Dear photograph…

A friend of mine posted a link on Facebook the other day that takes you back in time to the past. When I went there to take a look I was struck by the poignancy of what I saw. What a simple, yet fantastic idea. I wish I’d thought of it.

It show photographs of people holding old photographs of events and places over the original place the photograph of the event was taken. They hold their cherished prints so that the past is superimposed over the present, bringing the past into the present and merging them in a single timeless image.

Almost time travel really.

Well, you know me I just have to try these things, so I rushed to the place where we keep our old fashioned paper photographs and dug out one that I thought might work. This is a picture of the play bus we hired for Holly’s fifth birthday. It’s parked up outside of our house on the seventeenth of July, 1999 - almost twelve years ago.

I’d almost forgotten all about it. So good when something prompts you to remember, even better when the memories are happy ones.

As you can see the original paving-slabbed pavement has been vandalised since the picture was taken, replaced with horrible black tarmac when the road was dug up to repair the main drains and widened slightly. The tree that used to overhang the pavement (causing you to have to step onto the road sometimes) has been cut back and (although you can’t see it) the house to the right of the bus in the original picture now boasts a brand new enclosed porch. Apart from that though, things in the road are pretty much the same. People have come and gone, but the same grumpy old men still grump up and down it - and these days I’ve joined their ranks. The toddlers that once were are now six feet tall and driving cars, and the cars themselves are flashier, more streamlined and electric windows are the norm, not a luxury. But it’s still the same old road, the road that it’s been for the last hundred years or so.

Standing in exactly the same spot I’d stood all those years ago with my throw-away camera, I struggled to hold up the picture with one hand whilst juggling my Lumix with the other.

CLICK!

Well, not too bad for a first attempt.

And then like some older, less attractive, suburban, Dr. Who I was back to that day travelling through time to the past as the memories flooded in.

Small people everywhere, dressed in frilly skirts and shorts, feather boas and glitter masks, running up and down the road, screaming and laughing as they waited for the bus to arrive.

“It’s here, it’s here!” I heard them shout - and it was as Rumbletum’s Partybus drove over the cones I’d borrowed to keep the space outside free, squashing them flat as that proverbial fart.

“Sorry about that.” The driver smiled.

I wanted to smell his breath but didn’t dare, besides the little darlings were already piling onto the bus, pushing and shoving and pulling hair to be first up the stairs to the party games.

“Slow down, slow down.” The party hostess hissed from between clenched teeth. But of course they didn’t and one little girl was pushed back down the stairs where she lay, a crumpled heap of purple taffeta, spread-eagled on the floor at the bottom of the walkway. Needles to say she screeched for her mummy, who rushed onto the bus, scooped up her oscar-winning performance darling and carried her off to the car never to be seen again.

But apart from that (and the squabble that broke out between two waiting mothers who drank too much wine, the broken chair, the badly grazed knees, the child who was petrified of balloons and had to be slapped to stop her screaming, and that mysterious white dog who ran on to the bus and snatched most of the sausage rolls) the day went very well.

So take a look at some other time traveller’s pictures. Perhaps it may inspire you to make your own. I know that I’ll try this again and when I do I’m sure that I’ll share it with you.

Just click on the link below.

Dearphotograph

Speed demon – my first school sports day…

School sports days, they are all about us at this time of year like bees buzzing in the playing fields of every county. I passed one just yesterday afternoon and it made me shiver despite the muggy warmth of the day. I can’t even think about those three words without a slight feeling of fear passing through me – like a ghost walking over my grave,

School sports days… brrrrr.

Did anyone really enjoy them? Well the answer to that question is obviously yes otherwise sport wouldn’t be so highly prized, even worshipped by so many people. But I think that you needed to be good at sports to fully appreciate the joy of school sports day - and I wasn’t.

The egg and spoon, the sack, even the bean bags in a basket races left me trembling with unathletic fear and as for the proper sports, the running, jumping, and hop-and-skipping... well.

I have to admit to quite liking the tug-of-warring, but was that really sport or just an excuse too let of some boyish aggression?

It started out well though. The first time I felt the thrill of the race was a very special few moments for me, moments that I’ve never forgot or managed to experience since. It really was very strange and remains one of my clearest early-school memories.

Summer, 1962, John Hampden Primary School, Lower School – the class down by the recreation ground, a mile and a half from main school. Back then there wasn’t room for all the children in main school, so for the first year we were taught in a portkabin type structure in the grounds of the old school on Windmill Road. It had a playground, a huge beech tree, an overgrown garden that we weren’t meant to venture into, and an old school hall. The old hall was no more than an empty space where children were taught in a single class back in the times when kids had rickets and went up chimneys in their spare time. It was freezing cold inside in summer and even colder in the winter. I can still hear the wind whistling through the broken glass panes high in the tall, rectangular, windows above.

