This year seems to be the year for reunions, anniversaries for me, Reconciliation. Finding pathways out of the forest. Here's an artist and a record that means something to me. I've turned 60 this year. Reunited with someone I never expected to see again who means a great deal to me. Seen friends I've met in my youth, 40 years ago. Met up again with someone who was across the corridor from me forty years ago as I started university, Discussed with all of these people the state of the world we now find ourselves in.
I also graduated 35 years ago and set out earnestly into the world of work. Teaching. Which essentially is what I've been doing ever since. Before I did so I sat in a flat in Norwich before my finals, watching Sinead O'Connor on TV with my flatmates. Performing on the late show. One of my flatmates who came out as gay that year watched me and Tim another flatmate and commented on our slack jaws and glossy gaze. She had something that no one else had.
In September after I graduated my brother and sister in law drove me out to Komarno, Czechoslovakia in September 1990.. Stopping in Prague to witness a vanishing world before it vanished and dropping me off in a town ender dust on the Slovakian border where I lived and taught for an academic year without really knowing what I was doing. .I had no teaching qualifications or materials save a couple of old Cambridge Press teaching books. A word processor to type out worksheets for my classes. Otherwise working on a chalkboard and with my students,. Now I 35 years on teach online. One of the miracles of modern existence. And certainly progress.
I lived in a flat without a fridge or a telephone. In a town where there was little to do except stay in and watch television and listen to the World Service telling you of the bombs raining down on Iraq. Dave Lee Travis. John Peel. The Magnificent Seven occasionally. Where things were so dull that somebody sprayed my name on a wall.
There were very few bars because all of the bars were gypsy bars and people hated and feared the Gypsies. I used to dine out at the Europa hotel which was full of Gypsies opening their wallets, full of black market money. They ran a knocking shop in the hotel itself. . The musicians were all kinds of wonderful on the other hand. Coming to the table and serenading you with violins as you dined on chicken and stew and roast potatoes and boiled vegetables.
Back in my flat cockroaches winking at me on the end of my bath. Taking medication at the start of each day and waiting for half an hour before I ate as I'd been told I needed to do .I can still recall the state of nausea I experienced daily. All the time thinking of a girl that I loved and who was now in Turin sleeping with other men and for whom nothing compared in my earthly experience. For whom I was bleeding internally.
All the while I was mourning the loss of a sister who'd died a couple of years before in the most painful and gut wretching circumstances imaginable., At a point when I also might have died I now realise. But I fortunately had been diagnosed and treatment commenced. Before the condition got to my inner organs, Gripped the hubs and terminals of my inner arterials and I began to shrivel as I'd seen patients with the same conditions disintegrate and crumble in the hospital where I'd first been treated..
At Christmas I arranged a cross European train journey and travelled from Vienna to Turin to spend ten days with my love. We shared a bed but it was not as before. It was a gorgeous mistake in the words of Sinead. Our time had gone but we didn't actually realise it fully for a further 13 years until I finally realised what was for the best for both of us and I severed the connection..
I'm sitting listening to I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got. It's Saturday. My day is free and I feel free. More people have gone. The brother who drove me has gone. To wherever my sister has gone. The sacred, unknown space where we'll all go at some point. Sorry to break it to you but I suspect you're already aware. .Sinead herself has departed, I've got this record . That's good enough for me. She sleeps with the angels. Min is in Singapore I suspect, now married and I wish her well. I should get going. The day is mine. .
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