Creative Writing: "We Are The Battery Human"

This piece was written for "Folktales", LSR.fm's very own slice of folky story time goodness every Sunday at 3pm. It was inspired by one of my ultimate favourite songs, "We Are The Battery Human" by Stornoway. If you do not have Stornoway's spectacular album "Beachcomber's Windowsill" in you life, what the hell are you playing at? Get on that album, get on this song, listen and fall in love. 

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Listen up. I’ve got an idea and I think you’ll like it.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I can take any more of these power suits or that insipid water-cooler small talk. My life has become all meetings and meaningless figures, stocks, shares and staplers, scraps of information fastened together with paper clips, and I’m working though my lunch break again. I feel trapped, trapped inside a six-billion air-conditioned prison, barricading myself further inside my paper dungeon with every passing memo. It’s an origami Fort Knox in here and every time I move I hear the clanking of the shackles that chain me to this desk. This is a world of straight lines and square corners: square envelopes, square windows, square people, desks sitting in neat little rows, symmetrical beige carpet tiles stretching from here to infinity. Neat and ordered and dull and suffocating and… I want out. I want outside.

So let’s bunk off. Think about it. We could leave our suits in the wardrobe and our briefcases on the kitchen table, skip the bus journey and that lead-stomach Monday morning feeling. Let’s instead dig out our comfy old jeans and warmest woolly jumpers, don our sturdiest boots; wrap a picnic in that red-check table cloth and take to the hills. We’ll drive for miles and miles, away from the city and the smoke and then just stop, somewhere, anywhere. It’ll be deserted. And then we’ll walk. Walk and walk and walk until our feet hurt and our muscles ache and we feel alive. We can cross valleys, ford rivers, climb to the highest peak where the wind blisters faces and lungs fill with the freshest of air. We’ll bask in the glory of ancient oaks, the mothers of that paper fortress we’ve been building and as we feel the rough bark beneath our finger tips we’ll appreciate that the original is always better than the cover version.

Look at the sky today. Just look at it. Aquamarine and not a cloud, nothing but a pure bottomless blue.  I want to float with the dandelion puffs on the breeze, drift like an autumn leaf on a mountain stream. I want to lie flat on my back in the long grass and feel like I’m the only person in the whole world. I want to scramble up muddy banks and then roll down them again on my side, just like we did when we were kids. I want to eat lunch sat on a rock, not sat at desk and afterwards I want to feed the ducks and marvel at nature’s clumsy and chaotic grace. There’s the lark, ascending, soaring through the blue and I want to soar with him, up and away from this stale, concrete life. I want to simply sit and watch the birds. It’s time to break out and immerse ourselves in all of this. The Great Outdoors. It’s not right that a picture on a screen should be the closest we ever get…

So what do you say? Are you in? Here’s the phone, call work and say you’re sick. Sick of drowning. And then, when that’s done, we’ll go see the world.

Let’s cut those shackles and feel the sun on our skin. Let’s be free.