through europe

     Lettie said, I'm no genius never said I was, but my memory's in shape, know what I’m saying. Had said it to Mikeymike just the day before, down by the Sanitation Area, B Entrance. Had put him straight when he'd been on about the Roller, how long since he'd been seen on The Concourse.

18 months back, Mikeymike had said, when an Economy Toblerone was 41.

Thirtynine, she'd said. And not just that, but if he really focussed he'd remember it was exactly eighteen months ago give or take a week that there'd been talk of the 40 barrier being breached; and how in fact it never had been 41 

but jumped straight to 45.

I

At the end of the 1960s young and cocky Situationists like myself talked of the  Japanese economic miracle – because then it was the Japanese miracle –as being fuelled by amphetamine. The evidence was anecdotal, but it was well known that the cheaply-made drug was a major business for the Yakuza. This particular miracle was manufacturing-based, electronics and autos figured prominently. In modern parlance, it was Fordist.

There is a place, at the periphery of the work market, where many of us are still held. It is a space that resembles that of the ‘sweat lodge’, the tent at the periphery of the village where teenage Lakota Native Americans used to spend a few weeks of sacrifice and purification before entering the adult age. This place is now called internship, and, like all peripheries, it is a grey limbo, a space of suspension, where the laws of the centre do not apply and the freedom of the terra incognita remains only as the memory of a mythical past.

In June of 2000 58 Chinese people died of mass suffocation in the container of a lorry that arrived on a ferry at Dover. They died trying to enter the UK illegally. The direct cause of these deaths was the blocking of the air vents worked into the container by the driver, a Dutchman, Perry Wacker. He is the worst of criminals, a panicker lacking the basic nerve required, in this case, cutting the air supply from a fear of being caught. The reporting of the case by large sections of the British media was either downright callous, or sympathetic in abstract terms only, the horror felt from putting ourselves in the shoes of those who died, presumed to be too much. 

He must press on. No time to be lost. If there ever had been time to lose, he did not remember it. Sunday evenings? Perhaps, evenings when he should be sat down with his dreams but even then, how could anyone cross their heart and say that was lost time. How could you win without having your dreams?