An 'X.Press' Special ... {?!}

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jul/07/mirror-express-reach-cut-jobs-manchester-evening-news-birmingham-mail
The owner of the Daily Mirror, Daily Express and Daily Star newspapers is to cut 550 jobs, 12% of its workforce, because of falling income amid reduced demand for advertising in its titles.
Reach, formerly known as Trinity Mirror, said its group revenue had tumbled by 27.5% during the second quarter, compared with a year earlier, as newspaper sales and advertising plummeted during the coronavirus crisis.
The company, which also owns hundreds of regional papers including the Manchester Evening News, Birmingham Mail and Liverpool Echo, said more people had been reading its products online over the past three months, but this was not enough to offset the loss in income.
Reach said more than 2.5 million customers have registered to read its papers online, and it intends to increase this to 10 million by the end of 2022, against an earlier target of 7 million.
The group said the job cuts and other changes would cost it £20m, but save it £35m a year.
“Structural change in the media sector has accelerated during the pandemic,” said Jim Mullen, the chief executive of Reach, adding that the company had seen increased adoption of its digital products, “however, due to reduced advertising demand, we have not seen commensurate increases in digital revenue”.
He added: “Regrettably, these plans involve a reduction in our workforce and we will ensure all impacted colleagues are treated with fairness and respect throughout the forthcoming consultation process.”
Journalists in the company’s editorial teams are expected to be affected by the job cuts, as well as staff in the advertising and central operations departments.
The company said that its editorial department “will move to a more centralised structure, bringing together national and regional teams across print and digital to significantly increase efficiency and remove duplication”.
Staff at Reach are understood to be concerned about the plans to create a single editorial division, rather than the current split between national and regional papers.
It is also understood that the national and regional circulation departments will be brought together.
Employees were sent a memo by the group’s editor-in-chief, Lloyd Embley, and chief operating officer, Alan Edmunds, informing them that the company expects to cut around 325 staff from editorial and circulation.
The note said the restructuring plans “will have implications for everyone in our editorial, circulation and printing teams – both regionally and nationally”.
Reach has announced that it plans fewer locations and a simpler management structure for its local commercial and finance teams as it seeks to cut costs.
Staff at regional newspapers are thought to be concerned about the future of local offices, after many of them have worked from home during the pandemic.
Workers have been told that Reach is considering whether remote working should become permanent, and that the company will update them on its plans in the autumn.
Newspaper circulations have begun to increase, said Reach, as the government has eased lockdown restrictions, although they remain significantly lower than levels before Covid-19.
Reach said that the changes at the company will allow it to end the temporary pay cuts for staff, although a 20% reduction will continue for its chief executive, chief financial officer and other board members.
Journalists at Reach’s newspapers said in June they were considering taking legal action against executives after their wages were reduced by 10% at the start of April, which they claimed was “without consultation or consent” and with no reduction to their workload.
Several other news organisations have forced staff to take pay cuts or have announced job cuts amid a slide in revenue since the start of the pandemic.

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open emails:
To: Alison.Little@Express.co.uk
From: philtal_uk@yahoo.com
[An 'X.Press' Special ...  {?!}]
Hi Alison,
Haven't written to you for a while ...
I ReViewed this Plum [Pudding Club] 'Pastiche' the other day, while browsing through some Old[e] E-mails ... and thought/felt of 'YOU'/you ...
['] I last ran into young Jingo Little in the smoking room of the Senior Illiberal Club.
She was lying back in an arm-chair with her mouth open and a pretty vacant expression in her eyes ... while a grey-haired dame in the middle-spreading distance watched her with such disgust that I concluded Jingo must have pinched her favourite seat.
That's the worse thing of being in a strange club - without intending it, you find yourself constantly trampling on the vested interests of the Elder Inhabitants.
'Hello face!' I cried.
'Cheerio ugly!' she replied.
Despite what she said, I sat down beside her and settled down to have a few quick ones before lunch ...

Background to all this was that once a year the committee of the [A] B.'s C[lub] decides that the old base could do with a wash and brush up and so they shoo us out, and dump us down for a few weeks in some other institution.  This time we were nesting at the Senior Illiberal, and, personally, I had found the strain pretty fearful. I mean, when you've got used to a club where everything's nice and cheery and easy-going, and where, if you want to attract a girl's attention, you heave a bit of bread at her, it kind of damps you to come to a place where the youngest member is about 88 [= 'Two Fat Ladies' - in non-P.C. Bingo Lingo one of the favoured forms of dialogue amongst the Old[e]sters@theSeniorIlliberal]  and it isn't considered Good Form to talk to anyone unless you went through the Korean War and/or Cuban Missile Crisis together. Because of that, in spite of her dismissiveness, it was a relief to come across Jingo ...
