Woke up this morning..

Woke up this morning to the sound of gunfire and explosion, to the rumble of machinery, to the screaming of the old and the young, the women and the men, the young and the elderly, to the smell of cordite and smoke and rape and death, to a vision of bodies strung up on lamp-posts for desertion, a land of total ruin, a metaphysical landscape of total inhumanity, and I was lying in one of the rooms where it could all have happened.

It's a surprise I hadn't really registered this thought before, I mean I'm sure this was one of the sectors where the Russians penetrated in the horrific fighting of April 1945. And like many I am fixated by the cataclysm that was WW2. I have a considerable library on the subject, and find myself continually glued to the National Geographic Channel when I can (obviously not here- see below). I had it in the back of my mind.

But Julie discovered a long list of civilian dead for just that month of April 1945 in a local 'park' yesterday (I mean, an empty lot next door with trees in it - not the English understanding of a park at all) which was of course a small cemetery until the previous dead were lifted up once again by allied high explosive, and of course my register shifted. Only a few of the heaviest stones remained of course, that's gravity for you.

So I got up and felt sick and above all old; fat and old. And I got myself a beer from the fridge, and I thought about it.

Later we went out to that memorial, innocuous of course, mooched around, paid near 10Euro for the smallest piece of sushi in the world and two halves of beer, watched once more in wonder the parambulations of the latest inheritors of this landscape, who of course only scream out of innocence rather than utter despair, and looked at it, and went, well, my god, even the winos in the park are playing techno on their laptops!

'Laptops are cheap these days' said Julie

'But they're fucking Macs!' I said

Winos with Macs.

This, friends, is a different landscape, an altogether different landscape from the world I understand back in London. Here even the wino's have Macs. It made me think somewhere along the line, the UK has really fucked up. We have more disparity in England than ever before, and it is a conspiracy that favours of the rich.

Notwithstanding of course the utter subjectivity of these observations (only one wino had a Mac, the others had bongos) there is much to consider.

We are away tonight to the other side of town, slightly less weird and certainly more balanced than this one, but it's been, well, quite a trip.