Goin Back again

Of course there is a song too.

Goin’ Back

Every now and then there is a moment when you get a chance to review the past. It may be a smell, a song, a phrase someone says bit all of a sudden you remember exactly how it felt in the past. It’s not dejavu, it’s not a sense of having been there before but more like suddenly you have a complete memory of what that moment was like.

When Michelle and I had only been married a short time we lived in a terrible mouse infested house in Formby, just south of Southport. We had no many it seemed and all the furniture felt slightly grubby. We moved in when Michelle was eight months pregnant or so, the house had not been cleaned before we moved in, in fact the owners son was asleep upstairs, and my mum and Michelle worked so hard to at  least make it livable before we spent our first night in the house.

The whole place felt run down and grubby all the time we lived there. We adopted a cat to deal with the mice after the council had done there bit and settled in to await our first child. It was an idyllic time a young couple in love, a cat and a child on the way. The other day was that child’s birthday, he is an adult now and moving on with his life, of course he still needs support and help but he is learning to be an individual and we are learning to let go.

Of course the furniture in our 15th or 16th house still feels grubby, there is a dog now not a cat and this weeks infestation was carpenter ants not mice. There are now three children not one and what appears always to be more work. We are however still in love and young at heart. Anyway that every now and then was the other day and here is the picture, it’s a beautiful picture and captures those days so well when the greatest pleasure could so easily be a bowl of ice cream with the baby.

 

Castles Made of Sand

George R.R. Martin has danced with dragons and feasted with crows, but in the eighties he wrote the Armageddon Rag a novel about the sixties as seen from the dissolute eighties. A supernatural thriller that has more to say about how we lost our dreams as a society than Almost Famous or Wall Street ever could. The story of a fictitious rock band reuniting to perform one more time, manipulated in the past and manipulated in the present the band are only a tool for others ambitions.

Martin obviously misses the idealism of the 60’s but is also aware of that decades mythology overshadowing the truth. His hero is a flawed man trying to find his ideals and feeling strangely out of place in the present so he turns to his past and finds he doesn’t fit there either. It’s a good book that has disquieting moments without the horror shocks.