falls diorama

Three rows of dog design plates on the wall, four to a row. Newfoundland, Alsatian, Labrador, others.

A partially collapsed bookcase, a precarious herring-bone of spines: David Attenborough’s Life on Earth; A History of the Second World War; The RHS Horticultural Encyclopaedia; tatty romantic novels; three bronze darts trophies.

A watercolour – country scene – slipped askew in a chipped, cheap gold-leaf frame of flowers and leaves.

A slate mantelpiece where, amongst the piles of papers and letters, two bronze horses, one grazing, one rearing up, either side of a four-by-six colour photo where the tones have all leached away over the years. A man and a woman? Sitting at a table, looking up into the lens with their heads together, smiling. One of them may be wearing black glasses; the rest is lost.

A series of six plaster of Paris heads at an angle either side of the mantelpiece, three US Cavalry on the left, three Indians on the right. The Indian Chief is snarling; the Cavalry Captain is shouting.

A TV stacked-about with videos and cases. A stubby bronze candle holder, doubling as an ashtray, resting on the top.

Black bin liners splitting open with books and magazines.

A flowery sofa, partially buried beneath a drift of letters, calendars, free newspapers, shopping lists, prescription sheets, boxes of old electricals, two more bronze horses with their legs sticking in the air, a slipper.

Behind the sofa, a three feet long toy panda lying on its back, staring up beneath the dust with a glassily over-stuffed expression.

A pale pine sideboard. On the surface, amongst more anonymous clutter, a bronze tyrannosaurus rex rearing up behind a bronze man on a motorbike, souvenir of the TT 1962.

An elderly woman lying on her back, gradually waking up at the foot of the stairs where she exhausted herself trying to make the hallway phone.