Urban Jungle

Feeling a bit better than yesterday but still not great I did manage to stumble out and meet my minimal obligations for the day. Today even featured some human interaction. Unfortunately it was with a post office counter clerk who clearly hated her job, her life and me and not necessarily in that order. A favourite meme of sixties TV science fiction was the ease with which evil super computers could be made to blow themselves up simply by posing a paradox a 6 year old could deal with, the writers who favoured this device clearly did not understand computers BUT they may have met a postal clerk out of the same mould as this one. The fact that the package had been ordered by someone in Scotland from a company in the USA to be delivered to someone else in Oxfordshire and was now being picked up by someone from the same address with a different first name was unimaginably complex and contradictory, clearly laced with the sort of paradoxes that make cheap special effect explosions burst out of futuristic logic circuits. What hope did the elderly Amstrad this person seemed to have inside their cranium have? As I departed with the much travelled parcel sparks were already erupting from the clerk's ears accompanied by short circuit noises.

Outside the post office in the run down street of dying commercial enterprises, charity shops and empty premises that is Didcot's original shopping street, I glanced around for any possible subjects for a photograph....nope!....at least not today, not in the mood for urban decay. Then right next to the car door I almost bumped in to the tree growing up through a gap in the pavement. If trees could speak I think this one would be shouting "WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING HERE?" There's no wood here to keep it company, no leafy undergrowth or small scurrying animals, just fume breathing, reeking traffic speeding over the concrete and people with their heads down going about their lives with eyes downcast and unseeing. On the south side of the trunk though, close up, there is a forest of lichen. Lush and luxuriant and glistening in the torrent of drizzle running down the bark.