After a somewhat pained silence, lasting who knows how long, we started to talk in hushed voices.
'This club,' I said, 'is The Limit.'
'It's the Elephant's Backside,' agreed young Jingo. 'I believe the old girl over by the window has been dead three days, but I don't like to mention it in case it is considered Bad Form.'
I Diverted: 'Have you lunched here yet?'
'No. Why?'
'They have waitresses instead of waiters.'
'Good golly Mr Woofter! I thought that went out with the closure of Spare Rib!'
Bingo mused on this for a moment, then straightened her dress absently.
'Er ... are they pretty girls?' she said [conspiratorially].
'No,' I replied [deflatingly].
She seemed disappointed for a while, but soon pulled round.
'I haven't a Bean, you know,' she said suddenly.
I startled.
'Hasn't your auntie forgiven you yet?'
'Not yet, confound her!'
You see, young Jingo had had a bit of a dust-up with Lady Littleham, her fabulously rich Great Auntie, resulting a siz[e]able portion of her Family Allowance being knocked off. I was sorry to hear the row was still on, because I had thought it over. I resolved to do the impoverished Little Lass well with 'Festive' Board/Bored, and scanned the Menu with some intentness when The Waitress finally rolled up with it.
'How would this do you, Jingo?' I said at length. 'A bowl of Jellied Eels, Battered Cod and Chips, some Cold Curry, and a splash of Gooseberry Tart, with a bite of Hard Cheese to finish, all washed down lashingly with Ginger Beer, if you get my drift?'
I don't know that I exactly expected Jingo to scream with delight - 'though I had picked the items I knew to be her Pet Dishes - but I did expect her to say something. I looked up with surpriZe when my list of 'Treats To Come' was met with silence ... and ... found that her attention was elsewhere ...
Jingo was gazing at the recently arrived waitress with the look of a Bitch that has just remembered where her favourite Bone is buried.
She was a tallish girl with soft, soulful brown eyes, and some kind of Express'o coffee-coloured skin . Nice figure and all that also. Rather decent hands too. Impeccably clean.  I did not remember having seen her about before, and I must say she added Variety to the mostly off-white, pale and dull Illiberal Club environment.
'How about it Little Lassie?' I said to Jingo, being increasingly peckish myself, and being all for getting the meal order Booked and going on to the Serious Knife-and-Fork Work.
'Eh?!' said young Jingo absently.
I recited The Programme once more.
'Oh, yes, fine, fine' said Jingo. 'Anything, anything!'
The Dark Waitress pushed off to waitress elsewhere and Jingo turned to me with protruding eyes. 'I thought you said they weren't pretty Gertie Woofter!' she said reproachfully.
'Oh my heavens!' I said. 'You haven't fallen for anOther have you?! - and a Girl you have only just seen!'
'There are times, Gertie,' said young Jingo, 'when one look is enough - when passing through a Crowd, we meet Somebody's Eye/I and something seems to whisper ...'
As what seemed to be 'whisper'd trailed off into Jingo's private spaces, the hors d'oeuvres arrived, and we suspended further remarks in order to swoop on the Jellied Eels with some Vigour ... [']
...
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... open emails ...
From: "Alison Little" <Alison.Little@Express.co.uk> 
To: "'philtal_uk@yahoo.com'" <philtal_uk@yahoo.com>
Subject: 
Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2002 15:25:41 -0000
   
for the flowers-to-be, thankyou?

...
+++
...
Anyway ...
Dr. ['Quaker'?] A[lison].L[ittle],
I remain feeling 'strange[r]y' Fond towards the Memory of You ... even 'though it has seemed you turned out ToB./2b/into a ['Troll'able'] 'Right-Wing "Bigot"' ...
[I have been at more than a few 'Islamophobia' forums at which D.Express Front Page Leads, some written by you, have been 'held up' - literally -  as 'Examples'] ...
Nevermind.
[Even 'though you are 'despiZ'd' by some/many/most of  my friends in/on the Left-Wing/Minority/Minorities/Under 'Classes' ...]
I Wish You ...
Best Wishes,
P[hilip].T[albot]
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Journey of the marginal magi - or the 'ramblings' of three fairly foolish B-grade northern philosophers.
