Trouble At Number Ten (a.ka. my next home) By Katherine Horrex

I find him in the kitchen angrily carving potatoes into polygons, because he feels at fifty three that he's washed up already. Beads of sweat now slide from where creases of smiles once shone. He is singed by age like a tree - Tired, he turns his attention to the sluice of the peas, mundane as the job that dragged him to his knees. Turned loose he leaves the tap gushing, he has no reason to care - he can smoke on thin air and has given up rushing. Those days of care are now gone and the knife meets the chopping board with a bang. He becomes the prattling pan with its boil now near; the rattling oven his single fan as he feeds it the rest of the shopping. And then there is the imminent affair of the repo men next Tuesday - this causes the slow slicing of stinging conical oranges. Steaming trails of vapour cloud the papers on the pin board, unsigned treaties and pacts. The hob is adorned with flecks of fat from the acrid searing of meat, familiar like the spit upon the crown court's steps. Engulfed by the metallic gas he is lost in the heat of the moment. And as uncivil hordes (unravelled ladies and lords) collect beyond the gate, their bleating jeers a nation's descant of dissent, he reaches in true good form and cheer, for the vintage claret and decants himself relief from his missteps; granting himself a libation in honour of the party's imminent disintegration.

By David Cameron your sensitive, feminist, Smiths - loving, future poet laureate. Copyright © 2006  Katherine Horrex

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