Colin Falck

Who is there left that you can talk to? Days go by. ‘Friendless, deserted’ (The Beggar’s Opera?) — left in the lurch (what lurch?) — you languish. Time to make plans to die? You box up some age-stained letters, set aside more stuff, but your heart’s not in it. Tomorrow will be soon enough. Another of your thoughtless friends falls off the perch. Those language-teachers, those sergeant-majors, those not-quite-wives — how old they must all be now! And those types at school: grumbling, frowning, living their boxed-up lives — Mr Cartwright-Brown would be a hundred and thirty-nine. All gone... Time to wait out our world’s decline? (Wait even longer and watch the planet cool...?) Be serious. It’s not a dress rehearsal, OK...

A degree in maths might have helped. ‘Correction of the Day,’ wind charts, slide-rules, log tables, maps of the terrain, OP reports — all combined (again and again) to make four 25-pounders point the right way. B-Troop, ‘officer material,’ we learned our parts: don’t get VD; take care when choosing your friends; prefer gin and tonic; wear a hat at weekends; believe in the Empire (ignore what you know in your hearts). There was never much sense of who we were — except once, when the Colonel said ‘You gents are lucky to be here.

October comes: the year resigns. The currents down life’s widening stream run faster now. Like unpaid fines the leaves pile up. Dark evenings seem drawn out and under-loaded: lines from poems that won’t come right: a dream of emptier nights. Encoded signs for endings rather more extreme.

when the two-footed Mammal, being someways one of the nobler animals, regains The dignity of room, the value of rareness Robinson Jeffers Spengler was wrong: the world has become the West. Japan has bowed out now; in China they buy art, drink wine, play late Rachmaninov, groom themselves for decline in Prada or Bulgari, wonder which limousines are best. Our hard-won vision fades: dead faiths are reborn; circuses rule the airwaves; Darwin makes way. While bearded prophets prognosticate, announce their day, their raw congregations pray and exchange their porn. Time to turn out the lights. Too late to rely on gold, ammunition, canned food; to make plans to revive old powers we have lost: they are lost. Our last wildness gone, we drift to our ending.