Back then the old school hall building was reserved for assemblies and ‘Music and Movement’ lessons on the radio (be a tree, you are the wind, float like a feather). Basically it was falling down and too unsafe to spend too much time in, but it had the space required to leap about in stockinged feet to the sound of a Home Service announcer.

We were taught our lessons in the two pink-painted, warm rooms in the adjacent cabin; our library, a large cupboard space with shelves between the two rooms. Strangely I can’t quite remember where the toilets were, although I think they must have been in the old school hall at the back, outside toilets, under the beech tree and open to the elements.

One summer’s day it was announced that we were to take part in a running race heat for the school sports day. All the children were marched up to the recreation ground in Plimsolls and our white sports clothes and lined across the width of the rec’s short green grass. It was quite a line - fifty or sixty five year old girls and boys all waiting for the whistle to be blown and the heat to start.

The first three boys, and the first three girls across the line, far away on the other side of the field, would go through to the main races in Thame park the following week. We’d be racing against older children from the next two years above ours in the real race, so we had a bit of a disadvantage, but at least we were all more or less the same age for the heat. I desperately wanted to get through to the real race.

The whistle blew and we were off, running as fast as our ricket-free legs would carry us. Andrew Roberts, the tallest boy in class, was in the lead followed by Anthony something-or-other. I was with a mass of flailing arms and legs somewhere behind them fighting for a bit of space - and it was then when the weirdest thing happened.

All of a sudden I began to run faster. It was as though something fast had entered my body and was helping me to run. I felt exhilarated - my arms pumped, legs pounded, my fringe flew in the wind, a huge smile upon my face as I ran faster and faster. Nothing could stop me! I ran quicker, then quicker still, soon overtaking Anthony and making ground on Andrew Roberts who was twenty feet in the lead. I knew I would beat him. A voice in my head calling ‘faster, faster, faster’ and the more it called the faster I ran. It was almost as though I was floating watching myself run towards the finish line, cheering myself on from above my sweating head.

Soon I was level with Andrew Roberts, despite him being a foot taller than me with legs to match and running towards the blue cloth tape stretched on the ground in the distance. ‘Faster, faster, faster’ the voice repeated. Five yards to go, then three, then two, then one - and I was over and collapsing to the ground, gasping for breath, watching Andrew Roberts as he approached the line with a good five yards still to cover.

I’d won! I was through!

“I didn’t know you could run that fast!” Miss Higgs said in amazement.
“Me neither Miss.” I managed to pant.

On the day of the proper race I came in a sorry last of nine. Andrew Roberts won and Anthony something-or-other came third. I gave it my best, but whatever speed demon was in me on the day of the heat wasn’t around for the real race. He’d moved on to another sports day I guess.

I was very disappointed in my performance. ‘Don’t worry love’ my mum said, but I never really enjoyed running much after that. I’d tasted the thrill of winning by miles and knowing I’d never manage it again, at least not on my own. So I let running drop away and be ousted by Daleks and rockets and drawing.

Even today though I still believe that it wasn’t just me that ran so fast that day, and often wonder who or what it was that ran with me.

Something about nothing...

There are days when there seems to be literally nothing to write. On these days it would probably be best not to write anything, but instead I usually find myself writing anything about nothing. Well, not today. Today I am going to write nothing about anything.

I suppose I could stick some sort of image in to illustrate nothing, but just what sort of image would it be? Probably better if I simply illustrate nothing with nothing instead of something that tries to illustrate nothing but is actually something pretending to be nothing.

Sorry to have gone on about nothing, but sometimes nothing seems to be everything.

A warm night and a blunt knife...

‘The night is warm. I may take off to the moon and embroider the universe with a single poem.’

That’s the status I stuck up late last night on Facebook, just before winding my way up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire. Bacchus brings thoughts like that to me all the time, usually late at night, usually as the red wine is finished, usually as I sit pondering just who I am and what I am meant to be doing. Pity I don’t have the soul to live up to the grand statements that he drops into my mind.

At the time they seem important, the detritus of a tired, befuddled, mind struggling to make sense of another day – well, at least this one was sunny, and who knows perhaps they really are of importance. Perhaps they are the knives that could cut away the wool that encases me, if only I could sharpen them and make them last.

So, with this in mind it’s off to bed, struggling up that wooden hill, and as I flop the words come, pretentious and self reflecting, annoying and over sentimental. Like a silly sixth form student who has read too many poetry anthologies, noticing the rhyme, missing the meaning, but still managing to get a verse or two published in the school magazine because his English teacher knows that he can’t do any better. Probably out of pity for a stupid blunted boy.

