A Vision

The future was a beautiful place, once. Remember the full-blown balsa-wood town on public display in the Civic Hall. The ring-bound sketches, artists’ impressions,

blueprints of smoked glass and tubular steel, board-game suburbs, modes of transportation like fairground rides or executive toys. Cities like dreams, cantilevered by light.

And people like us at the bottle-bank next to the cycle-path, or dog-walking over tended strips of fuzzy-felt grass, or motoring home in electric cars,

model drivers.Or after the late show - strolling the boulevard. They were the plans, all underwritten in the neat left-hand of architects - a true, legible script.

I pulled that future out of the north wind at the landfill site, stamped with today’s date, riding the air with other such futures, all unlived in and now fully extinct.

Taken from the collection Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid, published by Faber & Faber 2006