A short journal entry written whilst walking down Chorlton Road in early winter.
Most nights the road is ordinary. The sky - varying shades of blue to match the season. The puddles yo-yo between milk thin or thigh splashers, but they’re almost always there. On winter nights, when its pitch dark by five, the pizza shop throws yellow light out through its windows and the walkers outside who had set off in the light receive it gratefully like a warming flame.
Tonight there is a desert sky and the road becomes a river. Leaves and litter along the pavement seem to swirl and eddy at its banks, yellow gingko leaves gather on the swell. The tarmac carries me along as an imperceptible current rushes me on, the blackness of the paving like that of deep, still water. I know there were houses here once, lining the route, but now I can only see them as cliff faces.
At the Jehovah’s Witness Centre the sky darkens, indigo at its edges, besides it there’s a winter tree (a poplar, maybe) in silhouette. Its multitude of tiny twigs grow straight from the trunk post-pollard and seem like the spines of a monolithic cactus. I mistake the uplit wooden facade of the A-framed building beside it for that of an American motel. It’s closed now; lit for no one. Empty rooms. Hollow seasons.
The Kool Runnings van just past here is an evergreen: roadside jerk chicken transcends the seasons, in all weathers chicken bones in the gutter turn pink as cars pass by, illuminating them in the brake light. Approaching the van the candyfloss detergent from the hand car wash lingers, but downwind of it, the only smell is charred meat. To me that barbecue smell is the summer of 1994 and the years between are engulfed by the road until I pass through the smoke. All of the 90s in my nose and mind, the dead leaves at my feet I imagine as those of the drained swimming pools of California, I hear skateboard wheels clatter against their brim - it’s a misplaced nostalgia inherited from someone else, somewhere else, and by the time I’m past the van, approaching the crossroads, I am back in Hulme.
There’s a tree surrounded by a dense bed of clover, ferns, and Cat’s-ear, and last summer somehow the inside reel from a VHS tape found itself entwined in the branches like tinsel. Coming home the sun would hit the tape and it would sparkle silver, a breeze through the branches made the light on the tape dance, from the northside of the tree it resembled a disco ball. Once, when, it was behind me I turned to see that the light had no effect from the south side and it was just a dying tree covered in a flimsy black band, and amongst the Cat’s-ear fly-tipped junk outnumbered the ferns.