The birds of the street were chirping, calling in the dawn light, while I was sitting in a camping chair, hypnotised by a dying bin fire of exam revision papers. Entranced in the moment, I was chewing over life’s riddle on how the seemingly endless years of the kid’s education had just passed by in the flicker of a flame.

Home truths buried deep under the surface had sparked into life round the fire burning since midnight, as empty spirit bottle evidence of a party ritual to mark school being out for another eternal summer, piled up in the nearby recycling bucket.

Leaving the arsonist crime scene of this burning of educational bridges, I went on a fool’s errand of a mission to gather firewood from the pathways of the sleepy estate busy slumbering in a state of early morning bliss. So, I combed the streets for pallets and dead wood in the bushes, while the birds warbled a wall of sound round the neighbourhood.

Returning empty-handed to find the fire abandoned by family members searching for their beds, so I stoked the glowing embers of the new day and cracked open a cold one, while making a quiet personal toast to a job done, yet left undone.