Modern Times

Modern Times

The dawn flickers across the glass of a hot‑press flat,
a quiet hum of electricity. My morning coffee sits beside
a screen in amber glow, the world delegated to a slideshow of updates, each notification a tick of time that arranges the day in pixel‑norms.

Outside, the city unfolds as a nervous heartbeat —
lorry wheels whisper down the boulevard, buses sweep across the corner where a crowd builds a queue for the train. Footpaths are shortcuts to the future; the old market square becomes a thread of digital stall‑tags, harpos in the wind‑switch of new‑era entrepreneurs.

Social media‑threads thrum like the veins in the Thames,
hashtags floating like bubbles, each story a trend, algorithmic echo chambers that build a new lexicon with every swipe. The conversation is buzzed, we speak in ghostly text and we sit in a quiet bar, sipping tea, counting the silence between semicolons.

Climate flags flounder in the wind, electric cars glide past the old petrol pump, green roofs sprout against cracked brickwork. We speak of carbon credits while we scroll, the colour of the sky still a promise.

We wear technology like a second skin, as if the new must replace the old. Yet in the glow of a phone, a photograph of a neighbour's son, we remember how the world feels under the same sky.

Modern times – a paradox: an age of circuitry and heart‑beat, the age of progress at once produced and, in its haste, forgotten, the little things that make Britain a little home.