In a Barnes and Noble, Tampa

We pulled in to the car park with Marcie on WMNF.

John Hiatt, John Prine and Iris Dement to keep us away from the news.

Here in the US, where the talk is of Trump, ICE and Elon, I pretend that England’s debasement is small beer, but everyone’s apocalypse is the most pressing apocalypse.

These nervy times. The magnetised air, the charged earth, the spooked populace. Useful idiots on campus, gangsters in government and on every high street, romanced and flattered by submissives and shills. Little kids trampled for the votes of haughty monsters.

Strangers on both sides of the water talk in a new shorthand. A click of the tongue, an eye roll and the talk is of leaving. At Heathrow a tall ground-staff girl in a red suit leaned against at the check-in desk and said wearily “Yeah. London. It’s all ghetto now”.

I dressed for ninety in Tampa but it’s rainy season here and the bookstore aircon cuts through my holiday clothes.

In a cavernous corner the book spines are black and purple, the script gothic. The standard outfit of Fantasy Fiction.

A Jenga tower of Romance titles for disappointed ladies. At a nearby table they are starting them young with the corn syrup of Teen Fiction. Not for the first time I pick up Riley Keogh’s book about her mother and I think of her doleful, burdened beauty and the downturn at the outer corner of the Presley eyes that her father had fixed but she never did.

The first time I leafed through it, weeks ago, I was scorched by the gunshot of her brother’s suicide and I set it down. I try again, to learn of Lisa Marie never leaving the house alone, never being without her crew, her handlers, her own mafia, then dropping them when the unexplained credit card spending started to mount up. A beautiful, friendless Rapunzel.

Cash registers ring for these how-to-be-someone-else-manuals, or don’t-you-wish-you-were-somewhere-else manuals, or how-to-pretend-you-are-somewhere-else manuals.

Back home in our tiny kingdom of slapping wind, ancient riots, musket smoke and Hallelujah stones I read about how to live in a totalitarian state:

• Pay lip service to submission.

• Carve out small daily victories

• Build strong networks

• Grow food

• Watch Peter Lorre movies

• Send each other racy pictures

• Plant showy flowers for your bees

• Read good books

• Tend your compost

• Treat your worms like princes and your princes like worms

I may have made some of these up.