A cold coming together we had of it in the northern [skies?] place of learning, and it seemed to be the worst of times for such a journey, and it was such a long journey, the ways were deep and the courses were winding and more complex and strange than we had ever imagined, and the weather was terrible, so cold, so god-forsaken-seeming cold, in the dead of winter, in some almost forgotten provincial place that made us feel inferior, though maybe we were learning something about humility, and up and down and left and right and round and about we went, and it always seemed like there was no getting there, and we weren't even sure if there was any there to get to, and we crissed and we crossed and we cursed, yes we fucking cursed, and we double- and triple- and other multiples crossed each others' paths, or so it seemed, and drank too much, and smoked too much, sleeping in snatches, preferring to travel at night, and perhaps that travelling was just dreaming, but maybe there was something to be found in the dream states, they might reveal things, you could never say for sure, and then we went on to make our ways in the world, but although we got to other places, and took on responsibilities of sorts, and did things actively, and had things happen to us, we never seemed to find a way that was really leading anywhere, or so it often seemed, in night thoughts, which might just have been dreams, you never could tell for sure, and sometimes we heard voices singing in our ears, but maybe they were only radio sounds, saying that this was all folly.
 
Then, at a new dawn of sorts, we came down to a temperate place, wet, below the snow-line, which smelled of last night's take-away meals and too much alcohol consumed, but perhaps that was just prejudice, what we expected to find determining what we did find, ... and there was another running river, which did, in truth, it was not just a fancy, flow onwards and outwards to blend into the worldwide waterway ...
Bittersweet Tyne, bittersweet Wear, bittersweet Thames, ... bittersweet world-wide waterway ... flow on while we continue our wanderings ...
Three figures, which might be seen as trees in silhouette, poking into a midwinter skyscape ... all shades of blue from indigo to sky flowing into each other in a fluid dynamic system beyond adequate description or full comprehension ... it seemed to signify something, but of what we could not say ...
Cursing and grumbling and running away and wanting more drink and sex, and fires going out and being reignited ... and maybe it was just one more damned cigarette after another damned cigarette ...
 
And the platonic prick turned away from all that worldly striving, but he could never quite manage to give up the fags ...
'I always said you were a repressed homosexual,' said the existentialist, who could be apparently cruel tongued, but was essentially kind (the platonic realist knew something about essentials), even if she was over-prone to rushing to premature conclusions ... but aren't we all? and he had his own problems with premature rushes, as they both knew only too well...
And the quaker, who was lively and chatty, but didn't speak her mind much, and who was lovely, but often had dirty fingernails (strange how inconsequential seeming memories can linger longer than more consequential seeming ones) became a remotely famous expressive observer of the powerful and rich (a chief political correspondent, in other words)... but she still sang quietly of bleak mid-winters, in the prick's mind at least ... he seemed to see behind her peaceful and pleasant vitality some great fears and some secret sadnesses ... but that must be true of all ...
And the existentialist left the hypothetical life behind her and embarked on an active do-gooding career ... but apparently it just wasn't in her nature to do the thoughtlessly active life completely, so she occasionally returned to the contemplative life, when on sick leave with exhaustion - at least that was one way of interpreting it ...
A hard time we had of it ... or so we pretended sometimes ... but we were affluent, and middle-class, and well educated, and always had multiple-possibilities open to us - too many it sometimes seemed - and what we complained of was usually what we had chosen ... and our hard times were never, in truth, all that very hard.
But voices still sang in our ears saying: 'Maybe this is all folly.' 
Had we come all that way, and would we go on all that way who knew how far further, for birth or for death?...
There was a birth, or seemed to have been one, we had plenty of evidence for, and no serious doubts about, that. But there was not enough information to come to other conclusions ...
It was impossible to say, as yet, why we had been gone or been led all that way, along those infinitely complex routes, which were different for each of us, even though there were similarities ... but then, as we knew, or guessed, the 'why?' questions were always the most difficult, and were perhaps beyond answerings ...
Most of this was a long time ago, I remember, or have to remind myself, but it continues, and past flows into, and determines, present and future ... and if the past is, as some suggest, best dismissed and forgotten, then what of the present and future, which become past all too quickly? ...
It was all, some might say, satisfactory, but not really good enough ... so we continued in search of better ... 
So the semi-super-semi-shitty sages got all mixed up...
Six hands on a door, pushing open, pulling shut, touching but not linking ... and which hand was attached to which body?...
They were supposed to be there at the same time and place doing the same thing - doing philosophy, that is, loving wisdom in their own peculiar ways, which were foolish, but not entirely so...
But the likely lass came late, or the other two arrived early ...
And the likely lad shouldn't have been there that year, he should have been somewhere else, or he should have come later ...
And the weird sister shouldn't have been there at all, she didn't have the grades, even though she was perhaps the cleverest of the lot, and she should have waited, retaken, and arrived later, or gone somewhere else, like the other weird sister...
