Switch on, filament sparks lighting a lonely bulb that hangs down from the garage ceiling over the sunroof of a carbon-fibred East Asian tiger cub. It lights up the web of tegeneria domestica. The house spider darts from illuminated exposure at the centre of its sprawling web into the dark-cornered sanctuary of rare-used wooden handled garden rake, shovel, fork and hoe.
Silver-birch seed-covered sun loungers and dusty parasols collapse in a forest of green plastic chairs. Milly Molly Mandy and Saucepan Man and Dick and Ann and an obligatorily blond-haired, perpetually fainting Princess dine on damp-aged paper and eat the rotten pea. As Five Get Into a Fix, Timmy barks and leaps from the margins to wrestle crisp and crunchy Crane fly carcasses from the fluff of a faded, luminous yellow tennis ball. Heavy-handled tennis rackets lean against brown brick and beneath their navy cases, muffled shouts and laughter of four squabbling sisters echo from nylon strings.
Dimpled balls cluster in plastic plant pots and gather around a homicidal Slazenger 9. In 1983, it left the iron of a clown-trousered, pastel lemon-wearing, Faldo wannabe across the grassy course, over the bunker, between mating magpies in Scotch pines, above blackened sandstone and through pink, blooming, honey bee-filled, buzzing rhododendrons. As Mother pegged towelling smocks in purple, pink, tangerine and lime green onto her prided rotary washing line, spinning three thousand times a minute and flying at one hundred and sixty miles an hour, the tight, white sphere, brushed by fluttering her fine auburn hair in its determined breeze and whispering ‘nearly’ in her ear.
Image: A good switch born 1979, Parental Garage
Yasmin Ward 