75 Years

The Fields And The Feels

The other night, waiting to meet friends of ours, I took this photo of a part of my hometown that will soon be transformed. For better or worse is a matter of perspective. Greed v Need, or the wont of a bartered balance? I suppose it depends what side of the fence you are on. So to speak.

Bowlee is a part of our ever-shrinking green belt, a portion of which is destined to vanish for housing. I think the neighbouring fields that my son played football on are safe.

For now.

The affects of this change, though, away from the obvious, objective changes, are emotive.

The following night I took this next photograph. The emotions felt this time were, for once, not mine (self-avowed creature of nostalgia that I am), but for my wife. This path to my daughter’s high school, which we were walking down for Parents’ Evening, is also a trip down memory lane for her. This school, now styled as an Academy, no less, is built on the site of a previous school that she attended decades before.

A different name, a different building, but there is a part of it that feeds into a surviving portion of the school that went before it. Imperceptible to my ignorant eye, it was there that she got the feels, know what I mean?

It was like the Christians among us, a few years back, when we were escorted deep below St.Peter’s in Rome, burrowing into the Scavi, a 1st Century cemetery housing tombs that held, as well as pagan remains, some of the very first adherents of their faith. And also, reputedly, the body of their first Bishop, better known by the name of Saint Peter.

Though the school holds no bones, and goes back mere decades rather than millennia, it demonstrates, for my wife at least, history is more deeply experienced when it is personal.

My Dog Through A Spider’s Web

It’s been a mild winter. No ice, not a single snowflake.

This morning, however, I let Bryn out to find we at least had been blessed with a little frost, slowly fading in the weak sunlight.

It’s not much, but for any fellow winter lovers out there, it’s a start.

As Storm Brendan Hits

I asked my wife if she fancied a little music on the patio tonight.

Thoughts On A January Day

City Jackdaw

Coincidence. It happens all the time.

I’m sat inside, reading a book as a weather warning comes over the radio threatening strong winds for my area in the next couple of days. The book I’m reading is by Nicolas Bouvier, and I’ve just got to the part where, during his travels in Ireland, he is asking a local about a meandering road of pointless bends:

I like that. I bet that’s why those lovers of straight routes, the Romans, wore helmets all the time.

*

I lost my Evie twenty years ago.

It was a man behind me, in the queue at the local bank, after enquiring how a newly widowed acquaintance of his was doing, during their chance encounter.

You don’t know what you’ve got ’til you lose it. No, you wouldn’t have seen me, I’ve been in hospital for a hip operation. But I’m still here, still upright…

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Thoughts On A January Day

Coincidence. It happens all the time.

I’m sat inside, reading a book as a weather warning comes over the radio threatening strong winds for my area in the next couple of days. The book I’m reading is by Nicolas Bouvier, and I’ve just got to the part where, during his travels in Ireland, he is asking a local about a meandering road of pointless bends:

I like that. I bet that’s why those lovers of straight routes, the Romans, wore helmets all the time.

*

I lost my Evie twenty years ago.

It was a man behind me, in the queue at the local bank, after enquiring how a newly widowed acquaintance of his was doing, during their chance encounter.

You don’t know what you’ve got ’til you lose it. No, you wouldn’t have seen me, I’ve been in hospital for a hip operation. But I’m still here, still upright. Eighty-one on New Year’s Eve. You’ve gotta fall apart sometime, haven’t you?

I was recently saddened to hear of the passing of an old colleague of mine. He’d made it to his eighties, too, though he’d succumbed to dementia. I bumped into him once, my own chance encounter, and he’d exclaimed “Bloody hell, I’ve not seen you in ages!” The next time I saw him he didn’t know me.

My Mum has just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. At the moment she’s not too bad, and living next door allows me to keep an eye on her. I asked her if she could remember the name of an old dog that she had:

“Was it Andy?”

“No, I’m Andy!”

She laughed, confusing me with the one who had slouched on the sofa and pissed on the floor. Easy mistake.

Though she’s not yet at the stage that my colleague was, I can see that this person I’ve known for the whole of my life is fading. I guess time can do that anyway, regardless of that particular condition. The years diminish us. It’s like we grow, we build, we peak, then begin to slip back to our primordial beginnings.

*

There is a house near to us where the occupants are shut away. Every single window, both front and back, night and day, has the curtains closed, fastened together in the middle to create a perpetual twilight for those, unseen, living inside.

The young me, the one who had not yet reached his teens and spent his time watching Hammer movies on television, would have immediately thought: vampires. The current me, a bit longer in the tooth, came up with crack den.

New Year