I’m watching the seagulls as they pour their vengeance down upon a crow, fluttering and stalling in the afternoon sky but resisting again and again until the onslaught becomes too much and it is forced to retreat to the crown of a tree far away. The seagulls catch the thermals and rise away to wherever it was they were defending. All this is viewed through a double-glazed window looking out onto a concrete and blacktop street lined, end-to-end, with brick, glass and concrete houses.

All this is out “there”, maybe fifty metres from where I stand, but a whole world away from the one I still live in: civilization came and took me from birth, entrapped me in a place I would call home and assume was the only place that mattered. I grew up; I dreamed of exam results, a degree, a job, a house, promotion, computers, fitted kitchen, conservatory, holidays, retirement…I don’t remember dreaming of death much. It was there, though, after the pension, or maybe before: before I had the time to enjoy the fruits of 40 years of toil, working for the machine that I called “employment”, buying the goods of the machine that I called “retail”, looking through the windows of the machine that I called “home”.

I want to be up there with the birds. Fuck the machine; fuck the system; fuck this steel, concrete and glass veneer that shuts us in and keeps us close so we can bleed ourselves dry in pursuit of a dream we have been forcefed from birth – a dream that sucks the humanity out of us and leaves civilians: loyal, hard-working, dreaming civilians that watch the skies for a second then turn away, unmoved.