Far From The Madding Crowd

How to make you like me?

It is no easy task.

I am mostly invisible, my age is advancing, not completely past it but i do find myself having reached an end point of a sorts.

The end of one more era, with one, perhaps two at most, to follow.

How to make you care about the people in these pages?

i cannot do them justice. All these people. Cannot speak of them with any sort of decency; for it was never in their best moments i met them.

i cast only shadows. Dark sillohettes against built up walls, bricked up lives that crumbled down and required me and the people like me, to gather up all the pieces and set them down in a room, in a bed, sedate them, hoping the sedation would provide some substance that would glue them back together again.

Not a likely story that.

Perhaps we were the deluded ones.

That is not to say these people knew any better than i did; well, perhaps, perhaps they knew the main points, had some notion of where the structure all fell down, and why.

We mostly didn’t care. No that’s not true, we mostly didn’t have the time.

You have heard of three strikes and you’re out. Well this was three days, three days and you’re out.

it didn’t matter what sort of crash landing yoi made through our doors, three days is what you got. Three days for a broken wing, three for an electrical problem, three for a mere puncture.

Three days.

The people who arrived and left, sometimes over and over, they had their stories to tell. But we couldn’t provide them with any sort of audience. We were extras, walk on walk off parts in the whole dramatisation of their lives. we barely featured; barely ever made a footer on the credit reel.

Walk on parts in a crisis, a whole team of directors marking out the same bland scenes, however, wherever that person might be in their story arc.

Sometimes, though rarely, we were witness to the endings. And there were too many of those. It was always possible we were to be present for their finale, their swan song, we worked tirelessly in preventing any natural or unnatural ending.

But we couldn’t save all of them.

We couldn’t save all of them.