Maybe I should never have been encouraged. Perhaps then I’d have a useful trade – an expert in double glazing, a mechanic, a salesman, a knife-grinder – anything other than this. I grind my knives to utter bluntness it seems.

Oh well, this is my blog. My dumping ground for all the rubbish of my life. I can chuck in anything, secure in the knowledge that if anyone reads this at all they’ll probably skip the poem.

Here’s another blunt knife to grind away on.

Warm nights and blunted knives

The night is warm.
I may take off to the moon
Embroidering the universe
With sewn stitched words.
Simple words made plain.
Small stars to speak my mind.
To convince myself in verse
That I see when I’m really blind.

The night is warm.
I may take off to the hill.
And watch the stars
Compose a dimming song.
Hummed upon the air.
In pattern hard to find.
The answers are all there,
Lost in a drink dulled mind.

The night is warm.
I may take off to the sea.
To watch the waves paint rusted foam,
Salt water dripping through me.
Stretched and pulled as paint
Of splashed and splattered kind.
To an end I knowingly await,
Still keep deep dark in mind.

The night is warm, not going anywhere,
With coldest nights yet still to come.
A warm night and a blunted blade
The moon, hill, sea will soon be done.

POP!..

Bubbles. Over the years I’ve seen pretty much all of mine burst and fade to nothing, first love, marriage, friendship, family, trust - promise after promise popped with a pin to vanish into nothing as if it were never there. POP!

Oh well. Whatever. Wherever. Whenever.

Best not to think about it. Best to walk away and put some distance between it, them, he, she, and me. Best to laugh out loud and carry on regardless - what’s that you say Sid? ‘There are always more bubbles to blow.’ Y’know, I think that you could be right, after all, in the words of the song: ‘I’m forever blowing bubbles.’ I’m sure that I can blow up a few more.

Is there anybody in the land who hasn’t blown a bubble? I guess there must be, today’s children seem far too busy with their X-boxes and Wii’s to bother with the simple pleasures involved in blowing a few rainbow shimmering orbs and watching them as they float up and away into a distant sky.

I wonder what it’s like inside? A view of the world through a rainbow? A universe caught within an undulating, shifting, transparent skin. Must be nice to be inside a bubble. All safe. The outside world just that, outside, unable to get in. Viewable, but at a distance and far more beautiful, far more colourful than it actually is. Maybe being in a bubble is like being in love. It never lasts - POP!

Bubbles are so magical. How strange that a splash of water, a little detergent, and a few breaths of puff can create such things that look so unreal as they float against the backdrop of the real world, intangible, ethereal, a passing fancy. When I was a boy we would hold competitions to see who could blow the biggest bubble. Usually we made our own mix with washing up liquid and a piece of carefully twisted fuse wire for a blower, but sometimes my mum would buy me a tub of ‘proper’ bubbles from the shop. They always seemed to work so much better, the blower an unusually blue plastic attached to the screw top of the bubble tube. Those bubbles were bigger, more colourful, longer lasting - I don’t think I ever won the competition though - POP!

I could watch bubbles all day; the precise spherical shape, the incredibly fragile and microscopically thin soap film, the beautiful colours that swirl and shimmer, and of course the combination of all three of these attributes meeting to form a wonder that is here one moment and gone the next – POP!

Of course there are the ones that get away, the ones that float on the wind, disappear over the roofs and on to who knows where? I wonder where they end up. Do they go on for ever never popping, always moving forward on the breeze? I hope so. Maybe I’ll go with them one day, caught up in a big shimmering rainbow, on my way to Oz, or Wonderland, or Shangri La, or simple madness - lost in a bubble moving forwards on the breeze.

I’m going to blow some more bubbles while there’s still time - POP!

The return of the Ju-Ju…

Ju-Ju’s back.

Yes, he’s reappeared. He does that. He pops out and up when you least expect him.

He can be lost for months, wandering around it the deserted desert of the Me Mind and then – when I’m least expecting it, he’s back with his terrible smile and deadly piety. He is the light you see. He carries the Hoodoo Voodoo Heart. And of course he is the one true way. All praise the Holy Peanut! Amen.

It never takes me long to slip into his world, or rather for him to slip over into mine - and when he comes he brings a deadly dread. I dread awfully angled and aligned alliteration, an anthology awesome as anything. Dread the terror of the complex sentence. Dread a torture of alphabetically composed paragraphs. I find it all too angsty, bothersome, credulous, distracting, eerie, frightening, gut-wrenching, harrowing, and all those other alphabetic characters up to terror and then beyond. More terrible than should be known to any man. He is the electricity that scars the earth. He leaves the smell of burning toast behind him. Sniff the air - he is the Holy Peanut.

