‘Matchsticks’ is my response to the ideas of Murakami, Joyce, Cheever and even those found in other forms of literature - including Priestley. Inspired by the stream of consciousness in Ulysses and comprised of delayed revelations, like those of ‘The Kangaroo Communiqué’, this story attempts to capture one moment in a boy’s life: examining it from the perspective of both an impersonal narrator and the boy’s own mind. ‘Matchsticks’ is both a story about this individual and a comment on society - a society which destroys the old, based on an unemotional value assessment (“... this whole row they’d be demolishing for a new development”). This is a society of widespread deceit and of a selfish abdication of responsibility: a world that the young Leonard is only just beginning to understand.
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