Saturday, 5 May 2012

The Seven-Day Plan in the nick of time

It is still the 5th of May here (although possibly not in France). It's not dark yet in Thurso. There's time, comrades, time.


Empty spaces, everywhere: canvasses, dirty but resolutely blank, are stretched along the ends of tenements and up the sides of tower-blocks. Here and there windows pierce them, looking terribly small amidst the white – like timid, suspicious eyes peering through a chink in curtains drawn tightly against the world and the sun.

The murals here are in the underpasses, or along the brick walls of abandoned places. Every artist signs his name, and each is just as anonymous as the next. It it you, sitting next to me in the bus-stop with your track-suit and weary face, whose mind is full of difficult questions asked in dazzling colours?

And from the ends of the bus-stop, or the hoardings, other eyes are silently observing: the inhabitants are all stuck buying razors and make-up and using them to look sternly attractive, day and night without a rest. Look carefully into those eyes. It's driving them crazy!

If it were up to me, the mural-painters would be clambering on scaffolding, daubing those blank canvases with essays and poems. And the people in the bus-stop ends and hoardings could take a well-earned day off. For once, they could get up and make breakfast without first getting their hair perfectly arranged. For once they could smile.

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