To Stanstead!

Slowly creeking, main ish roads, I had momentary experience of as a bicycle part of the less zig zag and more unofficial slithery way around days. The new viewing angle makes the plastic and grass landscapes, parks stretched across globe road seem cold and distant and its users and characters completely sliced away from my memory and all the things next to it- of the sensation of a half-directed half-sleep dream, that you never remember, but that contains incisions of brilliance as if to make you wish you could learn from it. All the names flash up straight to the coach window and surprise me in how I have stored them. Eg. Mile End road, gardiners’ because of the black swirly font I’m ashamed to have lodged in estate agents prob for resentment in its meaningless expressions of leisure and law. I even retain traces of the passing dusty crest of the set back council's carcass too permanent to conjure in memory. The pub on the main road has shutters down but built only half way up so the lights inside can be seen from the coaches taking their wives to the airport. Lock-in of sorts with a wifecleaner still there, with or without a few drinkers to shield.
Street cleaner differences; Victoria alone, green trousers, orange fluorescence, 2-wheeled bin and wide fat brush. New to area, careful to decipher private alarms using 2d business map with logos. Mind occupies other spaces within the old city walls, besides birthplace. Cambridge Heath- in between courtyard and pavement. Type of accidental thoughtless space he is comfortable in whether cleaning or catching up or trading or messaging. Works at steady pace without a rushing love or hate of the area because well there's no point moralising the matter and thoughts of an old phone box belong to him when assigning him there. Well you’re either gonna find him on the narrow estate path, cornershop lottery stand, outside bookies, or in the cafe. So he might as well be cleaning readers stereotypes out there, going nowhere sciving they think, they know. I encounter him from my slice, sharing the smouldering ash of a cigarette with a male half his age perched on bicycle with an exceptionally high saddle. They exchange little biroed words on a rolled up newspaper, chat and part. His bike goes faster than our coach to the airport. Cleaner walks back away from the road under cover, stops next to the large flintfilled leg holding up this cornerquarter of the estate. Encountering another person this time obscured by the pillar, he refers to his paper again, ticking off or adding to the list.

Further along our driver stops at a junction, exchanges some information with a man stood at a cordoned off slip road, and diverts. We reach outer land of circular grey plants, abandoned guard dogs, slime filled canals, and in the distance huge construction work for a future site of abnormally shaped windowless buildings. One plant seems to be producing large grey bricks, piled up against the partially ripped fence- to go behind it for multinational use. Luck of the Irish cement plant too was miraculously in right place, right time for the end of a business rainbow but they were definitely bought out or sold. Will they clean up a little boy’s forgotten transatlantic tag? Rust and dust surely impossible to suck into corporation when it settles after all molecular disruption to crevices of the machines, grass, pavement and the rest. Trick to avoid the crevices. They can’t drain the canals before pulling out the slime- all interconnected with a substructure of strong tendrils- to give shocks to the disused slime-trawlers that will need resurrecting before the investors inspect the new zone. Again I spot two lone men on foot amidst the wasteland in some fluorescent uniforms, again exchanging details written down by one on a rolled up newspaper only then to disappear behind the dust clouds rolling up from all around us whose thickness told me our coach was the first vehicle to disturb these crossroads in weeks. But in a few months the tanks and tourists will use the same clean tarmac paths around here.