I never see him coming. I take my wine and wafer and when I stumble to my rise the next day I find him perilously perched upon the paper, perfectly poised, pending personification, practically pathetic in his peanut pictured penance. And then he is out, with no remembrance of him arriving save the ink from the smudging stained upon my fingers, my heavy head a’thumping, thumping, thumping.

Kill or cure? Curse or Blessing? Who knows? Only the Ju-Ju, his holiness the Hoodoo Voodoo can answer those questions.

Yes, it is a god awful small affair to the girl with the mousey hair and so suffer the little children. He is the light. He is the shade. He has the light and wears the shade. He is the standard that lights the world. He is the eclectic, elastic, ecclesiastical electricity. Peanut Be Praised!

His journey continues…

Heroes... my Uncle Dennis…

Back in the sixties, yes I said the sixties, I had a hero. Well, I had a few really – Dan Dare, Dennis the Mennis, the Lone Ranger, but this one wore a leather jacket, roared around on a motorbike, seemed to know a little about everything, and talked to me about space – outer space that is, the planets, the moon, and rockets and stuff. I didn’t see him often - he lived far away in Lincolnshire and we lived in Oxon, Oxfordshire for those of you who may not have heard that some towns are allowed to use this royal alternative.

My uncle Dennis popped in and out of my life for a few years bringing excitement and thrills each time he turned up. He wore leather and jeans, and he was so cool, not that cool was a word I understood or used back then, but he was very cool despite his glasses. He’d roll up on his motorbike sounding like thunder, shattering the peace of our estate like some kind of Jimmy Dean, a real ton-up lad, a rocker and all the other estate kids would come to see – fantastic!

Yes, Uncle Dennis was a real biker, well at least he was in my mind although I think he worked as a bookkeeper. Either way, not only was he cool but clever too.

He was always interested, asking about what I was reading, studying my latest model kit, talking to me about my latest drawing. I think he told me about Andy Warhol, at least I can never think of him without linking the two in my mind. He was the first adult that talked to me like I was a real person, not just a kid and I knew that he wasn’t joking.

Uncle Dennis, my auntie Shirley’s husband, a man of letters and numbers, a biker, more friend than uncle even though I was only five or six.

Later the motorbike became a motorbike and sidecar, and later still, a three wheeler - a blue (or was it red?) Robin I think. I don’t think he ever bothered to drive a car. Well, why would he? He was a biker. Throughout these changes though Uncle Dennis didn’t change in my mind, he was always cool - double cool, triple cool even.

Somewhere there’s an old black and white photograph of him standing outside our house in Kings Close, number 57 I think, not number 53 we moved there later. He’s wearing a white nylon shirt and black tapered trousers. His arms are firmly folded across his chest and he’s perched, one foot on the ground, on the saddle of his bike – a BSA I think. He’s looking directly at the camera, straight at it and he isn’t smiling, he’s looking cool, he always looked cool.

That picture seems to have vanished along with all the other bits of the past that resided in our old blue photo album, the one with the blue tassle marker and the cellophane photo hinges that never seemed to hold the photos in place. My mum says it’s around somewhere. I really hope it is, it holds so many people in its battered covers and Uncle Dennis is one of them - frozen in time leaning against his bike on a sunny afternoon so very long ago.

And then one day I heard that he had died. I don’t remember exactly when and I don’t remember exactly how I heard – we didn’t have a phone at the time. Something to do with his brain, an embolism I think. Uncle Dennis had complained of a thumping pain in his head and a short while later he was gone. Uncle Dennis my friend and early mentor - another word I wouldn’t have used back then and only recognise him for what he was now.

I didn’t go to the funeral. I was too young, and I’m not at all sure that all of the above is totally accurate. But it is in my mind and that’s what counts. In my mind Dennis lives on - the motorbikes, the coolness, his leather jacket and his friendship. I’m very sure about that.

I was given his leather jacket by my Auntie Shirley, I think it had tassels on the arms but that may be my fantasy. It hung in my wardrobe for years in the dark. Sometimes I’d take it out and put it on, wishing that I was old enough to make it fit. It smelt of leather, and bike, and oil. It smelt of Uncle Dennis.

I kept it for years and then, I don’t know why, I let my Uncle Bob have it. He rode a motorbike, and leathers need speed, and I knew I’d never ride one. And I never have. I wasn’t my uncle Dennis. I’ve simply never been that cool.