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Sous les pavés, la plage!

All of the tube and train advertisements have been pulled.

‘Non-essential’ workers are house-bound, their roaming eyes aloft dark, fleshy pillows no longer held hostage for the duration of the commute by the proposition of hair plugs, a new mattress, dinner on demand.

Marketing budgets have been halted, or diverted from the public to domestic sphere, as the economy tanks and businesses scramble to compress fiscal haemorrhaging.

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London and beyond

On Wednesday MR picked up 50 rolls of processed film from as far back as March 2018. Nightly, we have made our way through a chunk of the contact sheets – each grabbing one and following the frames from top left to bottom right, rotating the sheet as necessary. The studious silence is broken occasionally with ‘oh yeh, this’, ‘this one is great’, ‘where is this??!’. On reaching sheets end we swap. Read becomes unread becomes read. The stack is in no given order, transporting us from London to The Lakes to New York to Uluru, back to London, to Sydney, to Paris. After exhausting our memory store, we start packing.

In a kind of temporal tumble turn we’re projected into the past and then launched into an unknown future.

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A sunshine state of mind

As I turned home on my regular loop walk this morning, I took up the invitation of a park bench drenched in sunshine and the soothing sonics of a nearby fountain. Eyes closed, ears full, it dawned on me that this was the first time I’d paused and truly rested in the last month.

Fixed to the bench a small brass plaque reads:

In memory of Pearl and Jack Attfield who lived in Lee Green and enjoyed this park for over 70 years.

In a month we’ll be gone from this place that has made a comfortable home for five years. I’m grateful that a modern lifetime isn’t confined to a sub 10km radius, but amidst the instability of this life on the move, I need more pauses.

Note to self: Sunshine is the cure (A lesson learned late in life – being raised in The Sunshine State, oblivious to the fact that sunshine wasn’t a given.)