Past Times

PAST TIMES

Some footsteps along my own lifeline and coming of age and beyond

Raglan Castle Fish and chips Holidays in Wales Boating trips Styrofoam surfboards Mothers’ Pride The Hillman on Birdlip And queue behind Saw and split logs Mackerel skies The Belt, the Lane Seven Rides Smelly old farm dogs Cats couldn’t care Fleas in the carpets Covered in hair

A finger beckons me, points to the lattice, the textures and spatial constraints, the nothingness and the everything without which there is what there was before my churning heart took to beating in these open fields and will be when the builder characterises my solitary little life.

School days, steam trains Chuff on lines Kiss in tunnels Girls are mines Titillating territory To explore, to explode Sensational sensations But feeling like a toad Bikes and puddles Satchels and guitars Homework, the wireless Life on Mars Piglets in bedrooms Cows in the barn Straw bales and tractors Flint Hall Farm

Rummaging suitcase, fading page, black and white, old worlds, new smells, quaint misunderstanding. Confused, surfing along, busy keeping a balance, never wanting to crash in the breaking wave of nostalgia. Yesterday’s best is yet to come

Strumming, picking Evergreen days Sliding out of solitude Slipping into ways Half boy, half sausage Left, right and wrong Puffing up a dream That sounds like a song Yellow platforms Head in clouds Place at Cambridge Music loud Red bag, woolly turban Freedom finds a cage Public Foot the Roman Post-pubescent rage

Rhythm & blues and Rock & Roll and symphony & harmony and love & pride and resonating & receiving and sleeping & dreaming and arriving & leaving, and giving & taking and tolerance & taste, berieving & believing and having & not

Balloons, Hyde Park Ads in the Times Travelling the world Hear the bell-chimes Permanently restless Love and lust aplenty Music in the background Start to feel empty Fumbling freely Spouting tosh Move to Bristol Life awash Faithful and faithless Fire scorched feet The Mexican menagerie Advances in retreat.

Well as you can see I gave up half way along this project, rather as I did with the real thing - never getting to the delightful examination of mauls and rucks - when I was the aptly named ‘hooker’ or ‘prop’ on the Hitchin Grammar School first XV team (me top left) I almost always did end up at the bottom of such scrummages. I enjoyed school games but finally gave up on Rugby too when at Cambridge University Emmanuel college team trials it seemed it was a game to be taken seriously despite being undertaken in thick fog that day where high or long-kicked balls disappeared from view! Eventually sent-off by my own captain for laughing I realised college rugby was not for me.