Seamus Heany vaguely, by Barry Tench

 I only ever close my kitchen window when it’s really windy. The frame is so ill-fitting there seems little point, so it rests at ninety percent rattling on its metal arm. Occasionally a pigeon will land on the sill and look in over the ceramic white sink. I live in the centre of town, so garden birds are rare. This morning I come face to beak with a crow sheltering from the 8.00am drizzle. It doesn’t fly off or even flinch as I enter the kitchen barefoot. It tilts its head and shifts its weight leg to leg.

Mid-morning I’m sitting on the 41 as it rumbles up the Wyle Cop over the cobbles. The November grey is dense enough for the shop lights to be on. The 41 comes to a halt on the High Street and lit and quivering it waits as passengers alight. The bus pulls away leaving a man standing in front of HSBC in a crumpled grey suit; he looks like Seamus Heaney, vaguely.  I cross the road to the coffee shop, order tea and think about a young Chinese woman I met at an interview for catering college in 1974. There is an advert for willow pattern china in the glossy newspaper supplement. I project her onto the blue bridge that arced across a plate. I want to fall in love with her all over again, even though I only knew her for three minutes thirty years ago. 

I wipe the case of a CD I had just bought – Otis Span, just for the track “Country Boy Blues”. I flick through the pages of a translation of the poems of Sappho that I’d bought at a second hand book shop as I sip my Earl Grey.

The doors of the coffee shop bang open. In flows a pink mother and a buggy steered by an enthusiastic five year old, his sister clutching the sides of the buggy as he hits the door frame for the third time. The father follows, bearded, directing the traffic. The Heaney-man has bought breakfast tea and sits puffing a macaroon on the table in the window.

I think about bridges, bridges over rivers, over roads, over valleys. We constantly cross over bridges. I plot a route from home into town avoiding crossing a single bridge.

Afternoon I’m looking through an anthology of Greek verse. I listen for the rhythm, dig for half remembered lines from grammar school days. The washing up seems to wobble having reached its limit of haphazard stacking. The Greek poets parade across my brown and beige linoleum. I search the classics for love but find only academic dust. One hour is linked to another. The clock ticks on. Is there a bridge between the minutes? Time is continuous but each second separate from the next. The phone rings in the flat above.

As the sun sets behind the multi-storey car park I perch precariously on my window seat. 

Being watched, by Peter Morford

 My grand-daughter is always teasing me about what she called my candle-powered payphone. Now that she had graduated with honours in Physics and Artificial Intelligence she had the newest phone on the market as her father’s prize. She decided that I could have her two year old model. What’s more, she’d tutor me. So began my education in state of the art communication.

As time passed I got more emails than before. The spam filter protected me but I intrigued by some of them. For instance, I was congratulated for exceeding my exercise target, having apparently walked an average five mile per day for the last month. A map appeared, showing my driving routes over the same period. The places I’d visited glowed in red.

Stranger still, I had a message from an organisation called Reporting about Your Appliances. The first one told me that my car, a Renault, had a suspension fault with a 60% chance of failure in the next 200 miles. I should take it to my garage. I did. They agreed, fixed and charged.

A few days later, came another message about my computer, the gist of which was to thank me for visiting Sainsburys and invite me to complete a three-minute questionnaire about the shop’s cleanliness, price satisfaction, staff manners and parking. I might even win a prize. Similar reports were invited about my tour of Dudmaston, the Farm-shop at Ludlow and a visit to the Crown last Sunday and that morning’s visit to the dentist.

Another day there was a message about my electric kettle. Its thermostat was cutting the power prematurely. I granted that the tea had tasted rather poor lately. Another report warned me about my lawn mower. The blades were worn and were tearing the grass. I was beginning to feel that I’d had enough of this phony interference via shades of Big Brother and the surveillance society. I phoned Anna to find she was still in Majorca with Tom, so I simply said I had communication problems which could wait until her return.

For another two weeks I had further reports. The clothes-washer was running a bearing. I checked that with the shop which had supplied me a few months ago, they agreed and fixed. Miraculously, no charge.

Three weeks later, daughter and boyfriend were back, tanned, fit and happy to be home in autumnal England. She asked me how I was getting on with her superphone. I related and asked how did the App got the data, some of which was correct.

“Have you seen this article in the Times?” she asked, handing me a copy. It reported that new Renault cars would, in future, be equipped with an App which would detect all the errors and signs of careless driving. Speeding, lane-roaming, tail-gating, letting attention wander, clumsy gear changes and jerky driving – all would be noted and saved. And what to do with the information? The computer would reveal the findings to the motorist who would apparently improve his driving.

 But my suspicious mind could again see the sinister Governmental ploy, licking its lips over the new course of fines and taxes.