I remember….

I remember a woman that caught my eye, from the back of the car, she came screaming into the road, ghostly in her pale terror, some flimsy nightie flowing out behind her, with her hair. We drove on and nobody saw her but me.

I remember my grandad, a man of so few words, he was not my real grandad, and he had white hair and a white moustache, and he walked with a stick, and he was very very tall, and he used to drive the buses, and he loved my nanny with all his soul, but everyone could tell she did not love him the same way back…and he kept boiled sweets in a jar on the coffee table next to his chair, and he ate grapefruit for breakfast every single day, and he dressed and shaved before he came down the stairs, and that was how she knew he was ill, because he did not come down the stairs at the same time, and he fixed peoples bikes, and he had his own cellar where he went for some peace, and I remember when we went to see the deer at Bolderwood, I didn’t know how to talk to anyone, or be anything, and she hurried us all on like she always did, and he was left behind, just staring, just standing there leaning over his stick, watching the deer, and I wondered what he was thinking, because he rarely spoke…and they said that she threw herself over his body when he died in the hospital and she called out no.

I remember sitting on my red and yellow trike…feeling sad and alone, picking at a scab on my knee and squeezing out the blood, and throwing myself to the ground and crying, and looking around to see if anyone had noticed, if anyone was coming, but nobody did.

I remember a long car journey, sitting in the front of the van with my dad, and he pointed out the stars in the sky and he told me things about them that I cannot remember, and I loved him a bit then, and I thought maybe we could get along.

I remember sitting on my nanny’s step, and shelling peas from the garden into a bowl, and the smell was summer.

I remember hearing father christmas steal into my room at night, the creaks of the floorboards, the slow laboured breathing, the rustle of packages, followed by the weight of the stocking laid at the end of my bed, and I held my breath the entire time and kept my eyes squeezed shut, and it was the longest time til morning.

I remember my first walkman, pushing the earplugs into my ears at the table on Christmas day, so that I could not hear the crying or the arguing, or the adult voices that surrounded me in a day that had become a steaming pile of disappointing shit.

I remember broken biscuits, and Christmas hampers saved up for year long, and Provident loans, and the Avon lady calling, and hiding behind the sofa when you didn’t have the money to pay them.

I remember a tunnel between the broken car and the conifer hedge, where I wriggled on my belly, plastic farm animals in hand, and I found a fat white maggot and it appalled me, but it was covered in dirt and looked like it was struggling, so I brushed it off and put it somewhere safe, and went back to my toys, knowing that I was getting too old for them, that time was running out.

I remember spinning around and around in the garden in a lovely summer dress, white with flowers on, and I tied the bow at the front, and my mother opened the door and said it’s winter, you can’t wear that in winter.

I remember digging holes in the garden and placing sticks over them to make traps. Flower fairies in the hedges.  Skateboards in the close.  Our bikes were our horses.  If we lay on our bellies on the skateboards, we were crocodiles and the road was our river.  The hollow oak tree overhung the road, and I sat up there and used my penknife to make arrows, and I never wanted to grow up, never, ever, and I didn’t believe I ever would. I pretended to be a dog in the house when no one was looking; up the stairs on all fours, trot, trot, trot, I am a poor stray dog looking for food. Higgledy piggledy lego houses we called them. Layers of lego, stairs and eccentric windows, the crazier the better, and they lasted for years, and they were epic, and they took over the landing, and were covered in dust, and we swore that we would have real houses like them one day.  Our captain beds were ships, and the toys on the floor had fallen overboard, so we made lassoo’s out of skipping ropes to get them back. I leaned out once from the bottom bunk and my sister was sick on my face. I peered through the neighbours fence and felt red ants crawling in my hair.  The dog next door was called Sam, a white bear that snapped and growled, and the man was Barry and he shouted at you if you rode bikes down the alley, don’t you scratch my car!

We got stuck in the mud in Wales, and it was funny at first, but then we were scared, and someone had to run and get the adults. We got the dog because someone my mum knew tried to break in, but I didn’t know why. She cried when he left her on Christmas day, she said the pain was going to kill her. My sisters guinea pig gave up on life and twitched to a stiff death in its box on the same day.  She said, that is life, and she said, sleep through the pain.  And she was the best.

