Fairground: a Photo-poem

The funfair’s in town...

There’s a strange nostalgia, almost a magic about a funfair. It speaks of an older world and, if you’ve read your Ray Bradbury or your Stephen King, of a world of odd, even uncanny, foreboding.

The big wheel is a new perspective on familiar landmarks. The ordinary blurs and skews and veers as you’re whipped round at high speed on the waltzer. The smells of fried food and candy floss drift through dry-ice mists.

Perhaps it’s because the day is drawing to a close, but the night hasn’t yet come alive, but there’s a wistfulness among the rides and stalls, the ghost trains and shooting galleries.

Maybe that’s why the teenager is the natural denizen of the funfair – a liminal being in a liminal, not-quite-real yet larger-than-life place, filled with a sense of dim longing, vague regret…