Bags of Gold

By God I was angry, I’d been angry all the time recently. It was one of those periods when you get something right and two things go wrong. I kept telling myself it could be worse, and then it would get worse. My prides of joy, my material religions had for too long been my fishing tackle; mountain bike and; car. The fishing tackle had been stolen, the bike had been stolen. The car had been twatted. Not only that, the builders were overrunning, and with everything that got fixed, something else was broken. Work was tough, overworked, over stressed, and Christmas was coming up fast. My calamities were beginning to transcend from my private life into my working, and I was getting known for having an uncannily jinxed run. It didn’t stop there, I was seeing a therapist and she’d been digging up my historical issues, getting to grips with my anxiety. I didn’t think it was affecting me, but it was. I was angry at the world, well not the world, indeed I care so much about the world it tore me up. The way we treat it, the way we treat each other. I was angry at society, indeed completely livid with humanity, right down to watching two colleagues go to the same shop, buying the same neatly packaged lunch, to eat in the same place, yet still requiring two plastic bags big enough to drown a whale. We care that little, we need to be forced. This generation will never care enough to think for themselves, conditioned now to the point of thoughtless convenience being core. Environmental cost means nothing, fiscal cost means everything, and for too long we’ve had the latter too easy, so easy, we just throw it all away. I got angry in the car, angry at the television, angry on Facebook, and worst of all, was becoming angry in the home. It’s funny how things can always get worse, worse to the point whereby the thought of all of the above seems like a complete breeze. Well. Things did get worse, but I shan’t go into that now, I’ve got a book to write, and four book ideas have already slipped my mind whilst I write these bags of gold. It wasn’t that which tipped me though, it was something small a little while later; it was the last card on a house of 51 that brought the house a toppling. My brow beat, my complexion grey to yellow as my pacing disturbed those at the other end of the platform. I was lost, just like everybody else, only I’d awoken to it; I was a ghost trapped in time. Thanks be to the elderly man who then appeared before me, took to the end of the platform he did, out of his way, out of everybody’s way. Introducing himself kindly, quickly he established a rapport with my restlessness, as if in tangent with the rhythm of it. He’d been strong in his day, probably still was for his age, told me he’d been an angry soul as a younger man, maybe seen something in me, pacing. He’d lost his way, lost his family through the anger, gave me a lecture on it he did. I found the whole thing strange; no-one had ever just started talking to me on this particular platform, never. He calmed me down with talk, his own talk, never asking me a single thing; he knew a response wasn’t there just then and there. Seems that plastic bags have been produced and recycled for the whole of a man’s career, different bags for different souls, a whole line requiring holes, another requiring no holes. Bags and films made of oils, some cheap and full of friction, some dear and touched with additive. Colours left in and colours left out. Specific contaminants dictating specific ingredients - specific ingredients containing specific goods. Paid over time for a thousand bags home to pay a boy a bob a hundred to punch the M&S line. Green was labelled, ‘profit’ as the old stuff got chopped to granule and came back out as new. I survived that day, turned back on a lost cause and had some Squares with a Spitfire.