the government has thrown into the wind, it is the same, except that fewer of those elderly poor are English.