CosmiKnot

So there I was swaying in the breeze contemplating the growing pile of fag butts in the plant pot and how I really ought to dispose of them for the sake of my karma when I realised that the click I had heard was the front door closing itself. I had no key. “I have no key’ I thought. I am ill and standing in the garden locked out feeling nauseous from the guilt of not being able to give up smoking. I knew for a fact that I had left the door on the latch. But this was no Victorian manor house I found myself suddenly exiled from – this was a late sixties purpose built ex local authority brutal semi. I still had my slippers on and my phone was inside. I remembered that I had seen the magnificent Tania sauntering home after the school run and wondered about walking around the block to her house in order to phone my wife. Oh the times I had fantasised about such an occurrence but in these reveries I did not have slippers on my feet and an eye of what I speculatively presumed to be suppuratin...

When did this all start? You know? The whole wearing a coat to school is so not cool. Except this is never articulated under any circumstances. This is stoicism writ large. Do school children act as one brain? Somehow all knowing that they must return to their respective hives and refuse to done the mantel of conformity. “I’ve cracked it.” I thought as I walked my younger coat-wearing son down the hill to school – children don’t wear coats because they are not TV advertised at all hours. Come on M&S I mused; let’s have a cool coat advert for the parents of the kids. But then on returning I enviously espied a pair of addidas gazelles on the feet of an older kid. These are not remorselessly branded onto our eyeballs by the glowing screen in the corner so why do I want them so? Ahh well advertising is branding now isn’t it? Things don’t need to be on the telly to be advertised. I mean those evil product development geniuses embed the advertising into the product. The product is a slow...

     For the past two weekends I have been trying to resolve the sale of my wife’s and mine long playing records. This is a compact way of describing the process that has been slowly unravelling since we met and so that is the plot I shall try and detail. As I type my wife has just congratulated me on “sorting the records out”. That’s more money than I thought she declares gaily dismissing three quarters of my life’s memories. Stick to the plot. Last Saturday I packed the four crates into the car and ordered the boys into the car for the drive a mile down the road. This took longer than a non-parent record collection indulging individual would anticipate and consequently we were fractionally too late for the loading bay outside the shop. After two circuits the space had become available when the Astra van pulled off. The boys and I spotted no cameras pointed at the bay and decided to take a chance. The moment we got in the space a large whale of a bus surfaced a...

  I have become a football dad. Okay I was already one last season but that was football-dad-lite and came free. For a start it was, whisper it, a church league. There was always a prayer before kick off and one of the hazards was a certain coach who seemed to enjoy asking me, in a Columbo style line of questioning, to remind him which church we went to. My son’s team, despite being an overspill squad, won the league in what turned out to be a nail biting close to the season. This season he is playing for an eleven a side team and I am suddenly one of the squad drivers. Last week in the car park one of the boys remarked on the soft suspension and I became aware of just how low I had let the tyre pressure get. Now coming from a family of panickers I always get a sinking feeling when confronted with something as simple as a flat tyre. It feels like fate has caught up with me and has decided to show me I was never meant to be a vehicle owner (Our family panicking is well founded and n...

Why does the search for the primordial experience feel harder to find these days? This was a question I half formed in my mind as, en famille, we marched with a growing throng of other villagers towards the annual bonfire (resists the urge to add bun fight). I mean all the ingredients are there – darkness, smells of cooking flesh, general hubbub of anticipation, big fire (not as big as last year – never is – will be a single match by the year 2065), alcohol, explosions and lights from neighbouring villages, mud squelching under foot, barricades… but still it feels like a simulacra of the real thing. We all know what we’re doing. Think of those kerazy surrealist dudes who took up automatic drawing with gusto only to find themselves falling into a pattern of knowing precisely what they were going to draw within a few months. Well that’s like fireworks night or rather bonfire night . I stood there remembering the previous years when I had felt all poetic like I was part of a genuinely pa...