Was the likely lass, that often silent thinker, the only one to get it right? had she had worked it out more quietly and carefully than the other two, who were always mouthing off and rushing things, one way or another? Or, as the 2-1 majority suggested, was she the minority that got it wrong, and messed it up for the others? 

And it always seemed as if there was no getting there, and we were not even sure that there was any there to get to, because every time we got to some desired there, it didn't seem to be what we had anticipated ... there always seemed to be something disappointing, which made us suspect that it was not the there that we had set out to reach ...
We had much more evidence - too much it sometimes seemed - but the doubts grew ... which was surprising, because rumour (which we said we didn't listen to, while listening to it carefully) had suggested that with more evidence, doubts would reduce...
And experience, which was supposed to be the most important source of knowledge (or at least more reliable than other sources) seemed only to complicate matters further ...
There was a birth, that seemed a sustainable assumption ... it was (whatever 'it' was) so it must have started, or at least have been previously so different that a change from that state to this state, to which the word 'birth' could be applied, was alomst certain to have occurred ...
But where was it leading? ...
The only certainty seemed to be that something was taking its course ... 
And so .. meanwhile ... we continue to take our courses ... never sure of the extent to which they are self-determined and of the extent to which they are imposed on the self by external forces ... and ...
... it is such a long journey ... and yet it seems all too short ... and there is so much happening during it .. and yet it seems that nothing much happens ... and voices keep asking:
'Is this all folly?'
The road thins out here ... and a narrowing gorge begrudges a way through ...
But random walkers can get around most obstacles eventually ...
The platonic prick said: 'Music raised me to new heights of love ... until that moment, nothing had so bound me in such sweet chains ...'
It was, perhaps, a rash statement - but now and then, through calm and cloudless skies, a sudden streak of fire cuts the dark, catching the eye that watches listlessly.
He continued: 'Vivid crowning beauties grow in strength as consciousness becomes more appreciative of them.'
The others looked at him with impatience, and, eventually, he agreed that he had digressed enough. It was time to turn their minds back to the road of truth, and to adjust discussion to what time was left to them - but that was not simple. 
Names change ... labels change ...
Or, as the pseudo-existentialist (concluding naturally, she believed) put it: 'Time passes, people change.'
True enough.
All in all ... it changes ... but the essence of it all remains the same ...
So...
The quaker, the catholic, the anglican [words meaning many things (and not necessarily indicating faiths), while also being merely nominal signifiers of particular, relatively insignificant, individualized human beings] wandered in and out of relative obscurity, and each others' and other people's lives, and noticed a few things that nobody had ever noticed before, and never would again, and missed many other matters that they might have noticed, but didn't.
While the voices sometimes sang in their ears, saying that this was maybe all folly.
'Six hands at an open door...'
But...
There might have been more, and the names might have been different, and ...
The time might not have yet come ...
Or it might have been and gone ... [and too much has, most probably]
Or, next time, after a reshuffle, it might all be different ...
One name might have been Zed ... who was a typically British delightfully mixed up mess ... iridescent, polyglottic, cosmopolitan ... a free-wheeling wild daisy ... daisy ... on an old-fashioned upright English bicycle ... riding to the unifying international news agency building through a changing London docklands on an island of sorts (which was nominally a home for dogs) and near the time centre at Greenwich ... and nearby lived mostly ignored people who would not recognise her as a fellow English rose because their own blooming possibilities had been neglected ... (and not far away in time and place, under a futuristic light railway bridge, a multicultural ideas spreading news agent was murdered by ethnic nationalists with closed minds who couldn't escape from their past prejudices) ... Z was a far from unnecessary letter ...
[... which I would like to send, but I am careful about decorums, and I do not know a proper form of address for her ...]
Another might have been M ... a sharp-tongued, snub-nosed Scottish socratic ... passionate and compassionate ... much concerned about The Issues ... who liked dialectics in non-standard dialects ... and complained that talking to him could be like talking to herself ... and who wrote letters with reverse strip-teases in them ... she sat in bed writing to him and put on an extra jumper and extra socks and ... well he was cold-seeming ... and he had once sat on a bed with her when she was wearing a partly transparent nightie and he had pretended very carefully not to see through it ...
[.. but then Mary has her own kinds of off-handedness ... and distancing techniques ...]
Or there might have been another A ... a very sophisticated Irish named (and double-barrelled) self-styled working class lass ... who encouraged him to go with the flow with kind words and curving flowing limb motions ... and who walked alongside him in a slightly absurd part-falling manner (which might have had something to do with the vaguely ridiculous thick-souled shoes she was wearing) ... but with her, as with others, there seemed to be a mountainous obstacle course in the space between them ... which even a veteran rambler could not find a route through .. or around ... and perhaps it was better to maintain a distance between ...
