Tati

One early morning, for the merest second, I glimpse myself as I will be in 20 years. I am coming the other way, sitting alone on the front seat of the top deck. I am exercising my bus pass. I have chosen to wear a flat cap and a sensible raincoat. My eyes are fixed forward, turned inwards, not seeing. Perhaps composing a poem or a tricky decision, my demeanour suggests the journey is a day trip, greyly taken for its own sake, a gratuitous excursion of the last days. I am surprised by the close resemblance of the mien of this future version to that of an earlier self of many years before - it is the countenance of one caught unexpectedly in reflection. Both are equally condemned to the passage of free time stretched between tea shops and small town public conveniences. Both are alone in their quixotic war against the world, but both are also stuck in transit, passively trucked as livestock to no definite destination. But the most remarkable similarity between earlier and later versions is located in that complex domesticated gaze, soft eyed as in the slaughterhouse, that only emerges from out of a deep conflicted inwardness.