"Imprisoned memories prowl thro' the dark." "Fuck it." "They scatter like rats..." "Dead souls." "Rat a pat a patter into the silence." "Ashes drift in the back of the skull." "A goblin parts the curtains with a slant-eyed chuckle." "Panic." "I blink as he vanishes into the shadows, hint of prophetic cats-eyes." "The dust settles thick, so by five when I stagger to the freezing bathroom" "I leave footprints for others to excavate." "They say the Ice Age is coming, the weather's changed." "The air stutters tic tic tic tic, rattle of death-watch beetle on sad slate roofs." "The ice in your glass is radioactive, Johnny." "Outside in the leaden hail the swan of Avon dies a syncopated death..." "A black frost grips July by the throat." "We pull the curtains tight over the dawn, and shiver by empty grates." "The household gods have departed, no one remembers quite when." "Poppies and corncockle have long been forgotten here, like the boys who died in Flanders, their names erased by a late frost that clipped the village cross." "Spring lapped the fields in arsenic green, the oaks died this year." "On every green hill mourners stand, and weep for The Last Of England." "My teacher said, "There are more walls in England than in Berlin, Johnny. "" "What were we to do in those crumbling acres?" "Die of boredom?" "Or recreate ourselves, emerging from the chrysalis all scarlet and turquoise as death's heads from chip plants." "Moths of the night." "Not your clean-limbed cannon fodder for the drudgey nine-to-five." "Sniffing glue instead of your Masonic brandies." "We fell off the cogs of misfortune." "Out to lunch in 501s." "Knotting up the pricks in the disco." "We heard prophetic voices:" "" I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness." "Starving, hysterical, naked... "" "" Not with a bang, but a whimper... "" "And gathered everything you threw out of your dream houses, treasured your trash cans." "Picking through the tatters of your lives we jumbled the lot, and squatted your burnt-out hearths." "Your world, beavering away at its own destruction, serviced the profit machine and creaked to a halt, not with a bang." "Even our protests were hopeless." "Neat little marches down blind alley." "All around, malevolent bureaucracies mutated, large as dinosaurs." "A thin yellow pus drained through exhausted institutions." "Citizens stood mute, watching children devoured in their prams." "And all you did, in the desperation, was celebrate the Windsors, yet again." "Old cows stagger to the slaughterhouse to emerge as roast oxen." "What do you see in those heavy waters?" "I ask." "Nothing but a bureaucrat from the ministry poisoning the buttercups with a new defoliant." "What's that I hear?" "The sound of Gershwin on his ghetto blaster." "What else?" "The atom splitting." "And the whispering?" "Half-truths spilling from the minister's case." "Wriggling in the blinding sun?" "What are they saying?" "All's well, no comment." "Someof them are silent." "Ah here's the guard." "What's the password?" "EVASION." "What else do you see?" "Lies flowing through the national grid, and bribery." "All's normal then?" "Yes." "Where's hope?" "The little white lies have carried her off beyond the cabbage patch." "They've murdered her?" "Yes." "And Tomorrow?" "Tomorrow's been cancelled owing to lack of interest." "You saw the graffiti years ago on the Euston Road, and didn't believe it;" "What proof do you need the world's curling up like an autumn leaf?" "The storm's coming to blow it into the final winter." "Can't you feel the days are getting shorter?" "The sad old Emperor bent beneath his black top hat smiles in the deathly sunlit silence." "The Lady next door to me says "There he is!" "There's Hirohito and his Empress Nagasake. "" "Look!" "Johnny look!" "They're playing the funeral march for the Royal Doulton." "He stole the patterns way back when you were a little boy, no one cared much." "They were busy squandering our threadbare patrimony on the atom." "Now you see it, now you don't." "England had it years back, us kiddies weaned on food parcels from uncle Randy in the wild west choc - full of comix and bubble gum." "I grew up in the wind of change ma'am!" "Quite!" "Quite blew away my reason." "Dad switched on the cathode ray at your coronation and watched the weather forecast in the suburban drizzle ever after." "His father's father's father's presentation clock, a black marble mausoleum ticked out my childhood." "101 years of middle class assurance." "The bomb dropped with regular monotony, leaving us waiting " "the frosty heart of England blighted each spring leaf, all aspiration withered in the blood." "In the silence of an English suburb power and secrecy dwell in the same house, while far away in the big city the A to Z clamped a grid on despair" "The world will never forget" "What kind of the people do they think we are" "Squad!" "Squad!" "By the right!" "Left!" "Right!" "Left!" "Right!" "Left!" "Right!" "Left!" "Don't be sad" "Aim!" "Fire!" "Speed bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing" "Onward, the sailors cry" "Carry the lad that's born to be king" "Over the sea to Skye." "Loud the winds howl, loud the waves roar" "Thunder clouds rend the air" "Baffled our foe's stand on the shore" "Follow they will not dare." "Speed bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing" "Onward, the sailors cry" "Carry the lad that's born to be king" "Over the sea to Skye." "Speed bonnie boat, like a bird by the wing" "Onward, the sailors cry" "Carry the lad that's born to be king" "Over the sea to Skye." "Loud the winds howl, loud the waves roar" "Thunder clouds rend the air" "Baffled our foe's stand by the shore" "Follow they will not dare." "Speed bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing" "Onward, the sailors cry" "Carry the lad that's born to be king" "Over the sea to Skye." " Is it loaded?" " Yes, ma'am." " Did you enjoy the Folklands?" " Yes, ma'am." " Preparing for the next one?" " Yes, ma'am." " It's going to be a big one, isn't it?" " I hope so, ma'am." "Keep up the good work."