The coachman Vor.

Vor was like a coachman; who adored everything about the role besides the actual holding of the reins. To the dismay and confusion of the few customers who’d climb into the cabin of his coach, prior to discovering his aversion to grasping the reins, they’d alight upon the realisation he was not a advocate of arrival- only of constant departure.

He grew thin and was often depressed, he’d entered his thirties. Some of his passengers considered him mad. Others looked at him, seemed to regard him as if from the safety of a shore, with sad eyes, judging his doggy paddle ill-equipped, foreseeing the inevitable moment his flimsy vessel sank into the shallows. Others thought he lacked application and a attention span, but thought him able still. Out of a charitable nature, they used his service. With patience through tangent after tangent finally they’d leap from coach and landed, rather late and befuddled at their destination.

His career as a coachman came a cropper, the day his two nags (post-departure he would have admitted- at his encouragement) veered off upon separate paths. Much like those charitable customers, whom knew, given enough time their sought for destination would inevitable come, Vor remained sat upon his coach throne, in a ditch someplace or other, and starved.

Vor returned.

“Our demands as far as time is concerned are less exorbitant than those which the heart requires in order to change”



It took many years before the flames that ensconced his home town vanished and only did they do so- when the town became a haven from London. His attic room, the room of his teenage years, consisted of various artifacts of that time, a time barely to his mind comparable to what is generally thought to be synonymous with that tiresomely pined after chapter titled: the teenage years. These artifacts stirred no emotion, no predatory memory lied in wait. The things-merely were just things. No Proustian deluge, nothing.

On several occasions, drawn to the windows on either side of the attics slopping ceiling, Vor considered visiting the sea and the hills. Neither prompted more than a vague consideration of a possible visit, neither commanded a pull greater than sitting on his single bed and reading Proust’s ‘Within a budding grove’ all day.

For all the lack of a desire on Vor’s part to return to memories obtainable in the things in his parent’s attic, he found no such reluctance on account of his memory to remind-to remind him of a girl he knew and was very much attached to whilst living in Brighton- when reading of the protagonist’s plight with regards to Swann’s daughter Gilberte.

Vor the plant.

Vor soaked up London like a plant. He had a suspicion- he had not been living as apparently human beings live. As a consequence, thinking himself more plant form than human being, his moods became brittle. Nourishment, besides those the requirement of a pot plant, he’d neglected.

Vor is dense.

He’d got a headache. A change of tack, he drew himself. He wasn’t particularly interested in himself, but he figured a change would do some good. Within 6 weeks, the walls of his studio were covered from floor to ceiling, with charcoal drawing all higgledy-piggledy. Vor in hindsight, likens the change; to using a door- in place of banging his head against a wall repeatedly….. Hence headache.

He quickly got good at using the door, after many years thump thumping his head, none of its novelty was lost upon him.

Vor repeated the feat, four times a night, until he had to let go of studio.

He readies his head, Vor bored with door.

Orestes.