Bus ride to ordinary...

It's hard going back thirty years or more. Trying to recapture the you that you were is like trying to see your old face beneath the caricature you now see each day in the mirror. Remembering how you felt and why you felt that way is even harder, pinpointing all this to less than a couple of hours a haystack needle hunt. My mind tells me that it has to be done though, so here goes.

I once loved Elizabeth Fraser, just for a lifetime and of course it was from a distance, only a few yards, but a 

distance nonetheless as she sang and swayed in the basement of a Birmingham club as the pearly dewdrops dropped and as I watched her hypnotic swaying. Five pounds and eighty minutes or so of passionate adoration and then a bus ride home. Edgy, smoke filled, sticky floored, reel to reeled, big haired boy thug happiness. Her diminutive swirly swirl, her immaculate voice as pearly as dewdrops dropping again, so far away from the mundane existence I’d trapped my silly self into.

Wait, it wasn’t so bad really. But it wasn’t what I’d mapped and I knew that I’d fallen into a falling into, something so comfortable that the sticky treacle of the comfort kept me from moving.

Not moving, easier than pushing a way forwards.

I’d like to say that those eighty minutes of far too hot green leather jacket listening, booted black and grey pad straightjacket trousers, made all the difference. But they didn’t. So I just loved Elizabeth from my few yards of distance whilst the twins twanged their guitars and life and laziness made those yards into light years. Pink, orange, red, as I blew a faint kiss towards her pallid face then ambled out of the sticky floored club, her voice still soaring in my ears, to catch the number 63 bus home to Perry Barr and ordinary oblivion.

I still love Elizabeth, but the choices we make reveal the true nature of our character, more’s the shame.

It is far too easy to walk away from danger isn’t it?