Newspaper

The sky was the colour of a squashed peach. In the west, the factories chugged and choked on a particularly difficult batch, expelling gouts of sulphur into the morning air in complaint. I was sat at my kitchen table with yesterday’s paper. Most days I woke early, and having little to do until my shift began at ten, I would make a strong coffee and peruse the events now safely ensconced in the recent past. My coffee machine was one of the old piston varieties, for the most part mechanical rather than electronic. If the method to create coffee machines was lost to history, I wouldn’t need to scour ebay for the microchips and transistors that made those other coffee machines, more akin to true computers than anything else. These thoughts were unpleasant, despite the ritual, and so I only dwelt upon them as I pulled my espresso shot and no longer than that.

The news was of little interest to me as a method to update myself of the comings and goings of this world. I knew enough, I had decided one day as I walked back from the factories, my clothes stinking of sulphur, streaked and caked with yellow. There was the work, and there was my time before and after it. To learn about matters going on above my head, the opening of factories elsewhere or the machinations of politicians who wished to close our own factories – those things were like the weather to me. Instead, I read these newspapers like one watches sticks floating down a river. The passage of events as they fold into history, however great or small, is what interests me. Do they leave a ripple, a trace that I can be reminded of when I encounter other history-objects passing by me at meagre or great speed? Or do they break and crumble into their constituent atoms, leaving the world as a haze or a felt sensation?

It is not always the events you may think that trigger such shocks of reminiscence when I read those early morning newspapers. Great turmoils of markets and nation-states tend to dissolve rapidly upon entering my history. Other matters, some small and inconsequential by any measure, snag upon existing accretions of memory and so briefly spark or flutter. For example, I saw a trio of obituaries for the surname ‘Quill’, or perhaps it was ‘Quell’. One arrived first, presumably the elder Quill or Quell, and then, a few months later, another, what I assumed was the partner. A few years later, a brother or maybe a cousin. The manner of their passing into their own histories was unremarkable, but I’m sure that were I to encounter this family again in the back pages, that length of chain flying from my mind into oblivion would grow thicker and less corroded for a while.

I sat with yesterday’s paper – the newsagent gives them away to me for free when I go down in the mornings, his eyes bleary as he hurls the new stacks by their plastic ties into his shop. I like the newsagent. His shop smells of a kind of tea I’ve never tried and probably wouldn’t enjoy if I did, heavy and perfumed, but I don’t mind the smell. I take the leftover papers and carry them up to my flat above the newsagents, as I have done for so many years.

Today, however, there is an issue. One of the papers is several days old, while another is fresh off the press. I can only assume the older paper was trapped under a pile of its contemporaries, while the new one is an error on the newsagents part. He’s not the type to give away valuable products for free.

This leaves me with a quandary. Re-reading the older paper will re-introduce items to my torrent of history, items which may have been justly discarded. Even worse, what if I take in an element of past news which I somehow had missed before? What if there is another dead Quill, or Quell, in that paper, waiting patiently in their sulphurous crypt to be exhumed? What if, like those factories in the west, something gets stuck in the pipes and pulleys of my mind?

And let alone the prospect of reading today’s news. Ugh.