TheEAST

Train home: In frustration I give up reading The17, just before the train reaches Romford. I can see the Vue cinema passing by.

In the book Bill is sitting on a ledge outside a window in his flat in Stoke Newington in 2006, and I'm 420 miles away missing my girlfriend.

It had been the greatest relationship I'd ever been in at that time. The most secure and comfortable, well for me anyway. The girl made all the right noises and thats all I can go on. Sometimes in relationships you get all insecure, you don't know where you stand, or what the other person thinks, whether you're on the verge of getting dumped or if its all in your head. But if you go on face value and she seems true blue then everything's dandy.

And then she moved away and it was all over.

She'd given me a book about the M25 and in the following months, whenevr I read it, I heard her voice, and so eventually I had to stop reading that book too.

Hmm, now I think about it, Bill Drummond has a cameo role in that book too.

I think I'll have to destroy this copy of 17, burn it, video it, sling it online, press the ashes into a brick, mail it out to my brother.

Another relationship, years before, we'd just seen Resident Evil at the Vue cinema in Romford, parted and then that relationship ended for 420 miles.

...

The voice some way behind me and to the right asks why 420 miles is the end of the relationship.

I dunno, kitten. You tell me.