Circular 'What goes around' lettering design

The night 23 is stuck at the lights by the old gasworks, so I'm writing this in the cab at the terminus with the engine ticking and the heater doing its best. You'd laugh at me. Eleven years on this loop and I still can't say where it starts. Every pass round the ring road I see the same things in the same order: the shuttered chip shop, the bingo hall turned into flats, the lad who sleeps under the canal bridge with a dog that never barks.

Last Tuesday a woman got on at the gasworks stop with a carrier bag full of tins and sat right behind me. She didn't pay. I was going to say something until I saw the name on the bag, Brenda Oakes, the woman who kept the bike shop on Hollins Row when you were still a rumour. I'd nicked a brass bell off her counter the summer I was nine, and I'd spent forty years thinking nobody saw. She got off where she'd got on, looked up at me through the glass, and nodded, as if we'd settled something between us.

I've been thinking about how a route like this only ever brings you back to where you began, just older and with a different face in the mirror. When I was young I thought that phrase Mum had stencilled on the kitchen wall was a bit of daft optimism. Now I reckon it's a warning and a promise both, depending which way round you're sitting.

Kettle's on at ours Sunday. Bring the good biscuits, not the digestives.

Love, Dad