[... and off Nessie flowed into the sunset /sunrise with her proeviously displaced bobby-dazzling-silver-buckled-sailor-boy sort of attachment ... which was pleasing but saddening for me ...]
And ... I do not overlook the delightfully expansive Welsh possibilities ... where words flow and flow deliciously ... and the letter arrangements seem to pile up almost randomly [but there are always ordering patterns holding things together, of course] ...
And ...there are all the other wonderful alternative possibilities in the other bits and pieces [... genes .. ethnicity ... culture ...] flwoing into the making of the presently flowering British rose to be considered [... proper consideration never ends ...]
{And anyone who thinks Brits essentially 'Anglo-Saxon' is surely the smallest minded of fools}
And ...

You get the odd glimpse of the infinite complexity of it all ... but then you lose it ... and you go on with your small-scale guess-work ...
So ...
Call them what you will ... ally, catty, filly ... or make them up as you go along ... angels, imps, aliens ... or (as it actually seems to go) rearrange bits of the previously existing into new patterns ...

They travelled.
Chilly awakenings under canvas. Buses that never turned up. Dreary, slow, often-stopping local trains. The dizzy kaleidoscope of landscapes and ruins. Cities that changed before their eyes as they stopped to stare for an instant. Seascapes and skyscapes. Ships coming in not laden with gold. Flowing patterns of lives in motion in a world in motion, with the increasing density of everyday experience seeming to render all experiences increasingly transient and superficial.
And...
Each found places there were satisfactory for a while, then unsatisfactory.
So they went to other places - or to spaces between things that, for a while at least, they could call their own.
And then one day, or it might have been many days, they seemed to find themselves among people clutching gods of sorts that they did not quite believe in any more, or which, one way or another, or in several (even many) ways did not satisfy all their needs of belief.
It seemed to be a time of general and particular confusion ... or of reconsideration ... or of reviews ... out of which a new synthesis of older ways of thinking might emerge.
If the hypothesis of a fully transcendent creator implanting motion in the system of extended bodies were judged no long sustainable, then it would seem an instrinsic characteristic of the extended or spatial world that everything within it is constituted of particular proportions of motion and rest - which suggests that motion must be essential to and inseparable from the nature and constitution of extended things. The proportions of motion and rest within the system as a whole must be constant, since there could be no external cause to explain any change in the system; but within the subordinate parts of the system the proportions of motion and rest are constantly changing in the interaction of these parts among each other.
Spin spin spin out the ever-changing (and ever so easy to misrepresent and misinterpret) system of Spinoza, or something like it.
Minds in turmoil, how they longed to embrace simples. Many times they rushed towards them, desperate to hold on to solid forms. Many times the solid things fluttered through clutching fingers, sifting away, like shadows, dissolving like dreams, and each time the griefs cut to the hearts sharper, and they cried out incoherent words, which winged into the darkness.
Now down they came to the water's edge, streaming tears ... drops of sea-stuff returning to the world-wide waterway.
Rumour has it that if you throw a cup of water into the sea and return a decade or so later to scoop up a fresh cup of water from the same (which is not of course the same) bit of the sea, then, despite all the churning and mixing that has occurred in the sea over the decade or so, the cup will contain some molecules of the water you threw into the sea at the earlier time. It seems unlikely, but statistical probabilities suggest it - there are more molecules of water in a cup (whatever its size) than there are cups (or the equivalent volume) in the sea.
'I don't know what to say.'
'No words. No words. Hush.'
Hush.
Sea sounds. See changes.

So we made for the outer limits, where the worldwide waterway seemed to flow towards its end - though of course it was an illusion. Some said it was where the Cimmerians previously had their homes, a realm shrouded in mist and cloud, where the sun could never flash rays through the murk. Others said it was a just a small northern town in the middle of winter.
Wandering on, bedlam melodies wandering through our minds ...
