In Salford’s modern mills there is escape from the ever present clouds, the omnipresent cloud, the never ceasing crowds, the customers seeking service.
A flight away, a fortnight’s respite. Breakfast beers; awaiting explanations for delays and lost luggage; queues to clear customs which never used to be and, ‘Why,’ you ask a friend, ‘do you get to go through already?’ Then curse their Irish grandparent like you’re a Black and Tan a hundred years displaced.
All to stay in identical apartments along Mediterranean shores. Where fishermen once mended nets, in villages which housed their families, and were already old when crusaders flowed to and from the Holy Land, are now long anglicised streets with British bars and caffs selling fish and chips and all day English breakfasts because, as the tourists say, ‘No one eats that foreign muck. Though that paella stuff, them koftas, them little spicy things, yeh, they’re all right.’
Children play in crowded pools and club eighteen to thirty play with each other. Parents bake lobster red while pretending that financially and emotionally everything is fine, and will be when it’s time to go home again.
Poem by stuartcturnbull, picture from dendoktoor on Pixabay
This poem is one written over the summer. It is part of a suite of poems that considers UK history and life from roughly the end of the Second World War through to an unknown future.
This poem reflects on what has been some common holiday experiences.
The suite's title is from the opening line of the fourth stanza in William Blake's 1808 poem Jerusalem.