Crab-like

Yesterday I took it upon myself to prepare for the four/five days in which to walk to and fro Ilkley and York for Robert, my cousin's, Charity fund raiser: Martin House Hospice on the Wharfedale Ton(14th June) - which he/they/them will peddle.

In order to make the walk back from my flat in Leeds, to mother's abode in Wetherby, a little more interesting I went north out of Leeds along Scott Hall Road, Harrogate Road, Moortown Corner, the Jewish ghetto, Wigton Moor, Slaid Hill and the west end of Shadwell, where I joined the usual route to Wike Ridge: a stiff 15 miles in four hours plus (I really dislike walking after lunchtime).

The amount of plastic litter on our streets blows my mind. A very real problem occurs everywhere: it seems people have zero care for anything that isn't directly affecting them? The damage of plastics to the planet may be quite distant to many simple folk, but this morning I could not just walk passed uncaring.

From the junction of the A58, and all the way up to Potternewton Playing Fields, I picked up all plastic within my general walking shadow and placed it in people's green bins - good deed for May Bank Holiday. Only once did I refuse to stoop so low!

A shitty nappy, which hung rancidly open, smeared in human waste, (that was kicked towards the nearest black bin) had a reek which followed me up the hill, to the park space, and had only diffused by arrival at Floral Avenue, LS7.

Surely the world we inhabit will flex its mighty muscles soon and shift our destructive path into extinction? Or is it all the necessary plan of evolution that we make millions of species die off for the next paradigm shift?

Last time I ventured to Floral Avenue, LS7, was when my second oldest half sister moved in with her new loyal doting husband and my nephew Ben, in 1986. Where I found an amazing record collection wedged between No Jacket Required and Sade: Gary was really a big brother I never knew I could have. My true primary education in The Smiths began, where I first heard Hatful of Hollow, Suffer Little Children, and Gary gave me a gift of Viva Hate, wearing any Chemise Lacoste I could persuade him to cast off in my direction.

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This morning I awoke from a bad dream! It's the one which repeats in which my father is alive, no one believes he's meant to be dead, and he's just about hanging on. It took place just as we were clambering up onto a proto-Cambrian shore. We were a family of crabs, or crab-like Malacostraca, pulling some tastelessly edible morsel apart with our nimble claws, having great difficulty, in the oxygen lacking atmosphere, doing it without anything other than a direct sense of urgency.

I, Crab, could not tolerate this aging, armless, de-segmenting creature getting its mandibles into the small amount of matter, corrupting on this beach, so bashed, gripped and rend the worthless and hopeless shape, corroding in front of my antennae, to its extinction.

Will his memory never disappear totally from my consciousness, even if I have to travel back to single celled organisms? It was only a dream and perhaps I need regress to the earliest aerobic being to let him go?

Tonight I head back into the primordial soup, to forgive the errors of the father. Hey dad we have survived billions of years, and trillions of reincarnations, so it seems silly for me to keep having this Oedipal conflict in my primitive brain! It must be time for me to forgive you, absolutely, for knowing no better?