Get Forked

I love rain. When I’m caught in a torrential downpour, I feel so alive. I love it when the heavens open and just let rip. Thunderstorms, the perfect combination of falling rain and deadly electrical forks are beautiful and thrilling. I never quite feel so lucky as when the hair stands up on my arms and I walk through the warm rain with flashes in the sky and deafening crashes of thunder watching the drama of nature unfold all around me. I love the smell in the air, the charge in the atmosphere, the fear in people’s eyes as they all scurry home to their brick boxes where they feel safe and protected. I love not being one of the scurriers, but one who flings her arms out with the sheer joy of it all, dances through puddles and opens my mouth to drink the heavy metallic tasting rain. I get scared, more so than in any horror movie but I somehow love feeling that I could die at any moment, that I am dicing with death. Yes, of course I am reassured by the odds of the situation, but still we’ve all seen the tree split down the middle, we’ve all heard the rumours of the kid who never made it home.

To me a walk in the thunder encapsulates both the sheer miracle of life as well as it’s transient nature; it makes me realise that I am not in charge here, that there are greater forces of work. I understand why humans have always given their head gods the thunderbolts. To see a fork of lightening, and be physically shaken by the many deafening claps of energy is both terrifying and exhilarating. You realise how tiny and fragile your body is, how at the mercy of chance you are every day you are alive. It makes you ask those kind of questions, the wondrous questions that you will probably never answer but are shaped in fascinating and beautiful ways simply by asking. To me, a walk in a thunderstorm is the spiritual equivalent of drinking ten cans of red bull, I come home from one of my long strolls feeling like I am bursting out of my own skin, like I have connected with the essence of energy itself. So, if there is one thing I would recommend for you to do this summer, especially if you have not done it before, go and walk in one of the steaming summer thunderstorms. Go alone, and take your time, but not an umbrella. Sing. Shout. Get somewhere quiet. Go out to nature. If possible, walk near water. There is nothing more spectacular than watching the lightening reflect in the lapping waves of a lake or river. Take my advice; get truly and properly forked up this summer. You will not regret it.

Bin Man

I have just come home from Sainsburies. It was a quarter to closing and the shop assistants were running round the shop putting reduced stickers on everything. I, like the rest of the soul sold middle class vultures was flocking around them around putting bargains galore in my basket. Lamb chops, hummus and poppy seed loaf. I am a fan of this time of day. Why pay full price when you can race in a most undignified manner against a sock sandeled man to the last pot of 85p guacamole? It is such fun.

I managed to score us some good grub for tea and was walking home listening to PJ Harvey swinging my leeks as I went, when I turned into the street that leads into ours. The sun had gone down, and the light was the sort of twilight that plays tricks on the eyes. So when I saw something moving in the corner of my vision, I didn’t pay it too much attention. But when I heard a rustling beyond the bushes I lifted my head to see a man, with a shaven head and combat boots on eating from a bin.

He look startled to see me (it is a quiet road) and I thought I saw a flicker of embarrassment on his face, but he wasn’t going to turn down food and he kept on eating. It was pizza. The box was soaked through with last night’s grease and the piece he was eating had somebody else’s ketchup on the crust.

I nearly burst into tears then and there. This kind of thing is to me like a body blow. Some people can block it out, some can look the other way. I can’t. I’m not saying I do anything much about it, except occasionally give guilt money for the big issue and the occasional cup of tea. I thought about the lamb chops in my bag, eight for only seventy five pence, and nearly gave them him. But, I thought, what good would raw meat be for someone who probably hasn’t even got a fork let alone an oven? I wondered about cash, to tell him to go and get a real pizza but I had none, and if I had run to the cash machine and given him a tenner, we wouldn’t have been able to go out tonight. So I just walked on by.

It is so wrong that someone, anyone, has to eat leftover food out of a bin, ever.

It is doubly wrong that in a city like York where people queue around the block for overpriced cucumber sandwiches at the numerous tea shops there is a man who for whatever reason can’t feed himself and we all look the other way.

And it is wrong, so terribly wrong that when I got home, I spread my guacamole on my poppy seed loaf and half an hour later had forgotten all about him.