New South Wales is twenty percent bigger than Texas. The trip I take to the farm and back takes about fourteen hours - round trip - and covers the distance and more of the trip from one end of Great Britain to the other. When you visit a friend in Australia, twelve to sixteen hour trips, by car, aren’t uncommon.
For some odd reason that train of thought takes me back to a rare childhood experience of having a boat ride in a coracle which is a circular boat .... typical Welsh .... ‘lets not have an end to the boat - it’s too confusing - lets have a circular reed boat instead..... then everyone can be in front!’
Anyway, it would have been on a trip to Poppit Sands - a regular childhood holiday spot on the west coast of Wales - for three or four years for our family - that we would have taken a break in the vehicle without seatbelts but with style and separate headlamps and those indicators which raised manually from the body of the car - and we didn’t drive that way because we were posh - vintage and veteran cars were cheap if you were mechanically minded which my dad was. I think it was an Alvis - a car which had a lot of wood in the body and which had a small area in the boot which a couple of small kids could sit or curl up to sleep in.
A break in the journey at a wonderful shallow crossing of a river with a small waterfall further upstream and where we stopped for a lunch of bacon and egg pie and milk coffee, from a Thermos flask. Just down away from the vehicle crossing was a broader expanse of water across which brave souls could pay the price to be rowed across the river by some ancient Welsh native. I was nine years old or so and it left a lasting impression and took forever and probably twenty minutes.
Poppit Sands was a bright spot within a difficult childhood. Just the name - Poppit Sands at Cardigan Bay - conjures memories of broad expanses of damp sand in which us five kids would draw and plan out whole villages complete with streets - and the likes of which would disappear with the encroaching tides. Making sand volcanos in which we’d burn bits of rubbish and lollypop papers. Memories of drinks called ‘Dandelion and Burdock’ and of few cars and fewer dwellings. Memories of the smell of the new supermarket which had appeared one year and which was probably just a large shop, but which had hundreds of fabulously useful objects - for a small boy - from far off places like Japan, and all for very small sums of money and it smelt of new plastic and of the excitement of a new age. What did I know then that I wouldn’t embrace now. Frank Ifield on the radio and a group from Australia who we all thought was named ‘The Beechies’ but it turned out to be ‘ the Bee Gees.’
Sometimes I stop and allow myself to miss the clarity of childhood. I miss the understanding that my childhood mind appreciated with the sharp definition which allows for no shades of grey.
I am a human who remembers a question from my hazy past and which asked ‘Who are you?’ At the time, I saw it in terms of ‘name, rank and serial number’ and was a bit flabbergasted to have intoned back the idea that ‘I am a member of the human race, I am male, I live at a time when civilisation is at a peak. It will not last - it never does . My planet is Earth..’ ...... you get the idea I’m sure.
Blues harp sings the Blues and - yet again and with thanks - a glass too many and -‘ just up to the brim, thanks.’.....and stops me in my tracks.
Before the days of the Internet when Mick and I, separated by a continent, decided to play a game of chess, by mail, and which took ten years to complete, we used to write letters - much like this - it took ten years before he listened to my music and decided that, if his friends like the songs then it must be all right..... well ... it took a few years to get his personal response - albeit positive. The game was lost, from my perspective, after the forth or fifth move but the brief - sometimes drunken ramblings which passed as letters and contained the next chess move - kept the lines of communication happening over a decade or more within circumstance which could have created an abyss between us in terms of paths taken.
We didn’t start a second game and I’m sorry that I didn’t respond more positively when Mick suggested it. Not too late to send off a surprise move.... by postal service and horseback naturally.
Life isn’t exciting for most of us. We struggle through, day by day and by ‘the skin of our teeth’. Hooray for skin and teeth. I’ve got too much skin and not enough teeth but that’s all part of the cosmic irony.
I’m going to introduce my neighbours to the joys of back yard croquet this weekend. With two small children, it should be a wonderful way to spend a few hours as we make up the rules to suit the circumstance.
The cd is wending its way to a final mix and, allowing for a break for Christmas and a bit of time for artwork, the final gleaming and shimmering set of songs will be..... available.... to a world which has enough on its collective plate... or alternatively not enough..... by early February.
Yippee .....I am now - officially - a Great Uncle as my sister becomes a Grandmother and it’s a very nice title too. Joy to the child who arrives in the world during such tumultuous times. All the more reason to be positive and careful about making it a better world.