Float and shelf

The Peel 07

Welcome to The Peel, a weekly dispatch from the AVM patch. Sit down, dig in, before it hits the compost.

That we can entangle our talons by running the streets of new cities has been discussed (here). Running along, running around, running to…we’ve got it.

What about running with?

As a child of the nineties, the future was presented in the form of floating things. Adamantine objects above the heads of Sims characters, maps and databases in the home offices of Bond villains, and in the cockpits of spaceships over earth. To throw an image into mid-air, to project it into a space nowhere near a wall with just two fingers pinched together, was the only sign needed that it was the year 3000 or thereabouts. Not much had changed, but they lived in a state of fluid digital projection. Floating things.

As detailed in a Peel previous, current happenings are not much in the wheelhouse at AVM towers. Not expert on the tech stuff, the physics, the bytes and data. We’re in the business of matter, thoughts, the pursuit of the unlikely. I cannot therefore comment at this time on whether we have actually reached Everything Floats times? If you’re in the know, comment below.

Aside from technological advancement then, there is something ethereal, angelic even, about all that which hovers. A bird on the wing, a dragonfly circling a spring.

Do you ever get the notion, dear reader, that nuggets of information, pointers for our lives, are to be found floating somewhere, glimmering unassumingly, just beyond our field of vision? They may well herald the future, they might just encourage a deeper connection with the now, they could even extend a firm handshake to the past.

As a butterfly that lands on a nearby blackberry could be a coincidence, it could just as well be a sign to pick the berry and eat it, as within its pips waits a woody depth and sunshine sweetness greater than any other on that bush, in this county and beyond.