I remember sitting on the landing, listening in, a soft tiger in my lap, crying, because Christmas was over, and the adults were all still up, laughing and talking, the TV on, the sweets going around, the glasses chinking, and it wasn’t fair.

Dad was always at Bobs, fixing cars. They both wore green overalls and they didn’t know how to talk to children except how to tell you off.  My nanny said nice things came in small packages, and I was a big girl for my age.  Big girls don’t cry, except me, because I couldn’t stop crying, except they called it grizzling, which made it worse.  I cried once because my brother rode over a snail on purpose.  I cried when the boy next door to my nanny through an acorn at me for no reason, I cried so much I could not speak.

My sister held my hand in the playground.  My sister combed my hair when we lined up to get our school photograph taken. My sister got my care bear figure back for me when another girl stole it. My sister took my hand before I crossed the road.  My sister held my hand at her baby boys funeral, she took it and held it and she did not let go.  And after that they said my nanny wanted to go and be with him, to look after him, and it gave them comfort to think of that, and the good thing was, she died in her chair and not in the hospital, and my mum who had never felt loved, stayed at the grave for hours and hours and could not speak…

I remember sitting on the coal bunker and singing loudly with my headphones on. I felt alive. I remember lying on my bedroom floor with the speakers on either side of my head, so the music could thump and shake through my brain.  When my brother slept on the top bunk, and I was on the bottom, I would put up my feet and kick the slats up and down and make him giggle and scream on his rocky boat on the ocean.  I remember the view from my bedroom window, when I felt the time to say goodbye nearing…I wrote it down, it was my view, not hers, it was mine, mine, the close, the cars, the trees, the flats, the long sun parched green stretching up to the left of the flats, the allotments on the other side of the green, the man with the wheelbarrow and the two black labs, and the time the rabbit escaped and we chased it into the allotments, and into Bob and Mary’s back garden, and had to climb over planks of wood and bits of cars to find it again, and the spider, red and yellow, right in the centre of the green, how we used to hang upside down on it, and blackberry picking along the hedge there, and walking the dogs up and around, and that was my view, and I didn’t want to say goodbye…

Summers were so hot that we lay on the floor, our bare feet against the cold radiators.  We were always too shy to ask my nanny for ice lollies from the freezer in the cellar.  Summers went on forever, and we paddled in the water at the secret garden and caught tiddlers in buckets, and jumped over cow pats, and pretended to be sharks on our bellies in the paddling pool.

Winters were cold and it always snowed, and once my brother lost his cp30 in the snow outside, and he cried and cried about it, but he found it again when the snow had melted, but it had a leg missing and no one knew why.

I remember…witches fingers in the toilet bowl, waiting to claw at you, and gremlins under the bed who wanted to catch your ankles and drag you under, and getting out of bed to go to toilet in the night and my mum screaming get back in bed!! Banana splits made me sick and I should have known better. Lego is the most painful thing in the world to step on in the night.  You can spell out words to each other with a glo worm from your bed.  One day your dreams will all come true.  Never give up on your dreams, my mum said to me.

I remember that and she was right.

 

 

Well they will, but only if people read them.

Right now, all my words are lost in cyberspace! Floating in the air waves from twitter to wordpress to facebook to back to my head…back to where they came from.  My head is full of words unwritten, words unspoken, thoughts made up of words, words that swell and groan with sorrow, and joy, one after the after, rising up and dipping down, taking my stomach with them, holding my heart and then releasing it again to breathe, keep breathing, in and out with the words and the thoughts and the knowings and the awakenings, and the realisations and the pain of knowing that it will one day all end, all cease, all cramp up and twist inwards and freeze and crumble and fade and die…

And that we are helpless.  Stranded in this life, loving it and embracing it, and seeing the beauty everywhere, and grabbing it and tasting it, and never really truly owning it or being able to capture it or hold it still, for it all keeps moving on, moving forward, whooshing and whooshing away from our grasp, because it does not belong to us, it is elusive and teasing and transient and it leads us to our deaths…

And we stumble on, because that is all we can do,because our feet and our hearts keep leading us on, drawing us nearer to the flame…And we want to hold it back sometimes, we want to drag our feet and take our time, but we cannot do it, because one moment tumbles ruthlessly into the next, and becomes another, becomes another single breath of solitary life, never to be breathed again, it spins us on and on and on, and that is why we look back so much, we turn our heads to the past and speak of good times, bad times, mistakes and joys, photographs that keep it still for us, and words that speak of what it was…

If you speak the words, then they are already nearly lost…they transmit from your mouth to anothers mind, to memory and that is all, but if you write them down, they have a longer life, some chance or resurrecting themselves…No one sees what you see, no one knows what you know or feels what you feel…it’s all locked within us, and we all just view the shell that covers us and think we know.

