Twenty Past Six on the High Street
The town before the shutters open, when the wet road belongs to no one and the day has not yet chosen a mood.
Before the bell
At twenty past six the high street is a diagram of itself. Shutters down, one bakery light on, the road dark with the kind of wet that remembers rain rather than receiving it. My footsteps are the loudest opinion in the parish, which is a responsibility I try to carry lightly.
The green paint on the first shopfront is blistered in a way I have started to think of as decoration. No one has asked it to be charming. It is simply what wood does when it has been a door for a long time.
A public road with no public
Emptiness is not the same as abandonment. A delivery van will come. A woman will unlock the florist and speak to the buckets before she speaks to anyone else. For these few minutes the street is paused between being a route and being a place of business. I like it in the pause.
Dawn does not improve a town. It only removes the reasons you usually have for walking through it quickly.
When it opens
By seven the spell is thinner. A radio starts. Someone drops a crate. I turn off before the newsagent, not from dislike, but because the street has remembered what it is for, and I have already had the part I came for.
