Disconnected early morning thoughts…

A few days away, well a week if you were really counting; yes, a week away, dropped off the world in one of the most inaccessible places on Earth – no, not quite Everest but North Wales nevertheless and deepest North Wales with grass growing in the centre of the tracks. Only a few grabbed days… and what happens?

Neil Armstrong, Hal David, and Max Bygraves that’s what; news all coming across on the radio as if from another world – crackle, crackle, fizz, pop. Who knows, perhaps it did, news is like that – particularly bad news. Earth calling. Earth calling.

Too early to get up; I lay in bed listening to the drizzle seep into the room through the glass of the windows and wondering why I wasn’t as fit as a Paralympic athlete, trying to get back to sleep by doing an A-Z of red things: apple, balloon, cherry, deer, earth…Earth calling. I suddenly think, as thoughts do often pop into my head, that maybe Wales actually is a different universe after all and maybe I am living on a cottagey space station far out in the outer reaches and how, now that he is gone, I wouldn’t be bumping into Neil Armstrong on my travels – one small step for man and all that.

My mind is a tangled web, so I wasn’t surprised to find myself moving from one small step to running. It seems to me that those Paralympic athletes have it sussed. I’m sure not many of them would have chosen their (dare I use this word) ‘disability’ but, all condescension put on one side (and hacked into pieces and buried in a big hole marked ‘crap’ where it deserves to be), they really are marvellous in the truest sense of the word. These people haven’t overcome their physical issues, they’ve embraced them and used them to their advantage, gone on to become champions, not bothered with or by the stigma that others attach to them, knowing that not only are they as good as ‘able-bodied’ people (whatever that means) but that they are an awful lot better than most. Even in my fittest days I know I couldn’t beat a blade-runner and whilst, I was always a good swimmer, I might as well not walk through the footbath or even put my trunks on - after all what would be the point? As for riding a bike around a velodrome… well angled walls and wheels at breathtaking speed have never been a forte of mine and I’m not even going to mention blind football…

The moon is a blind football with a bell inside and I’m back to Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on another world. I listen to the moving statement that his relatives issue, the one asking that when we see the moon we give him a wink. What a great thought. I’ll do that the next time the skies clear and the rain clouds blow away (and away and away) as I drift, drip, drip, drip…

Raindrops keep falling on my head Mr. David and I have one of my Welsh colds at the moment despite not having kissed anyone in a while and - thinking about it - that’s probably just as well; I don’t want it turning to pneumonia… and by the way (s)he’ll never phone ya. Pneumonia and phone ya… inspired - brings a smile to my face every time I hear it, even when I’m sleeping…

And then, as if I didn’t have woes enough what with my cold, that bloody tune running in my mind and the drizzle seeping deep through my glass bones, I am Max Bygraves. At least I’m doing my boyhood impression of Max Bygraves, learnt from those endless hours of black and white Saturday night variety shows, my hands moving like two unattended white flags in the breeze – ‘Tulips from Amsterdam’, ‘You need hands’, and ‘Gilly-gilly-ossen-feffer-craps-a-nelly-bogen-by-the-sea’. Well, I never could remember where it was and it’s not on any of the maps, not even the mind maps of my fleeting dreams…

All this in those few moments before I really wake; a spider’s web of half-dreamt thought as I lay in bed listening to the sheep bleat outside - electric sheep, the ones that robots dream of - moving on sprung metal legs, eating synthetic grass and counting in binary as the two moons above my Welsh asteroid are double-hand waved in salutation. I need my hands to do that and to wipe my running nose – no, he’ll never phone ya now Hal – but here’s a couple of winks, no make it three – one for you, one for Neil, and another for Max. The windmills turning on in the solar wind, grinding the ore that will used to make wheels for athlete’s racing achairshoooo!

The web breaks; and I sneeze my dreams away and out to full wakefulness - will I never be rid of this bloody cold?