So i write it down, I write it down, I think it and feel it and write it, and then it is safe, it is there, it has escaped and it is not lost, it has a chance. Words and pictures are all we have left.  Without words and pictures to record our moments, it would feel like our moments never existed, because once the thought is gone, its gone, and the moment with it, and the day has trundled on to the end of it all, and you have to go to bed at some point, and that brings sleep at some point, and then I close my eyes and wonder what if I never wake up again?  What if that was it?  My last day on earth?  What if tomorrow I am a shell, but only a shell, empty on the inside, just gone.  Forever.  When I get behind the wheel, the thought pokes at me every time, what if this is the journey that kills me?  What if this is the day a car collides into mine, and I hit my head and I never wake up again?  I am snuffed out, turned off, tuned out, wiped out, obliterated from this world in one tiny unimportant passing moment of time…People that love me, people that know me, people that see me, people that hear of me, people that spoke to me, people that remember me, they will cry, or talk, or shrug, or be sad, or feel nothing, or walk on, or make a cup of tea…All that will remain of me is their memories of me, for a fleeting amount of time, until they begin to fade, until those people die too, until like all the others that returned to the earth before me, nothing, nothing, nothing is left.

Except pictures…for a while

Except words…if I am lucky.

Stood in the queue, we feel old.  Out of place.  Amused, but close to embarrassed. Surrounded by kids, wearing their trends. It’s all long hair and floppy fringes, and tiny shorts and leggings, and lots and lots of stripes.  They are all clutching their mobiles and smartphones, seems like they were born with them in their hands, born with a build in knowledge of all technology. While we will always be scrabbling to catch up, but I fear I will never get there, I will always be one step behind.  We try to join in.  Send photos and status updates to facebook. What is all this?  This social networking, this sharing of every little detail in our lives.  Sometimes I wonder if it’s attention seeking, hunting approval from people we barely even know. From people we have never even met. Then I think what it really is, it’s like we are talking to ourselves.  Running a commentary with added images inside our own heads, and reflecting it back on ourselves.  Does it define us or make us real? Did we exist before we could tell the world what we just ate for lunch?  We are older, we look back on a time when this was all new.  These kids were born into it, holding their tablets aloft at the gig, sliding their well practiced thumbs across the screen to zoom in on the singer. (I thought tablets were pills?) Tapping, tapping, sliding, flicking the screen up and down.  Recording and sharing every breath of their lives.

I try to decide if its a bad thing, or a good thing, or both?  Why does it make us feel better to tell the world we’ve had a shit day and have lots of people we don’t know send us virtual hugs?  Are we that lacking in attention in real life that we feel the need to foster it on line?  But then I think, hold on, maybe these people, these’ ‘friends’ and ‘followers’, are just a bonus, an extra, something more.  Maybe they add to us, enrich us and inspire us just as equally as the people we can actually touch and speak to.  Maybe they even see more of us, and know us in ways that our loved ones do not? Does the internet allow us a kind of anonymity and a freedom to say and share things that would shock the ones who surround us in real life?

