The grim window is open and reggae blares out. Satellite is received: cricket, Arsenio Hall, stuff they have on Sky Digital in America. Somebody’s mum looks down on the kids at the bus stop, a picture from when she was young and the view was earth red and aquamarine. This is her room with a view although she has an even bigger view from the sky where the earth is as big as a beach ball or small as a fly’s eye.
They say it’s grim up North: well here’s living proof of just how grim things can get down South. This is the first in a new series called Grim Windows. (Although it was an agony deciding against THE CLOSE UP and opting for a bit of perspective.) It just goes to show that while we live in fear of the mirror-glassed march of faceless globalisation some things never change: foxes are still dodgy, local newspaper subs still know where to put apostrophes which is no small feat in these days of grammatical heresy, ruched nets still hang and the mono-business is alive and well. Although not having read the story, perhaps it indicates that local newspaper subs have NO idea where to put apostrophes. How many pairs of shoes did the fox get away with? This punctuation suggests two pairs minimum and that shows pre-meditation. A heist so cunning, so daring, so dastardly even Raffles/Ronnie Biggs/George Clooney himself would have been envious. The Streatham Fox would surely have had to fetch the shoes in its jaws, if not sandal by trainer, then pair by pair. A family of 10 are now Shoeless Joes and the Streatham Fox tapdances in the alley with a smirk on his chops and a pink flip-flop thong chafing his left hind paw.
As for the grim windows – how grim can you get? The only thing grimmer than these windows is the view: Brixton Prison.
