Rents being astronomical and ownership out of the question, we’re living on borrowed time, where third-rate architects and fantasists live out their impractical utopias, where picket-fence suburban idylls squat cheek-by-jowl with impractical futurist pods and other failed machines for living. We dress accordingly: there’s a lot of gingham and a lot of nylon, though some of us like to improvise, and I like to rock a Dan Dare/News From Nowhere hybrid, with tinfoil robes in a cut straight from Chaucer or Dante. I’ve a matching costume for the cat but he’s not keen. We’re living on borrowed food that we’ll somehow have to give back later, and on borrowed air that we can’t keep in our lungs. I used to have a borrowed wife, but a coach and horses came to repossess her one storm-bruised night that was borrowed from Wuthering Heights. It broke my borrowed heart, but I haven’t told the owner. You see, the thing about borrowed time is that you can never erase all traces of all those who have lived in it before. I wander gleaming skywalks above chalets and bright caravans, and I wonder who it all belongs to, who’s keeping the tally? I suspect it might be the cat.
Oz Hardwick
Picture Nick Victor