Everything You Have Missed
Dear Nadia — you have been gone four months and the town has managed a small crisis in each of them. The big one is the sculpture. The council put it up outside the library in March, eleven metres of polished steel called Aspiration, and the argument about it has now outlasted the scaffolding. My mother says it is the emperor's new clothes; my brother says it is the best thing to happen here since the bypass, which tells you rather more about my brother than about the sculpture.
Nobody will say what it cost. There was a figure in the paper, then a correction, then a longer piece explaining that the first figure had included the lighting and the second had not, and by then everybody had stopped reading. It is a white elephant, obviously, but it is our white elephant, and I notice that the people who called it a disgrace in April now give directions by it.
Dev has taken over the corner shop, which is either very brave or the third act of a story we have all watched before — the last two owners lasted a year between them. He has put in a coffee machine and a sign saying OPEN, in case the open door was ambiguous. Mum has been twice a day since it opened and reports on the coffee as though she were filing from a war zone.
And it is Groundhog Day with the bins again. Same letter, same fortnight, same three men standing outside the depot at eight in the morning. I will not tell you the rest, because it would only make you homesick, and because you have heard all of it before — which is, I suppose, the point.
Glossary
- a white elephant
- — something expensive and impressive that turns out to be useless
- a bypass
- — a road built around a town so that traffic does not go through it
- to file (a report)
- — to send a report back to a newspaper from wherever you are
- a depot
- — the yard where a service keeps its vehicles and its crews