Leigh, 10 October
My mum’s car is off the road. I’m wandering Tesco when she calls me. The bowls. She’s walking, but not along the canal. She saw a man wearing black. She avoids the canal when she sees a man wearing black. I avoid it myself sometimes. The journey is longer along the road, nothing pretty to look at, an abandoned Grade-II listed church perhaps. I know it doesn’t matter what becomes of each of us, but what about all of us, the here of us, the next that will derive of us? It’s an intergenerational crumbling. And whenever I hear the phrase cookie-cutter planning, all I see is a lump of staling dough falling apart in its thinness in big hands, being rolled out again and again. And why would you go to Tinsley now? Without a landmark. It was home once, a beacon. And why would you go to Bingley now? Without a landmark. It was home once, a beacon. My mum says it’s incredible how much Leigh has deteriorated, given how disappointing it was in the first instance. My aunt says her husband can’t walk anymore and she can’t drive, never could, but he’ll drive her to Bradshawgate, the main street in Leigh, so she can get what she needs, a haircut, a top, I don’t know, but she won’t walk around, not from the outskirts. She’s too scared to walk the ten minutes from her home to the high street. What will she do when her driver is gone? How do the old people find each other now. My other aunt waits to be taken out. I see my future. What when my legs go? Our pensions. When they are allowed to kill us off at their convenience. First they came for the buildings … anything they couldn’t profit from. My friend says Mansfield isn’t going anywhere, but it will become less interesting, as everywhere else catches up with it. What are we as a country? Ten city centres and an empty theme park? Capitalism crashes through like a wave of Vikings. Our towns are not even on fire. Just quietly dying while we prise open the fiddly little attachments on our cheap plastic pill boxes. What day is it? They are selling half-price Labubu dolls on the market and it is nearly Christmas.