Inside the gig, it is dark and cold. We shuffle up to the bar to get the drinks in.  I eye the young ones flocking in, I examine my reflection in the mirror behind the bar.  I look short and cautious.  Yes, finally, a man with white hair has just walked in.  Two middle aged women with middle aged spreads have come up to the bar.  Yes, yes, fucking yes.  I look back at my reflection and see a youth that is mine to bask in for now.  A man with a bald patch.  Oh yes.  Come on in.  We’re all here.  We’re all out! Still feeling it in our bones…

Two pints later and I’m full of love and enthusiasms.  People watching.  Mind spinning.  Thoughts rolling and crashing.  Legs twitching, feet tapping, head nodding.  Let it fill my veins.  Being alive.  I sneak to the toilet, dread the face in the mirror amongst the girls with their messy up-do’s and snug shorts, but she smiles back at me and tells me not to give a shit. Oh yeah, that’s right. Fuck it.  I’m me and I belong wherever the fuck I want to belong, and on top of that, I feel it, I feel my presence and it propels me forward, and that my friends is called drunk-confidence. Reminds me of so many times.  Makes me smile, but I am not living in the past right now, right now I am here! Still feeling it…

We sit through the support acts.  Not bad.  I watch them with narrow eyes and ponder the lowly position of the support acts. The place is still half empty.  People clustered together with drinks in hand, conversation murmuring everywhere. Ah the support acts, you never remember them and you can’t hear a word they are saying.  Is that because they are new, because you have never heard them before, because you do not have their album and the lyric sheet?  Give em a chance.  The singer is gorgeous, reminds me of Fleetwood Mac.  The sound pulls us in.  Everyone has to start somewhere.  All our favourite bands were support acts once!  I think about people in a dark place like this, chatting and drinking and ignoring a band called Oasis who weren’t even supposed to be there.  I think even Oasis were ignored and talked over once.  (Not by me though, not if I’d been there, I fucking know that…)

I scratch my neck.  I scratch harder because I am drunk.  Pain is muffled by drink.  Awakes a curiosity in pain and a feeling of lighting up inside, of glowing brighter, simply because I am alive and I can feel it. Sometimes moments are nothing less than electric.  And we all shine. 

We move forward when the band come on.  Like the rest of the crowd I take photos and send them to facebook, like anyone cares. I remember a time when we didn’t even have mobile phones to take to gigs. We had our hands free and our memories inside our heads only.  The crowd surge forward, the hands fling into the air.  I watch the singer and wonder how it must feel.  Spewing out what you have created, what’s yours, what’s come from inside you, sharing it with that lot, and that lot, lapping it up, shouting it back, jumping up and down, higher and higher, stronger and stronger.  I stand on the edge, on the perimeter, as is right, and I am smiling as I watch them in the middle.  The shoving, the leaping, the swinging hair, the thick stench of sweat as it gathers and rises.  Smells like onions.  I am watching a human burger bar sweat passion through their skin.  

I smile because this is their time.  This is their music.  This is their band.  This belongs to them.  They are young, and going crazy, pumping their fists, clapping their hands in the air, singing the words out loud, calling out for more.  I stand on the edge and remember how it felt.  And I think, none of it matters now, all of the fidgety embarrassment outside.  It is dark and no one can see.  It does not matter if you are young or old, if you are fat or thin, if your clothes are right or wrong, because no one can see and no one cares.  Everyone is here for this.

When it’s over we hurry out before the crowd, before their flushed and vibrant youth catches up and shames us again, and we scurry off down the road, back to the car, joking that most of them are probably too young to drive. We talk about our times.  We talk about our music.  We talk about standing in a field and necking vodka and screaming out don’t look back in anger….

We talk about going to see our music now.  We’re older, but so are they.  So is everyone.  But when you are all there, and it’s all kicking off again, then it’s like a reunion.  You don’t know them, but they know you.  You see yourself in their faces.  When they throw back their heads and belt out the lyrics to a song that raged in their blood when they got ready for a night out, up in their teenage bedroom, surrounded by posters and downing white lightning.  They know it and you know it, and them up on the stage, the magicians, the music makers, the ones who tie it all together, everything you think and feel and hope for, everything you fear, everything you are, they fucking know it better than anyone.  They know it, and they make it, and they give it to you and they’ve got it right, because it stays with you forever.  It soundtracks your life, your days, your time, it clings to every memory and image and when you hear it again, then you are right back there, you are young again, you are still you.

So we look back and we look forward and we take it all with us.  The chords of a guitar stirring a thousand things inside you.  You’ll be part of that crowd again, you’ll look into their eyes and you’ll all feel the same, you’ll all feel the love, you’ll all rise up.  

So we go home.  Fucking Stone Roses here we fucking come.