Stories like Lives

We let these things go because they are too hard to hold onto. We let the days slip between our fingers and swim off down the river of time into the endless sea of the past. We let lovers slip away into the night, leaving only the echoes of themselves fading from our fingertips as they walk away into memory and regret.

People fade into, then out of, our lives like some film coming into focus as they walk into shot and then blurring, fading away, as they leave the scene and our story moves on.

Stories are like lives, with their beginnings and endings and casts of characters, some major and some minor. We are all characters in the stories of each other’s lives, moving in and out of each other's narrative and always changing the world and changing history.

There is glib talk of moments, events that changed the world, events that changed history. That is all history really is, though, the story of a series of events that changed history. Everything changes history; otherwise, there would be no story to tell.

History is a story and all our lives are a story too. Everything and everyone always has some tale to tell.

Time will Tell

Time will tell.

Time will tell you everything, if you have the time to sit and listen. Sitting there, in that chair, listening to just the tick of the clock on the mantelpiece, he learnt all the secrets of the universe.

He learnt how to move through time and space, to visit the past and the future, how to travel the universe and how to reach the furthest stars. He learnt to understand the true nature of love and how to hold a woman close in the darkest hours of the night. He learnt how to fight for what he believed was right and how to hold a sword and how to aim and shoot a gun.

He walked strange exotic streets and rode in gilded golden-curtained coaches with the princesses unwrapping each other from silk and diaphanous veils just for him.

He learnt how to touch and be touched.

He learnt how to feel the tremulous heartbeat of small living things as he held them in his hand waiting for them to take to the air of freedom. He learnt about you, and I, and learnt all our secret names.

Most of all, though, he learnt how to sit still and let time pass without worrying about all the time passing him by.

The White Attic Room

Carla’s room was right at the top of the house. It was small, under the sloping roof with angled odd-shaped windows set into the roof. She took me by the hand and led me there.

It was an odd-shaped room, seemingly with more corners than walls. It was obviously some kind of afterthought, shaped out of the spare places of the house and turned into a room.

However, it was a bright sunny room with bare white walls that seemed cool and inviting in the heat of that summer. The windows were open and I could hear the cries of the gulls as they circled the cliff top and this big old rambling house which stood up their like some royal personage on the throne of its cliff.

There was just a small three-drawer sideboard, also white, and her single iron-framed bed in the room. On the bare floorboards as a small striped brown and cream rug.

There were no pictures, posters, no record player, no discarded clothes on the floor, just a single plain-covered hardback book on the floor by the bed, and nothing else.

Nothing else except the two of us. When I turned towards her, Carla was already reaching out for me, smiling that smile of hers, which I already knew, and I knew what it meant.

She’d smiled that smile many times before, already for me that summer, down in the dunes, over on the far cliff-top over the other side of the bay, in the woods, the old abandoned barn and several other places.

Yes, I knew what that smile of hers meant, and – so – I smiled too as I stepped forward into her arms.

Monday Poem: A Marker

A Marker

It will all end here, a few stones piled up
to signify another pair of hands
that reached out, but they could not touch the world
which lies just out of reach of stretching fingers
that need to hold onto this world that twists

so easily from the grasp, evades each hand
that reaches out towards it, hoping to touch
and waiting for the world to take and hold
us by the hand and lead us back to a place
we can pretend is something like a home.

Fruit Security and Public Thoroughfares

When there are days like this, it helps to have some sort of container for the raspberries, at least if you are considering venturing out onto the public roads. As you will be aware the 1987 amendment to the Use of the Queen’s Highway Act of 1867, expressly forbids anyone to venture onto the roads, paths and other avenues of communication (except – for obvious reasons – canal towpaths) without their fruit being secured in some sort of container.

As we all know, the fruit riots of the early to mid Victorian period resulted in several deaths, many hundreds of injuries and some of the largest elderberry stains ever seen in peacetime England, certainly in the post-Reformation years.

Of course, in the Victorian era there was much concern over the access the working class had to such middle class foodstuffs such as fruit. It was felt that - in the moral climate of the time – that fruit led to licentiousness and other forms of moral delinquency that the god-fearing Victorian middle-classes would find too upsetting to contemplate, especially if, say, approached by a wick trimmer brandishing his gooseberries in an overly provocative manner.

Of course, there were certain Victorian gentlemen wiling to pay young women – and even – occasionally – athletic-looking young boys to fondle their plums or give their banana a good squeeze, but most Victorians overlooked such things.

We would like to think times have changed in the intervening years, but even in this day and age, any attractive young lady out on the street with her melons on display will be on the receiving end of a great deal of – often unwelcome – interest and speculation.

World Enough and Time... and a Bag of Chips

Ah, but, if we only had world enough and time... oh, and a bag of chips, then perhaps we could see what has become of our lives. There was a time… but then I'm sure you remember that, especially when you dropped your bag of chips due to the passion of the moment.

Anyway, those were the chip shops of our youth. Back in those days, they were everywhere and all our kisses were salt and vinegar flavoured.

It doesn't help though, to dwell too long on the past, especially if it suddenly makes you remember what happened to your most-prized mandolin... and that incident with the butter.

Still as they say... or do they?

To be honest I've never come across a bit of concise, but meaningless, bit of folk wisdom condensed down into some half-remembered pithy aphorism that deals with all the subtleties of a situation like that. Not one that specifically mentions a naked Subbuteo cup-final between consenting adults, anyway.

Who would have though that green baize could be so erotic?

Those were the days... and the nights. Although, some of the afternoons did tend to drag a little, especially in those long dull hours before the chip shops opened.

Waiting for Me

Well, what if....

There are always possibilities. There are always times that can seem as though they offer all the ways you want to go. There, in an instant, it seems the future lies in the palm of your hand, just waiting for you to close your fingers around it and clutch it tight to yourself, never to let go.

I have been there and I have held on to those moments. I have seen the world begin to shape itself around me and the road I walk down.

I have created the distant horizon and shaped the sky that barely touches it. I have peopled that sky with a bare handful of small white clouds to contrast against the eternal blue. I have sculpted those dark distant hills that keep the lands of my creation safe from the unknown that lies behind. I have turned the twists of the slow lazy river to flow between the sides of these valleys I walk down. I have traced this roadway that goes to meet the simple wooden bridge that crosses the lazy river to go on towards the village that nestles beyond, filled with those who know me. A place where I know the one small cottage waits where I have placed you, waiting for me to come home.