Magpies crackle: almost metal music. High on a bough in the courtyard they sit. One holds in its gargantuan beak a twig of stray dub material: May 1997 I got my first console. N64. From Ankerside shopping mall, which is comedy for seeing yourself deformed in all those circus mirrors but at CURRY’s counter I asked to buy on tick please a NINTENDO and the assistant saying she needs to run a credit check went to a beige keyboard and beige monitor because these were beige times, very beige and asking my name-address-DOB she keyed them (keyed a beige me) into some financial database, took a few minutes to claw until she said: Sorry love but your credit score’s too low, we can’t authorise it sorry. Ah man, I thought: Cos you screwed the mountain bike payments, KAY’S Catalogue. My face buckled under the surface. Pus, the taste of it dripped over my tongue as the shop-assistant whispered that she really shouldn’t but next week (pronounced wick) the N64’ll be twenty percent cheaper. Priced at three-hundred I did the calculus: three-fifty the most I’d ever saved is in my bank and payday tomorrow so I decided get it and FIFA 97. And it was that day, the glare of sunbeams stung my tired eyes. Polling stations opened across the UK for the general election: John Major, the hardcore rave and shoegaze prime minister, oversaw his final hours in power and I didn’t vote because.