... we get by and keep on keeping on with a little help from our friends all is on little loves and small acts of kindness and big hugs pulling mussels from shells and pulling muscles in other words squeeze me you know how to do that Annie and get your gun she's passed it's a miracle her paint's all over town and Alison my aim is true I know this world is killing you and her and him and me and OK I was just Cathy's clown on a hillside desolate will nature make a man of me yet visions of swastikas two new pence to have a go and fall wanking to the floor and frigging in the rigging while there are footsteps on the dancefloor the next time I'll be true I heard on the grapevine that rumour had it that I just called to say I love you thank you for giving me the best day of my life and thank you for calling inquiries while I got stuck in the moment records stick stuck records bells on our fingers ask not whom we toll them for we shall have music wherever we go on go on go on at last the go on show at last but not the end there is no end to wandering I would go out tonight but I have not got a thing to wear but don't you forget about me as you walk on by if you see me walking down the street walk on walk on by with love in your heart and take a walk on the wild side and you just know that bitch won't fuck again but say it ain't so Joe say it Joe eh Joe Hey Joe where are you going with that gun in your hand excuse me while I take another face from the ancient gallery and kiss the sky often mistaken for kiss this guy kiss me kiss me you know how to please me yeah yeah kiss me in the milky twilight you wear that dress and I will wear those shoes and she was last seen the last time I ever saw her face wearing stop me stop me if you've heard this one before hey hey hey what's going on we're sailing off the edge of the world living like Fu Manchu there's nothing else to do maybe baby we know where we are going once in a lifetime on the road to nowhere or funky town or kook city and live life from a window just taking in the view all around the world looking for you and you just stayed in your room that day that day when we took off our clothes and you were crying and the stupid things you said and I said we were birds of paradise and you saw the whole of the moon pink pink pink moon no matter where I roam I will return to my British roses before the sky closes on them and opens on others and no one will ever take me from she and she been a long time been a long time been a lonely lonely lonely long time under the northern skies waiting and wondering and wandering on for more life in a northern town wandering on and maybe tomorow maybe someday we'll get by ...
... jigsaw feeling ... has me reeling ... which may be lurching desperately ... or which may be a kind of dancing.

What triangles ...
The solitary sage of Walden (or there or there abouts - or some other place of concorde) pointed out that triangles of extraordinary size were set up when two people by chance (as it might seem) separated by many earthly miles looked at the same distant star at the same earthly instant ...
What polygons of unthinkable complexity are formed when the consciousnesses of three or more (billions maybe) are linked up deeply for a single instant.
And each individual consciousness is limitless ... set off at any instant in any direction in any individual mind, and you'll never reach an end to the association networks ...
Beyond the outlines ... barely experienced, poorly remembered ... fragmentary details ... the bewildering spread of the simple seeming event ... 
Figures in a blended inscape and outscape ...
Cathy and her clown walked together near the water's edge. Blurs from some perspectives, dots, or even less from others. Viewed from some places and times they become recognizable human forms, though mostly in outline, devoid of many details. Further perspective shifts reveal complexitity upon completity. It is possible to conceive of a multiverse perspective ... all possible perspectives at the same instant.
Two little people on a coastal walk in a small town, on the margins, but at the centre of things ... So it is with all: any point, any person, any event, is central and marginal and everywhere in between.
She is small and short-stepping. He is tall and long-striding. The long and the short of it. Big he who is not so big and small she who is not so small. They do not seem well matched. Their mortions are not very synchronized-seeming, as she is too fond of pointing out for his comfort (and hers perhaps too). She walks close to him, often bumping into him rather clumsily. Mostly she talks, he listens. A deluge of words. Waves crashing on to the shore. Her voice rises in pitch and and increases in tempo as she continues. She seems anxious to get things said, while she still has the chance, while there is still time.
They walk in no particular direction, to nowhere in particular. Separate random walks are taking place, which, since they are walking together, in however an unsynchronised and clumsy and bumping manner, become a shared walk. They walk on the edge of land and sea, near a pub called the Water's Edge. Human naming systems help to make a sort of sense of things, providing reference points and an order of sorts.
They seem on the edge of things, in a marginal zone, a place of transition. and they are nearing the edge of their time together. Soon they'll separate, perhaps forever. So it seems she has to get her words said. She talks of people on the edge of things, marginalised people, known as the 'UnderClass' for want of a more human label, whom she's encountered in the early stages of her training as a probation officer. It seems important to her to let him know of what she has witnessed. He's a bit puzzled by that. She's leaving him behind, but wants to fill his mind with her thoughts and experiences. She's planting trace memories perhaps.
Another way of seeing it ... on the shores of the cosmic ocean a strangely beautiful well-matched asymetric couple mess things up.
(This much seems true: new life comes from asymmetry - the evidence is all around. Fear death by symmetry - when all the complex, messy slightly disordered asymmetrical unities break up, and 'it' becomes a spread of equally distanced particle fragments drifting ever further apart.)
Random walks
The myriad contingencies of a short walk in a small town.
But when you consider them with an open mind everything can seem to 'Connect' and every part seems integral to the whole.
Sitting in my small town room, given strange powever by technologies, the workings of which I do not understand and never will, I seem to travel far, and seem to perceive many things.
Common culture. It is in us all. Flowing through us all and being transformed by us all.
All in all.
All things might be written in a single book of love, of which creation is the scattered leaves.
