I’m an old fashioned relic cast adrift in the ocean of time… A lonely sundial stuck in the shadows of Apple watches… An analogue dinosaur lost in a digital jungle. Whilst most invested in a wife, mortgage and 2.4 kids; dial-up, pagers and the dotcom boom, I sunk all my savings from a 20s spent wondering aimlessly from dead end job to dead end job into a video store. My dream was born out of a childhood spent secretly serenaded by my father’s vinyl collection when he went to sleep; an adolescence consumed by Atari games I had to work every weekend to afford; a young adulthood captivated by VHS films I had to scour every store in Brighton to find. With such good times emblazoned in my fondest thoughts, I practically wept when the opportunity came when I could finally weave those same beautiful memories into my own inclusive paradise of the vinyl’s, cartridges and VHS’s of my youth and give them a home where others to could bask in their glory.

 

For the first few years I was staring at a silver lining, stood on top of cloud nine in the middle of heaven; life had become pure bliss without a blemish in sight. The store was a lighthouse, a beckon in the dark with welcoming rays ushering all lost souls to the home I had built. I didn’t know what most of them did for a living, if they had wives or what cars they drove… but I still felt like I knew them better than anyone else had ever known them before; I knew what songs they sang to and what films they laughed to and if that’s not knowing someone, then I guess I have never truly known anyone before.

 

In the early days when Amazon was just a river in South America, the money rolled in, enough so I could travel the world twice over, but I didn’t. No midnight strolls in Paris, gondola tours in Venice or bike rides in Amsterdam, instead I kept my feet firmly planted in the store and spent the profits investing in Presley records, Spielberg films and Pacman games and the guys who came to the store noticed that and respected me even more for it – I was their hero.

 

However, the grains of time had begun to fall through my fingers faster than I could ever hope to hold on to them. Technology was quickly changing, evolving with each passing day yet I was too busy enjoying myself to notice. My friends tried to warn me about this thing called the internet, but I simply didn’t believe this boy cried wolf story… In my mind and heart, I always thought and felt people would always want something they could physically see, hold and connect with. In my mind and heart, art was supposed to be experienced, not merely consumed for nothing. In my mind and heart, you simply couldn’t condense magic into pixels on a screen, algorithms and 1s and 0s… But the mind can be tricked and the heart shattered…

 

Usually the store was a revolving door of new faces, each with their own unique stories to be told and tastes satisfied. Then the millennial ball hit 0 with the force needed to set off a destructive domino effect in my perfectly curated world. No longer were there no new faces, instead I just kept seeing the same old noses, eyes and ears I had seen plenty of times previously and even before they could open their mouths, I already knew what they wanted because they had asked for it a week earlier and the week before that. Then even those old faces began to drift into a distant memory, leaving nothing but the carcass of a ghost town in their wake.

 

With no costumers to speak of, I finally found the time to invest in that mortgage and wife, I meet her at a 50s appreciation night. But while nostalgia was a one-night whim for Barbra, to me it was an everyday torment. My life with Barbra was amazing! She made the ‘now’ romantic and exciting -something that once felt so foreign, felt so right with her. Our life together was great, occasionally even perfect but in the back of my mind not a day would go by that I wouldn’t yarn for yesteryear; I miss the dependable days of two channels instead of being swept up in the chaos of demand TV. I miss the dependability of paying with cash instead of contactless swipes of cards coupled with the fear of theft. I miss picking up a phone and hearing the warm sound of someone’s voice instead of the cold sight of letters on a screen… I miss, I miss, I miss a time when life was simple.

 

Barbra had finally had in enough of playing second fiddle to my nostalgia, she finally gave me the ultimatum, “let go of the past and embrace the future or ignore reality and cling on to an expired memory?”. I couldn’t bear watching her heartbreak any longer, so I did the right thing and left – you probably think I’m an idiot for deserting a chance at real happiness. But it wouldn’t have been fair for myself or her to have my body and mind in one place and my heart in a different era.

 

I crawled back to the confines of my shop. I locked the door behind me and re-watched all the spaghetti westerns, re-listened to all the Motown records and replayed all the Donkey Kong levels again and again until the pendulums of time swung back the other way – the right way.

 

 

 

 

 

 

From Earth the stars looks so beautiful, mesmerising and special enough to make a wish on. Yet I hurtle through the intoxicating blankness of space dreading their very existence. They are ugly, annoying and they are about as special as a grain of sand in the Sarah desert. They’re liars, empty promises, and hollow projections of what died millions of years ago, but only still continue to haunt me out spite.

 

I don’t know what’s real anymore…I’m locked in perpetual night yet infuriatingly inflicted with insomnia. I’m verging on insanity with the only thing helping me maintain my grip on reality is the constant fear of death. A slow painful, agonising death in which my lungs are suffocated, my blood violently pushes against my skull or if I’m lucky enough I’ll survive long enough to freeze.

