Up through Meneage

Fountains of yuletide-rain, rot the gums of Meneage street kennels. It's 10pm. I push up town on my bicycle. My dimming bike-light bounces off St Piran's tomb-like walls. No spingoed-drunks straggle the streets, these days. Gone are the hollering voices of; "Alright are 'ee?" "Yeah, you?" Pinching a poorly-rolled fag between chapped farmer lip, chubby hands swinging off bus-stop with a Kernow Kebab. Tragic Trelawney's night club grieves between the leftovers of empty charity shop fronts; no puke on the streets, no electronic music pounding the wet air, no roughed-up bouncers guarding the foggy club doors. No one throwing me and my friends out for being sweet sixteen with forged IDs. The town is an empty shrine to a time that was. The ancient thatched tavern of the Blue Anchor waits. Flaky-painted doors and windows battened, tight shut. For hundreds of years, this brewery has warmed cheeks and hearts of local drinkers, has hid the gratuitous goods of smugglers, has danced gaily with soul-redeeming folk music and compromised on Cornish looseness. Now pandemic signs flutter at the smugglers' saloon, like wanted posters in a wild western. And Wetherspoons, sits like a proud and pompous funeral home. It's taken the dead ones and powdered them pretty. Disenchanting 'spoons decorated with a vacuous veneer sheen. And the lights of a purring Helston taxi flickers outside. Pornography fixes the driver's attention; picking his nose. Waiting for no one. I pedal harder against the bitter hail pelting at my rosy cheeks. Up the hill, traffic lights change for the ghosts of horse carriages. Which once carried tin, copper, and passengers to the fanciful estate of Trelowarren. Now the arsenic tasting rain beats hard against the mirage of Meneage. And Christmas lights are hangmen floating like Day of the Dead; ominous rituals shaking on street lamps. A rusty white transit van splutters onwards through the downpour. One young man steals through the dark, stopping by the bank and gobbing a clump of phlegm on the filthy pavement outside HSBC. I pedal on. As the town mayor sleeps, as the town snores in a Valium-sedated stupor, in fear and in fury. A plastic bag catches in the wind and carries itself along the desolate road like a polythene angel. As I arrive in the neon lights of Texaco garage, a fresh-faced matlow fuels his Mercedes; he darts a look at this dishevelled woman alighting her carriage; a mud flecked bicycle. I pull of my bobble hat and enter. The air is cold tonight. As I cycle home with my over-priced tobacco pouch and bottle of gin, I see that Helston is assured of herself. Well and truly extinguished is the superfast modern-world. And the spirits of olde times spit with zeal. They scratch up through the sickly-slabs of cement, they stink of pilchards, spingo and smuggler's sweat but - they are clawing up gleefully to return.