I WANT TO BE A TOURIST

    by Kapka Kassabova

    I imagine my life as a city
    somewhere in the third world, or the second.
    And I want to be a tourist
    in the city of my life.

    I want to stroll in shorts and baseball hat,
    with laminated maps and dangling cameras.
    I want to find things for the first time.
    Look, they were put there just for me!

    I want a room with musty curtains.
    I want a view of rubbish dumps and urchins.
    I want food poisoning, the dust of traffic
    in the mouth, the thrill of others' misery.

    Let me be a tourist in the city of my life.
    Give me overpriced coffee in the square,
    let me visit briefly the mausoleum of the past
    and photograph its mummy,

    give me the open sewers, the stunted dreams,
    the jubilation of ruins, the lepers, the dogs,
    give me signs in a funny language that I never
    have to learn. Then take my money and let me go.

A WEEKEND OF FREEDOM

This time last year I was melting. I could hardly persuade myself to get up for work in the mornings. My marriage was no marriage at all. All I'd ever wanted was to be able to afford good suits without having to check the price tag, but recently the fat salary my Dad would have killed for had been somehow getting sucked away from me, going on an over ambitious mortgage, on bills, on five different-but-apparently-all-thoroughly-essential types of insurance, on taxes, two cars, a pension: the rest was wasted on expensive wine I didn't appreciate. Meals in restaurants with menus entirely in French.

Heather said I wasn't awake anymore — even my only hobby wasn't really mine. I searched out old war memorabilia, First and Second World War mainly, a habit and a collection inherited from my Dad. They're my little containers of history, he said. Not always beautiful, but then, things of value rarely are. One piece was a regimental cigarette case with an engraving explaining it had been presented to a soldier by the Princess Mary Christmas Fund in 1914. I kept that one in a special locked glass case. Heather often asked what happened to the man she fell in love with. Well, you don't notice it happening. Life just gets gradually narrower, until a ray of sun is enough to make a good day and a splash of rain is enough to make a bad one.

Then two things happened in the same week: first, I got made redundant. Cutbacks due to challenging ec