About five minutes before the football classifieds results and all we could see on the tv screen was the teleprinter golf ball ticking away. Pulse. Pulse. Pulse. The seconds ticked away slowly as we lay horizontal on the sofa a rug drawn up over us to keep us warm. Central heating was an irregular business in those days too.
Finally, the golfball sprang into life and the Saturday afyernoon match results began to spew out. Resuscitated until the dread phrase ‘Late kick off’.
Unexpected Encounter by Michael Kruger (poems Last Day of the Year)
‘We knew each other at a time / When the brightness was still our own. / In those days we wrote dark poems / about the invasion of the light / that we learned off by heart. / And every evening we made / an outing to the empty terrain / of philosophy, right outside our door. / We bumped into each other at the post office. / He wanted to get shot of a letter / that he had written at the time, / I was looking for his phone number. / The queue swallowed us up / and tore us apart with a woman and child / who wanted to hand themselves in. / An unusually hot summer stripped the memories from our bodies. / The rest would fit on a postcard.’