The reporter speaks to camera from the steps, recently swept, across the churchyard where huddles of tourists peer at maps and hold up camera phones, squinting into screens.
A TV is being watched.
The camera’s banal gaze focuses on the grey flagstones. Everything is clean as if a uniformity has returned, a natural order resumed.
Laughter is heard.
[Off stage a tented green, colourful banners, cups of tea. But the cameras will not travel and the gaze will not turn. Attention is fixed on the clean stage. The question is how to depict what is not ever to be presented.]
MW Bewick 