Swans

Swans.
If threatened,
they can break a child’s arm
with one flap of their wings,
but sometimes they will do it
just for fun.

No unauthorised access

The tidal gravity of the 1st train on the platform

As usual, I nearly got on the first train to arrive at the platform.
Not as usual. I usually hop on it, sometimes sitting down before saying ‘oop’ loudly and getting off again.
Usually I talk to myself as I get off, explaining to myself that I’ve got on the wrong train, so people don’t think I’m a crazy person who gets on and off every train that comes in.

The getting on bit just happens.

I’m reading or something on a bench at the platform, waiting for the second or third train, and then a train arrives going to somewhere wrong. My arms put my paper away, my legs stand me up, walk me to the train, get me onboard safely, my mouth says thankyou or excuse me as required, then it’s usually my ears that hear the unfamiliar destination on the tanoy and they take control of my legs and send me mumbling back onto the platform.

Sometimes there’s no announcement it’s another trigger, a small humunculous inside my skull runs to the front and with a tiny, squeaky voice says excuse me! excuse me! until my lumbering frontal cortex turns and booms ‘WHAT DO YOU WANT OH MY GOD THIS ISN’T MY TRAIN’

Arrogant Little Boy

The boy sits and watches the swans. He watches for a long while. The tide goes out and he sees that when it gets low enough the swans can stretch their necks just far enough to reach the plants that grow on the bed of the river. They tear them up and fight over the loose strands that hang from their bills and create a frenzy of feathers and foam and spray, not unlike the piranhas he has seen working at a stray cow in the museum.

Watching the swans he wonders if they realize that the tide has gone out. After-all, there is no reason they shouldn’t think, that it is the river-bed itself that rises and falls periodically.

‘Perhaps’, he concludes, legs dangling above the murky spray, ‘perhaps swans don’t really think anything – at all.’ The arrogant little boy.

A beach somewhere

The locals picked through the wreckage of the alien craft, giggling like the children they ressembled, though they were a lot older than they looked. Millions of years older.

The crust had already started forming on the wreckage, in greens and greys and deep purples, even as it sunk into the soft silt that formed the entirity of this small planets surface. It spooled out in little patterns, decorating the edges of the framework, or hanging down towards the planets surface in stalagtites, as it does on anything that sits still for long enough.

The crust squeaked and foamed slightly as it was drawn down and smothered in the horizontal sludge that is itself made up of the ground skeletons of the tiny creatures that made up the crust. The ship was sinking.

 

Bits of space suit and sail cloth hung limply in jolly colours from bits of the frame and the giggling creatures pulled bits off and whacked each other over the head with them, without much thought to what they meant and what they had once been.

That was unlikely to endear them to the riders of the massive  platform framework that had, a few hours before, broken through into the large watery atmosphere from the chill of outer space, and now loomed over the wreckage, hoovering, massive. They were watching with some distain as the child like inhabitants of the small beachy world slapped each other in the face with the soggy remains of their collegues, ducking and weaving and giggling, like the children they weren’t.

*

Dosplacement activitoes

Normally this thing corrects spolling mistakes. Nevermind.

Here is some artwork from the show and something a visitor left for us sometime near Christmas.

Space

The final frontier.

Displacement Activities Photos

There now follows a series of pictures from our Grand Exhibition.

from the National Lottery website, these words, surrounded by animated glittering stars.

“Ms. R from County Antrim has just won £2.00!”

ooh

I’ve mucked up the site a bit… maybe I can get the heading up again…ahhh