A Bajan greeting (bajan being the contraction of

Barbadian)

See me here, now!

Friday at last. The culmination of a week of research and information gathering, stuff that has been simmering in between my brain cells while I went about the rest of my job to be turned into a tasty stew ready for serving tonight.

Last evening I blew joining the BBC for the news, twice. Instead of a smooth 7 pips, time check and the news starts I couldn't hear the pips at all and missed the time check. Second time the timing on the commercial was longer than the advertised 30 secs so I couldn't join until it was over.

Next challenge was the weather forecast. How hard could it be? You call the met office, they give you the info and then you announce it ten minutes later. Except every radio station is calling the Met Office for the forecast (why can't they print it out and fax it or email it?) and they rattle off things like "clouds 4/8 low" barometric 1015.3 todays max 30.0 today's min.25.2 and go barreling on with never a pause while you write so fast your carpals wince and consider developing a syndrome.

Then you put down the phone: look at what you have written on a form too small to hold all the information and realise you haven't got a clue what you wrote. Random words come back..partly cloudy, brief showers, dissipating tropical wave in the Northern lees and Southern windwards, it may not be the weatherman who is wrong - the announcer just makes it up as they go along (just kidding...partly)....and now oh shoot time to start the sunset theme...a practise I hope to eliminate as it is so hit and miss just like the darned sunrise theme.

Start a piece of music and when it ends the sun is either up or down. Hah! One Saturday I ran in horror back into the studio after closing my show because when I got outside the sky was pitch black and I thought I had inadvertently signed off an hour early. No, the clocks all made me right so it was the weather, so overcast the sun just wasn't taking a bow that morning!

All this and yesterday the windscreen on the mic had been treated with a disinfectant and reeked of chemicals, a scent so strong I could taste it in the inch of air around the microphone; so after an hour my head was pounding, my lungs adopting an asthmatic wheeze and my tongue was swelling in my mouth making the finer points of articulation beyond my reach.

This morning my throat and chest have iron bands around them and my voice breaks on the fifth note of the scales instead of the seventh in the fourth octave. Well, I have fourteen hours to get it working again. Go for a walk, sit in the sun tossed by the breeze I can hear lashing the branches into a frenzy while the five wind chimes in the apartment downstairs sound as though they are hitting against their neighbour's chimes as well as their own, melodious cacophony, antiphony to fill the morning's silences. No poetry today.

Indifference draws a veil
across vision
Eyes turn, unseeing,
to the wall
sinking into white
oblivion
avoiding the day.

Well, I guess it is in there somewhere but no gentle wafts of love and romance or even the salty tang of passion are tugging at my roots to be born.

I gone.