 

Whirling and whistling the 3d machine acts as my only confidante and saviour. I use its output of pieces of plastic and complex devices to fix, tinker and build constantly in and around my ship to keep myself on course and not spiralling into the belly of a sun.

 

If reaching the moon was “One step for man and one giant leap for mankind” then considering I’m in the process of reaching another habitable planet is “one step for man and 13 billion light years of leaps for mankind”.  So suck it Armstrong! But I still feel the weight of billion people’s dreams, wishes and imagination increasingly threatening to compress my spine like the gravity of a planet I could possibly wrongly land on. It’s a scary thought that the only thing keeping me hurtling through space are numbers on a computer screen.

 

I don’t really call earth home anymore, I don’t have much family, friends or lovers to speak of either. However what I do miss is not having the bone density of a small child and the shitty, boring diet of pills and powder that needs water to even look like food. I guess I should be more grateful considering I’m about to go down in history as the first man to leave our solar system, that’s if there is still a human history. I have the chance of being the Christopher Columbus to a new earth, known as Epsulon and humanities last chance of a do-over.

 

But when I joined this mission I didn’t have grandiose dreams of being the torch carrier to humanities continued existence, a winner of Nobel prizes or schools built in my name. I just wanted to escape, escape to where and what from? Are questions would also want to find the answers to. 30 years… I could have been prime minister 6 times, gone to 5 Olympics, I could have had children and grandchildren in that time.

I was chosen from a pool of millions, they say because of my years of involvement in aviation, piloting air crafts and working on Luna bases, but really I was the only candidate with literally nothing to lose.  So my job now is simple; take millions of frozen microbes and plant spores to Epsulon and release them on the new planet to grow and colonize and create a natural biosphere. Then once that is done, release nanobots to start creating cities ready for man to move into.  That’s if there is still man left on earth when I reach the new planet.

 

Call it a punishment from god, bad luck or culmination of mankind’s selfishness, stupidity and lack of solidarity, because now in the year 2150, man finds itself on the edge of extinction on a planet ruined my poverty and war. And to make matters worse, on its knees man finds himself also at the mercy of violent, fluctuating and dangerous weather patterns.  Somehow I still wonder… Will a change in scenery be all that’s needed to vanquish the seven deadly sins from our souls or will the new planet be another host to our disease instead of a remedy to our inflictions?

 

Every day is the same, I now know every last inch of this spaceship; all I do for 16 hours of the day is scrutinise every nut and bolt and constantly program the ships AI to maintain the exterior of the ship. Beep

 

I do get sporadic communication from mission control, but call and response take almost 30 hours and increasing every mile I travel further away from our solar system. The sudden sound however of the intercom warms the room and fills me with great excitement even after all these years. I know I give the impressions of a being a solitary man, I am. But sometime even the confines of the vastness of space is lonely enough to conjure a strait jacket that suffocates your soul. Recently in the sentimentality of old age; in between each call I even go to sleep and have the nightmare that I’ll wake up and know with indisputable certainty, that I’m the last human being left in the universe and I will be left to drown in the deafening silence of empty space alone… Beep, the intercom goes off.

 

The silence that always ensures after is always interrupted soon enough by pitter patter of asteroids slamming into the hall of the spaceship. This time a seemingly innocuous collision causes one of the bay windows to sprout a crack. In shear panic I rush to stem the damage because out here in space things can quickly go from bad to worse in the fraction of a heartbeat. In the process of desperately trying to fill the crack with liquid silicone, the room begins to flash nonstop with a florescent green, momentarily distracting me from my present and urgent task at hand. Green can only mean one thing. Almost instantly after the flashing up I’m abruptly thrust to the ground as the spaceship nose dives through thick plums of smoke. This could possibly be Epuslon or a planet that could possibly act as my final resting place.

 

My eyes however begin to crawl back to the crack in the window, where under the air pressure the crack begins to splinter in a multitude of chaotic directions, getting bigger the quicker I fall. I know I have only seconds to decide before the window smashes and the air pressure rips everything out of the spaceship; do I lunge for a parachute and let the air take me or do I strap myself in and hold on tight and hope the reinforced craft can withstand the crash?

 

The decision is made for me when even before I can strap my seat belt in, I’m grabbed and yanked kicking and screaming out towards the window, with only enough time to crawl and scrabble until I can scarcely wrap the tips of my fingers around the parachute and cling to it with all my might. Hurtling in through the air I can barely breathe or open my eyes, finally gathering enough presences of mind so I can pull the parachute cord. Suddenly I’m halted in mid-air then flung up, before beginning to rock gently down, now on the ground I surrender to the mercy of my lungs begging for oxygen.

 

I’m no oxygen connoisseur, but somehow the oxygen feels different, cleaner, lighter and somehow calming in a way. Soon I’m no longer conscious of it, as my attention is diverted to the world that surrounds me. Barren, entirely flat and void of practically all types of complex life except for tuffs of grass and beginnings of trees. This planet is truly in its infancy, virginal and untainted. From the distance a spiral of black smoke explodes into the sky and scatters all blue from it.

