The sun had indeed risen but the sheet grey of the skies were only vaguely coloured by its presence. The showery bursts of rain had been intermittent all through the night and into the morning, the fallen water puddled the streets and pavements providing pools for the relentless traffic to spray about. Lyndsey was down amongst it all, striding purposefully down Cheetham Hill Road back towards the city centre.

   Past the long, terraced lines of the flats above the many shop fronts, past the parked cars, the overflowing bins, the discount and sale signs of the run-down premises. Through, she cut a path through the throngs of shoppers and pedestrians, the deliverymen and the on-street workers.

   For the first time on her short life Lyndsey felt jarred by the recurring sounds and refrains all around her of her native accent. For the first time she found herself listening to, rather than merely hearing the rough edges and abrupt styles of address. She could hear every abbreviated phrase, every casual familiarity, every coarse, lazy swear word unthinkingly thrown in to emphasise a point. All around her as she heard the passers-by talk and call out amongst and between themselves, she heard the accent and language of all her life minus the last few months, but suddenly it all sounded so crude and almost embarrassingly ordinary; she felt herself to be so, so out of place.

   Suddenly the rough and singing lines, the almost – to her ears, unintelligible phrasing of the Glaswegian tongue seemed so far away and so much missed. During the few times she herself spoke, she found herself almost involuntarily mimicking the Scottish accents that she had lived amongst day by day, everyday recently. And of course when she did speak with this new artificial affection she produced a peculiar hybrid of an accent with almost comedic qualities and a tone that fell between the two areas that she had lived in and so was unrecognised by either community.

   But this new voice of hers helped Lyndsey to feel different, to feel above and apart from all those around her. She, at least she had until just recently, had been doing something different with her life. She had stopped, thought, then had branched out. She had seen the open gate and had wandered away out of the field to see what was around the corner. She no longer wanted to stand or associate with the rest of the herd, they who were afraid and disinterested in exploring and undertaking anything that was different or new away from the norm.

   Except now she felt herself to be back down and amongst them all again: just another face in the crowd – one of the herd, indeed. And her little paddle in the different waters recently had just made her feel more unsettled, now that she knew about the vivid brightness of the grass on the other side of the fence, it made the normality and familiarity of her hometown streets and neighbours horribly mundane and depressingly ordinary.

   Lyndsey sighed; sat in the small room of the modern city centre café just off Piccadilly Gardens with a coffee and cigarette on the go, she was able to abstractly watch and obliquely observe the scurry of the hurrying humanity passing the window.

   But why?