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| DillyTante |
Has anyone noticed the weather? 
It's a bit warm here in ToyTown. Fortunately for this would-be, Igloo-dweller, mostly the heat is tolerable, as it's offset by gentle breezes. Most of the time.
I've heard some make comparisons, with the summer of 1976. I was about seventeen then and that summer was significant to me, for two reasons. The first, is that it was the summer I attended my first music festival.
The venue was Cambridge folk festival, set in Cherry Hinton Park, which is only a sneeze from where I used to live as a child. I'd hear the music from my bedroom and wanted to go, so much, but wasn't allowed. We moved home and I forgot about it for a while, until on an inferno of a summer day in 1976, finally I achieved my goal.
I toiled the two or three miles (it felt like twenty), from the railway station to the park, clad in an outsized heavy RAF coat. My steely determination to remain swathed almost head to foot in heavy wool, had its source in the certain knowledge, that my arse was too big. Nothing my new best friends could say (I met them on the train from Letchworth), would persuade me to remove that bloody coat.
I'm glad I'm not seventeen (ish) any more. I was a ridiculous sort, but oh...that was a very good time. A brave new world and ah... such people in it.
It was also the summer I discovered that sex could be enjoyable - although sex in a tent, a little less so in my opinion. An opinion which I still hold, incidentally.
Concerned readers may be relieved to know, that I relented eventually and divested myself of the coat for the occasion. I don't recall any of the bands that played, but that's probably because I spent most of my time, in a tent. Without my coat.
Thirty years on. Another blistering summer. I am alone, this time. By choice. Instead of benign, but illegal substances enhancing my world view, I'm legitimately medicated. Vague. Unfocussed.
Much of the time, it's not unpleasant. I'm marooned in a location, which matches closely my notion of Paradise. It's as if I'm waiting to wake-up - or perhaps for a startling something to occur; a hole punched, through the wool of my comfortable cocoon.
I don't and it doesn't. Somnolent summer days repeat themselves and drift into equally repetitive, sleepy weeks. It seems that this summer is to pass peacefully for me, punctuated by occasional phone calls, emails or visits from friends. These are determined, kind and dear hearts, who refuse to allow me to degenerate entirely, into a mindless puddle.
Surprised by each intrusion, baffled by attention, I'll shake myself and rise edgily to each occasion. I perform my Dilly-dance. I perk and smile, offering a battery of brittle jokes and wry observations. I know that I'm not always as funny as I would like, as I can be, as I was. The smile is sometimes just simple reflex. I grin uncomfortably and caper, as I aim for a credible impersonation of myself.
Most don't notice. Which is just as it should be, else the effort would be wasted, eh?
I'm sincerely grateful for my friends. They add a genuine warmth to this hot summer. They offer gentle nudges, reminders of much I shouldn't forget. On their departure, I subside once more, into an uncomfortably comfortable torpor.
The remainder of the time, I sleep, shower, dress, attend to what requires attention, walk my dog - and think. Too much.
Three decades ago, I gasped for breath and perspired freely onto sizzling pavements. Now, I drift peacefully by a cool, sparkling river. If I'm lucky and my timing is right, sometimes I have Eden almost entirely to myself.
I sit on the riverbank and when I can be bothered I read a little. Mostly though, I watch idly, puffing on a fag, as my comedy dog plays in the water. A consummate clown (most dogs are), she makes me smile. She looks for all the world, like an earnest otter. After completing several, self-determined lengths, she knuckles down to the real job of the day; that of excavating enormous boulders from the riverbed. These she deposits next to me, before shaking off the river in cold splashes, which dry almost instantly, as they hit my warm skin.
I'm describing heaven on earth. I know I am. It's perverse and contradictory therefore, that while living such a tranquil life, I'm simultaneously carting around, a heavy weight. It's sited in my chest, slap bang in the middle of my ribs. A weight which has been part of me for so much of this year, that it's as if I've grown an extra organ, so accustomed have I become to its presence.
Romantics might determine this to be a heavy heart. I'm not a conventional romantic however, so I identify the sensation to be an irrational, absurd and ultimately foolish reluctance to let something go.
I'm preoccupied by a painful puzzle, which by its very nature is unlikely ever to make sense. Something which is long since done and unlikely to be undone.
It's like plugging away at a crossword, knowing that if you could just answer a particular clue, the rest would fall into place.
Mistakes layered upon misunderstandings, compounded and built to a confusing tangle. A series of events, actions and reactions, over analysed, dissected and ultimately becoming senseless. I cannot organise, summarise, neatly articulate and then file it all away under the heading of 'Oh Well, Never Mind. One of Those Things'.
Because I do mind. I mind a lot.
Not for me, the comfortable lunacy of imagining that I'm suffering from a broken heart. Or believing that however much I dwell and obsess, I can put right or even understand that, which sense dictates, I should long since have put away. Mayhap it was something that never even was. I'm rational enough to know that the odds are firmly in favour, of it being a miserable puzzle, that's current for and exercises only me.
In the course of composing this self-indulgent but heartfelt drivel, I've spotted another significant difference between this 2006 version of Dilly and the vain, inappropriately dressed young girl, fizzing sweatily with wide-eyed excitement, in the summer of '76.
The young Dilly would fuck up and with an insouciance bordering on sociopathic, would be back on Boogey Street in the blink of an eye.
This older Dilly, is tired now and disorientated; she wouldn't know how to find Boogey Street, if it stripped, danced on a table in front of her, singing, 'Happy Days Are Here Again'.
Actually, this modern Dilly isn't even so sure, that Boogey Street is the place for her now.
In fantasy world, I'd return to the beginning and start again. Get it right this time. Regrettably, I'm not entirely without sense. I know that's not going to happen; that it can't.
So. I wait. I wait paralysed in this insufferable perfection of a summer. I wait for the wind to change, to blast through ToyTown - and me, announcing a new season.
After all, everything changes eventually.
Which is just as well really. Ain't it?
| 28 Jul 06, 8:31 PM PFLsAgain UK, 7 yrs |
Have you warned her about the countryside activists that haunt the Marches? If the river-bed-boulder activists get to hear about it who knows what might happen? A mildly miffed letter might wing its way towards you with a plea to monitor the number of missing boulders, and then it's all downhill from there. You'll be on the hill counting bluebells before you know it.
Toytown is a beautiful place in which to get lost, hide, settle, or make a harmonious place. The trick is deciding which and I think dog Why-Not has got it sussed "I learned what every dreaming child needs to know - no horizon is so far that you cannot see above or beyond it." ~ Beryl Markham (first pilot to cross the Atlantic solo the hard way - East to West) | |||
| 28 Jul 06, 8:53 PM DillyTante UK, 7 yrs |
I did, but she's just a damned anarchist.
I'll be in hell, first I'm buggered if I'm ever going to count bluebells. 'Sides, I've not the eyesight for it.
Indeed I throw like a girl.
Dilly Edited 28 Jul 06, 8:57 PM by DillyTante | |||
| 28 Jul 06, 11:30 PM bohemian 8 yrs |
For once in my life I'm utterly speechless (make the most of it eh?!) welcome back to bloggyland darling Dilly xxxxxxxxxxx All along the ancient wastes the thin reflections spin, That gather all the times and tides at once we love within... Edited 28 Jul 06, 11:33 PM by bohemian |