Organisations can form in the underground [and they can be forces for good - not terrorist networks], and they can communicate in undertones, and without the constituent parts having much conscious awareness that they are a part of a larger whole.
Birds flock together at appropriate times, but probably are not much aware that they are flocking.
Perhaps we are often acted upon by 'Organising Forces', beyond our understanding. 
This long watch, which dog-like he kept ... Soon the long wished for signs might relieve his passive toils ... beacons gleaming through long recurring nights ... Beacons .. which might only be cigarettes ... These walls could recall strange things .. and much else...
Like a shrunken leaf ... that is not really dying ... all recycles .. flows .. changes ... feebly feeling ... like a dream that walks by day ... the persuasive breath of memories involuntarily recalled ... mostly stirring the heart with songs .. sometimes sensed as beautiful .. sometimes not ...
Like shapes in dreams he wandered through the years, seeming random, planless, his 'forethought' in chains ...
But the vision of the birds might yet work its end into bliss ...
But contraries might yet blast darkly first...
This way the part-time seer hymned, dubiously mixing doom and bliss, dark mingling with light ... and much confusion and obscurity ...
Sharing with the way-haunting birds, which seemed to signal something ... he was responding to the strains .. which could not be merely sounds .. there had to be some meaning, some purpose in everything ... the singings sounded of sorrows and glad days ... and of good times that might yet shame the bad. 
Meanwhile ... a most unpleasant surprise was in store for the platonic prick ...
...just as the likely lass began yawning as he was telling her all sorts of amusing stories that had happend to him at different times and places, and even referring once to the Greek cynical philospher Diogenes, the weird sister appeared from one of the back rooms. Whether she had torn herself away from a cold collation, or from the little green drawing room, where some postgraduates' conversation had become more alarming to her, whether she had come of her own free will, or whether she had been thrown out of her previous environment in embarrassing circumstances, which she might or might not later reveal ... whatever the cause or collection of part-causes that had brought her from some other place to this place, she apeared to be cheerful and in the best of spirits. And she was holding on to the arm of the devil's advocate, or one who was assuming that role, for the time being, and in the particular circumstances in which they now all found themselves. Yet he appeared unhappy. Maybe she had been dragging him along with her (and even perhaps attempting to pull him to the floor) for some time. Whatever the cause, assuming there was one, the poor putter-of-the-case-against certainly seemed discomforted, for he kept attempting to turn around, while his eyebrows beetled in all directions, and his eyes seemed to be searching for a way to excape from this amicable arm-in-arm promenade with the weird sister.
It was, indeed, quite an intolerable situation. The platonic prick saw no ther way out of it than to gulp down quickly, with forced convivialtiy, two cups of coffee, with were, of course, laced with red wine, while he kept on telling the most unlikely stories. The devil's advocate became ever more disconcerted, but still could find no way of excape. The weird sister laughed and scowled at the fun of it all. The kindly quaker remained, as often, seemingly calmly silent. 
Bridge buildings ...
Ally and philly were sitting together in a bar, which might have been called The Bridge (but that was actually another place, another time) and she began openly to speak her mind to him for once ... The wonderful flow of words enters him and fills him and swells him, and the words change her in his mind ... she'll never seem the same again. After an hour or two, he feels obliged to say something about himself, but when he attempts to interrupt her word-flow, she says, 'No ... I'll speak' ... and the wonderful warming and expansive words continue to come out of her, and to close the space between them, and to fill him with a her glow, which he will never forget, even though, for various reasons, they do not see much of each other afterwards.
She was possibly the least malicious person he had ever met, but ally was the one person to speak negative things about catty into his ears - telling him that catty 'was just not worth it' and that he 'could do better than that woman'. And when he thought feelingly about it then, and for a long time afterwards, he saw multiple possible meanings in what she said ... but he could not accept the proposition that any human being was 'just not worth it', because all are worth it, or else all are worth nothing ... and maybe that was just quibbling ... but ... that was the way it was with him.
Years later, (2002 in fact) pally ally cropped up in India and Pakistan (this is no fiction [and is if to prove she was a real person, not a symbol, in 2003 Alison supported the dehumanizing and illegal - by the normal conventions of international law - U.S./U.K. invasion of Iraq) at a time of tension, when some feared the possibility of a nuclear war. She was part of a leading world stateman's 'travelling entourage' (her words) ... to most a unnoticed face in a crowd ... but to the platonic prick she was a symbol of peace ... she carried love with her and no hatred that he could imagine. And oddly enough (or not) tensions on the Indian sub-continent reduced afterwards, and the threat of nuclear war faded. Of course many others were involved. The key seemed to be: not the 'great' men's [there were, alas, still too few 'great' women on the world's stage] words and deeds ... nor even the charms (which were considerable) of his known female peace symbol ... but all those millions of little loves of little lives of mostly kindly mostly decent people who didn't actually want to slaughter others, or to be slaughtered themselves - maybe they all worked together, without quite knowing it, to calm things down.