 

Rushing towards the remains of the spacecraft, the ground leading to it is coated in contorted metal, melted plastic and shattered glass. “Alan, Alan”, I hear the still operational intercom barking my name. Strangely something deep inside of me prevents me from responding and instead alerts me again to the purity of the air, and I’m reminded that it’s uncontaminated, and it’s not dirtied by pollution or gun smoke. Humanity had its chance, it ruined it. I switch the intercom of and gather and destroy any devices that could be traced to Epsulon or alert anyone of my presences here or that I’m even alive anymore. I’ve finally escaped.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I once thought the best thing about living in a small town… was leaving it. It had come to a point when the constant beating of the humdrum rhythm of a repetitive life, threatened to deafen my ears to the point that my own screams of escape, sounded like a whisper with no around able to hear it. Did you ever see the film Groundhog Day, the one where Bill Murray for some bizarre reason is forced to relive the same day, over and over again? That film felt like my biography…  I looked back at the same old tired faces, the uninspiring places and remember how they played agonisingly on a continuous loop. I even knew that I could have closed my eyes and been able to navigate my way through each day, knowing that nothing new would occur and falter my step. As a painter and singer, I am sustained by gorging on being creative and getting drunk on being inspired, but in a small, unremarkable town, where very little happened I felt starved and thirsty.

 

So naturally with my starry eyes and my body brimming with ambition; my heart and mind was seduced by the blinding bright lights, endless cacophony of excitement and the tasty creative melting pot of London. So with the ink barely dried on my A levels, before the zipper even closed on my bags and before the first tear could even fall from my mother’s eyes, I was sat giddy with anticipation and a mind conjuring, on my way to the big city. The only time London was ever going to stand still was when it was going to be welcoming me! The capital was where I felt I truly belonged and small town living was just the entree, to a great big city meal. I was now a creative in London and that meant buying vinyls, going on a macrobiotic diet and dating more foreign women!

 

London was the place where I would spend the early mornings roaming the streets going to vintage markets, stylish boho coffee lounges and casual strolls in the park. While in the evening I would be bursting with explosive inspiration, begging to articulate itself with paint on a canvas and lyrics on a sheet. Then at night, I would take a break from writing top40 hits and painting Picasso’s and go out on the town with guitar playing, label redefining, sexuality exploring artists/activists. But as cool, trendy and creative as everyone else was In London, the city would truly fall in love with me because I was an enigma, a genius, somebody special…

 

I should have known it from the warning signs… The first was when I stepped off the train and was instantly swept up by the stream of people pouring from the other carriages and pooling on the already flooded city streets. London was a big place with lots and lots of people each with their own ambitions and dreams so big that money couldn’t buy and the word special was a buzz word on everybody’s lips. Then looking down there wasn’t a red carpet or a Hollywood star waiting to put my name on it, instead beneath my feet was cold, hard concrete littered with fag ends and chewing gum. But I readjusted my rose tinted glasses, ignored the glaring signs and still considered greatness and riches firmly on my horizon. Like Lilly Allen’s song LDN, “The sun is in the sky, oh why, oh why would I wanna be anywhere else”.s

 

Despite crippling rent prices, a blank canvas weighing heavily on my shoulders and music execs slamming the door in my face. I was still able to strut down the street knowing I was still in the creative centre of the world and success was awaiting around the very next corner. Looking back now, I was rather impressed how long I was able to go on deluding myself especially in the face of; ever mounting bills and an ever dwindling bank balance, a group of friends only made up of Tesco work mates and with the only place hanging up my paintings was my fridge door.  But the optimism wasn’t to last, I soon realised in and among the big, beautiful neon letters there was a small print, there is always a small print.

 

In the capital nothing matches the magnificence of billboards that outreaches the sky, steel and glass buildings with no give to the surface and a capitalist heart that never stops beating. London will ultimately always leave your dreams yielded and your warmth taken, just too cruelly remind you that the Big Smoke will always conquer us all.

 

So eventually finding myself with my bags packed, my mother on the other side of the phone and my head desperately trying to believe that maybe small towns aren’t so bad after all; what’s wrong with familiarity, having everything you need within a 30 minute walk and having your mind and talent appreciated by the people you care and love the most. Even in a small town, you can live a big beautiful life…But that’s the worst part about London, it’s like a drug, it’s hypnotising, it’s sexy, it’s intoxicating. Saying that I could go back home and be satisfied after; never being able to catch your breath after being immersed in the exotic, serenaded with the poetic and learning the rich tapestry of stranger’s stories, would be a lie. It was at that point, I put the phone down and left the small town behind for good and painted exactly what London meant to me. Success in the city is only a stones throws away when you let go of expectations, maps and worries and fall deeply in love with the soothing chaos of the Big Smoke.