Let me catch it, pass it to you. Intense rain rolling down the windscreen of the bus, caught by the wipers, pass it over, the windscreen wipers, just for a few seconds, clearing the windscreen of the rain, halting its downward flow, the torrents of rain on the bus windscreen, two wipers, one on either side, working in unison, let me catch it, pass it to you. These mundane and helpful robots entrance me, mesmerise me, I hope the driver doesn’t see me staring in his rear view mirror and think I am staring at him, let me catch it, pass it to you, back and forth they swing, back and forth, as the bus passes through deep puddles, hear the water in the wheel wells, it’s absolutely torrential, let me catch it, pass it to you, let me catch it, pass it to you.
I have vivid memories of being a child on the back seat of my parents car, which would have been an Austin 1100 or a Austin 1800, there were no seat belts in those days, no buckles, and the seats felt like leather but probably weren’t, they were comfortable, the seats, I remember being in the back seat with my parents in the front and we were probably driving from my uncles house near the airport home along the dual carriageway, because it had rows of streetlights which I recall so vividly, these streetlights lit in the dusk and lined up like robot soldiers, they looked so pretty, these street lights, and there were electricity pylons with electricity lines slung one to the next, and they had these ceramic separators to stop the lines from touching, and when I was a kid in the back seat of that Austin 1100 I’d look at these ceramic separators and it looked like they were moving along the electricity line, it looked like they were moving back and forth, back and forth. The streetlights would curl away following the route of the dual carriageway. And then it would rain, and the rain would tumble from the sky as if flung down, and dad would put on the windscreen wipers and I would stare at them, let me catch it, pass it to you, let me catch it, pass it to you. And the rain on the windscreen would smear the view, spoil the symmetry and the order of the row of streetlights, the ceramic separators moving along their electricity cables, that these mundane and helpful robots would do their best to clear a view so that I could see the ceramic separators doing their own thing and the streetlights like soldiers protecting us from whatever was gathering in the autumn dusk, on this rainy day, near the airport of one of the busiest cities on the planet, and it’s no wonder that I’ve always found beauty in the urban environment, it’s no wonder that I’ve been able to assign personalities to inanimate objects.
Let me catch it, pass it to you. I wonder if the bus driver thinks I am staring at him. He’s sitting there safe in his cab concentrating on the road in front of him. He doesn’t know that I am thinking of my dad.
Robert Garnham 