Meanwhile, the curious cat cared so much about the marginalized people whom she worked with (and for) that it once (or more) almost broke her. She saw hellish visions of 'bottomless pits of need and deprivation' ...
And there can seem to be no end to the suffering in the private hells of even an affluent society.
But even with such dispiriting thoughts in mind to discourage her, she returned to work and did little things to help people and to fill up the void bit by bit.
In the near past that was a long time ago cat wrote many letters to phil and complained that he never wrote enough to her ... it was a complaint that mixed fairness with unfairness, as most do ...
In her letters, as far as he could remember, she only ever quoted him one line of poetry, from Tennyson's Ulysses:
'... I am a part of all that I have met ... '
As she might or might not have gone on to point out, the reverse it also true:
... All that I have met is a part of me ...
[In passing, it is probably fair to note that Catherine does not have much literary appreciation ... and although she seems to believe herself manneredly superior, she does not follow the rules of polite communication ...  and her cruelty sometimes outweights her kindness ...
(Matter of factly, she suggests as a title for these ramblings 'Ravings of a Madman?' - anyone who has used up time reading this far can judge how apposite her suggestion is).]
The surprising thing was that while Cat and Al studied much the same subject in much the same place at much the same time, and wandered more or less contemporaneously in much the same streets of at least two other cities ... and had much in common ... and must have crossed paths occasionally ... and had even perhaps caused each other some hurt of sorts, via their connections through Phil ... they never fully met (unless a trick was missed) .. which is something a shame, because they had much good to share with each other ...

It can seem like nonsense, but it does eventually seem to resolve itself into a sort of sense ...
... for a while ...
All this was a long time ago. But what is a long time? The long and the short of it all. Big he who was not so big and small shes who were not so small. I remember little but much. I forget much but little. And I would do it again but in different ways. Repetition is a form of change. Nothing is the same twice, so nothing is the same ever. Say hello, wave goodbye. Wave goobye, say hello. In every meeting, the image of birth, a sort of coming together. In every parting, the image of death, a sort of falling apart. I never knew you well enough, you never knew me well enough. So it goes. Undertanding of other people is, like all understanding, never good enough. On it goes. On we go. Finding out more. Making new patterns, remembering and forgetting, building up and breaking down. Say hello, wave goodbye. Kiss and hug if you want to, do not kiss and hug if you do not want to. Something was taking its course, that much is certain, if no more. Whether we follow a course to birth or to death is uncertain. And that uncertainty clouds the issue of whether we act freely or follow courses determined for us. But there does seem to be free will on the local human scale. At any possible world junction there are many, perhaps limitless, possibilities open to us, and every instant brings us to a new possible world junction, when a small act of choice can make a huge difference. But if, whatever choices we make, the overall course of things is towards a break up of all unities, and so towards oblivion for all, then individual destinies seem trivial. If it is not to be futile, then we must find courses that lead somewhere, to some betterment, some resolution, some harmony, some development, or just some continuation. Maybe it comes down to faith, but that might just be wishful thinking. But you never know - and maybe there's hope in uncertainty. No one, the pessimists or the optimists, really knows. Humans are perhaps just too limited in understanding, and probably, however developed they become, always will be. That is the way it seems to be and maybe will remain. And so one cannot escape from the voices singing that this might be all just folly. But then folly is not the same as futility. And folly is at least amusing and out of 'amusement' might come a more profound kind of comedy, which is a movement towards harmony, and when the motion is towards harmony then perhaps the easier it becomes to make approaches towards some ideal harmonic state - even if it is never reached. And actually achieving complete harmony might not even be desirable, because that might be the end of it all - after which no more for worse or for better.
It can seem foolish to speculate at random about the narrowest and widest matters ... but what else can you do? 
...
Even if it is perhaps a hopeless and unrewarding endeavour ...
...
And even if there can seem little point to what can often appear to be merely enduring for the sake of endurance ...
...
Pass me another cigarette, please ... and ... do you have a light, please? ...
[... January 2002 ... September 2003 ...]

+++++
p.s. what[so]ever became of 'COPY'-takers ... who needs them in the digital age? ... they come, they go ... and who gives a 'SHIT' when they lose their jobs ... so long as you keep yours/years [when you have survived some 'transition' from 'this' to 'that' ... so it goes?!] ... see you in
pps Ever read Dante's 'PurgeATory'...?, Alison ...  NeverMind ...